Edit! When I wrote this on Nov 6th I didn’t know that EU had already decided to not do this (yaayy!) eleven days earlier.
All the “stop it stop it” sites I was looking at didn’t update.🤦🏻♀️
Requiring Signal, WhatsApp, and so on to introduce vulnerabilities into their products does not make life much harder for criminals. Criminals can easily build or buy an extra layer of encryption on top and exchange messages that can’t be decrypted.
It does make everyone else less safe.
100% correct. He goes on to show a mildly steganographed public key system. Not undetectable but impressive for a demo.
I appreciate that Chisnall didn’t go the “lol sending csam is nbd” route that some “privacy advocacy groups” here in Sweden have so misguidedly headed down. That is messed up.
Most people outside of the hacker community think that other people’s privacy is only creepy.
I was listening to the news the other day and the reporter was indignantly yelling at a postal delivery company for not opening more packages to check for drugs. Even though that would be illegal to do.
However, these bans on e2ee are technically not doable without a complete lockdown on all computers ever made. Like a super gooped down Android or iOS with no sideloading. Goodbye general purpose computer, hello spyware appliance.
There are plenty of good reasons beyond privacy to not wanna attempt such a horrific lockdown.