[styeco]

Sorry for the choice words, but shit like this makes my blood boil. You're not trying to "keep our children safe" motherfucker, and you know it. You're trying to prevent people from being able to have private conversations, so your secret agencies can harvest all the data from everyone easily. To phrase it as "but think of the children" is instrumentalizing the actual victims of child abuse and you should be ashamed.

[qwerty456127]

This is blatant disrespect of the people. Every time the government, its agencies and their pet organizations draw the "protect the children" card that's appealing to the most technically-illiterate and privacy-unmindful people who have zero understanding of how does the web work, can't think two turns in advance and naïvely believe they "have nothing to hide" and nothing like this[1] can possibly affect them, let alone an inherently malevolent party getting their unencrypted data to misuse it in quite a number of ways possible.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60369875

[Youden]

You might not realize it but there really are people who honestly, genuinely, in their heart-of-hearts think this way and if you want to have a chance at inducing real change in the world, you need to acknowledge that they exist and see things from their point of view.

It's easy to forget but not everyone lives in a bubble full of privacy-conscious techfolk. There are people whose children were groomed online and convinced to submit themselves to sexual abuse. There are people who were those children. There are the law enforcement officers and NGOs dedicated to fighting this stuff. These people are all real. They all exist.

Other people are parents. They see the stories, they worry that it'll happen to their own children. Whether you like it or not, this justification garners sympathy from a not-insignificant number of people.

Often, these people don't understand E2E encryption or why they should give a hoot about it. They see the very real, tangible problem of child abuse on one side and some kind of vague objection from technical people on the other.

If you want to move past venting and have a real chance of inducing change, you need to acknowledge that other people with very different worldviews exist and you need to think about how to engage with them, see things from their point of view and convince them that E2E encryption should be protected.

[heavenlyblue]

Why are the people against E2E get a 500K government grant FOR MARKETING and people towards E2E don't?

[CodeGlitch]

This is the best comment in this thread.

I would add that some may see E2EE as important, but protection of vulnerable as *more* important. Life just isn't so black & white.

[m12k]

The right to have a private conversation is one of those fundamental rights that society exists to protect. Undermining that in the name of law enforcement is putting the cart before the horse.

I'm sure the police would also have a much easier time solving crimes if they had a CCTV in every living room. They might even pinky swear that that they'd only look at it with a court order. And promise to keep the recording extra, super safe so no bad guys can ever look at it. Just think of how much child abuse takes place inside houses - the very notion of houses that the police can't look into is an abomination that must be banned immediately!

The pushback if they proposed something like that would be enormous. But the only reason they think they can get away with the same thing, just regarding chat systems, is that they want to take advantage of the fact that most people are tech-illiterate enough not to understand how encryption works, while they do roughly understand how CCTV works.

Some things are just too dangerous to exist. A backdoor into every communication channel on the planet is one of those things.

[bradhe]

Right? Their complete statement is "remove end-to-end encryption so we can catch child sex abusers...by monitoring all the content that flows through social media" -- they just don't say the second part out loud because everyone would realize how fucking crazy this is.

[UltraViolence]

Most citizens are now well aware of governments ploy to use children's virginity to muzzle their dissent.

[b112]

What! No way, just no way!

You live in bubble. Most citizens include all age groups, backgrounds, etc.

Most people literally have no idea what encryption is, what it means, does, how it is used.

Along comes a trustful thing, a news site or tv channel. It explains that encryption is being used to harm little kids, or to allow thieves to do evil.

Governments spout this blather, because it works on the majority.

[stonepresto]

> so your secret agencies can harvest all the data from everyone easily

The thing is, I don’t think the people who work at those agencies would want this either, except for maybe law enforcement. It’s the bureaucrats who think it’s a good idea, everyone else knows it’s a shite one. It’s an utter farce.

[b112]

I think more are for it, than you believe.

Someone in such an agency believes they act for the greater good. To watch, aides in protecting society from bomber, insurrection, threat.

They see themselves as noble, and likely most are.

The problem here is misuse, and the scope of information. While the majority behave acceptably, agency culture, and political leanings become a trap.

And so the noble use, becomes corrupted. And because the person believes themselves to be good, who they work for is surely good, and so the work done must be good.

Just look at all the devs working at facebook Do they see themselves as evil? Causing civil wars, breakdown of societal cohesion for profit, destruction for stock price?

No.

They see themselves as non-evil. They see what they do as non-evil, because of <reasons>.

[collegeburner]

It's a great tactic. Gun grabbers have been using it successfully in the UK, US and everywhere else.

[m12k]

Since when have gun grabbers have any success in the US? From the outside, it seems the US has decided it would rather just live with regular school shootings than deny its citizens access to lethal weapons. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...

[collegeburner]

1930s machine guns, short barrel rifles and shotguns, destructive devices and AOWs got a $200 tax, cost prohibative at the time for most people. 1960s more restrictions on FFLs and on types of guns especially imports, both raise prices and reduce availability more. 1980s new transferrable machineguns banned so now existing ones cost more than a car. 1990s handgun age raised to 21. And you steppers keep saying "it's not enough". If the cost of freedom is school shootings then so be it. We could cut down lots of other crime with a police state but don't because it's wrong.

You may as well support banning E2EE because nobody needs it.

[maxerickson]

We should amend the constitution and then make permitted ownership of single shot bolt action rifles the only widespread form of personal gun ownership. Plenty capable enough for sport hunting.

That would be enough.

There would be people made less safe by such a restrictive regime! Of course a much larger number would be safer. Tradeoffs are exactly what they sound like.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Nitpick: "single shot" and "bolt action" are a contradiction in terms. A "single shot" rifle has no magazine, only a single cartridge can be loaded at once. A "bolt action" rifle has a magazine to hold more than one cartridge, with a bolt that the user manually actuates to eject a spent case and load a new cartridge from the magazine.

If actually proposing legislation such distinctions would be important. For an internet discussion what you meant is clear enough.

[collegeburner]

Not quite no. There are plenty of bolt action rifles with no magazine, they're still bolt action. Like there are other single shots that aren't bolt action, and there are other bolt action single shot. Stupid policy this person is proposing but their language is technically correct.

[collegeburner]

Police states tend to reduce crime very well. They're still wrong. And i hope if somebody like you ever gets power and tries to do this Americans resist them by force.

We should uphold the Constution as it is now and remove every single gun law.

[maxerickson]

Citizen resistance against a modern military is largely a LARP fantasy.

[ethanbond]

To be honest the motivation to keep our children (or people more generally) safe seems way more clear to me that the motivation… to prevent people from having private conversations… to what end?

[LatteLazy]

Except that Removing encryption actively endangers children (and everyone else).

[ethanbond]

That’s a different argument than “they’re not trying to keep kids safe”

[LatteLazy]

It's the stepping stone between the two: you cannot believe the motivation is to keep kids safe if the action makes kids less safe. That doesn't prove a specific other motivation. But it does pretty decisively disprove the stated motivation.

[ethanbond]

Ah, I see. You’re saying the threat of someone successfully breaching a child’s data and appropriate keys from a service is more significant than the threat of just internet weirdos relying on E2E to transact child pornography with impunity.

[LatteLazy]

Pretty much. That is what happened every time other people have been given access.

We're in the middle of a whole bunch of cases of policemen being sacked or charged here for asking our underage girls on dates, keeping and sharing nudes from crime victims phones etc.

And remember: if someone is lying about why they're doing something that's further evidence it's not something you want. If they had a good reason, they'd be up front about it...

[iakov]

To expand the total surveillance even further? It seems to me that every government, no matter how liberal or progressive, loves surveillance. Look at how quick European governments started to vacuum up the data from mobile operators when COVID broke out - all "for your safety", of course.

[ramoz]

Power/control.

Fwiw seems rather clear to me that we live in an age where information is groomed for us, for the same reasons.

[fastball]

So that they can better control you?

[llamaimperative]

But again… for what? Are you under the impression that every government is actually authoritarian under the hood but that characteristic just doesn’t really show its head due to encryption? Seems to me authoritarian governments have no problem being authoritarian with or without these sorts of provisions.

Side note: I’m not actually against E2E encryption. Strong proponent really. I just think these arguments tend not to resonate with a very broad audience outside of the security/privacy/technolibertarian communities