[nimbius]

from what ive learned about encryption and cryptography in general, it seems like you dont get to put this cat back in the bag once it gets out.

You can hold all the meetings you want. pound fists to table, elegantly restate your problem, but the mathematic fundamentals of it are your immovable object. your only option is to block it throughout your nation. this just makes room for a new, or an updated version of the fly you swat last week that gets around your flyswatter.

Sure, you can try to poison the code base, or inject some kind of malware, but this trick only works once. its not a silver bullet.

[MarcScott]

I wrote a blog post about this awhile back, when the UK government was talking about adding backdoors to encrypted messaging platforms, framed as an open letter to our PM. It's a basic introduction to cryptography (I'm no expert though).

http://coding2learn.org/blog/2017/06/11/dear-theresa/

Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal organisation or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily encrypt their own communications. The only people who won't are the innocent public, who can be spied on with impunity.

[coldtea]

>Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal organisation or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily encrypt their own communications. The only people who won't are the innocent public, who can be spied on with impunity.

It's always the innocent public who is the target of such moves. The goal is state omniscience, not crime fighting.

Competent criminal organisations wouldn't care about laws banning encryption, and would know to use the proper tools.

The random non-competent criminals caught this way, would be used to justify the measure...

[mantap]

I wouldn't be so cynical. The real goal is to catch stupid criminals. Not all criminals are stupid, but most are.

Of course governments cannot stop tech people from using e2e encryption. That's not what bothers them. What bothers them is that e2e encryption is the default. They want to change the default to be insecure.

The people who demand these laws are tasked with making various statistics change, such as crime rates. They are metaphorical paperclip maximisers: a surveillance state is not a goal, it is just a means to an end, a way to make their numbers look better.

[coldtea]

>I wouldn't be so cynical. The real goal is to catch stupid criminals. Not all criminals are stupid, but most are.

The real goal is to expand the state. Bureaucracies, like cancer, want to expand into any aspect of their subjects lives they can. They get job security, bigger budgets, and more power as they expand, what's not to like?

Individual opinions (of politicians, bureaucrats, etc) don't really matter, as the aggregate dynamics of a state/organization tend to expansion and self-preservation -- even if an organization has no real role or is mostly BS (eg TSA).

Besides, nothing wrong with being cynical. Remember McCarthy? The real goal of the collection of data then wasn't to "catch stupid criminals". They collected data on politicians, journalists, businessmen, etc. Same thing with now public records of 10 and 20 years later -- check the files on people like MLK, Lennon, civil rights leaders, etc.

(And of course anybody with experience from European governments like in Italy, Greece, Spain, France, and so on, knows that private info/surveillance is used against whom which the state considers an "internal enemy" all the time, and in fact collection on those was far more common up to the 90s than collection on criminals -- which merely had their criminal record, and periods when they were bugged in suspicion of a crime, whereas politicians, businessmen, activists, writers, journalists etc were tracked all the time).

[jddj]

While I agree for the most part, these are people who are in positions of power and would like to stay there. They have their personal biases, and their livelihoods depend on their staying in power.

When they say (not in so many words) that "I want for us to be able to bulk monitor communications", I'm not willing to concede that they aren't considering or aware of some of the possible second order effects.

To me it seems more likely that they feel they (may) get to move their crime rate statistics and, when their mind goes for a cursory wander over the likely consequences, they find all of those to be mildly pleasant as well.

[coldtea]

Or you can always make it illegal, and no commercial chat program will ship with it.

Then you confiscate devices and jail people when you believe (or have "reasonable suspicion") that they use one.

Problem solved for the 99% of the population!

[gnode]

A government can punish people for using cryptography, punish failure to disclose keys, or treat use of cryptography as circumstantial evidence.