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Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

> Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption.

This is trivially possible.

1. send an end to end encrypted message to the recipient

2. also send an end to end encrypted copy of the message to the government.

I’m not agreeing with it. But you can clearly send end to end encrypted messages to multiple parties without fundamentally breaking the encryption…

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If message 1 is properly encrypted then I can put whatever I want in message 2 without the government knowing the contents of message 1.

Also, assuming message 1 and 2 contents are identical, if anyone steals the governments' private key the encryption of message 1 is moot.

I think by the point you encrypt the plaintext twice the idea of end-to-end is broken.

Disclaimer: I do not agree with this EU proposal.

Why do you say that e2ee is broken if the plain text is encrypted more than once?

Isn't that what happens in group chats?

And if not, they could just make all chats group chats. You, your recipient and the government.

Maybe this would actually make people tick on how outrageous this is.

That would make it very obvious. I like that idea.

Are you saying that sending and scanning are the same? I think we need to define "scan" (or "sniff" or whatever other metaphors are used here) as more than just receiving a copy that's still encrypted. What definition is there, which is distinct from "decrypt"?

You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.

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