Keeping Encryption Elitist
blog.cerebralab.com
blog.cerebralab.com
> The world we live in contains fairly nasty people
With the exception of government...
> "any public chatting service owned by a for-profit company needs to keep decryptable copies of all messages on its servers or 12 months"
And how many of these services are interested in analyzing private correspondence? Some already did that of course and I am positively surprised they had that on offer, but gladly some wise users expected it.
The examples you bring forward about potential dangers aren't solved with weakening encryption. Also the believe that government wouldn't like to know what people are talking about because that is a massive advantage for political framing and campaigning. And these ambitions always win out in the end, there are numerous examples of that beyond some NSA employees spying on their "loved" ones. All these negatives should just be ignored?
> It's a laughably easy problem, the fact that terrorist attacks are as low [...]
exactly.
Have you ever heard of Hong Kong and the situation there? Are these people terrorists? Should their communications be able to surveilled by the state?
> End-to-end Encryption should be easily available for communications between any two individuals, up until considerable proof shows that this is untenable if societal cohesion is to be kept.
Disturbing social cohesion is actually a crime in many modern democracies but it doesn't get applied very often because people got more liberal with time. I can of course frame it as anything I would like. You could prosecutor people that show too much skin on twitter for example. It has fallen out of time. I think it is good that people are allowed to ruffle some feathers. Keeps life interesting.
I disagree and think this line of reasoning is mostly founded on fears.
Encryption needs further improvement and should be made available to everyone as easy as possible. TLS is a channel encryption and needs to stay but further payload encryption should be developed and become standardized.
So I would reject this alleged compromise.
> But providing encrypted channels of communication as the default servers no purpose and can be rather dangerous.
That the world is filled with nasty people was your argument, but I would let it stay here, even though I disagree.
You say the LSD example is "Inapplicable" to the question of cost, difficulty and the economics of illegal activities... in what way? It isn't the same as your favorite example, but getting ahold of large quantities of the correct isotope of uranium is less convenient than you seem to think.
The unit cost of destruction goes down every year; fears are normal if relevant. You'd do better to argue, say, that terrorism kills only a fraction of the people every year that asthma does. Which is true, even in Isreal, during every year of its existence.
My comment was deliberately contrasting having access to Uranium and having a feasible enrichment process. It does not matter if for a dirty bomb, a nuclear bomb or thermonuclear bomb.
The articles argues about lacking education of fundamentalists and it is probably often true. The WTC attack was an exception to this case, but let us assume this premise to hold in the general case, like with my grandma (sic). Fine, some terrorists would fail due to lacking knowledge. If that happens too often I would expect this to change rather quickly.
It also contains other premises: States act according to the law. That is empirically wrong as we know from different whistleblowers how states handled surveillance. We could go back to that argument if we start talking about whether it was the "right thing to do", but I am referring to the premise at hand.
A state is not your mothers tits and I would not want to keep the benefits of encryption from the general population. Maybe you could argue that the EU, the US and some other states could be trusted to have this power, but I simply do not agree.
The argument remains purely subjective forever at this point, but my position would leave the technology accessible for every user and the security benefit is quantitatively higher compared to the terrorist case. I am thinking about every country here with billions of users. We could create some tangible metrics here, but I am confident.
> kills only a fraction of the people every year that asthma does
I could argue that, but that could end in a trap since it could get into ethics and "saving human lives at all costs" that can easily be manipulated. I think in the end it would hold against establishing a huge surveillance mechanism with very likely lacking oversight if I dare to look into the future, but it is another perspective.
I could also argue that the goal of the terrorist isn't just to kill as many people as possible, they primarily want to signal their objections to a certain way of living, but that is also another discussion. Maybe create a forum where they could vent their objections. Some honeypot you could take a look at and just keep them from coming up with any ingenious plan. Worth a shot, much less expensive and you wouldn't have them on their guard.
And you would still have secure encryption. There is real evidence that the possibility of being surveilled changes behavior and we live would again live at mothers tits, sorry , I meant under constant state surveillance that we would incorporate into every form of online exchange. Sounds like cancer.