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0 pointsrtkwe2y ago0 comments

There's no way to have E2E encryption that's strong against government overreach that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop. It's a moral conundrum that anyone interested in preserving privacy is going to have to grapple with in the end, your tools are going to be used by criminals to evade justice no matter how many exceptions or tools you try to include to differentiate between "good guys" and "bad guys".

Even things in the neighborhood of Apple's hash and device scans can only detect existing minimally altered images and also fall down to context if they try to detect more general issues like "nude children". We don't even have to get hypothetical about false positives of anti-CSAM measures [0] they're already out there happening. The devices are blind to context and the occurrence of actual CSAM are rare (blessedly) but there's a whole genre of "my kid did something cute in the tub" that look a lot like it without the context to a machine.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medi...

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throwaway2902y ago· 2 in thread

> There's no way to have E2E encryption that's strong against government overreach that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop

> There's no way to have cash that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop

Life is not black and white. You can have freedom enabling technologies like cash but you acquiesce to cash controls, maximum transaction amounts, personal searches if there is reasonable suspicion and so on. Same applies to e2e encryption or anything else. To think otherwise just in this case is a nonce move, you have not refuted my points in the slightest.

rtkweOP2y ago

To do all of those you have to go to the person and perform the search, the law can also go to a person and perform a search of their E2E encrypted files by getting a warrant and requiring them to unlock the devices. Providing a back door in E2E for law enforcement gives them the weakness to search anyone's traffic with or without a warrant, it's also an ambivalent weakness anyone can potentially exploit. Compromises in digital systems for communications are infinitely more abusable than any physical search because they can be performed automatically and at a massive scale, pretending they won't or can be trusted to follow the law is ignoring the 2 decades of evidence we've been given since the Patriot Act allowed mass wiretapping. Do you remember parallel construction? Room 641A? The rubber stamp of the FISA courts?

throwaway2902y ago

> To do all of those you have to go to the person and perform the search, the law can also go to a person and perform a search of their E2E encrypted files by getting a warrant and requiring them to unlock the devices.

Violation of privacy in person is still bad. They can know your hidden illnesses or anything else people generally keep private. Something that you can't find out from texts.

There are plenty of examples where you don't need to be in person. Like financial transactions. You submit to your income to be disclosed to the government, and that the government will not freeze your money for no reason. The capability to freeze is key in order to combat profit from crime, kidnappings, blackmail etc. If you forgo that you get anarchy.

If you don't trust your government's checks and balances to take measures in public benefit, you should elect a different one. But the ability to take measures is important, more technical solutions will not solve a human problem as time always shows.

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