On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors

Interesting. Compare https://safenetworkprimer.com/ by the way

Signal client is centrally managed and can be updated for every user. And it's quite ridiculous claim that Signal can't implement a backdoor in the client because of some arbitrary design choice.

Consider that the article may be written for people on the law enforcement/policy side of the debate.

I think you're conflating two different positions, which do admittedly co-occur in many people: 1. The technical, that any such "backdoor" is necessarily a backdoor, with all that implies, and thus to be eschewed on a "fundamental principles of good security" basis, and 2. The moral, that any such backdoor is crime against humanity, or whatever, because some of the people who have the technical capability will be leveraging it in order to oppress, and all of them will be doing so in order to act in a manner contrary to the user's interests.

Who do our tools serve? Is it just that they should be made to serve someone else, against us? Where, exactly, is the line on one side of which it's justified, but on the other it's abuse? How do you build a system that prevents abusive uses, but allows appropriate ones?

Decrying absolutist positions is all well and good, but it is a nigh-on tautology-level truth that a system with a flaw or backdoor, will be exploited — usually in multiple ways, and well beyond any potentially intended such.

Yeah yeah, but ultimately this all comes down to whether you think government interception of private messages is ultimately better than the messages staying private. People here obviously don't feel the same way you do about that.

Myself, I'm not quite so convinced as you seem to be of the harm of "absolutist" positions. Maybe the truth isn't always somewhere in the middle

The way WhatsApp was used in e.g. Myanmar included group chats involving dozens of random acquaintances - basically the equivalent of gathering in a town square to gossip. Needless to say, there isn't any security to speak of in such an arrangement. Nor did anyone ever complain that WhatsApp encryption is the obstacle. It's the part where everybody can gossip to everybody, with transparent scaling, that enables flash mobs - and it could just as well be a plain text SMS otherwise.

That's a little hard to do in a world where this kind of thing is done by National Security Letter.

How will the accused know about the search when they aren’t told about it?

Unfortunately, in the world of crypto, if the state can intercept communications, then it's equally possible that a determined attacker can. Encryption either works for everyone, or it doesn't.

Governments are more powerful actors on this playing field, but they are far from the only ones on the field.

A warrant doesn't expose something your saying to the government, it exposes what you're saying to anyone who might be listening.

We're not talking the equivalent of handing some documents over to the police, we're saying the police are ordering us to stick the documents to the window of our house so that they can see them.

I think a large factor in this is the range of intended uses - in the example of a nuke, it can only be used for one thing which is evil, and so there is no downside to banning it or mandating changes to the properties inherent to its existence. But tools like private messaging and hammers have a huge potential for being used for good (due to the same properties that make them useful for evil) and targeting their properties to reduce viability for evil also reduces the amount of good they can do.

All that being said, I do agree that in some cases there is a definite ethical burden on a creator to consider the impact of his creation - I just think that in many cases the best solution is not to change the tool to avoid misuse but to figure out why the misuse occurs/would occur in the first place and try to solve that. I would conjecture that the misuse more often than not points to a deeper social issue that is for some reason not being properly dealt with but which is actually a really big deal that no one wants to confront. I can think of a few examples but I think that level of exploration may be better suited to a blog post than a comment.