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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Just as a reminder making crack-proof encryption standard everywhere is a trade off. It’s often discussed and presented in forums like this as the only and just choice (and I believe net it is), but in doing so WILL lead to bad outcomes. Terrible crimes, unsolvable murders, large scale terrorism, emboldened enemies attacking a country, more successful coups, etc. It would be nice as a community to acknowledge nothing comes for free and every technology is a double edged sword. I wish more of these double edge swords could be debated by the public it affects, although it’s out of the scope of comprehension and thoughtfulness by most. And yet we all make the choices that will affect generations…

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(1) crimes happen, and have happened forever

(2) historically people simply did not create a huge written record (texts etc) detailing their crimes, so there’s no change in available information

(3) even before any of this tech police are not good a solving crimes, and generally rely on errors by criminals

(4) and finally. Your argument is definitionally the slippery slope and is the reason the 4th and 5th amendments exist in the US. Your argument is trivially extended to literally everything: why shouldn’t all communication be routed through government servers to find evidence of crimes? Why shouldn’t all device locations be available to police at all times? Why shouldn’t you have video and audio recorders in every home (most child abuse, the quintessential horror) is committed by family members in the home.

Having actual privacy does not result in crime, and mandating that privacy should be illegal in only a single case is clearly nonsense. Either you have a right to privacy or you don’t.

Widely used unbreakable encryption has been available in chat apps for at least a decade and hasn't led us down that slippery slope yet. PQ3 is just future proofing what we already have.

Yeah, that’s what the NSA has said forever - but it turns out that all encryption has that human factor.

Imagine I’m planning something malicious. If I literally do anything other than talk about it, there’s going to be evidence, and that evidence won’t be encrypted.

Plus, crack-proof encryption existed at least back to Roman times - simply because making a secure code was fairly easy and we didn’t have codebreakers. We managed.

people commit crimes with: cars, money, public transit, restaurants, food, bathrooms, roads, … why don’t we get rid of all that?

we don’t remove all rights to privacy for people in their homes because criminals use homes too. tech should be no different

https://www.eureporter.co/world/human-rights-category/europe...

Yes, giving people privacy means giving everyone privacy, whether they're doing good things or bad. Pointing cameras into everyone's window would also prevent some crimes, and we shouldn't do that either.

I don't think "This has tradeoffs but those tradeoffs are absolutely worth it" is a level of nuance that's possible in the face of the level of scaremongering against E2EE.

For a minute I thought you were only talking about non-state actors performing those terrible things, then remembered history is full of nations doing all those things.

It’s all of the above. That’s my point. Good, bad, ok if you’re on their side, some never have a side to be on.

Those “bad outcomes” already existed pre encryption. If anything, it’ll be more of the same.

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