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Comment by billywhizz | Hacker News Reader

agreed. i feel the real motivation is much more sinister and much more to do with the geopolitical situation than anything else.

the reality is, if anyone is seriously determined to commit what they know are crimes then there are many solutions, of admittedly varying quality, for having private communications outside of the mainstream apps available on the app store. even signal itself has an apk you can install on android from their website.

so, it's unlikely this will indeed help in the fight against CSAM or whatever else is purportedly motivating this legislation. the end result will be mass surveillance 24/7 on the vast majority of the population who aren't commiting any crimes at all. it seems to me like big brother's wet dream. ironic that this is exactly the thing the US/EU political leadership have been bashing the chinese for since forever.

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> ironic that this is exactly the thing the US/EU political leadership have been bashing the chinese for since forever.

there's a good reason for that. it's not controlled by and for the benefit of our oligarchs.

governments having low level dirt on their populations feels like manufacturing excuses to send people to war and remove their autonomy

Any intelligent criminal will just meet face-to-face to discuss their criminal activities. None of these apps protect against someone taking a photo of the screen and snitching to the authorities about what was said in exchange for less jail time.

To be fair, criminals are (fortunately) not always intelligent, especially the rabble they are trying to catch; or at least, the "small fry" isn't, but that's precisely how - I suppose - they hope to catch the bigger fishes who may be more cautious.

Or, to be honest, implement a fully E2EE chat application by themselves, right?

it's pretty easy to do these days. even in the browser you can use WebRTC for P2P and Web Crypto on top and knock together an e2e encrypted messenger in a few hours. assuming you can trust the browser crypto of course.

I haven't confirmed this, but I would expect that creating E2EE chat that doesn't follow this new law would itself be prosecutable? Now criminals can be picked up for merely using secure chat, if the government can't easily get them for human trafficking/drug trafficking/whatever. Reminds me of how the twentieth century US gangster Al Capone was prosecuted for tax evasion.

Anyone who is not explicitly privy to a fully bespoke, end to end encrypted data transmission and retrieval system has no way to determine the function or purpose of that system.

It could be text, audio, video, raw signal bitstream from an IoT sensor, or a full duplex async combination of anyone of those.

It wouldn't be a "chat service" to an outside observer, it would just be seemingly random, opaque bits between two endpoints.

If the traffic can't be identified and it isn't a known endpoint, then that's already suspicious.

well, for example, you could roll your own secure messaging over WebRTC data channels using Web Crypto. There won't be anything unusual looking about the traffic as it will all be wrapped up inside DTLS/SRTP which is the transport for WebRTC. so, it's encrypted twice and would look perfectly normal to any outside observer. there's no way to tell what is happening in the messaging layer WebRTC "encapsulates".

At end of day, if someone wants to do this, there is no way, afaik, it can be detected. so, all these laws won't really help combating serious criminals who have some savvy.

The way to do it would be to outlaw any protocol that can encapsulate to a point that off the shelf DPI can't read it.

I know you're being sarcastic, but you can implement perfect crypto and still get analog holed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

If you're running a criminal organization, a bigger threat than a wiretap can be someone wearing a wire, so to speak. Talking about anything over text creates a ton of evidence about the criminal conspiracy that you are currently engaged in. That evidence can be screencapped or recorded or whatever else by the person at the other end of the conversation. Since you don't have physical control over that person, it's possible they could be compromised.

If you keep everything in-person, even if someone becomes a snitch, you can still check them for hidden recording devices. At best, this means the evidence against you is that person's recollection of your conversation.

This is the same reason why it's much harder to pirate a movie in theatres than one released on streaming. Physical control over the environment that information is disseminated in is the gold standard, just look at the US military:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...

> agreed. i feel the real motivation is much more sinister and much more to do with the geopolitical situation than anything else.

Of course. Your "privacy" is very important for Microsoft, Google and Apple because of the "geopolitical situation". /s

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