Memespeech: Censor-proof end-to-end encryption

Encryption doesn't matter if we eventually get to the point that Apple can be forced to run a key-logger on a user's iPhone (warrant or not). People are lazy and won't use an extra app to "encrypt" something before copy/pasting it into FB and then the other uses has to copy/paste back to the Memespeech app; all just to send :D. Additionally, let's say encryption is banned and this is the "workaround". They just ban this app in the AppStore. No way users are building github repos and side-loading.

But you'll also have a real hard time convincing a court you have a free speech right to uppercasing and lowercasing letters in certain ways - the speech is in the words, not the presentation. That is, if there's a law banning encryption as a whole (and not simply certain messages, encrypted or encrypted), I think this still doesn't save you.

I think the courts have generally held that you can't simply throw speech onto some otherwise prohibited activity to gain First Amendment protections. For instance, see the case about the man who tweeted a GIF at Kurt Eichenwald with the intention of provoking a seizure - the fact that the GIF also contained words (... which were "you deserve a seizure for your posts") seems unlikely to say that the act of sending the GIF itself was protected speech.

I think there are multiple senses of "banned" here. There's "made illegal" and there's "disallowed by a third-party platform." Something can be illegal but easy to do, e.g., driving without a seat belt. Something can be blocked by a platform but still quite legal, e.g., proselytizing your religion on HN.

It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to run your own transport that doesn't go through a third party, at which point you can just use OTR or whatever. Then you're immune from banned-in-the-sense-of-blocked, and you can make your own risk decisions about banned-in-the-sense-of-illegal. (Also, depending on the details of the law, this might be perfectly legal too, e.g., "big tech must give us backdoors" doesn't need to imply "everyone who runs encryption must give us backdoors.")

It does seem like Memespeech has an advantage if you're using a third-party platform as a channel and you don't want to be blocked, i.e., you want to exchange encrypted-and-not-backdoored messages over Facebook Messenger because you can no longer trust its own encryption. I agree that this seems less likely to be blocked than literally sending base64 over the channel. But it still can get blocked - Facebook is under no obligation to transport all "Free Speech" (whatever that means) from user to user. If Facebook says, on our platform we disallow text with >20% uppercase letters, they can do that legally and constitutionally. The government could force them to do it, but they could also do it on their own (e.g. a spam detector might do it, honestly).

So you basically end up in a steganography arms race: you want to send messages that look to Facebook like actual genuine messages so they don't block you, but they contain coded information that is end-to-end encrypted using modern cryptography. I suppose it depends on a number of external factors as to whether that's easier than setting up your own transport.

For instance, if your goal is just successfully sending messages and you don't care about legality, another easy (relatively speaking) thing is to run Noise Protocol over your favorite shortwave digital mode. Then you don't have to worry about being blocked at all.