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Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply

Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content. Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

bostik 5y ago
I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications". >Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption). No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß] Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate. ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.

bostik 5y ago

I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications". >Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption). No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß] Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate. ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.