They might say that you have the right to say whatever you’d like, but when ordered you also have to say how to decrypt it. This doesn’t account for things like steganography, and can be challenged on 4th/5th Amendment grounds, but when a judge is involved, these protections are a lot less dependable. Point is they could still get a lot of crazy bad ideas past the 1st Amendment.
The 1st is 1st because it’s the most important.
The 2nd is 2nd in case some asshole in government tries to do away with the 1st.
4th is pretty much dead at this point, and 5th is only in very specific circumstances, but those generally include being ordered to do something like that by a judge, unless they give you immunity, but the 1st has been repeatedly held to prohibit compelled speech.
Also, that wouldn’t be even remotely as bad as what is being proposed here. What they want is something that they can use for secret fishing expeditions, without warrants, against huge numbers of people. If they had to get a judge to compel you, you would know what was happening, you could challenge their warrant in court, and it would be impossible to use it as a mass spying tool.
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Yeah, good point - the constitutionality of compelling decryption is probably beside the point, they’re just looking for a way to maximize the reach of mass surveillance. Along those lines, they probably don’t even need a hard ban on strong crypto, they just need the designers of any widely used software to use weak crypto - very few people will “roll their own”. Of course, the state already has surveillance arrangements with all the major platform providers, so weak crypto is not even needed there. It’s mostly about those edge cases…hmm…if only it could be made a crime to offer commercial platform services without a “weak crypto certification” by the state…
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