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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't be so bad with ubiquitous end to end encryption though right? If everything was encrypted in transit it wouldn't really matter if Huawei (and by extension the supposition goes the Chinese government) because they'd just see noise.

Guess they would also be able to do location tracking though and that's not so easily solved.

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Even end to end encryption often leaves them with metadata [0]

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

Which is why you'll want to use some open source onion-routed app like Briar, Ricochet, Cwtch, TFC, or Session.

Using tor to keep your communications secret is like having ACAB tattooed on your forehead - fine if you like the attention, not exactly useful if you don't.

It is when everyone uses Tor.

Nobody uses Tor: Everyone is surveilled.

Few activists use Tor: Activists are easy to pick and everyone else is easy to surveill.

Everyone uses Tor: Nobody can be surveilled.

Nothing to gain by not using Tor, only one way to win, use Tor and tell everyone else to use Tor too.

It's like the prisoner's dilemma, and not using Tor is like betraying others just in case things ever get bad.

Governments are focusing more and more on end-to-end encryption. It can be banned within the next 5 years. They could need to manufacture some consent before that (e.g. mention e2e in the news every time a major crime is committed).

Not going to happen, considering djb vs US declared code free-speech; E2EE is implemented in code so you can't ban it without violating the constitution.

I mean, you can do a lot with metadata.

Also, I think quite a bit of telecomm traffic is encrypted by the telecomm carrier itself. For example I don't think my iPhone, by default, encrypts/decrypts SMS or voice calls on the device. To the extent text messages and mobile phone calls are resistant to dumb eavesdropping, that's provided by the mobile carrier. So having access into all the equipment at the carrier would be a nice centralized place to sit and observe/record.

The US government does not get to dictate mobile phone standards so that is irrelevant. Besides, it’s not like the US government doesn’t have its hand in the sniffing cookie jar, they don’t really want the traffic to be indecipherable.

Yes, this is my understanding. But, haven't USA for Adobe history wrt "backdooring" the encryption algorithms themselves (ie private knowledge allows decryption to be made plausible [but still costly]).

There is also the risk of disrupting network operations at some unfortunate time, especially since these new networks are thought to be dominated by machine-to-machine communications.

There is metadata, but you also have frequent bugs or other errata that render encryption vulnerable.

A nation-state type actor can hoover up everything and retroactively decrypt.

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