[nathan_compton]

I'm not a digital privacy dogmatist and in like general terms I agree that sometimes states have legitimate powers to wiretap or whatever. And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary. But technology has put us in a challenging position wherein it seems like our only two choices are living in a perfect surveillance state all the time, where everything can be, in principal, observed by the state at a whim and the former reality, where people can have genuinely private communications.

When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.

[matheusmoreira]

It's a politico-technological arms race. Government makes laws, people make technology to circumvent those laws, government makes new laws, people make new technology. With every iteration, government must increase its tyranny to enjoy the same level of control it had before. Governments get worse and worse in a desperate attempt to hold on to their power. We'll either end up in a totalitarian state or with an uncontrollable population, whichever comes first. Who'll reach their limits first?

Brazilian government is already speaking of giving judges and politicians total power to censor things on the internet. They're speaking of "autonomous internet supervision entities". Yeah.

[nathan_compton]

I'm not so sure its so zero-sum.

[bheadmaster]

> And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary

The problem is, short of banning encryption altogether, you cannot prevent people from communicating in near perfect secrecy. If a criminal (or neo-Nazi, or homophobic, or whatever scapegoat you want to use) organization wants to communicate secretly, they will have means of doing so. All it takes is single programmer to write the custom application, and a single AWS instance to relay the data.

By banning Telegram or enforcing government rules, you're only taking away privacy from ordinary folks, while doing effectively nothing to those who you're claiming to fight against.

...and no, this is not an argument for banning encryption. I hope that part is obvious.

[nathan_compton]

It is pretty easy to imagine a world where all manufactured hardware is compromised by default so that the state can access it. In some ways were close to that already. That said, you're point is good. The dedicated person can probably achieve pretty good privacy except in the most powerful regimes.

[bheadmaster]

Even that wouldn't stop the most dedicated, which are most likely exactly the ones you're trying to stop.

As long as embedded devices exist, you can write a QR reader/writer + encryptor/decryptor on an embedded device with a camera/display, and use the compromised devices as just a transport layer for encrypted QR coded messages.