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Comment by alkindiffie | Hacker News Reader

So in France you will not be able to send your friend gibberish text that only you and your friend understand. Will they also ban the ability to make new languages that only you and your friends understand. Will they also ban whispering?

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Or will they ban you from using something like https://github.com/filosottile/age to encrypt and armor text encode things you send inside of the non-encrypted chat?

echo "Am I doing something illegal, France?" | age -e -r age1ql3z7hjy54pw3hyww5ayyfg7zqgvc7w3j2elw8zmrj2kg5sfn9aqmcac8p -a -

  -----BEGIN AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----
  YWdlLWVuY3J5cHRpb24ub3JnL3YxCi0+IFgyNTUxOSBjTVQ5VTdMaTlnRkEyT1BY
  MHZPc0lncHFvbS9FMTlDa2FkK3JQZy9sQnprClRFN3lNQUtnNzJWK0RxQVlYNE1q
  NCtlNFJTUWpwZExJSDMvSGlRL2VHc1EKLS0tIC95bEErRU9NNERJRVVuYlMwUFg4
  WUx1R0IyTHd1d2dxQTdqU0NJWlF0MXMKL1x9fz+ZVObYrn3bY/IdVBsd4KYxn78P
  aWePVjaRUityGTkndNSy6gg1meVky22iv4rxd9MZ4XYnsGJDfRUmkVZhQcCxag==
  -----END AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----

Yes, to protect the children ofcourse.

I have talked about it with a high-ranking french policeman. That person is mostly active in fighting sex-crimes on children, which is the angle I will mostly be referring to. From what I understood, it is very clear to them that even if these laws comes to pass, a good amount of criminal activities will move to other safer options. However, the general criminal is not technically competent. Currently, with WhatsApp providing end-to-end by default, access to pedophilic content is extremely simple. By suppressing these simple means of end to end encryption, the goal is to reduce the amount of people accessing them due to a higher entry bar. What's concerning to me is that it renders anyone using encryption suspect, which includes pedophiles and narcotrafficants, but also activists.

Also, if we're only targetting pedophile networks, one option that comes to mind to me is the following : Most of those images are known and have been circulating for a while. By hashing any sent images and comparing them to the checksum of known ones, one could easily flag suspicions senders and proceed to access the phones of those users. Does that seem feasible to you or am I missing something?

>By hashing any sent images and comparing them to the checksum of known ones

How do you propose that would happen in an e2e chat?

Well, if it is some gibberish between you and friends the state doesn't understand, they will have you silently and continually investigated by a pre-crime unit. You and your friends could be committing "thought-crime".

But I thought crime---

- He said thought crime! bots start firing the machine guns

They've already banned religious and cultural freedom so why not?

They did not.

Yes, they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering

When Loglan & Lojban are outlawed, only outlaws will use Loglan & Lojban. And Klingon.

But how can they be SURE that you are not a terrorist? Neuralink is the only option!

Unknown associations and free speech are too scary. Neuralink and continual surveillance for the win. Pre-crime units at the ready.

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