Well, my tech-illiterate grandfather knows about this debate, and all he can understand is that the FBI has a terrorist's phone and Apple is obstructing their investigation.

He thought encryption was something we could easily ban, and he's a civil engineer. I walked him through it mathematically, then gave examples until he understood, but not everyone has a technical background.

We are losing because we aren't presenting an alternative public narrative.

We must educate the public on the necessity of strong encryption to the modern economy, and the danger of backdoors. Even getting them to imagine how the Soviets would have used this technology is usually enough to get the greatest generation and the boomers to at least think.

We won against the Clipper chip, munitions classifications, export grade encryption, 96-bit maximum key sizes, and SOPA.

We can win here.