> For example, almost no one had the ability to protect their communication and personal files from warrants when the laws regarding that sort of thing were written...

Pardon? We know that encryption was used at least as far back as the days of Julius Caesar. [0] Clever kids and adults have almost certainly been making their own ciphers since the invention of written language, and their own conlangs since the invention of verbal language.

I expect that -in the US- one could not be compelled to provide the decryption methods for one's papers and journals to the cops back in the 1700s just like cannot be compelled to provide one's passphrase to decrypt one's encrypted data today. Both are really obviously testimony, which cannot be legally compelled. [1]

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher>

[1] ...abuse of contempt of court charges notwithstanding...

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slg 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted. I didn’t claim that encryption was historically impossible in the same way the original comment didn't claim that it’s impossible for a cop to just sit around and watch a public road. The original point was about scale and the scale (and strength) of encryption available today was not possible for most people until the advent of computers.

	▲	simoncion 8 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted. Nope! These methods were available to everyone who was literate as well as anyone who either maintained oral traditions describing how to perform them or just decided to make up a language for fun. Maybe you're forgetting that our ancestors were generally just as smart as we are today. > The original point was about scale and the scale (and strength) of encryption available today was not possible for most people until the advent of computers. This is completely irrelevant. Why? Cops have access to computers that can brute-force most everyday ciphers that would have been cooked up in the 1700s. The just outcome is for non-cops to have access to those same computers to create and use ciphers that restore the ability to keep one's private communications safe from the eyes of the police back to what it was hundreds of years ago. This just outcome is -incidentally- what we have today because of a lot of tireless, difficult, thankless, ongoing work by some absolute heroes starting most visibly in the 1990s and continuing through today. As a bonus, none of this has anything to do with the establishment of dragnet surveillance systems built and operated by private companies that are defacto acting as agents of The State. Dragnet surveillance is -at minimum- plainly antisocial and has no place in any civil society. EPN3D's point stands despite your complaints: the only reason that the illegality of these dragnet surveillance systems wasn't immediately obvious to the courts is because the US Constitution doesn't explicitly mention that courts must always consider the expanded scale of what enhanced technology makes possible, so courts are very slow to incorporate it into their decision making process. Judges and lawyers rely heavily on tradition, so this slowness is only natural.
	▲	cucumber3732842 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When the constitution was written correspondance (papers and effects) was physical and you could destroy it. It was not kept for years in a "oh it's deleted but that's just a flag, until we need the space it's still there" on some other party's servers like it is today.