One day that'll be illegal. End to end encryption? That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence. Maybe they'll declare your efforts to protect yourself as being in contempt of court and then jail you indefinitely until full decryption.
To absolutely no sane person's surprise, the main audience of e.g. anti-censorship platforms is exactly people who typically feel or find themselves censored, which in a harmonious or at least well-functioning society will not be a particularly cheritable set of individuals. In one where that's not the case, the audience would change alongside too, sure, but clearly these narratives mismatch reality, at least for now.
Conversely, (actually) high privacy platforms will be primarily seeked out and leveraged by those who value precisely that. While the privacy scares have been pretty serious for a while, for now that is still both evidently, and indeed obviously, in good part criminals or other high risk individuals.
It's like trying to pretend people are shopping for regular items on .onion webshops rather than for contraband. I'm sure that crowd exists, but like, who are we trying to fool here exactly?
Performative victimhood only works so well, and until such blatantly deceptive narrative is being pushed, you may very well see your doomsday scenario realized. It's a trivially vulnerable position, so much so that it feels like a rhetorical trap almost. Like a poet self-sabotaging the monetization of their work, while waxing poetic about how they're (financially) un(der)appreciated. Although people have been getting into anti-government conspiracies pretty hard in the past few years, and governments have been working hard to demolish whatever good standing they have in parallel, so that does help your case I suppose. One may even recognize this miraculously well oiled process and nosedive in social trust as uncoincidental, in fact. But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?
Well-funded criminal networks like the ones in the video you linked would have little issue if all e2ee chat apps disappeared tomorrow, they have enough money and operational incentives to pay someone to make custom encrypted chat apps (not to mention the myriad of open source ones available).
The only people actually hurt by banning e2ee are regular people.
> It's like trying to pretend people are shopping for regular items on .onion webshops rather than for contraband. I'm sure that crowd exists, but like, who are we trying to fool here exactly?
Based on public metrics, 3% of Tor traffic is .onion traffic and it is incredibly likely the vast majority of that is the Facebook .onion service (based on some stats posted by Facebook a few years ago).
So no, I think the burden of proof falls on you to show that the vast majority of .onion usage is illegal.
Despite that, for some reason, these well funded criminal networks keep buying into these weird phone deals instead. I genuinely don't understand why, but they do.
> So no, I think the burden of proof falls on you to show that the vast majority of .onion usage is illegal.
How does the burden of proof fall on me for a claim I (intentionally) did not make?
> Despite that, for some reason, these well funded criminal networks keep buying into these weird phone deals instead. I genuinely don't understand why, but they do.
Given how many of them have been CIA honeypots, they must have amazing marketing.
> How does the burden of proof fall on me for a claim I (intentionally) did not make?
Nice trick -- make a very clear implication and claim that you didn't make a positive claim.
The implication (representing a belief, not a claim) was about the nature of item purchases on .onion webshops (that they're primarily contraband), not about the composition of .onion or Tor traffic. If anything, the attempt to pivot to that was a trick.
You may still fault me for mixing in beliefs into an argument, it is of poor form from me. Up to you. But then I don't think sentiments are just pure hard logic and evidence, so it'd have been potentially more dishonest from me to exclude it than to not.
I skim-watched your link and it doesn’t seem to support your thesis.
First, the secure end-to-end encryption was broken by international police and messages were read without making it illegal.
Second they suggest reading hundreds of thousands of people’s messages to catch a dozen or so gang members - not supporting your claim that only crooks use it.
Third, the video ends by the gang leader saying he was working for the President; not supporting your implication that criticism of government is all baseless conspiracy theories.
I have very serious concerns on the human vs LLM effort that went into this comment, but sure, let's go point by point then.
The first counterpoint I can't even decipher, it makes no grammatical sense. Are you saying that law-enforcement-intercepted encrypted messages are not necessarily illegal? ...why would they be? Sounds like a strawman.
The second is explicitly a strawman. I intentionally left space for legitimate use, because it's a trivial rhetorical target, so I just said that it primarily interests "illegitimate" use for now. While I do not have actually comprehensive data on the Sky userbase, the way these devices were distributed, the volume of criminal-use-connected messages uncovered, and the globally dispersed gang use presented in the video did suggest to me exactly what I said. I'm not sure why you think "just catching a dozen or so gang members" is a reasonable takeaway either, given that the video's focus was exactly just those people.
We can take issue with this, and downgrade this to just being evidence of significant (in the statistical terminology sense of the word) criminal use rather than primary criminal use. I just both fail to find that particularly compelling, and don't really feel like arguing on your behalf.
The third counterpoint I also struggle to decipher. It seems to also build on a strawman like the other two points. You accuse me of implying that "criticism of govt is all baseless conspiracy theories". I don't know how you managed to extract such a thing out of what I wrote, so I'm not sure how to respond. Governments around the world are routinely criticized, have plenty of perfectly valid things going against them, on which both the media and the general public report on plenty. It is - thankfully - only a select few places in the world where such speech is actually restricted. Now that was more a part of my point.
The first counterpoint is that you took the position E2E Encrypted messaging will be made illegal because of criminals. The video you linked to support this shows criminals being caught without banning E2E encrypted messaging. Therefore your link does not support the claim that catching criminals needs E2EE apps banning.
The second is not a strawman, you claimed that only criminals are attracted to E2EE messaging when the link you gave showed some 170 thousand users of that specific messaging app with no suggestion that most of them were criminals. "I just said that it primarily interests "illegitimate" use for now" yes you did say that, and that thing you said is not supported by your link.
The third is about your writing about how people who want privacy are performative victims who are falling into anti-government conspiracy theories, but your link shows a thing which was not a conspiracy theory and the government in question actually was accused of targetting their political enemies with gangs, and it would be reasonable to want privacy against such.
> "I don't know how you managed to extract such a thing out of what I wrote"
> "But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?"
maybe write less of this winky-face bs and just say what you mean.
> you took the position E2E Encrypted messaging will be made illegal because of criminals
That is not the position I took (and as such, the video I link to was not in support of this either). The position I took is encoded in this sentence:
> (...) until such blatantly deceptive narrative is being pushed, you may very well see your doomsday scenario realized.
This is to say, I consider the "narrative" the person above is "pushing" to be "blatantly deceptive", given the well published and significant cases of criminal use, which I then linked to a recent example of, and in which stories private comms play a key role. That the fairy tale where encrypted comms is "merely just for innocent people to protect their privacy" is indeed "both obviously and evidently" phony, and pretending that it isn't thus only harms their political case, rather than help it.
It's frustrating that this has to be argued tooth and nail, because it is common sense. Private communications is essential for covert operations. Obviously by preventing such communications, you'll be harming such operations, a goal which can be trivially made politically compelling and for good reason. To say that this is "obvious" is an understatement.
> shows criminals being caught without banning E2E encrypted messaging
The video doesn't actually feature E2EE. It speaks of intelligence authorities extracting decryption keys from server memory, and using that to decrypt traffic. This suggests ordinary encrypted messaging (if even that), not E2EE. You'll notice I also wasn't singling out E2EE.
The video also spends a great deal of time on how those captured messages provided crucial evidence for their various crimes.
> Therefore your link does not support the claim that catching criminals needs E2EE apps banning.
Indeed, that link never meant to support such a claim to begin with. What it was meant to demonstrate was encrypted messaging directly supporting criminal use, and being an evidently attractive feature for criminals. So much so that they'll actively seek out weird-ass phone deals, like SkyECC.
> you claimed that only criminals are attracted to E2EE messaging
That is not what I claimed. What I claimed is that it is primarily individuals who are high risk that will be attracted, who will be "in good part" criminals:
> While the privacy scares have been pretty serious for a while, for now that is still both evidently, and indeed obviously, in good part criminals or other high risk individuals.
I could pretend I didn't mean majority use, but I'll spare you. Rewatching the video, I do concede that it does not outright claim the 70K monthly active users were found to be primarily criminals. It merely suggests so, such as by referencing the port of Antwerp dealings, and mentioning that there was a hotspot of users there. That is thus borrowed speculation on my behalf, although I do think it is plenty compelling enough. You're free to disagree or chase it further.
> The third is about your writing about how people who want privacy are performative victims who are falling into anti-government conspiracy theories
That is exceedingly not what I said. The person I was portraying to be a "performative victim" was OP, because they wrote in a sarcasm-laden, self-victimizing style, like so:
> That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence.
I then explained that people who already believe in anti-government conspiracy theories will likely be the ones to find it compelling, because what they said is against government control on encrypted comms, is conspiratorial in nature, and because governments have been abusing their power more and more lately:
> Although people have been getting into anti-government conspiracies pretty hard in the past few years, and governments have been working hard to demolish whatever good standing they have in parallel, so that does help your case I suppose.
This doesn't mean they have been specifically "falling into anti-government conspiracy theories" either. It means they're the ones actively sowing some, or at the very least are riffing off the trope hard and willfully. And that this is indeed weak against the evidenced criminal cases, even if they feel it shouldn't be.
> your link shows a thing which was not a conspiracy theory and the government in question actually was accused of targetting their political enemies with gangs, and it would be reasonable to want privacy against such
This is a non-sequitur. The gangs in question were not depicted to have relied on surveillance technologies or harvested comms intelligence, not on their own terms, nor through governmental means. One of the gangs being in bed with the local government being proven to be not a conspiracy also has little bearing on conspiracies at large. Some conspiracy theories are true, some aren't, some partially. Why would I make such an obviously fallible claim that government-related conspiracy theories are never true?
But maybe your point is more that being able to privately communicate can be helpful in cases like this. And I agree. Even beyond it, I do think that private communications are important, even essential, and I'd like to see them protected. I just also happen to think that very obviously bullshit deflections like this do not serve that cause. I mentioned the .onion webshop example, but I could have really brought up e.g. torrent as well. Is it exclusively for piracy? No, it cannot actually be: it transmits arbitrary data. Is it obviously the main attraction and what people use it for? Very much so. Does this mean it shouldn't proliferate further and be used in legitimate settings? No. It just means that defending it by pointing at it "not necessarily being for piracy" is a hideously weak, laughably phony political position, that would not at all stand up to scrutiny in a sufficiently adversarial environment. Like come on...
A robust argument for private comms, encrypted comms, and E2EE comms, in my opinion, does 100% need to have a compelling explanation on how it hopes to mitigate issues like this. Because beyond the sob story of the person above, these are very real avenues of abuse, avenues that these technologies do uniquely support, and this does matter. And I'm yet to encounter such an explanation. So much so, that some individuals even flagrantly refuse to address it, like the person above. They'd rather spend their time moping, and pretending that it's only ever the government conspiring against the people, painting them as terrorists, gangsters, and pedophiles falsely, just to get their data decrypted and stolen. This can and does happen too, but also, they do indeed could absolutely be all that, and sometimes are. As per the example above.
If I was holding a position where I'm arguing for backdooring private, encrypted, or E2EE comms, I'd need to similarly have a compelling story on how to mitigate governmental abuse. I do not hold such a position however, exactly because I have no proposal in the way of that. I do recognize this at least, and am more than willing to acknowledge it. This is a complex matter, and I think it should be discussed accordingly. Not with tired self-victimizing brainwash like the person above.
> maybe write less of this winky-face bs and just say what you mean.
All the points you ran into issues with were delivered in very direct terms.
I guess there is an interesting possibility here. Perhaps the targets were encrypting end to end (that is more or less the default now with XMPP clients). With the TLS over top of everything the attackers would not know that. Perhaps they went to all this trouble for nothing.
