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Comment by mrkentutbabi | Hacker News Reader

What is your reasoning?

That this reduces security for honest citizen, because it makes it harder to find evidence against criminals.

Police can't even catch terrorists before an attack despite getting warnings from foreign countries and having the suspects on a list. What makes you think that they'll gain anything from an encryption ban when law enforcement is already complaining today about their inability to make sense of the surveillance data they're basically drowning in.

It's not even an "encryption ban law", that's fake news.

> the proposed passage that would have forced companies to decrypt encrypted data upon request by the authorities got removed from the draft law.

Secure E2E encryption makes companies unable to decrypt encrypted data upon request.

Therefore, a law forcing them to decrypt encrypted data upon request necessarily makes it illegal to implement secure E2E encryption. QED.

(If the law only allowed them to share with the government data that was already decryptable by third parties, that would be a different matter. That's what happened to Tutanota in Germany: the tribunal ruled that they had to allow the police to access messages sent as cleartext, but they could not be required to put a backdoor in their E2E clients.)

"E2E encryption ban" != "encryption ban"

Semantics. E2E is necessary against a wide array of threat models and is a fundamental part of what can be considered 'pretty good privacy' by 2021 standards (pun intended).

If a government, possessing a working set of quantum computers, chose to ban post-quantum crypto algos only, by the same semantics it could be argued that it would not be a general "encryption ban" either.

I think it's clear we're talking about effective, secure encryption, and that means E2E. Faulty implementations are technically an exception, but I don't think you can argue with that in good faith.

This is mainly to catch drug cartels.

Well, criminals would still use encryption even if it was banned because they are...criminals.

Not if we catch them before they learn the lesson!

sure you catch a few, then everyone gets wise, but law will be on the books

You are overestimating the capabilities of the average criminal. If you changed the protocol so law enforcement with warrants could decrypt messages from people on WhatsApp. Most criminals on WhatsApp would not leave the platform. They would just continuing using it regardless.

It is not a zero sum game.

I personally like being able to connect to a bank online without criminals being able to hack the connection.

This is what they are talking about:

> a passage that would have forced companies such as WhatsApp and Signal to decrypt their encrypted chats upon request by the authorities for criminal investigation.

That is done with backdoors.

The bad property of backdoors is that they can be discovered and used by other people, not just the ones that have the correct badges.

I definitely do not want the Russians, the Chinese or that infamous Israeli private corporation to read my messages at will.

And you'd rather have criminals that we can't catch because evidence is encrypted running around in the same streets as your children? Nobody's saying this law was a silver bullet.

yes.

"evidence is encrypted running around in the same streets as your children?"

What?

Most crimes leave a lot more evidence than just communication; physical illicit stuff, suspicious money transfers, blood, witnesses.

The only exception I can think of is distribution of child porn. Everything else has a massive real world trace that can be used to convict the perps.

For one, the kind of psychotic violent criminals that might assault random children in the streets are unlikely to get caught thanks specifically to cyber-surveillance.

I am perfectly comfortable with having my children run around in the same streets as people selling drugs or stolen credit card numbers online.

But to address your point less literally - "it might make it easier to catch criminals" is an extraordinarily weak justification for compromising the privacy of BILLIONS of citizens (WhatsApp, sadly, runs most of the personal communications in vast swathes of the world).

Well, that's nice because drug sellers are armed with AK-47s here.

And crime is not limited to selling drugs and stealing credit card numbers (which is actually not a thriving business anymore ...), example:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-abuse-idUSKCN1GO1...

What makes you think it will only be used against criminals?

Because there are so many of them we don't have time to bother honest citizen, except on the road but that's for the money :)

you're assuming people working at the NSA would rather catch criminals than look at people's nudes. That assumption, unfortunately has been proven incorrect.

Now we've got NSA in Belgium that's interesting!

More like they ignore dangerous criminals in order to focus on inconvenient "honest" citizens.

And why would that be?

> Because there are so many of them we don't have time to bother honest citizens

Can I come and live on your planet? It sounds very nice.

Well join the police then.

Is the bottleneck on improving security a lack of evidence?

Of course, in many cases, we're talking about Belgium here.

Having right to an attorney also makes it harder to convict criminals, but the trade-off is still worth it.

A world without strong crypto is a world where all kinds of records and communications are mercilessly exploited by entire armies of bad actors, some of which may sit ten timezones away from you. It is like having your home or business open to the entire 8 billion people out there.

I think you need some data to support your argument here. How many criminals go unpunished because information can't be decrypted? What is the real cost to society because of lack of backdoors?

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