In the physical world, the limits are clear: no democratic government is permitted to monitor citizens in their homes without a court order, even to prevent domestic violence or child sexual abuse. In the digital world, though, the answer remains unresolved. Child safety advocates believe that governments must be able to unlock private messages, while tech companies and privacy activists see a smokescreen for mass government surveillance.
What will happen here will be exactly like what happened with the net neutrality laws in the US. Even if we beat it once they’ll just keep trying until the media gets fatigued and they can pass it without a large amount of uproar. There’s no legal way for us to stop them.
Not there is a feasible way to remove e2e from the internet. tons of banks would just stop working in the UK. the bill wouldn’t last a week.
I see this argument every time this comes up but it’s not true. The end to end encryption they are talking about is between users so the service provider doesn’t have access to the data.
You sent a WhatsApp message and it’s encrypted right through to the recipient’s phone.
Your banking doesn’t do that, it’s encrypted between you and the bank.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you there’s no feasible way to stop it and hasn’t been for 30 years since the release of PGP, but it’s not about encryption in general, it’s specifically encrypted communication between individuals and bringing other stuff into it just weakens the argument against it.
They might be referring only to instant messaging, but in a technical sense your communications with your bank are encrypted e2e, where one end is the bank and the other one is you. there is no intermediary. The important part in what you said is the recipient, there user recipient in my communications with the bank is the bank itself.
Anyway, if this bill is only about instant messaging, disregard my message, but I hope messaging apps just stop working.
Yeah totally agree in the technical sense but if they want to spy on your banking they can go to your bank. If they want to spy on your instant messaging they can’t.
The bill doesn’t mention encryption at all, it only creates the ability to compel service providers to grant them access on request. Breaking the encryption is the only way they could do that. The law isn’t telling them not encrypt traffic directly.
Up until the last decade, law enforcement could access pretty much any communications with that appropriate warrants. They could intercept mail, tap phones, get access to emails. E2E being so widespread is fairly new and I vaguely remember messaging platforms implementing it to avoid all the potential legal problems with law enforcement around the world and and international user base. I have no source for that though.
I can imagine it’s a potential minefield that they don’t want deal with so removing their own access solved that problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe people should have access to private communications and I think all the rhetoric about protecting children is BS. It’s just an easy way to quiet the dissenters then they expand those powers later on.