The judgement [sic] argues that encryption helps citizens and companies to protect themselves against hacking, theft of identity and personal data, fraud and the unauthorised disclosure of confidential information.
Backdoors could also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously jeopardise the security of all users' electronic communications. There are other solutions for monitoring encrypted communications without generally weakening the protection of all users
Back doors enable bad actors to access everyone’s systems.
Absolutely not. If anything, public officials would be the one group whose messaging I would understand being scanned so that the people can sort of keep them on check. But again, implementing such possibility that would still weaken security of everyone else as well so of course it should not actually be done.
How about making every message of government officials be public and saved in easily searchable database for the populace and make content of their screens be streamed 24/7? No? Why? Nothing to hide nothing to fear? Right?
The law must apply to all, including public servants. As they are beholden to the public, they are subject to review and FOIA requests are automatically granted for the content.
Remember the rule of authoritarians: if someone wants to stop you from being suspicious, they want to stop you from doing the same things they've done.
The law must apply to all, including public servants. As they are beholden to the public, they are subject to review and FOIA requests are automatically granted for the content.
Now I'm suddenly not so against this law. Journalists paradise. They'll have a field day!
It would just result in them having official and unofficial devices, where all the things they don't want linked to their person, political party or public knowledge is on a different device that isn't going to get caught in the FOIA requests.
I'm violently against every attempt to try and weaken e2ee. In my mind doing so would be equivalent to telling people they're no longer allowed to meet in private and have one on one discussions.
There's just this one issue with this that causes some doubt for me. CSAM. Yes, think about the childer and so on, I know.. This is however still a real issue that I have personally encountered multiple times. I use certain encrypted platforms to chat with strangers anonymously and there's a significant userbase there spreading this content. And I don't mean provocative instagram pics but the kind of content that leaves you with zero doubt about what you just saw.
Do we just accept this uncomfortable trade-off? Obviously there are other ways for these people to get caught aswell than monitoring their private discussions which in my mind is kind of even worse than what they're doing (unless they're creating that content aswell) but it's just a fact that if the conversations truly are 100% secure then there's nothing that's going to stop this behaviour. I guess there's nothing stopping them from meeting face to face and trading printed physical photos aswell but I don't know.. This feels different and I'm really struggling to figure out how I feel about that.
Criminals will always find a way. Make a surveillance state, and they'll just break the law and use encrypted communication anyway. Might even hide data in other data if necessary.
That said, I'd wager that there are quite a few of those communities hidden in plain and unencrypted sight (discord, fediverse, etc.), but they just keep it small enough to not be found (The ones on discord did get found out eventually, but probably just moved platform). So the question would aris: why do these exist when we apparently have the resources to monitor EVERYONE given the chance?
Best you can do is to report communities and places where it runs rampant to the relevant authorities. That's much more efficient than the authorities having to make privacy-violating laws and crawl the net themselves.
Except that's not really the trade-off. There will still be means to secure communication and people who have an incentive to do so will go the extra mile to make sure they won't be spied upon.
But we've opened the another door to spy on the general population, because average Joe won't care. Another big leap towards total control, total surveillance.
Do you really expect people that are involved with child pornography to go "Oh well, now that it's forbidden to have private messaging I guess I will just stop looking at children, because the law is the law and I have to follow it."?
These people know they are breaking the law and I can promise you this. They will find a way to privately exchange their shit while the rest of us now have even less privacy...
Encrypting files that can only be unencrypted by one other person is still a thing. Sure it's not quite as convenient as it happening automatically in your chat app. However, anyone who thinks weakening e2ee in chat apps actually stops illegal actions occuring needs to think a bit more carefully.
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