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Gates seems to hint that the way to reduce lie-sharing is by eliminating safe encryption (replacing safe encryption with unsafe encryption). This is an inherently dangerous stance (to everyone except repressive authoritarians).

Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? I hadn’t until I listened to this podcast with NYT investigative journalist. Worth considering how serious the trade offs are https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

throwawaythekey 2143 days ago

I normally enjoy Sam but found that episode was voiced more by his inner parent than his usual hyper-rational self. Child porn is a scourge that should be destroyed but there was minimal discussion of the following that I would normally expect from Sam:

  - Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs

  - Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?

To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue they cite a study that around 5% of the population have consumed child pornography. My own experience has been that unsavoury images can be posted in public places and none of the viewers intend to see the material. I suspect (and hope!) this is where the 5% comes from. This is not caused or solved by the masses having access to encryption.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.

Curious what does “reducing of e2e” refer to? What does reduction without elimination look like?

E2E refers to end to end. I imagine he means encryption in transport as opposed to encryption at rest.

HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.

Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.

His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.

boomboomsubban 2143 days ago

Presumably like historical encryption, available to the government and the super wealthy. That was what they were attpting when they tried to classify PGP as munitions.

throwawaythekey 2143 days ago

The podcast makes the suggestion that encryption doesn't have to be universal. If most communication were through unencrypted channels then policing would be easier, and the use of an encrypted channel would still be possible for critical communications (although may draw scrutiny).

I use reduced to mean non universal.

>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media?

What does that have to do with encryption?

Also, sidebar:

Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet".

Together they're responsible for a bazillion-fold increase of illegal porn. It's imperative that legislation be passed that sabotages the basic functions of computers and renders them ineffective at performing their primary task.

> what does that have to do with

Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

> Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.

I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure. I don’t see your point though as we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet... Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped. If currently reported counts from automation in the US are in the order of magnitude of 100 million (I forget exact numbers, but it was near this) from a small number of companies, there’s just no way to combat that manually with “good old fashioned police work” and I don’t know of other options besides those two..

Sidebar: I don’t understand your flippancy. There literally are children to think about. Is your privacy really more important that children being raped? So yes “for the children”.

Usernames and passwords are just one "privacy" related item that are transported over networks. Without encryption they are trivially easy to retrieve from any number of points along the network.

I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.

Such an off beat example, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.