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Comment by euthrow439 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in my early 40s. Up until I was ~35 I was very strongly against this, sort of like most you.

Now I feel the EU in general (some member states a lot worse than others) has backed itself into a corner because of the utterly failed integration efforts, union-wide. I live in a EU nation that has seen a very high rise in violent (and sometimes frankly horrible) crime over the past decade. As a dad of a 1-year old daughter I unfortunately find my self welcoming this proposal. The criminals are doing laps around the police because of these apps. :/

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What makes you think this would help? In the specific recent case of the Vienna shooter, he had been in prison for trying to join ISIS, he had gone to Slovakia to try to buy ammunition for a Kalashnikov AK-47 and the Austrian authorities were warned.

They had all the necessary information to know that guy presented a risk and they didn't act on it. What makes you think that having more information in the form of unencrypted chats would have helped the authorities?

The question on banning encryption always comes back, but so far I haven't seen any cogent argument for why it would really help the police stop crime. And, what would stop criminals from using an illegal chat app that uses encryption? Or from using their own code words? This kind of law will only reduce the rights of the innocent majority while doing very little to stop criminals.

You are of course aware that "having a law that says one more part of the already illegal activity is illegal" is going to do nothing to stop that illegal activity, right? All this does is criminalize the use of e2ee for everyone, which solves the whole "crime" problems for exactly no one. Your kids aren't any safer, but everyone who needs e2ee (journalists, activists, vulnerable/opressed groups) now needs to engage in criminal behaviour. That's the opposite of solving the problem.

Just curious: do you also apply this argument to the the gun control debate in the United States?

In any case, it's quite possible that making something dangerous illegal does indeed stop some would-be bad guys. The truly committed criminals break the law and gain access to the contraband, while the casual/less intelligent criminal is stopped.

You have to make a call: is the reduction, but not complete elimination, of bad things worth the loss of value derived from allowing law-abiding people access to encryption/guns? That's a difficult question because its answer depends not just on how much bad will actually be prevented but the subjective value you personally place on the good these things provide.

It's an interesting point you make, but there's a fundamental difference between E2EE communication and guns. Mass shootings require guns. They do not require E2EE communication.

Yes, regulating both could reduce the "bad things", but clearly to very different degree. They would both cause "reduction, but not complete elimination", but equating them does not make sense in my eyes.

Removing guns from easy access means removing the very means that a lot of crimes are perpetrated with. Including crimes of passion (non-premeditated ones).

Not so with encryption.

And since the terrorist cases are really aberrations in our times (there are very few incidents, realistically speaking, compared to other kinds of crime and other causes of death), the perpetrators must be significantly motivated individuals (or groups) that are unlikely to be deterred by E2E encryption being unavailable in the popular chat apps.

If you could just download a gun and some ammo in the US, using any internet-connected device? Absolutely.

But we can't, and you know we can't, so I can only assume you're trolling. Stop.

What makes you think that this will reduce violent crime in any meaningful way? The guy who mugs you isn't going to go on Messenger and send out a quick "brb gonna mug someone" message. And they definitely won't if they know the government is listening.

And regardless, we trade freedoms for risk of death all the time. We would have far less crime if no one was allowed to leave their house without an ankle monitor and a body cam, but that would be a violation of people freedoms.

I don't think he's talking about the guy who mugs him.

More like about the guy who mows down a crowd with an automatic weapon, the guy who drives a truck through the center of a Christmas market or the guy who blows up a metro station.

That kind of people.

The guy who does that stuff is going to keep using encryption. Or maybe he won’t bother and he’ll keep using SMS or some other channel that intelligence agencies are too busy to monitor. Mass communications surveillance against operations like this is a fool’s errand.

>The guy who does that stuff is going to keep using encryption.

Then we can charge him regardless of the contents of his messages.

Well, no, you're wrong. The terrorists are horrible, of course, but they don't really cause that much of a risk to the everyday person.

In my country there's a rapidly growing organized crime scene built around the distribution of narcotics. They are organizing themselves via these apps using burner phones. They are exploding bombs in multi-home buildings to scare/take out the competition on a weekly basis. And its all accellerating at a very scary rate.

School-age kids are using what sales people love to refer to as "military grade encryption" to communicate about hits/murders.

Really, what country would that be? I call BS. And when ever I read "military grade encryption" I'm thinking buzzwords. Don't make yourself sound more important than you actually are.

So stop letting "that kind of people" into your country rather than take away everyone else's rights.

Well, half of the EU has already backed itself into a corner.

It's common that people become much more concerned about possible threats to physical safety after having children. That strikes me as reasonable, even if it leads someone to take a different side than I would in a freedom/safety question.

With that out of the way, how do you propose stopping criminals from using encrypted chat? You can make it illegal, of course, but making it impossible for someone who doesn't care about laws to install software that's available on the internet and use it to send and receive data over the internet is... difficult.

Well, one way: If you do make it illegal:

1. Police finds e.g. a 19 year criminal gang member doing something mildly illegal.

2. Police inspects their phone

3. Police finds illicit encrypted chat app

4. Criminal gang member refuses to cough up password

5. Criminal gang member gets sentenced and cannot hurt the public while they are contained.

I suspect you're underestimating the ability of criminals to obtain communication tools with sufficient plausible deniability to prevent detection by the local police after the first few prosecutions for that.

I suspect you overestimate the bespoke firmware-altering abilities of the average local criminal gang.

All they really need to hide from the local cops is an app that appears to be something else. A quick google search for "disguised encrypted chat app" found one called CoverMe that can disguise itself as a photo album. There are probably more sophisticated options available now, and there will be an explosion of them if the EU bans encrypted chat apps.

With a marginally more sophisticated user, they can get far more hidden. The Android anti-theft app Cerberus, before the company behind it imploded spectacularly, could be installed as a system app on any rooted device, then hide itself until a user-specified code was entered on the phone dialer. If there isn't already an encrypted chat app with that feature, there surely will be after an EU ban. The barrier to entry is not high.

I'll grant it would likely result in a small number of gang members spending a greater percentage of their lives in jail, but that's not a lot of benefit for an extremely high cost.

He is wildly _underestimating_. There won't be any prosecutions even, criminals would buy already 100% working tools on a darknet forum.

Source: worked for 3 years in threat intelligence

Why do you trust the police?

With everything that has been happening in US, Hong Kong, China, Belarus, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, and others. Where does this trust comes from? Media?

I think you are more likely to be brutalized by police in US than terrorist right now. Maybe you feel that your country is better and somehow won't end up like others but what exactly is stopping that?

I really want to know how this mindset works. Maybe people have been living in peace for too long that they don't recognize all the horrible crimes committed by the state.

You do know that "think of the kids" is a terrible argument?

And, more importantly, why do you think that your daughter won't want the same freedoms that you had? Or should she be protected from those freedoms?

Don't get me wrong, douchebags exist. Nonetheless, however well intentioned any of this starts off, it opens the road to mass surveillance at a level that was never practical before. And that is just as a big a danger, if not bigger, than any you might see today, and I don't discount extreme religious nuts.

Letting the criminals talk in secret is the cost of letting everyone else talk in secret. Don't you think your daughter deserves secrecy in her life?

And of course, there's the obvious question: why would you expect a criminal to stop using encryption just because it's illegal?

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

B. Franklin, 1756

Yet here we are in 2020.

The general idea of “governments should have powers not available to the general population” isn’t one I oppose.

However: the way to get the security you want for your family is not to mess with encryption. Mess with that and everything breaks.

It would genuinely be less bad to require every display to, on command, transmit to the authorities what it is currently showing, to the than to mess with encryption.

Yes, because creating a backdoor key that WILL get leaked will help your daughter not get hacked and blackmailed when she has a phone.

To give up the freedom for the majority to battle a tiny minority of (potentially) bad actors seems like a really bad deal to me.

Your daughter is more likely to die from obesity than terrorism or primary cause of someone using encryption.

Can you provide me one reason why we shouldn't ban sugar including all the candies?

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