[Zak]

It's common that people become much more concerned about possible threats to physical safety after having children. That strikes me as reasonable, even if it leads someone to take a different side than I would in a freedom/safety question.

With that out of the way, how do you propose stopping criminals from using encrypted chat? You can make it illegal, of course, but making it impossible for someone who doesn't care about laws to install software that's available on the internet and use it to send and receive data over the internet is... difficult.

[euthrow439]

Well, one way: If you do make it illegal:

1. Police finds e.g. a 19 year criminal gang member doing something mildly illegal.

2. Police inspects their phone

3. Police finds illicit encrypted chat app

4. Criminal gang member refuses to cough up password

5. Criminal gang member gets sentenced and cannot hurt the public while they are contained.

[damnencryption]

Why do you trust the police?

With everything that has been happening in US, Hong Kong, China, Belarus, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, and others. Where does this trust comes from? Media?

I think you are more likely to be brutalized by police in US than terrorist right now. Maybe you feel that your country is better and somehow won't end up like others but what exactly is stopping that?

I really want to know how this mindset works. Maybe people have been living in peace for too long that they don't recognize all the horrible crimes committed by the state.

[Zak]

I suspect you're underestimating the ability of criminals to obtain communication tools with sufficient plausible deniability to prevent detection by the local police after the first few prosecutions for that.

[euthrow439]

I suspect you overestimate the bespoke firmware-altering abilities of the average local criminal gang.

[Zak]

All they really need to hide from the local cops is an app that appears to be something else. A quick google search for "disguised encrypted chat app" found one called CoverMe that can disguise itself as a photo album. There are probably more sophisticated options available now, and there will be an explosion of them if the EU bans encrypted chat apps.

With a marginally more sophisticated user, they can get far more hidden. The Android anti-theft app Cerberus, before the company behind it imploded spectacularly, could be installed as a system app on any rooted device, then hide itself until a user-specified code was entered on the phone dialer. If there isn't already an encrypted chat app with that feature, there surely will be after an EU ban. The barrier to entry is not high.

I'll grant it would likely result in a small number of gang members spending a greater percentage of their lives in jail, but that's not a lot of benefit for an extremely high cost.

[throw_threatint]

He is wildly _underestimating_. There won't be any prosecutions even, criminals would buy already 100% working tools on a darknet forum.

Source: worked for 3 years in threat intelligence