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After Apple argued for years that a mandatory encryption-bypassing, privacy-bypassing backdoor for the government could be used by malicious entities, and the g
by danudey 2y ago
After Apple argued for years that a mandatory encryption-bypassing, privacy-bypassing backdoor for the government could be used by malicious entities, and the government insisting that it's all fine don't worry, now we're seeing those mandatory encryption-bypassing, privacy-bypassing backdoors for government being used by malicious entities and suddenly the FBI is suggesting everyone use end-to-end encryption apps because of the fiasco that they caused.
But don't worry, as soon as this catastrophe is over we'll be back to encryption is bad, security is bad, give us an easy way to get all your data or the bad guys win.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoThe story is a little longer than this. A bunch of folks from academia and industry have been fighting the inclusion of wiretapping mandates within encrypted communications systems. The fight goes back to the Clipper chip. These folks made the argument that something like Salt Typhoon was inevitable if key escrow systems were mandated. It was a very difficult claim to make at the time, because there wasn’t much precedent for it - electronic espionage was barely in its infancy at the time, and the idea that our information systems might be systematically picked open by sophisticated foreign actors was just some crazy idea that ivory tower eggheads cooked up. I have to admire those pioneers for seeing this and being right about it. I also admire them for influencing companies like Apple (in some cases by working there and designing things like iMessage, which is basically PGP for texts.) It doesn’t fix a damn thing when it comes to the traditional telecom providers, but it does mean we now have backup systems that aren’t immediately owned.