The notion of encrypted private communication didn't exist a couple of decades ago and people are talking about it as necessary for rule of law.
There's a missing logical link in there somewhere.
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You've changed the contents of your comment.
I don't adhere to the American Civil Religion, so I don't need to consider opinions of the founders of the project.
Sure, we didn’t have encrypted communication a couple decades ago, but we did have an expectation of privacy: letters, phone calls, even in-person conversations.
Encryption is just the modern way of preserving that same right in a digital context.
They dont just “feel” oppressed, they are.
Nor was pervasive monitoring of our every action, nor were our actions and daily lives conducted on a digital system that makes data storage trivial.
There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances.
But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you phone's location can be hundres of miles away.
Use it to your advantage.... They do.
Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive cellular data connection that was intentionally uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way wifi is.
Right now, the only legitimate reason cell networks have to identify specific devices to users is for billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in various ways, either by making it a public good, or by integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data connections.
* Ideally the user id should be used only once and derived from some pre-shared secret.
I really appreciate Signal's public responses to warrants ("sure, here's all the information we have, by design we don't have anything important"). https://signal.org/bigbrother/
The method that works is to make it technically or practically impossible.
Recently in the country I live some people from interpol accidentally withdrew a red notice, after initial prosecution, the prosecutor realized several mistakes were made and documents lost, so as a country with the rule of law, the prosecution withdrew the charges as there was insufficient evidence, compare and constrast with a corrupt country like Canada where the attorney general was fired for wanting to prosecute a company that had bribed Momar Ghaddaffi with 2 million dollars. Worse yet, they spread their culture of corruption through out the world instead of keeping it at home.
You seem to be saying that letting them go free is the best answer we have. This may be correct - it is something we as society need to debate in great depth. However it still isn't a good answer.
This isn't a problem of process like requiring warrants and just cause. Even if said process is designed to be perfect and is executed flawlessly, it is still hinged on a fundamental breakage of the security model a given chat software is built on. If a trusted government has a magic password that can read anybody's encrypted text messages, then it must be assumed more nefarious actors can figure out that password and use it themselves.
It creates a single point of failure that would compromise literally everyone.
That is not a state governed by rule of law, but instead, a peoples being ruled by the power of surveillance.
Furthermore, do you feel comfortable with your government scrutinizing what you say? If so, would you feel the same if your political enemies controlled the government?
While it's true that many pieces of information would be more beneficial if they were public, claiming ALL information should be free and available to all has a variety of problems.
But more than that, even if you had all the information available, it will still be drowned in order of magnitudes higher amounts of counterfeit information, propaganda, lies.
we got any of those? please tell me so i can move there
Maybe anything in Western Europe...
Where should I send my money?
I heard "rule of law" being used to justify roughly the opposite (Russian laws, including mass surveillance and censorship), and neither that was clear; apparently it worked simply as an universal justification.
The usual definition is that there are written laws that apply to everyone equally, as opposed to a rule by decree and some kind of tyranny, and the laws do not change too often, are not made for particular occasions (so they do not turn into decrees effectively). So I'd think "suspicionless" -- that is, universal -- sounds closer to it, rather than selective/arbitrary surveillance on a suspicion. Unless such suspicion is at least decided by a court, without rubber-stamping.
w4rh4wk5•1h ago