My thoughts are below:
An update on your petition on strong encryption:
Thank you again for signing the We the People petition on strong encryption and getting involved with this important debate.
We wanted to give you a quick update on the process so far:
This month, administration officials met with some of the original petition signers to listen to their priorities and concerns regarding encryption. In our last correspondence, we asked for your thoughts and questions — and you answered.
So far we’ve received over 5,000 responses from you, which we are carefully reviewing.
In the meantime, watch what the President had to say about bringing law enforcement, intelligence, and high-tech companies together:
Thanks, and we’ll be in touch soon.
— The We the People Team
This kind of reply is why this whole government petition system is pointless in the hands of a centrist republican bank puppet President. All you’ll ever get is more evasive non-speak and 10 minute staffer written throw away replies.
The “answer” given in that video is worthless. It basically boils down to “we’ll ask your question to tech companies.”
Fortunately, on this issue we don’t have to wait for the government. But we do have to wait on coders to get over the greed.
People that want to patent the question mark when they grow up are not going to be helpful when society finds itself in need of blanket user friendly encryption solutions. They’ve already made it abundantly clear that they collectively don’t want anything like a user friendly open source windows alternative.
Not a single distro makes compatibility and familiarity core objectives. Each one is extremely petty systemically in that they disregard windows users as mentally defective and respond to desires from that crowd as flawed desires outright. Tech support answers in that context virtually always boil down to “want something else.”
We need strong encryption baked in to this kind of effort because it has to be adopted in bulk and it needs to be incidental and easy to provide real protection because at the moment, the very act of going through the monumental hassle to harden your communications very likely in itself puts you on a watch list unless you are already just a tech fetishist or are a committed privacy advocate.
We don’t need better bullet proof vests, we need bullet proof tshirts, so that when asked why you are bullet proof your answer can be “it just came with the shirt.” Until then we all know how society will react to anyone else who hardens their communication. “Well what do you have to hide? Why are you going through so much hassle to do this if there’s nothing illegal going on in your tech sphere?”
Thus what we really need is a deep privacy, deep encryption, baked in, peer to peer open source, distributed, version of windows xp. With the twin primary design goals of protecting people from assumed digital tyranny and providing a nearly seamless transition experience for the bulk of PC users. That is why it’s critical that this OS be able to install and run windows apps the exact same way they are run and installed under windows xp in terms of work flow and cosmetics, so that we have a true user-feasible, alternative to the dominant closed source ecosystems. I would also suggest a mac skin for this same base. So that all of us can move towards a shared operating system with pooled resources that serves users above all else.
It is not Obama and the NSA preventing that. So in a sense they are right to lay this sort of problem at the feet of the industry.