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Comment by thefz | Hacker News Reader

> how do you respond when someone brings up concerns of E2EE platforms being used for child sexual abuse imagery or terrorism?

These are only a tiny part of uses of encryption. Ask anyone if he would like to have his bank transfers, or his credit card credentials in plain text. End to end encryption allows the whole internet to act as a commerce platform.

Encryption allows journalists and activists in strict, controlled regimes to let facts out. It allows an abuse victim to safely expose the abuser. It allows at a broader spectrum to maintain secrecy when secrecy is the only way a subject has to distantiate himself from harm.

Disabling end to end encryption requires an implicit good faith on those who look at our communications, and the history is full of abuse from those figures.

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You are confusing E2EE encryption with encryption in transit/rest in the commerce example. The majority of transactions today are encrypted in transit and (you would hope) encrypted at rest so that the bank and selected parties can access the data (including the customer). There is no bank that would encrypt financial data using E2EE so that only the customer and merchant could access it, which is the analogy here on E2EE with messaging.

Sure, now we are looking at tokenization which reduces the risk merchants store your details insecurely, but commerce will always require a bank to store your information and share it with legislators for anti money laundering purposes etc.

Correct. Nice catch.

I still think that full E2E is a fundamental human right.

Many governments agree with you. Sometimes hypocritically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

I think it would be entirely reasonable to have communications between a person and their bank end-to-end encrypted (isn't that the goal of SSL?) as well as communications between a person and a vendor or a vendor and their bank. Wouldn't this cut down on the instances of credit card information and other data being intercepted while in transit?

> You are confusing E2E encryption with encryption in transit in the commerce example

I think he meant to do that. E2EE between two people has the same kind of requirements as E2EE between a person and a server. If you're trying to say point-to-point encryption, where the server is just a relay between the points, and it handles the data unencrypted, then I think all the arguments for E2EE apply here as well.

They still catch them, usually by posing as a "bad guy" and infiltrating their group. That's how it's been done forever, and it still works that way.

Much like crimes using a gun are against the law doesn't stop criminals from using guns. Laws against backdoor-less encryption won't stop criminals from using encryption without a backdoor.

I'd be surprised if most of the "child sex abuse" and "terrorism" traffic isn't already encrypted.

Twofold: one, criminals are, generally, stupid. They're not going to be perfect, and when they slip up we'll get them.

Two, people are sex trafficked in cars and in planes as well, should we stop using those? "But we can patrol and monitor planes and cars and catch the bad guys!" Okay, but then why do they still do it? Did any of that stop sex trafficking? No.

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