What's the point? Criminals will just use linux/custom devices, while normal people will have to face all of the false-positives of the scanning..
What I've heard is that the only this is a proposal that child rights NGOs has been lobbying for, which I think we can both agree, are not expert in anything tech.
How often do communications done through a wide variety of channels that wouldn't satisfy a cypherpunk from email to Whatsapp show up on evidence before court, even if the people involved knew that they could end up in court? Weren't a bunch of criminals fooled by a literal FBI phone?
I am often dumbfound by the exsessive paper trail people leave for all kind of things...
It's far more difficult than that.
Most Linux contributions are made by multi-billions companies like IBM/Redhat. They would not risk to contravene to law. For example that it conforms to the law, look at WiFi drivers. There are many requirement by local laws on which band to use, what kind of traffic is authorized, etc. The WiFi drivers (most of them opaque binaries) conform to each country law.
To make Linux not lawful, you would have to create your own kernel with your own altered drivers, except you can't modify binaries.
Even then how could you make you system unidentifiable? How would you have control over booting your modified Linux in a commercial computer that uses UEFI? How would you know that the commercial CPU is not phoning home through the Intel Management Engine?
You would have use a FPGA CPU, your own designed hardware and a trusted OS but at the end you will always rely on the work of thousands people and hundred companies.
If literally every jurisdiction on Earth makes it a crime, then I guess this option would go away, but that seems unlikely to me.
The source code is published on the internet under the GPL. Anyone who doesn't like any of their contributions can take that one out and keep any of the others. Do you expect the Kali Linux people to include a backdoor?
> To make Linux not lawful, you would have to create your own kernel with your own altered drivers, except you can't modify binaries.
You can in fact modify binaries, it's just more work. For one person, once. Although that's fairly irrelevant because there exists hardware that doesn't require binary-only drivers.
> How would you know that the commercial CPU is not phoning home through the Intel Management Engine?
You install a firewall in front of it to detect or prevent this. Also, because it can be so easily detected and would be a scandal, it's very likely to be public knowledge if any commercial hardware in widespread use actually did this.
Then you use default deny and allow only e.g. a VPN connection.
This would require the hardware backdoor to be aware of and integrate with the specific VPN that you used, which could be a version of the code published after the hardware shipped.
> Is in possible to have a VPN provider which guarantees not having any Intel machines on the network?
Irrelevant unless the code on your side could hook the VPN, though of course you could.
The better attack would be to have the compromised firmware send its packets using the addresses and ports of some existing connection regardless of its contents, and then have a compromised ISP read them. But even that could be detected by logging the packets at the clean firewall. If it records any that aren't a part of the VPN connection then you've got yourself a rat and a scandal.
Remember, these are politicians. What they do doesn't have to make sense or be possible. All they have to do is pass laws. If it makes everyone a criminal that's good. The law just won't be enforced unless you rock the boat. Much like with the CFAA in the USA or GDPR in Europe.
eventually either nobody will use that, or they'll just jump the shark and outlaw such things
I know that for example in Canada, because taxes, ALL restaurants are (were?) FORCED to use a specific sets of devices else they're branded as tax-avoiders and dealt with accordingly
I've already had trouble using banking stuff under linux, I have had to cancel some cards because they became useless without a smartphone app (the real punchline is that I got a new card that's only works on a smartphone. but at least it was like this when I signed up; they didn't change how it works under my feet)
Either a Matrix Server or even NextCloud chat will do the job just fine. Then just sideload an APK which is rather trivial
But it might be a good way to attract the attention of law enforcement. People running PGP phone services have been arrested and prosecuted because their networks were primarily used by criminals. If you run a encrypted chat service to circumvent the law you might be held accountable for what users use your encrypted chat service for.