Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

There's a very reasonable double standard between private citizens using encrypted messaging tools and their ostensible public servants using them in a public capacity.

Put another way: there's no sense in which the public is made safer or society is made to function more wholly when the police are less accountable due to un-subpoenable communications.

View on HN

As long as the encrypted communications are logged and available in accordance with public records-retention policies, using a good encryption system sounds like a good thing, no?

Sure. But that isn't end-to-end encryption; that's a weird key escrow thing. It would be a little strange for Matrix to officially support that kind of use case, since it's indistinguishable in the general case from dangerous, privacy-compromising forms of key escrow[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Govs use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is Red Hat inherently bad? What else would they use? Fucking WhatsApp like the UK gov during the pandemic?

I didn't say Matrix was "inherently bad." Where's that coming from?

If you're asking me what I think the police should use for police business: I don't care, as long as it can be made accountable to the public. The technology behind it literally does not matter to me, so long as that constraint is satisfied.

I think I must have hit reply on the wrong comment on my phone as it doesn't make sense in context.

Sorry!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com