Comment by nqzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nqzero | Hacker News Reader

i'm going to go against the grain here and propose an alternative arrangement

medium term, i don't see how democracy can function if E2EE becomes the norm (esp in the context of cryptocurrency). influence-buying, disinformation, collusion, bribes, bullying, etc become much much easier, and policing would become nearly impossible

instead, ban E2EE but allow each person to have multiple identities (with technical means to prevent them from being tied together or expose personal info - a nontrivial but solvable problem), ie Privacy via Multiple Identity or PvMI

this scheme would provide many of the benefits of E2EE (eg, preventing an employer from punishing your for political speech) while allowing policing of many illegal activities. one exception is that if the people became fed up with the govt and wanted to stage an armed rebellion, PvMI wouldn't help (though it would help get to the point of consensus that rebellion is needed). I'm not sure how practical the concept of armed rebellion is today, but I haven't written it off either. So this is a downside.

Can anyone think of any other not-harmful-to-society activity that E2EE helps with that PvMI wouldn't ?

End to end encryption allows for the ends to exchange information without fear of the intermediaries leaking the information to others.

Even if it weren't connected to your identity, you may send pictures you wouldn't want seen by anyone you didn't send them to.

You wouldn't want to send forbidden thoughts if your local government was known to repress them. A government could certainly track down your multiple identities and jail you.

I'm more likely to be harmed by government corruption or poor security practices of a messaging service than by terrorism; I would rather be safe from the first two, than maybe have slightly less of the third.

in the 1st world, I agree that terrorism is a negligible risk. but at least anecdotally, that math appears to be less sound in the rest of the world - i at least imagine that in much of the middle east, expressing a nominally legal but unpopular idea would likely result in you being killed. and i think that it's fairly accepted that in mexico speaking out against the drug cartels is risky

i'm thinking of MvPI for the USA (and presumably similar places). and it would require a society-level commitment to transparency for it to be sufficient (which may not be practical).

as for pictures, there would be technical means to obscure faces, tattoos, voices, etc.

as for the govt tracking you down, there would need to be an elaborate system of checks and balances - access to the unobscured data would require blockchain-like keys from multiple parties and would be publicly visible

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