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Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

(threema.ch)
960 points andrew918277 | 2 comments | 18 Jun 24 08:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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romankolpak ◴[18 Jun 24 10:46 UTC] No.40716163[source]▶
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused.

If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

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cauch ◴[18 Jun 24 11:14 UTC] No.40716364[source]▶
I'm seeing more value in your comment than, apparently, the other people who have answered it here.

I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle.

I'm not convinced by the other arguments here that usually contains a hint of slippery-slope, what-aboutism or false dichotomy fallacies.

The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. However, it does not mean that the equally terrible situation of having easy way for criminals to avoid justice is the good solution either.

Personally, I think that a good system should be a distributed system where several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt (for example, a message can be decrypted only if Amnesty International, Interpol and the Austrian Justice Department put their 3 keys together, each individual key being useless on its own). In this model, abuses are almost impossible while obvious crime can still be investigated. I don't know any argument that really works to say that this model is not always better than the free-for-all-all-anonymised-messaging.

Such ideas already exist, and David Chaum even came up with proof of concept of something similar https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-a...

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1. NoGravitas ◴[18 Jun 24 14:39 UTC] No.40718375[source]▶
> I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle.

The correct solution should be something in the middle. Old-fashioned wiretapping, with a warrant and the need to dedicate staff to installing and monitoring the tap is basically okay. The problem is that the mathematics of cryptography and the scaling inherent to information technology mean that only all-or-nothing solutions are possible. If the cryptography is intentionally broken, it's broken not just for law enforcement, it's broken for everyone. If law enforcement has a backdoor they can use with a warrant, they're capable of using it without a warrant, and probably will. And if their special keys get leaked, then again, the encryption is broken for everyone.

Like you point out, secret sharing is one way of getting around this in principle. But governments would never make their access dependent on an NGO; in practice I'm sure they'd only agree to secret sharing schemes where the separate parties were separated only by nominal bureaucratic firewalls, and then you're back to the original problem.

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2. cauch ◴[18 Jun 24 15:30 UTC] No.40718963[source]▶
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).