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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Any intervention by government that picks our locks only works with platforms that choose or can be forced to participate. People with something to hide will always be able to find a place to communicate beyond the reaches of such surveillance.

This makes government backdoors not only an unwelcome intrusion, but also entirely pointless.

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I agree completely. These efforts to "break" end-to-end encryption seem entirely ineffectual so long as open source alternatives exist - they are plenty and well proliferated. Banning the use of unapproved software is impractical, like asking everyone to turn in guns. So what's really their end game?

Controlling the popular platforms, that the vast majority of people use, while ignoring or attempting to restrict over time the little-used alternatives?

"People with something to hide" is everyone.

But this isn’t a lock pickable by the government, so there can’t be anything wrong.

Instead it’s just a lock the reports who visits your house and can choose not to allow some people in.

You can not make a computer lock written by the government and also auto-updateable by the government, that is then unpickable by the government.

That was my point - it’s a nonsense concept invented by an overreaching “law enforcement” agency that is more intent on spying on the general populace than it is in obeying the law itself.

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