4 ms·
I cannot fathom end to end encryption ever being made illegal. I tremendously doubt this will ever happen in any effective manner. At worst, they will pass from
by beeboop 11y ago
I cannot fathom end to end encryption ever being made illegal. I tremendously doubt this will ever happen in any effective manner. At worst, they will pass from vaguely worded bill that makes it illegal in the sense that you are required to decrypt data on demand for any government agency. But since we are already seeing the trend of service providers being unable to decrypt user data, I doubt that will be much of an issue either.
We will probably start seeing a lot more people getting locked up for decades for "contempt of court" by refusing or being unable to decrypt their personal data for a judge. Current record for contempt is 14 years - with no conviction and no jury.
- jacquesm 11y agoIf you're not willing to revolt over it then it is definitely a possibility that end-to-end encryption will be made illegal. Non-techies simply don't care, they have 'nothing to hide' (or so they think).
- beeboop 11y agoI don't think it will happen due to the impossibility of actually enforcing it, hence "effective manner" in my OP.
- cmurf 11y agoI think it's naive to underestimate a government's ability to coerce people into not using it. There are many surviving illiberal democracies and it really wouldn't take that much to get the U.S. to trend more toward illiberalism either. Lavabit?
- beeboop 11y agoThe Lavabit case was only contentious because of a very poor implementation of encrypted user data. It won't be long until there are established platforms and libraries that are used by most apps that fix the technical problems of Lavabit. Mega (the file uploading service) is pretty close to having a reasonably fool proof design, in that the most security conscious users are unlikely to have any external party be able to send malicious code that prevents the security and effectiveness of client side encryption.