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by cauch 731 days ago
It's not up to governments to agree.

Right now, there are encrypted communication solutions that exist. None of them have been built by a government. We can build Chaum's network and start to use it. If we do that, government will have to either accept this network as a legal usage, or admit that they don't care about kids and crimes but just want to spy.

And sure, some government will admit that, but it's not by chance that right now the bad legislation are justified by "for the children" instead of "because we want to spy on you": admitting that will make these legislation obviously harmful, and they will be stopped even more easily.

There are some reasons why a network like the one proposed by Chaum is not used. One is that it's not easy to put in place, similarly to how difficult it was to build ethical journalism network for example. A second one is that some people don't want such network, either because they want to do illegal things or they want to spy on citizen. But another reason is the childish mentality of being instantaneously against any ideas that does not fit into the "100% anonymity" of the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian (not saying that anyone who is against is like that, but some who are against are indeed like that).