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Comment by cassonmars | Hacker News Reader

This is why messaging apps need to be decentralized and built on top of protocols that cannot be censored or meaningfully monitored.

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With enough effort, anyone can go to jail. America held a taxi driver for 17 years at Guantanamo Bay with no evidence. Tech won’t save you from the state. As always, if your threat model includes a state actor, you are going to have a bad time. For all intents and purposes, their resources are unlimited.

Freedom is won in the courts and the legislature, not in the code (although tech is as useful tool for keeping government implantations in check).

(I still use and donate to Signal, but have a healthy understanding of its limits)

Yes, but their tyranny must also increase in order to circumvent the technology. They will increasingly resort to actions like you described. Hopefully the population will eventually revolt and put an end to the corrupt government once it becomes unacceptably totalitarian.

Freedom is won through weapons. Encryption is a potent weapon, it can defeat states, militaries. Before computers, it used to be a military tool. It must be democratized, the whole world must use it.

They can put one or two people in jail, but they can't put everyone in jail. If everyone has easy access to end-to-end encrypted messaging and relies on it (for non-nefarious purposes), the government will have a tough time changing that.

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