The fact that governments are so hellbent on having backdoors to encrypted communications should be telling…
That’s because they’re the baddies!
Won’t catch me arguing.
Its because they would rather be reactive rather than active. They would rather the ones be on an individual improve themselves with little to no outside assistance, then be punished if they dont. Not as a lesson to that individual, but to others.
Shockingly, it doesn’t really work very well.
Considering I remember the news hitting that the anti-terrorism task force knew about the Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert in advance and did nothing about it, that tracks.
That’s why I hate the “give the government a master key” metaphor for weakening encryption. You aren’t making a master key, you’re making every lock worse. The “master key” is just knowing how to exploit the giant flaw you’ve now created in every lock, and if that knowledge escapes every lock is now worthless.
Knocking “shave and a haircut” now opens every door, let’s hope nobody else figures that out! I know! we’ll lock that information inside this “shave and a haircut” safe!
One thing I don’t like about the “master key” metaphor: I do lockpicking as a hobby. And locks built for a master key are easier to pick, because you can open them with two keys. It seems kinda obvious when you think about it. (You gotta be careful when picking mastered locks though, the master wafers can fall into the keyway and permanently destroy the lock.)
TSA luggage keys are a good counter example.
In theory, only you and airport security can open your case. In practice, you can pick them up off eBay for next to nothing.
The US is a century of building softpower to be able to respond with “but you can trust us more than anyone else” that has been toppled by the current regime in less than a year. It’s the whole reason Edward Snowden was a big deal, now he wouldn’t even appear in the obituary section of a newspaper.
It’s been toppling since George W. Bush.
Reagan
There are two ways of handling security vulnerabilities.
One is to try and find them before the “bad guys” do, then fix them. The other is to do nothing and just hope the “bad guys” don’t find them (or have already found them and are already exploiting them)
There’s a third option. Find them and horde them as “weapons” but then sometimes get hacked and leak them all.
I get the feeling that privacy advocates like the German CCC or the EFF in the US need to get ahead of this chat control and age verification bullshit by implementing a privacy-first age verification system prototype. Something where you can identify yourself as adult that is both trustworthy and anonymous.
Because if they don’t, palantir will implement your age verification and harvest all your data.
The point is that the internet shouldn’t be censored though, we shouldn’t be giving corporations or governments the keys to censor the internet based on any protected characteristics (one of which is age), even if it’s done in a ‘private’ manner. What comes next? Sexuality/gender verification? You can only view porn if you’re the opposite gender? Race verification?
Or, like, add a feature to a browser where parents can force an “I am a Child” header in Calls…
That’d work too, although I’d implement it the other way around. Define a new http header that indicates what type of content the site you’re visiting is hosting and handle the content blocking client-side based on those headers.
👌🏻very elegant
You mean like buying anonymous tokens in a supermarket that have an 18+ sales rule on them and you have to show your ID as when you buy booze? It’s not like it isn’t trivial. It’s just that out government fucks want totalitarian control. Fuck them all with a rusty rebar.
