This kind of legislation fundamentally misunderstands how easy it is for bad people to build their own end-to-end encryption layers on top of other messaging systems.
This person is mistakenly taking the justifications for these laws at face value. These governments aren’t trying to thwart bad actors, they’re trying to control their entire population. To point out that scofflaws can circumvent the laws is to misunderstand their true purpose.
Independent report, which has been posted before. It doesn’t even seem to be as deep as controlling the population, rather they just take big US tech money in exchange for pushing these laws.
As an old nerd I’ve lived through previous battles in the crypto wars.
Wouldn’t it be easier and more direct to simply impose a tax to those external big tech services?
I don’t understand why using protection against “bad actors” as an excuse is necessary at all if getting money from big tech were the ultimate goal. A lot of people within the EU would happily support such a tax targeting big US companies, it’s the privacy problems what we are pushing against, not the fees. So I’d expect a more direct and honest fee for external companies making business within the EU would be easier to pass if that were what they actually wanted, wouldn’t it?
And yet it’s still important to strike down their bullshit reasoning so that normies can see the argument for what it truly is.
Various lawmakers in different countries are proposing to require messaging services to provide a mechanism for law enforcement to decrypt end-to-end encrypted messages. This kind of legislation fundamentally misunderstands how easy it is for bad people to build their own end-to-end encryption layers on top of other messaging systems.
Requiring Signal, WhatsApp, and so on to introduce vulnerabilities into their products does not make life much harder for criminals. Criminals can easily build or buy an extra layer of encryption on top and exchange messages that can’t be decrypted.
It does make everyone else less safe. If a backdoor exists and is usable by authorised people, it will eventually be exploited and used by malicious people.
This repository contains a trivial demonstration of this. 👉
It does make everyone else less safe.
This is all the evidence one should need that these laws are about control, not safety.
I haven’t read the article, but I’m going to guess that it describes a form of encrypted tunnel with pre-shared keys that operates over any text messaging app and is trivial to implement.
In the world of tech illiterates, the script kid is a seasoned cybercriminal.
I am glad you had fun writing that blog post but, for any purpose that matters: Yes, it is possible. And we are already seeing the pathway to it
- Increasingly build a narrative that encrypted communication is for CSAM. The tor crowd are already doing a good job of providing fuel for this.
- Argue “terrorism” for the rest. “Fortunately” people have realized the mess in Israel/Palestine is a lot more complicated, but it is only a matter of time
- Strongly pressure/incentivize the major app/social media companies either disable it at the app level or maintain internal keys to decrypt messages (effectively disabling it)
End result? Only “tech savvy” people will know how to set up their own entirely parallel “internets” (similar to tor). And then the phone and OS app stores increasingly lock down on third party apps for “security”. Hell, I can even see a world where Redhat and Ubuntu strongly discourage these tools from being allowed in any official repositories because they want the government contracts for their premium OSes.
Will e2e truly be “banned”? No. But the only people doing it have insanely janky phones and linux.users with laptops. Which means it is nigh useless for the vast majority of whistleblowers and that “secretly being gay or a woman” becomes a huge mess where the vast majority of people will never understand how to protect themselves.
I am glad you had fun writing that blog post
Who are you talking to?
I find this article more complex than it should. For me the logic is more basic:
You want to ban encryption? So no https so no banking online.
They don’t want to outright ban encryption. They want to force communication providers to build in backdoors. And not tell you about them.
Banking regulation is going to freak out with this. Tracking this risk which has to be kept hidden can only be fun.
Can’t bad actors just create their own messaging app and their own encryption methods?
They absolutely can. Its just the matter where to find a trusty guy to write one for them.
Ok then, what are these politicians smoking?
That’s the point
Some of them are useful idiots, and some of them are working with State security & intelligence, which want full-spectrum communication access.
This independent report has been posted here a while ago. They seem to be smoking big US tech dollars.
Laws made by elderly people, who confuse a remote control with a cell phone, to satisfy certain lobbies, whose spokespersons they are.
Even if they manage to carry out this law, until all the chat companies introduce it and the legislators of the different countries manage to introduce it into their own legislation, with the necessary infrastructure and the corresponding bureaucracies, I think that most of us would already be retired. or in a pine box.
Adding that until then there will be zillions of countermeasures available to give them the middle finger.
Until now there is a regulation that allows access to chats with a court order, in case there is an investigation against certain people for crimes. Trying to globalize it to the entire population by default, well, I think I’ll wait quietly, with agencies and administrations that still use FAX and Windows XP.
I don’t think anyone thinks that e2ee bans prevent people from using e2ee. What it does is force companies in their jurisdiction to install a backdoor
It is entirely plausible and it will make many people (who dont migrate to secure service providers) loose security and privacy.
