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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, is there any evidence that E2EE eg in WhatsApp, Signal, etc. is routinely broken? I am not talking about exceptional hacking of phones of individual high-value targets for surveillance by nation-state-level actors, but mass surveillance.

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If there was public evidence allowed to be released nobody would be using those algorithms obviously. The point of those algorithms is to make them hard to break for the public and easy to break for the agencies . E.g. None of your mentioned products use quantum hard encryption. It is not far fetched to assume that all the relevant agencies have access to a working quantum computer. But I doubt you need even sophisticated hardware. Most "government approved" encryption algorithms should be considered compromised from the get-go.

I seriously doubt that agencies have more capabilities than the scientific community of mathematicians. Perhaps there are weak points in implementations, but I don't believe any agency has the capabilities to crack encryption, even some of the older algorithms.

There is no evidence that a quantum computer can break classic encryption yet. Even if the agencies tried, they would not have the means to stop the spread of such information.

And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this.

Almost 100% of the "scientific community of mathematicians" is funded by the government. They can't be trusted either. If they want to publish something that is considered to be a "threat to national security" the agencies have multiple avenues at their disposal to "convince" them to not publish.

> And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this.

Codifying covert practices into law has the big advantage to make the whole oppressive surveillance state much more efficient. Gone are the days of "parallel constructions". Also the chilling effects of total surveillance alone might be enough to prevent the opposition to be effective.

Sorry, but these are conspiracy theories without good evidence. You don't think other countries have good mathematicians? And the long arm of your government agencies reaches all of them?

Signal uses post-quantum encryption

Oh, indeed, they're adding a quantum resistant layer. Nice. Not sure it's in production yet.

https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

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