| > And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case. The scenario I'm talking about isn't overly-broad warrants, etc. Technology can't prevent that. I'm talking about just the tech implementation. Fine, we have a private keypair for every message, and every message is additionally encrypted with the public key of the government-per-message-keypair. How are these per-message keypairs generated? If from a central server, then that becomes a massive weakpoint in the system for multiple reasons: it could be attacked to prevent new keypairs from being generated, it could be hacked to extract private keys, it could be modified to generate keypairs that an adversary can easily break, it could be modified to also send private keys to adversaries, etc., etc. If they're generated on-client, and the secret key is sent to some central repository, then the client or the device the client is running on could be compromised; the private keypairs could be intercepted en-route; the central repository could _still_ be compromised since it can't be airgapped to receive these keypairs. In the case of a warrant, how is each key actually fetched? I don't mean the legal process, I mean at some point someone has to push a button and decrypt a message. How do we protect that process? Besides the fact that even air-gapped systems can be vulnerable to a sufficiently motivated and well-funded adversary, at some point some human being has to have access to this system, and that human being probably has family members. How vulnerable are they to being beaten with rubber hoses, or receiving their spouse's fingers in the mail? If you're going to build a system that can expose everyone's private communications, it better be incredibly close to fool-proof, or it better not be built at all. |