Another difference from the metaphor is that busting down doors is visible and obvious, and doesn't scale.
Imagine if the government busted down a quarter of all doors in the country - that's a lot of industrial-scale police work, and it's very visible to all citizens. On the other hand, the government can tap half of all phones in the country, or intercept half of all emails sent by US residents, and we're not even legally allowed to know it happened, so we can't even argue against it in a public court of law.
Atomic-grade offense requires atomic-grade defense. We will have un-breakable encryption, or we will be crushed by secret intelligence agencies with immense power and no public accountability. It's a whole new game.
Anyway, I'm not too worried, strong encryption is open source and widely available already (even if not used in nearly all the circumstances it should be yet). This cat isn't going back in the bag.
Imagine if the government busted down a quarter of all doors in the country - that's a lot of industrial-scale police work, and it's very visible to all citizens. On the other hand, the government can tap half of all phones in the country, or intercept half of all emails sent by US residents, and we're not even legally allowed to know it happened, so we can't even argue against it in a public court of law.
Atomic-grade offense requires atomic-grade defense. We will have un-breakable encryption, or we will be crushed by secret intelligence agencies with immense power and no public accountability. It's a whole new game.
Anyway, I'm not too worried, strong encryption is open source and widely available already (even if not used in nearly all the circumstances it should be yet). This cat isn't going back in the bag.