No Place to Hide – U.K. campaign against end-to-encryption encryption
noplacetohide.org.uk
noplacetohide.org.uk
> "According to the [M&C Saatchi] presentation, the push will appear to be the result of grassroots action and children’s charities, while downplaying any government role."
The whole thing is just a pile of emotional manipulation, while compeletly ignoring the far, far greater number of legitimate uses of end to end encryption, and the actual dangers to everyday people of personal information being stolen, accessed, leaked, etc. if it's banned! Extremely dirty tactics.
This campaign is ripe for hijacking and inverting like the "you wouldn't steal a car" campaign.
"NO WHERE TO HIDE: (from criminals)... thought you were safe when writing innocuous private messages on Facebook? think again, criminals intercept the plaintext to commit identity fraud in your name. Thought you only had to worry about corporate surveillance of your location data? think again, now criminals can easily track you to break into your house while you are out. Thought your job was secure? think again, now criminals can build a comprehensive profile of your social and work activities to easily and effectively social engineer their way into your organisation, risking your livelihood."
[edit]
The other approach is to apply the same thinking to something non technical to more tangibly demonstrate how this is a bad idea. e.g:
"NO WAY TO RUN: we are banning wheels, because they help paedophiles make for a quick getaway after abducting their target. In future we plan on banning legs too."
There was a really fun game where you could join public wifi and change every image request response to be images of cats instead. (by changing the requesting URL and/or response).
This idea was borne from the 'upside-down-ternet' which people ran on their Guest Networks. (https://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html)
Would be fun to have a word replace running for "Thank You" to "Fuck You", it's not at all impossible to do.
Eventually, my housemates just contributed to my internet bill and dropped their own subscriptions. I got rid of the captive portal and went with something more traditional
A better counter-argument is foreign governments (China, Russia, etc.) requiring data to be held on their soil and then using it to hunt and impression political enemies.
Actually on closer inspection they don't even particularly care about E2E encryption, and here I was thinking this was snooper's charter v2:
> We are not opposed to end-to-encryption in principle and fully support the importance of strong user privacy. Instead, our campaign is calling for social media companies to work with us to find a solution that protects privacy, without putting children at even greater risk.
So we missed the point. This is a campaign to protect kids from shitty parenting, aa, I mean the social networks... so that they can be safely indoctrinated by social media without needing to encourage a responsible society.
In all seriousness, the larger risk here then is not necessarily criminal activity from data leaks (though that's still a real possibility with a gov backdoor) - the greater risk is deeper government mass surveillance built directly into the most popular social media networks.
Basically everything would become an encrypted group chat (Double Ratchet etc) where the 3rd party is the provider which can optionally encrypt/secure access. That would ensure the provider is the only one with a backdoor for some time until access to previous messages are lost. Similar to loosing decryption keys for GDPR compliance. Access to the keys would require a court order.
Nonetheless authoritarian governments could and would misuse this. It should at least be required to have an international court order. Still very difficult.
Instead the risks are added complexity creating opportunities for bugs, and having to trust everyone with decryption access to not abuse that. It is possible to control that access technologically. For example, by requiring two separate keyholders (or in general N ot of M) keyholders before being able to decrypt any messages.
Those downsides matter, but they are scary for abuse by governments, nation state adversaries, and NSA type hackers. The downsides do not make criminals more scary.
Eh, I'm not sure. Assuming that the government keys never get leaked (which is possible even with the key-split method you propose). And assuming that the local municipal police departments and groups given access to those keys never get hacked. And assuming that products never get restricted to less-secure schemes as the technical world evolves around them.
Maybe the UK has a better track record on this, but off the top of my head a lot of the key-escrow systems I've seen in the US are quite bad. We have systems for TSA locks, fireperson access to locked buildings, etc... many of those systems are not secure, they just don't get abused very often because the prizes for doing so aren't large enough.
Key-escrow systems are less risky in terms of criminal activity than just banning full E2E encryption entirely, but I don't think I agree that 'less risky' is the same as 'safe'.
Not sure if they've thought this through.
"The campaign is funded by the UK Government and..."
https://twitter.com/mcsaatchigroup
Their slogan is to deliver Meaningful Change.
Are those actually legit charities? I've never heard of them before, and at least the rightmost one ("SafeToNet - incorporating NetNanny") sounds like it's just a lobby group of some internet filter company, or an Internet filtering company itself.
If those are legit charities: Remember the names and make it known among friends what those charities are supporting.
https://www.mariecollinsfoundation.org.uk/ proudly sports the logos of Microsoft, Google and Facebook at the bottom of the page. Maybe those companies should be made aware of what they're indirectly supporting with their logo.
However, what offends me, and I don't see mentioned enough, is that the UK government is exploiting the real suffering of children to destroy something that protects us all, children and adults alike. They do not speak for those children or their families. They're exploiting them and their trauma for political gain.
If I was in the U.K., this would be enough to forever turn me off the ruling Conservative party. It's disgusting. They have no morals. It's not just that they're lying -- every political side lies all the time, sometimes out of necessity. It's that they're re-victimizing the very kids they claim to be protecting. And they appear to be proud enough of that fact to promote it in this way.
I will never vote for a politician or party that's OK with that, no matter what their other policies may be.
UK peeps: complain loudly!
To be frank, it seems like most politicians would rather be at war with the technologically apt than to work with them. All we can hope is that technologies adapt at a faster rate than authoritarian governments can, and the witty can outwit the witless.
The fact that "specialists like us on HN" can say this sort of thing with a straight face and no hint of doubt, is one of the many reasons we are sleepwalking into dystopia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/03/uk-ministers-w...
Politicians can always rely on any part of the holy trinity of terrorism, piracy or child to either justify or manipulate their constituency to support a measure that infringes on their security/privacy. The media plays along too easily.
Interestingly, conservatives in the US made anti end to end encryption legislation part of the EARN IT act, which also claims to deal with child abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020#Legislatio...
I get how IP holders care about piracy, but I don’t think it resonates enough with the general public for it to really matter to politicians… Unless the politicians are literally just being paid by IP holders to care about it, which could be a thing.
"politicians are literally just being paid by IP holders to care about it"
Reports are also coming in from certain parts of Central Europe …
you forgot to add the mandatory element of ignorance on a particular subject matter to make the mix truly explosive, but fair point.
You've gone pretty extreme there. There is a much more plausible explanation, which is that they genuinely believe that more people would be saved if the security services could access messaging apps and they don't think the level of potential abuse is worth worrying about.
Don't get me wrong, I think they have made bad decisions etc. but in this case, I think it is simply naive "if you haven't done anything wrong..."
I think both can be true: the government believes it can increase security in general by expanding the state's surveillance powers--the state always wants to trade privacy for security. However, they're not framing it as a general "give us more surveillance powers and we'll increase security"; they're framing it narrowly as about protecting children ("give us more surveillance powers and we promise we'll only use them to protect sexually exploited children") which is exploiting victimized children in my book.
I do think that it's naive to think that one of the most important countries in the world with a rather effective intelligence service and a lot of smart people everywhere in the state is naive. I really don't think the UK government believes that if they remove encryption from popular chat apps the tiny percentage of population that might use it for evil purposes will be caught instead of, you know, moving to a different mechanism.
There's an even more plausible explanation, which is that both are true. They're aware that stopping encryption might save a few children, but they're also aware that it enables the mechanisms of the surveillance state that give them extraordinary power over the public. They want to stop child sex trafficking and they want to abuse people's privacy.
I've also heard Conservative MPs say that "lockdown measures were against our freedom-loving sensitivities" or something similar, so they at least acknowledge the value of freedom to the population.
Our ruling class cannot plead ignorance as an excuse.
I think the more-plausible thing is that this part of that Red Meat programme, which is going to consist of a train of announcements designed to appeal to rightwing Conservatives, none of which will have anything at all to do with the Prime Minister.
This Red Meat programme will also distract the opposition away from the Prime Minister's moral emptiness and deceitfulness; the government hopes that by making sufficiently-nasty policy proposals, they can force the opposition to devote their time and attention away from the weaknesses of the Prime Minister and his coterie, and towards opposing these proposals. It's very cynical.
Forecast: I have a long record of wrong political prophesies! But I think Boris will have gone within a week. I have no idea who they will replace him with; none of his colleagues has electoral appeal, as far as I can see, and they're facing a General Election in two years. I wouldn't offer odds on the outcome of that election, either; the leader of the opposition isn't particularly appealing, is not loved by his party, and seems to have no policies.
I have to admit - I was expecting Brexit, Trump, and a massive Tory majority at the last GE (not rubbing it in - good lord I wish I had been wrong about all of these), but I really don't know how much road Johnson has left to run. I really think it's getting shorter now every day. The (liberal) press have made a big deal about everything else so far, but the lockdown parties (sorry, meetings) I think are the first 'real' big hits to him that people will actually care about. It's genuinely going to get bumpy for him, but he was smart and filled his cabinet mostly with people who just aren't that clever and are dedicated to him - I don't think there's anyone who knows when to make the first move. I think he can only really be removed when there's someone ready to replace him.
Unfortunately this isn't unique to the Tories. Politicians across the whole political spectrum have fought to introduce increasingly authoritarian controls over the internet and technology over the past 30 years.
UK culture as a whole is more authoritarian than you'd expect. Labour would gladly implement their own version of the same if they had the opportunity. To that point, any UK millennial will likely not be able to remember a time where there wasn't some hand wringing campaign about online privacy or porn.
He has publicly clashed with the powers that be about increasing police powers.
But I don’t have a clear answer for your question, especially as he has many supporters who might not vote along his own lines.
The election manifesto for Labour in 1983 contained pledges to abolish the secret services, too.
Not to mention the fact that this same part of the Labour party is often engaged in protests that will have left wingers as attendees and speakers. They're very often on the sharp end of both surveillance and crackdowns on protest.
That combined with their belief that the police are racist (eg the Met) and that prison is generally harmful is not likely to produce an authoritarian programme.
They'd have dealt with large scale tax dodgers too, unlike the current leadership.
For example, they blocked the "snoopers charter" (digital economy bill) when they were in coalition; although the Conservatives, predictably, passed it after they won the following election on their own.
Was it a good trade in hindsight? I'm not so sure. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and my vote, a couple more times.
Not on the level of the tories, and perhaps labour, but I doubt they'd be anything special in that regard
They took a huge gamble entering the ConDem coalition: getting some concessions from the Conservatives (e.g. same-sex marriage), but overall achieving hardly any of their manifesto promises (which, indeed, included scrapping tuition fees; first mentioned on page 33 https://www.markpack.org.uk/files/2015/01/Liberal-Democrat-m... ).
It seems they gave away way too much in order to get a meagre chance at voting reform. The resulting referendum was watered-down to Alternative Vote (rather than STV), and was not only attacked by Conservatives, but also Labour (who had ignored their own manifesto pledge in 1997 to follow the Jenkins Commission recommendations, which were to use a variant of Alternative Vote!)
There are some grass-roots efforts to support electoral reform in Labour; I doubt they'd do it themselves (like they didn't in 97), but maybe they'd be more amenable to accepting it in return for Lib Dem support?
My main worry about a Lib Dem government would be how much influence their 'free market libertarian' wing would have; where 'individual liberty' becomes a synonym for 'deregulation of the private sector'. There's definitely been more of a such rightward-lean since Clegg (compared to e.g. Charles Kennedy).
Welcome to every conservative party in every country. They're all terrible humans
Its worse than that by the looks. They're trying to convince people you can still have end to end encryption whilst having a man in the middle scan it to make sure its all A-Okay. Again, I think everyone knows how stupid this is.
I seem to remember Theresa May talking about this a few years ago and the idea was quickly shot down, and here I was hoping that was the end of it.
Since the rise of PGP and fall of key-escrow it has become more and more clear that spreading free (ussurveilled) communication between individuals and businesses was necessary to the operation of capitalist democracies. However, they can't give up their dreams of controlling their own populations so they will cede them to competing totalitarian states, which already know how to control their populations and can well afford to breach such "security".
That idea is so outrageously stupid that no, I don't believe they think that.
Every one of those intelligence agencies are perfectly aware they are collecting dossiers on their public (with emphasis to gov employees) that can be used to compromise the administration and coerce people into doing illegal or immoral acts. You just got the wrong adversary in mind.
It's not collecting the dossiers... it's that they are the weak link, whether they like it or not.
Well, any other one would require that people on the intelligence community, whose work consists mostly on either using dossiers to compromise people or avoiding the creation of dossiers so people aren't compromised to not noticing that they are collecting a dossier on every citizen or not being aware that will lead to people being compromised... and incompetence or dishonesty not being involved.
doesn't seem so:
> End-to-end encryption is valuable technology designed to keep our data and conversations safe. We are not opposed to end-to-encryption in principle and fully support the importance of strong user privacy. Instead, our campaign is calling for social media companies to work with us to find a solution that protects privacy, without putting children at even greater risk.
they apparently claim to be looking for a third way.
In any case, advocating for mandatory digital spies on end-users' devices is arguably worse than attempting to undermine E2EE.
What you are proposing is a pluggable censorship module that can identify any forbidden speech and report back to the authorities. It will take less than 16 months for every regime to co-opt for their own aims. It will indirectly lead to the deaths of thousands of dissidents.
UK wants to dominate and enslave its population for the political gain of the ruling class.
It is clear as day to me.
This campaign has nothing to do with protecting children - especially given the UK establishment's veritable tradition of both organizing and covering up industrial scale sexual abuse - and it is nothing more than hate speech designed to cast aspersions upon and isolate technologists as part of a broader political effort.
The Rolling Stone article from earler this week said, "The Home Office has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency — a spin-off of Saatchi and Saatchi, which made the “Labour Isn’t Working” election posters, among the most famous in UK political history — to plan the campaign, using public funds."
I would encourage HN readers to recognize this campaign is only nominally about encryption, and mainly it is about politically attacking the credibility and reputations of civilian technologists, and by conflating your expertise with abusers this M&C Saatchi agency has produced literal hate propaganda against you. (just following orders, surely!) I'd recommend people to not underestimate what this is.
No question about it, this is accurate - especially given the way the UK has treated those who have a legitimate reason to use encryption for political reasons.
This is cynical authoritarianism being used to confer a totality over protective technology.
This is, quite frankly, from a government that has waged a war on truth.
Why would anyone assume this was ever true?
I'm alarmed by the rise of right-wing populist totalitarianism too, but I also feel like we need to remind people to keep their eye on the other players. I heard a funny saying once: the march of tyranny goes "left, right, left, right..." You don't need to posit a conspiracy to explain that pattern, just reaction and opportunism.
I'm hearing rumblings in the USA about a "domestic war on terror" which is every bit as scary as another borderline coup attempt if not more. We'll see that get pushed hard if there is an Oklahoma City scale attack that comes out of the fringe of the militia, right-populist, or Qanon-type circles. That push will include our own version of this UK campaign but framed around surveilling domestic extremism.
I don't think the cryptography wars are over. I think we'll see renewed pushes for more spying and crypto restrictions as we (perhaps) enter a period of increasing domestic and global political instability. I also expect to see pushes to lock down all devices to only run approved code, an open and general war on universal computation, or a push to require all devices to have remote backdoors.
Edit:
Anyone who entertains these arguments needs to remember that "their side" may not necessarily be the ones wielding them. Always picture any increased invasive powers or reduced individual liberties in the hands of your worst political opponents. Political winds can shift quickly, especially in these times.
The domestic extremism thing in north america is going to use the same absurdist playbook, which is filling the message with inconsistency and nonsense so that people are so disgusted by it we treat it as too stupid to do anything about - and that in effect neutralizes us so we do nothing, and that is the sufficient condition for evil to prevail.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist so much as a conspiracy arbitrageur, and as long as we think the cadre of people behind these authoritarian plays are stupid and incompetent, the longer we will do nothing to stop them, and the more extreme it will ultimately need to be to dislodge them. There was a time when I would leave these things unsaid, but I think it's important to recognize the time where that was strategic has passed.
If you are among those who can see what's going on, now is the time to articulate it, imo.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
This seems disengenuous. Is there any way to implement E2E encryption that wouldn't "put children at greater risk" if we accept that framing?
I understand why the Government and child welfare organizations don't like the idea of E2E. It would, in fact, make it more difficult to identify child abuse on social media, all else being equal. But the attempt to balance privacy with child welfare doesn't have to mean abandoning privacy altogether.
An alternative would be to require social media companies to allow parents to monitor their children's social media activity. Or to have "child-friendly" accounts without E2E. It doesn't seem necessary to impose a blanket ban on E2E, which would almost certainly be abused.
Yeah, that's what Apple's CSAM detection system is basically. They scan the content before encrypting.
If child’s messages don’t have encryption, the first thing a predator does is move them to an encrypted messaging platform.
This is about the massive open door that is messenger and the full sweep the five eyes get from this.
And confounding this issue is the fact that the major platforms (Facebook, et al.) simply don't want parents to have this kind of control over their children, because it will effect their bottom line. Children with less adult supervision tend to be far more easily manipulated.
Its not just child diddlers who want this manipulation to proceed un-impeded by parental oversight - its Facebook, et al. too!
So this evil campaign is going to get a lot of corporate support, I fear. For the wrong damn reasons.
(Disclaimer: am an angry parent who is sick of the shit my kids have to deal with online... but who will also NEVER give up personal encryption as a right.)
Think of my children is just another step along the line of pearl clutching. But I’ll do you one better, I had a covert video taken of me and circulated around the internet and school that I went to. Would e2e encryption made any difference to that? No.
A parent wouldn't let an 11 year old go to a frat party. They wouldn't let them go unsupervised to a concert. Most probably wouldn't leave their children home alone for a week. So why in the fuck do their kids have unfettered Internet access? Do they also let the kid just go to anyone's house without at least knowing who that friend is?
How would unencrypted messages preventing grooming of your niece? Her parents should be checking on her devices the same as they'd want to know who her friends were and where she was when not at home. A phone or Facebook is not a babysitter and certainly not a parent.
If E2EE was banned or restricted what at all would have changed with your niece? If she was groomed on completely unencrypted IRC what would be different? If she was groomed by some friend's older relative what would be different? Her parents failed at several occasions to actually parent her. Restrictions or banning E2EE wouldn't make them more capable parents.
What changed is the message she send will be unencrypted and not E2E, so now more people have access to them and maybe save or send them to their own closed messaging platform.
Given that a lack of E2E encryption means that it is impossible for children to have private conversations with each other, it also means that predators have an easier time watching those conversations and using them to do harm. As such, the mere act of enabling E2E encryption reduces the risk to children.
Exactly , make this giant companies have 2 apps Facebook Messager and FB messanger for Kids iMessage and iMessage for Kids then is you responsability as a parent to setup your child device to enter the correc tbirth date of the user, then the App Store could only allow the "kids" version of the application.
But now what? you have shit AI flagging pictures and badly paid people around the world attempting to classify is the picture is "bad" ?
The problem seems to me to have a much more effective solution, hire some real cops or social workers to answer reports from children and parents, when some creep asks for such material you could easily report them, then FB,Apple or whoever will have to help the authorities and stop this illegal activity. Make an educational compaign to educate the children and parents and let them know where to report the issue, explain also the punishment and make some public examples.
The problem is is that there is still a large portion of parents who will give their children devices despite being less educated on the dangers of online safety regarding children.
I think that tech companies should ask parents whether they are buying a device for a child at the point of sale (since children are unlikely to purchase a device for themselves; instead they wish for a device for birthday/Christmas), and at that point, those companies should in some way inform those parents about the dangers of online use. Better yet (though could further complicate the process of distributing devices) is to give the option for parents to set up parental controls while they are in the process of purchasing a device.
Implementing parental controls (which tech companies have largely done) that allows for parents to monitor their childrens' devices seems to be the only viable way to allow for both CSAM mitigation and end-to-end encryption to coexist, in my opinion.
Mightn't those parents be right? IMO it's more important that children use E2E so that their information doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Otherwise it will be sitting in some government database for the rest of their lives.
The real predators live in a doughnut shaped building.
The government could educate, in my country there are a lot of informational on radio/TV like "drink at least 2L of water" , we need to attempt to solve the problem very close to it's roots. Like why should I click "I am 18" over and over again, the OS should know my age , the browser should ask my OS and if a parent setup correctly the device then the browser would refuse to load this website (the website would put somewhere in headers the age restrictions).
Honestly I do not see how removing encryption helps children, if you do it wrong you might even make it possible for people to now spy on children,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
The use of the phrase "Think of the children" in debate a type of logical fallacy and an appeal to emotion.
A debater may use the phrase to emotionally sway members of the audience and avoid logical discussion. EG "I know this national missile defense plan has its detractors, but won't someone please think of the children?"
This particular Simpsons joke is pretty tired at this point, and it's often just used to short circuit any discussion of potential harms to children.
I am not in favor of banning E2EE, by the way. It’s just that the claim that E2EE puts children at risk should be met with a carefully considered factual response that respects the intelligence of people who are genuinely concerned about child sex abuse, rather than this reflexive ironic cry of “think of the children!”.
Engaging with baseless propaganda preying on the unthinking parts of everyone by "carefully considered factual response" means you lose. Every single time. For this reason it is a naive strategy.
I should think that there must be even less to be gained by responding smugly with rote slogans and links to clips from the Simpsons. Who is going to be persuaded of anything by that?
What you need to show is either that (i) kids are already pretty safe online, or (ii) that the situation can be significantly improved without increased surveillance, or (iii) that the current level of child sexual abuse is a price worth paying to preserve important freedoms. But making one of those arguments would require actual thought and effort.
To a lot of people who aren't on HN, it's obvious that more needs to be done to combat child sexual abuse online.
Rather than fuming at the government, it would be more useful in the long run if people could come up with actual ideas for combating child sexual abuse that don't require increased surveillance. Otherwise we are left with the unattractive (to most people) alternative to just ignoring the problem.
I mean sure, the government might have bad motivations in this instance. But there is a real problem that a lot of regular people are sincerely concerned about, without sinister ulterior motivates.
Yes, we should all argue properly ... If only politicians were educated enough about the things they try to push or prevent, they could actually do that. Anyway, even if we discussed this properly, it would only answer half the question. The other half is: "Are children safer without that E2E encryption?" Most likely not, as they themselves send each other pictures and stuff, which can then be intercepted by some people. Everything they communicate using their spy phones, ah sorry, I meant "smart phones" of course, at their young age of -- well, what age? maybe 6 or 7? Or even younger? -- will be potentially up for grabs.
And then that is only the question about children. That is one tiny speck of the whole picture, which is not discussed.
So yes, we should argue this properly, but also we should then open up the whole debate about society as a whole. There is a huge debate to be had there, before anyone should even consider making any decisions.
My impression seems to be that it's almost always reported long after the fact or some vigilante posing as a child.
Neither of which would be prevented by e2ee.
Someone will propose addressing an actual real thing that actually is a serious threat to children and someone else will mockingly and with a Calculon level of overacting say "Won't someone think of the children!", using it as a kind of ad hominem.
Right now is there child exploitation? Yes. Even though FB haven’t yet enabled E2E encryption. So what good will banning it do? There will always be ways to encrypt communication for criminals. And there will also always be ways to remain very anonymous online. The internet is just not set up to prevent it.
Further, banning all encryption is just a non starter.
Further still, having strong encryption except where law enforcement would like it to be breakable is also impossible. It’s just technically not doable. Whenever people say ‘but give us a way’ the answer is. There is no way. It can’t be done. It’s either encrypted or not. They’re the only options.
So instead of any sensible, workable plan some technically illiterate politicians have deliberately chosen the most controversial topic they can think of - child abuse - something that has been happening since forever without any E2E encryption (did those catholic priests need E2E encryption?) and blamed it on E2E encryption in the hope that emotion will override people’s logic and give them the power to read whatever online communications they like, presumable with some form of weakened / backdoored encryption that will, inevitably, be used for nefarious purposes either by our own government (see Snowden) or criminals / foreign governments who figure out how to exploit it
This is an emotion over logic argument and therefore surely a perfect example of ‘won’t anyone think of the children.
If done quickly and sent to the newspapers this could maybe discredit that campaign?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...
This is the kind of stuff that will be in the history books in 2 decades time.
Do you think so? I don't, history is written by the winners, and all western governments play the propaganda game.
Doesn't matter if it's the democrats or republicans, labour or Tories. No politician is going to call this out, the behavioural psychologists are in on it, and so are the media companies.
Unless there is some major disruption in the next 2 decades, think revolution, invasion. You won't see a thing in the history books.
Maybe we need to get ahead of the game. I propose we add a new http error code: 452: this history does not exist
It's 451.
They say "we aren't against e2e, we just want big tech to deploy it in a way that is safe". Well, either you have e2e or you don't; it's not surprising they have no proposal.
There's a saying that you only notice propaganda that doesn't work on you. That's not quite true, but roughly speaking, that's why you think this is so dumb. I could list off around a dozen other incoherent positions with no underlying policy proposals, if it wasn't for the fact they're actually quite popular right now and I know well enough to bite my tongue.
One could also argue this could further _protect_ children. Now, criminal material cannot be viewed by an unintended third party. For example, it is well known that an iCloud hack leaked the photos of many celebrity women and was dubbed "the fappening", only possible because they were stored in a viewable format without e2e.
We should be maximizing the control an individual has over their own data, not minimizing control. Anything the police can easily access is also something tonnes of other people can easily access. Given how common data breaches are, we should simply not trust that the transit/storage process is secure at all.
I thought the 2014 iCloud hack was because attackers tricked users into revealing their passwords, not because Apple's iCloud service itself was compromised. If that's true, e2e would not have made a difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
(Of course it's definitely possible for a service itself to be hacked wholesale, in which case e2e would help.)
I think the vast majority of people agree that unrestricted screens and online communication are bad for kids, so I think this idea could get pretty widespread support. It shouldn't be the norm that a 10yo has an iPhone.
It's like giving them a Land Rover instead of a Hot Wheels. But of course, the Hot Wheels of phones doesn't exist right now. Maybe it should. A smartphone dedicated for children, which can only install a small number of safe apps?
Naming the campaign a title shared by Greenwald's Snowden book is an amazing touch. The same hashtag was even used extensively to discuss/promote the book. Would almost be funny if it wasn't so depressing.
Sure, there has always been porn and abuse etc. but the scale that is permitted now due to the internet is massive. There are questions around how to reduce demand for content that feeds illegal activity including child abuse but also drugs, terrorist materials, human trafficking from certain porn etc.
It isn't just how do we protect children but how do we protect society from becoming so numb to this that it just continues? How do we teach children that some snuff movies are real? That you cannot unsee an execution? That most porn content is either fake or coerced? How can you teach people that just because someone is called Doctor, doesn't mean their anti-vax conspiracy is true. Sure, you cannot stop them seeing it but we definitely have to think of some way of deciding what is and isn't acceptable and having much better cross-border enforcement for people who peddle this stuff.
I think removing E2E encryption is a piss poor tool unless you fix the bigger problem.
But sometimes the future is unpredictable. What if ten years from now armies of hackers operate AIs that pollute absolutely everything with false information, impossible to distinguish from true facts? Those information wars are being waged now, only by humans, and yet, often with great effect. Imagine a time when a small agency can deploy an AI that creates hundreds of thousands of fake profiles looking like actual people, each posting slightly biased opinions on a slew of topics. At that point, the biggest social good may be to outright ban a big chunk of the Internet. And yes, it would be a sad day.
Just so long as they get to use it, and you don't.
> We are not opposed to end-to-end encryption, as long as it is implemented in a way that does not put children at risk.
The rest is fluff.
The real answer is we want to read all of your internet interactions any time we want; the children thing is just a way to convince people that letting the government (and everyone else) to spy on you is ok.
After the technical capability was in place, they've expanded the possible grounds to block websites on multiple times. It now includes piracy, refusal of cooperation with FSB, being a public VPN, being related to Navalny, etc.
There were many things that were perfectly legal but had personally offended the people presiding over the filter, including random Wikipedia pages and certain personal websites, including a dentist's site. This filter, of course, was sold to people with the idea of protecting children against predators.
Anything not directly relating to children that is sold to you with "B-BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" is done with the intent to manipulate you and provide you with the false dichotomy of "unconditional acceptance, or child abuse", which is nonsense and should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
User-initiated reporting features where the server can only read messages that the user reported would be the obvious solution (and should be uncontroversial), but they're not asking for that.
(To avoid concerns with false reports, the sender could include a random value in the message to prevent brute-force attacks on short messages, and send an unencrypted hash of the message including metadata together with that random value. The official client would only show messages where this hash matches, so a sender cannot just omit it. When a message is reported, the full message including the random value is sent to the server, the server can then verify that this message hash was actually sent through this service by that sender, and report the sender to the police if the content is report-worthy.)
I really think we're heading straight into the panopticon. We'll probably happily vote for it, to "protect" ourselves. I'll buy some more PLTR and the bags under my eyes will grow darker.
Funny how we've gone from court order to intercept somebodies mail to this...
Would eliminating E2E encryption helped Savile's, Maxwell's, or Prince Andrew's victims? Nope.
I haven't seen a single article that could reasonably be called a defense of Maxwell.
> It’s hard not to feel a batsqueak of pity for Ghislaine Maxwell — 500 days and counting in solitary confinement. I intersected briefly with her at Oxford. As a fresher I wandered into Balliol JCR one day in search of its subsidised breakfast granola-and-Nescafé offering and found a shiny glamazon with naughty eyes holding court astride a table, a high-heeled boot resting on my brother Boris’s thigh. She gave me a pitying glance but I did manage to snag an invite to her party in Headington Hill Hall — even though I wasn't in the same college as her and Boris. I have a memory of her father, Bob, coming out in a towelling robe and telling us all to go home. I’m sure fairweather friends would not reveal they went to a Ghislaine Maxwell party: as Barbara Amiel’s brilliant memoir Friends and Enemies proves, you only know who your real chums are when you’re in the gutter.
It is horrifying to me that this approach of using pedophelia as a scapegoat to permanently degrade civil liberties goes largely unchallenged in the media.
However... What can even be done with 14,000,000 annual reports of suspected child sex abuse?
I'm just intrigued to know how that volume of data supports actual investigations, and to what extent it has helped bring perpetrators to justice or helped children suffering abuse.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/281208/population-of-the...
Edit: I assume they use that since they are focused on social media companies, which are almost entirely US based.
This article tries to understand where that number comes from (and fails to do so): https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902
Details here. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902
Disclosure: I wrote the blogpost.
I only got as far as realising the stats were from the US and were probably global.
Every foundation/organization initially to influence politicians (i.e. what happened here through government funding) wrt end-to-end encryption is at most two bank transactions away from getting funding from either Hollywood or the military.
"Save the children" (c) , because some organization is controlled by a power mad narcissist, for whom privacy is a luxury you shouldn't be able to afford.
That said, "60-90% of abuse takes place within the home or family circle," - a quote from Mick Moran, co-ordinator of the crimes against children unit at Interpol.
That leaves up to 40% happening online and elsewhere. Is it actually possible to prevent this online without compromising privacy? I think that's a legitimate problem to try to work on.
Mainly elsewhere and mainly IRL not online.
It's trivial, take kids out of social media.
You should stop your children from having unrestricted access to the internet.
I personalty don't see it as anyone else's job to protect my children but me and their mother.
“Online” isn't just a place abuse happens in a way that is exclusive with abuse being “at home or in the family circle”, it's a place preparation for abuse happens and products of abuse are distributed. A lot of the online abuse material is from abuse that happens at home or in the family circle.
Going after online sex abuse while 90%+ of it happens IRL is like trying to solve climate change by targeting marginal uses of fossil fuel like motorboats while ignoring coal fired power... which... is something we also do.
You target the biggest things first. That's how you solve problems. For child abuse that means targeting home and institutional IRL abuse.
Here's a controversial thought: maybe you should educate your children?
And if that doesn't work, maybe children shouldn't be allowed to be on social media, since (if I recall correctly) it's proven to be bad for them anyway? (By the facebook/instagram leak?)
Would it be worthwhile to have a competition to create something along this line? Something in the same spirit as the js13kGames [2] but in this case who can create the most human looking and most efficient communication that is actually E2EE encrypted messages using customizable word-lists?
[1] - https://github.com/c9fe/txtmode.git
[2] - https://js13kgames.com/
Why doesn't the Govt produce an app, which lets people voluntarily offer up information to authorities that can run on all their devices?
This way a subsection of the population will be automatically sidelined and the authorities can concentrate on the data from those not using their app. But this only targets devices, it doesnt target offline situations like people meeting in a pub arranging things, where the consumption of alcohol provides an automatic defence to the prosecution!
> No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State is a 2014 non-fiction book by American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. It was first published on May 13, 2014 through Metropolitan Books and details Greenwald's role in the global surveillance disclosures as revealed by the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.[2] The documents from the Snowden archive cited in the book are freely available online.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Place_to_Hide_(Greenwald_bo...
When their conversations with their mistresses become frequently public, they will change their attitudes.
Twitter/Reddit? Kids shouldn't be on those. They're full of porn.
It’s like banning hand signals. How do you ban a way of communicating that anyone can do for free?
If the fine is £100,000,000, but you have only an estimated 0.01% of being prosecuted for it, would you write such an app in an hour? Or would you think twice about it?
wouldn't apple's solution from last year be a pretty good solution for the way they're framing this?
I mean do you think that this is the government being "convinced" by law enforcement and the rest of the security apparatus in order to maintain the state of easy interception, and mass intelligence gathering?
Or do you think this is purely politicians thinking about how to keep their analytics algorithms and propaganda machines fed with data collected from social media on private chats?
All the main messaging platforms have some sort of e2ee, apart from gchat and FB messenger (that I know of, I'm not considering snap/insta/twitter/tiktok DMs)
Given that Facebook are going to outspend the government significantly to prove that they are encrypting and making your messages private, its going to be an interesting fight.
Most of these companies already know the users birthday, if this is only about child abuse then instead of adding backdoors for everyone, why not just disable end to end encryption conversations for users under 16?
That is the cohort that _most_ needs end-to-end encryption.
https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryp...
End-to-end encryption is crucial to protect today's kids.
https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryp...
No secrets for us, none for the govt too
It's really scummy to use children as a weapon here e.g. Encryption allows child abuse.
This campaign is emphasizing on one aspect of a tech, and trying to manipulate people emotionally.
1) There is no way to monitor/prevent abuse for kid to get exposed to extreme (literally, potentially mentally damaging) pornography and perversion that percolates into the mainstream life via innocent channels - manga, anime, Reddit, and so on. When I grew up the content of that sort was significantly more limited, i.e. occasional porn GIFs, most fine erotic material, but nothing of the extreme sort you could easily stumble upon by just being online today, etc).
2) Qustodio can partially filter out some content as it's installed on the PC and the smartphone, but due to the all-pervading encryption it has no visibility into Discord and other social networks.
3) Disastrous breaches in IT school policies. School has given mandatory Chromebooks to all kids which they use probably half of the time in the class and for homework, and there is no way to bind the school account to Google Family Links - this is forbidden by the school admin. There is some filtering on the school Wi-Fi which school kids circumvent by joining their phone's shared Wi-Fi. Complained, received boilerplate "we are doing our best" reply. This is an independent school in London.
4) The only option I have is to begin breaking SSL in the middle via, say, FortiGate and hope it will catch some of the sites. This would also be applicable only to home Wi-Fi, rather ineffective.
As a parent, the only solution I have is to prohibit access to screen, i.e. take all devices away, completely. Which I have failed, as there are very little communal spaces for the kids to hang out and interact where I live, and those who do hang out tend to be vaping, drinking alcohol, etc. All the kids are online in the evenings - chatting, sharing memes, laughing together, or they have pre-arranged playdates.
So, my choice here is to completely take away all devices and, hence, completely remove the social component. Or just pray he won't get abused online. I, honestly, don't know what to do. I have been living with computers since 80s, started out with ZX Spectrum and PC/XT, and I am horrified by what allowing the kid to roam Internet without filters may lead to now.
Regarding the overweight / underweight problems, do you think that all the over and underweight people, and proper weight people who still battle some eating disorder, just missed a good hour of talking to? I wonder what you'd say to them.
I do not think you have a firm grasp of how peer pressure works and how powerful it is. That's like saying "we told people that drugs are bad, so clearly nobody will do drugs anymore".
Perhaps children need 1 hour, or more, "don't fall in with the wrong internet crowd and let weirdos claim possession of your identity" education. I am not sure what form that would take.
The idea of protecting children from all this through control is naive for two reasons: 1. you can't monitor children 100%. This leads to the fact that I can never prevent all things. Both in reality and on the net. 2. as adults, these children must have already thought about all this in order to act wisely. A child who moves out at 18 and has not yet dealt with it is completely on their own, although the adults would have had time to explain everything to the children.
And one more thing from pedagogy that contradicts what you said: children process only what they understand and is relevant to them. For example, if you explain to a 4-year-old child what rape is, the child will absorb almost nothing of it. For the child, sex and the sexual need is foreign. Thus, they cannot derive much information from the explanation.
I have seen a lot of sick stuff on the net as a teenager. For example, a beheading of a white journalist in the Middle East by Islamists. No one could have prevented me from clicking on the link friends sent me. However, it could have been explained to me that there are such things on the net and how that should be classified. In the end, it was up to me to classify it. And of course, such experiences could have led to anything. For example, racism.
You must have lived a sheltered life as a child. As soon an VHS tapes came around in the late 70's and my family got a player, I was exposed to all kinds of crap- rape porn, bestiality, snuff films, white power propaganda, etc. You name it, and we'd trade the tapes as kids. Sure it's a lot more convenient now, but it was all around back then.
I've taken the approach that I'd never be able to stop my curious child from seeing nasty stuff online, no matter how hard I try. The best thing I can do is educate and provide context. I explained pretty early on to my son that he has to be careful what he looks for online, because he'll find it. Now at 15 years old, he tells me, "you wouldn't believe the shit out there, it's disgusting." Exactly.
It was, but wasn't. I never saw porn on VHS, nor did I have a sheltered life. It wasn't until I was 15, last year of secondary school was when I saw porn round a pals house.
My parent's were not the parents who were in to such content so there was never any of that in possession. True, it has always existed but regardless it can be damaging to a child.
I worry too, my nephew is only three and is happily running around playing with dinosaurs.
With social media the way it is, young teens selling themselves on OnlyFans, different types of pornography/hentai imagery traded on Discord. It's all horrifying.
Hentai isn't traded on Discord? look around, because it's all there. Join a NSFW "lewd" discord and see for yourself.
Discord welcomes 13-year olds to join the platform. That someone that young can see that content is horrific.
Not that that ever stopped anyone though lmao.
Breaking SSL is not the answer for one more reason: with more and more web apps (cannot say "websites") relying on JavaScript-only content delivery, long polling, websockets, server-sent events, and who knows what else, there are less and less standards. Earlier, such nanny software worked because everything was text and HTML, and it is known how to stop bad things in these content types. Nowadays, we can't just block replies, because we have to substitute some dummy JSON (or whatever) instead, so that the app doesn't crash or hang - and such dummy replacement of the blocked content is application-specific.
Also, think about today's children, they are tomorrow's politicians: now you deploy an automated system that breaks the internet for them, tomorrow they will deploy an automated system that will deny access for you to anything published by the opposition.
If watching some weirdo porn was enough to mentally damage people, the world would look quite different.
* An LGBT child using LGBT safe spaces online. Being outed before a child has come to terms with their feelings themselves can be horrendous for their mental wellbeing, even in an understanding household. In less LGBT friendly households it could be extremely dangerous.
* An abuser is part of their family and trying to communicate that to teachers, authorities or whoever else.
Of course you are right to be concerned for your child, and age/maturity is really critical in this discussion. A 4 year old clearly shouldn't have unfettered access to the internet. Should a 15 year old who has shown they can be trusted be forced to have their parent view everything they do? I'm not sure.
As an adult I don't "stumble" onto the type of content you're talking about and I browse the web a lot. So if children are "stumbling" onto this content, maybe just maybe, they don't need unfettered Internet access and their own private devices.
From your post, I divine that you don't really like porn much. I actually seek it out; but I've never "stumbled upon" anything more extreme than a model who looks as if she's 17. You don't find kiddieporn by stumbling around pornhub.
Also, Discord is not end-to-end encrypted. (Messages are sent and scrollback is loaded over HTTPS, realtime messages are received over an HTTPS WebSocket. (They are compressed, but not encrypted any more than normal HTTPS.))
School devices are generally monitored/filtered way too much already. Fortunately until highschool I'd always been able to bypass blocking by changing my DNS or using HTTPS. My highschool has Fortinet though which seems to do SNI filtering so whenever I need to visit blocked things I have to use Tor. (There's probably a more efficient way but Tor works fine.)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but it's interesting how manga/anime is invoked in these discussions, often unintentionally or even unknowingly recalling the image of 'weird Japan', a supposed hotbed of child abuse and perversion, where no material, much less anime and manga are safe for Western eyes, supposedly more moral and discerning.
I recently read a paper about this kind of discourse, in which the authors pointed out, quite rightly in my judgement, that the popularity of such readings in the mainstream Western press projects a certain idea of fiction and its relationship with reality which is not shared by many in Japan, and certainly not by the consumers of this 'pornography and perversion' according to ethnographic research on their opinions and perceptions.
Second is the idea of 'stumbling' upon porn. Some people even class Neon Genesis Evangelion as 'perversion' in its own right, and recently in the US, portrayals of adolescent sexuality in stories and books, which some lawmakers are trying to remove from libraries. I'm of the opinion that the sparation isn't nearly that easy. Teenagers writing Harry Potter slash fanfiction is a far cry away from Blender animated monster porn, and a fannish teenager or younger will have a greater interest in the former.
Consider just how well moderated most Internet communities are. The chance of seeing porn (as opposed to the anime equivalent of a very softcore porn gif) on r/all, or even r/anime is slim. A child is much more likely to 'stumble' accross it if a friend they know in real life sent it to them through Discord. The only other place I can really think of a child 'stumbling' in a zone meant for children would be Twitter, but then we're talking about Twitter, not 'reddit', 'anime', or 'manga'. In other words, I'm saying that just because the material exists, it doesn't mean it's innocently 'stumbled' upon by a wide-eyed child. Children get curious, especially when you tell them not to do something, or society provides that narrative.
In many ways, my childhood was horrific. Bullied from a young age for being very different to my peers, I had my bones broken by older children aged 8, 9, and 13; scratches and bite marks from the age of about 5. Older children did "things" to me that definitely count as sexual assault with adult eyes; I'd rather not get into all of it as I was never groomed, but I was certainly abused. One memory I have is of sitting on the sofa with my arm in plaster, freshly broken, and playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on my N64. A teacher visited, out of the blue, and asked my mum not to sue the school I was at. Several of the teachers I had as a teenager are now convicted paedophiles -- convicted because they had sex with students (of my gender). I remember one talking about getting large erections in class.
When I went to Oxford, to read physics, after years of being beaten, bullied, spat at, stamped on, urinated upon; after having to battle my school to pay for someone to invigilate my entrance exam paper (they refused -- I did it in the head of the sixth form's office); after being threatened with expulsion for cracking their WEP key to read wikipedia in class; after having faeces thrown at me, a firework placed in my locker, stolen property put in my coat pocket to frame me, and other boys putting what would now be considered "extreme pornography" in the UK in my coat pocket, or changing my unlocked computer's desktop picture to horse porn; or being shown videos of pigs being decapitated with a chainsaw because I was vegetarian -- after all that, when finally, I was welcomed into a place where learning was encouraged, and the others were like me, I frankly thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I've hung onto it, tooth and nail, trying to do good in the world (and let others like me have their chance).
I therefore feel that I'm uniquely qualified to comment this government's attempt at disrupting E2E encryption. I understand the maths (but I am not a cryptographer) and I very much feel like I would be in the target demographic.
Banning or breaking end to end encryption won't help.
Targetted abuse is, I believe on the part of the abuser(s), entirely psychological, and that process leads to physical violence. The medium is a lesser concern. I had seven shades of shit beaten out of me in the era before 2004 -- at AIM and Jabber's height -- and snooping my messages would not have helped.
People who are sexually attracted to children are very rare, and the allegations take a long time to come out because your state of mind only really develops fully about the whole process years later. The medium of communication matters -- and having some sort of post facto evidence chain is undoubtedly helpful -- but breaking disappearing messages is not what this PR campaign is about. It's about increasing the ability of the security services to snoop.
The proposals are something I vehemently disagree with – there is a very large difference between a complaint being raised, that complaint being investigated, and as part of that evidence gathered (and message databases recovered); and proactive, untargetted investigation of crime. The UK's town of "Scunthorpe" famously fails most "bad language" filters and it blights the lives of its residents. Having the police investigate children proactively without talking to them is...immoral. I very much believe that, complete with the five-years-non-negotiable key disclosure law in the UK, encryption moves the burden of duty appropriately onto the police: they can investigate matters when a complaint is raised, but not before.
Any further goes too far towards the surveillance (Stazi-style) police state, in my opinion, with children being investigated by the empowered, frightening apparatus of the state because they said something naughty. We already know what happens to children who look like they might happen to be carrying drugs on their way to school, when the police have the powers to stop and search. It hasn't ended well, either for the police (wherein trust is rapidly falling), or for the children in question. Let's not make the same mistake again with what is, fundamentally, maths.
Giving government the ability to snoop on people to maybe find something objectionable would in my opinion severely inhibit people opening up about abuse. Even if you believed government to be your perfect friend. For many it isn't just a question of security, it is also a question of shame and guilt. Ubiquitous surveillance would be damaging to the low trust of people that were abused.
Here is a possible solution to your problem: Release an open source library that locally has a trained model to detect child abuse texting. Allow messaging platforms to integrate this library on the user end (you know, after the second "end" in the end-2-end). Implement parental control tools that enable this library to look st messages and report when something is fishy.
Op-in, privacy respecting, user controlled.
The "end" in E2EE is the end user, or software acting on that user's behalf as their agent—not software acting for some third party such as the service provider against the end user's will.
Integrating digital spies into peoples' devices is not the answer.
I am not sure you read my comment but anyway.
They can already get a warrant to go through my underwear drawer, tap my phone or read my snail mail.
Why would chat messages be different?
For example, if it really looked like I were trafficking drugs it would be fine to send somebody to follow me and listen to me talk to people
Now, the e2e encryption crowd needs to make a similar ad explaining why encryption is important.
And the public can make their minds up when they vote.
Further, I don’t understand how they can actually manage to do this without weakening all encryption on the internet.
Very strange moves that aren’t well thought out at all with a single focus to reduce the power of the people.
So they're not opposed to an end-to-encryption in principle? I'm sure that was an honest mistake.
What is this nonsense? They are a majority government, they can pass any laws they want, why are they wasting my money on this insulting propaganda.
What is important is lying about your true intention convincingly enough.
> We are not opposed to end-to-end encryption.
I'm not commenting on the merits of this campaign, simply on the fact that the title is inaccurate.
> We are not opposed to end-to-end encryption, as long as it is implemented in a way that does not put children at risk. We are in favour of both strong privacy and children’s safety and urge social media companies to protect both.
Which basically means "we are not opposed to end-to-end encryption as long as the encryption is not end-to-end".
> We want social media companies to confirm they will not implement end-to-end encryption
(our two quotes both omit similar amounts of context.)
console.log("you are being tracked");
just realized the title is wrong (end-to-ENCRYPTION encryption).
https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg
Anyone willing to make a UK version?
There is just no concrete, tangible reason why sex predators and terrorists do need to have this protection from law enforcement. Meanwhile, there is no concrete, tangible need for the average citizen to be able to foil lawful access by police (say after a warrant was issued - you do have protections!).
I say concrete and tangible, because while I strongly support e2e, it is impossible to justify on purely objective, let's weigh specific pros and cons grounds. It's essentially an ideological position, where you are willing to accept a lot of concrete downsides for the idea that the right to privacy is a tool in the balance between the individual and the state.
I'd venture to say that very few people here actually deeply believe this though. Rather, it has been adopted as commonly accepted wisdom within our community. Your supposed to support encryption. Within the larger culture wars and the techslash, I have serious doubts as to how many people are willing to defend e2e encryption once the wider public turns against it. This just needs persistence and the right political trigger.
By the way - the argument for cryptocurrency, or for Tor, is exactly the same as the argument for e2e encryption. You are supposed to accept all the bad stuff (crime), not because the average Joe needs the tech, but because it serves as a counterweight against the tyranny of the majority. You don't need to be a libertarian to believe that.
Invalid use cases would be things like social media platforms where children are able to communicate with unknown parties.
Could something like that work? How could a system like that be protected from abuse? Obviously pedophillic doctors and reporters would have an immediate loophole that would need to be considered...
There has to be a way where we can have legitimately end to end encrypted systems while preventing illegitimate ones. There's a massive grey area in between "ban encryption" and "let pedophiles do what they want without any oversight." There must be a solution that falls somewhere in the middle of those two things.