if you prohibit secure-against-government-search communications
That’s a very big IF and I’m fairly optimistic that the cryptography genie will be hard to stuff back into his bottle.
Even if you try to enforce plaintext-only communications (which by itself leads to a host of issues), I can stuff a wide communication channel into the lower bits of cat videos (and such) after which we are off to the arms races and your “marginal cost of governement agents” becomes not so marginal after all.
In any case, if we get to THAT totalitarian society, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than the freedoms of the internet.
You don’t need to catch every secure communication. Even a 1% identification rate is enough; less if you’re willing to toss in some traffic analysis into the mix. Your goal, after all, isn’t to prevent secure communication, or even to identify what’s inside it, it’s to identify the people doing it, because the secure communication itself, rather than the contents of the communication, are what you’ve banned.
But I don’t think anybody -wants- this level of control. The Internet is too powerful a weapon.
That’s a very big IF and I’m fairly optimistic that the cryptography genie will be hard to stuff back into his bottle.
Even if you try to enforce plaintext-only communications (which by itself leads to a host of issues), I can stuff a wide communication channel into the lower bits of cat videos (and such) after which we are off to the arms races and your “marginal cost of governement agents” becomes not so marginal after all.
In any case, if we get to THAT totalitarian society, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than the freedoms of the internet.
You don’t need to catch every secure communication. Even a 1% identification rate is enough; less if you’re willing to toss in some traffic analysis into the mix. Your goal, after all, isn’t to prevent secure communication, or even to identify what’s inside it, it’s to identify the people doing it, because the secure communication itself, rather than the contents of the communication, are what you’ve banned.
But I don’t think anybody -wants- this level of control. The Internet is too powerful a weapon.