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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

my guess is they will soon be rendered illegal. States don't like it when someone repeatedly gives them the finger...

Yeah for those of us who remember it, what Signal is doing now is what TPB were doing many years ago.

Of course TPB were also enabling the sharing of masses of copyrighted material. But what Signal is doing, in the eyes of police and intelligence community, is almost the same.

I honestly see a bleak future where the development of secure applications is forced underground. And the next step would be total control of the internet so no anonymous networks can exist. And after that we'll just use radio, so really there is no way to stop people wanting to be private.

Because the Stasi searched for pirate radio stations with vans.

Eh, if they do they’ll eventually discover some naughty persons have made a website that looks like a foreign bank right up until you log in with the appropriate username and password, at which point it turns out to be a naughty chat forum.

And no way to break the https encryption in advance without also making all online banking vulnerable to hackers.

Perhaps they’ll try to get around that by van Eck phreaking everyone’s phone/tablet/vr/computer screens. That will explode in the faces of both law enforcement and politicians when the fantasies in table 2 of this paper have official faces attached to them [link is research paper titled “What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?”]: https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/docs/FWG/GSC/Pub...

(Before anyone thinks of the obvious fantasy on that list “good, I don’t want such people in power!”, the egg will still be very much on the face).

And last I checked, unlawful drug use is sufficiently common[0] that actually trying to enforce it fairly would bankrupt the nation[0], so same applies to other types of naughty.

[0] (in) the UK

Let's see. In many countries Signal is now the primary communication tool for politicians. They love to communicate securely, without the risk of getting caught by law enforcement ;)

That's easy to solve though. They could easily write exceptions to any anti-encryption bill for public orgs who have access to sensitive information (police, politicians, etc). In fact, I would be shocked if they didn't make exceptions for certain parts of the government.

Sure, but they still need to get an app somewhere. And also all the people they want to communicate with need that app. And that are not just other politicians, with them they can anyway communicate face to face in meetings. But politicians can't meet up with shady people. If they meet up with CEOs it's always on some record. But with Signal they can just text with them in secret.

Signal is there. And you can also install it on private devices, that's what politicians like even more. That even their own intelligence agency can't read the messages.

A lot of politicians are corrupt, and they don't like laws that make it harder for them.

> In many countries Signal is now the primary communication tool for politicians

citation please

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...

This was the beginning. I know from corruption cases in Austria, that a lot of politicians were using Signal. You can find it in the documents of the prosecution.

Don’t tell the Luxembourgish government, they still use Whatsapp (seriously) for communication (some also use Signal et al.) but not a majority. And I personally use it amongst other things to communicate with whistleblowers ;)

up to now, the US has taken a softer approach (unlike Russia or China) of trying to quietly convince companies to set up backdoors. Outright banning E2EE is a losing proposition, since it's fundamentally not possible. Far better to have a root password and corrupt the whole system than to publicly take it down.

i can see a middle ground with just disabling e2e for metadata, just like whatsapp.

In my books this is worse. It gives users a false sense of security and allows government to hide it's intensions. The safe face by supporting free speech only in principal. At least with China and my home country India the intensions are clear, you have very few rights.

Edit: changed a word

Well perhaps, but I get the impression (as one who lives here) that the EU values privacy over free speech, so perhaps not.

in theory yes but in practice your rights to privacy stop the moment you're on the radar of LEA's. not because of the laws but because of companies / vendors over-enthusiastic and pro-active efforts to collaborate.

one of my first jobs working as a dev for what was back then the largest email provider in Germany was a system that would automatically extract all email correspondence from user-accounts that were demanded (via fax) and fax it back to them. we received only a few per week and it was a manual process at LEA's s. there was no law that required this to be automated and we could have done this manually but we wanted it to scale so that we could serve the same answers not per week but per second if we had to (at least that's how I implemented it because I was young, and keen and not thinking). I have no idea how many requests they answer today but if I'd have to guess it would be a lot more because these processes today are also automated at the LEA. It's no longer a deputy that prints it out and manually sends a fax.

also LEO's are just people. there are plenty of cases where they are totally happy to use the system to their advantage, and well beyond making speeding tickets disappear.

Indeed, absolutely. I’m only saying I think Signal is unlikely to be made unlawful for failing to make things easy for LEAs, not that people don’t do as you say.

unlikely because the 0day / offsec market ensures continued access for LEA. OffSec vendors may have contributed more than we think to help silence the discussion about legal backdoors. Personally I prefer this over mandates to key-escrow and legal backdoors.

>> OffSec vendors may have contributed more than we think to help silence the discussion about legal backdoors

Can you explain this further?

the problem for LEA is that subpoena that goes nowhere matters less when they can get the evidence in another way (Pegasus, FinSpy, etc):

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/is...

You mean encrypted communications or making order documents public?

i mean encrypting metadata as well, so that you can't provide security agencies anything at all

totalitarian dictatorial authoritarian states, yes

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