Let’s say they ban end to end encryption tomorrow in their save the children and puppies act. Guess who is still going to use it? The criminals are of course. You can’t ban math.
I don't think banning encryption or something silly like that is therefore the solution, but minimizing the problem is not helpful in understanding why there's such a heavy push from all sorts governments, democratic and authoritarian alike, to "deal" with the problem. It's not always because they are Teh Evil Surveillance Statez who want to Take Your Freedom for the sake of Total Control. It's because they are faced with a serious actual real problem of criminals using a technology they barely understand and cannot get past, and so they instinctively reach for the trusty hammer they are so accustomed to using against all serious problems - the Legislative Ban.
They don't understand that using this hammer will have significant unintended consequences, but this isn't malevolence. It's fear and lack of competence.
I'm not sure which is worse. We absolutely need people with the expertise in the area to make these kinds of decision. It's like giving a gardener the position to launch nukes. I'm sure they're very capable at trimming bushes, but that isn't exactly useful here.
e2e is really not a must-have in crime. It's a nice-to-have, but people can and often do very well without it. If we aren't capable of catching the lowest hanging fruit, how is this even of any use? At the same time we're not giving out the right signal about the state of surveillance already in place by not utilizing it to it's maximum potential.
Power corrupts, and the effects can be seen all over. Imagine what absolute power does
This pretty much solves a very serious problem for all illicit activity - secure communications. It's strange to argue that this ought to have no impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat organized crime or terrorism because they should just compensate elsewhere. That's waiving a problem away instead of facing up to it. Of course it's having a big impact, and telling them 'just be better elsewhere' is not gonna work, they'll still push for stupid legislation.
There are plenty of organizations who by this logic don't. However they don't dissappear, even though we already have the tools available. If they're not capable of using the tools they have, why are they reaching for something substantially harder to do? There must be something else to it if they're not bothering to do what they can.
> It's strange to argue that this ought to have no impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat organized crime
Of course power grants you that, it grants you absolutely anything you want, just like setting a fire gets rid of the rodents in your house, along with the house. That is exactly why absolute power is not to be assigned to any single organization, it can't be contained.
There is also the expectation like anyone using encryption for malicious purposes wouldn't do it regardless of any law, just like criminals carry illegal weapons. Only the law-abiding citizens could therefore be targeted
Do you happen to have a source? I'm under the impression that they prefer to use SMS on pre-paid burner phones.
The advantage of e2e is so a central chat server can’t be ordered to leak secrets; I can’t see how an org which doesn’t care about the law in general is going to care about that law in particular.
If you want to enable communication where both parties don't need to be online at the same time, and with easy setup of a trusted system, you will need something very much like the signal protocol.
That requires setting up a pretty complicated central service. Moreover, you are going to need to do quite some updating on the end-points of the e2e encrypted communications? Setting up this kind of operation, when illegal to do so, is hard. Moreover, it requires certain expertise that is not common among criminals.
How many criminals are going to be able to run this correctly? How many of these systems will get infiltrated by police, with a 'security update' being pushed that surreptitiously breaks the encryption?
Banning e2e encryption would do pretty good at moving almost everyone of off e2e encryption I think.
PGP and S/MIME would like a word. Note that PGP is used routinely on the darknets for pasting orders into a web form. There are several detailed howtos available.
Certainly, they existed for a long time, and yet it did not seem to impede police investigations. Whilst I don't think the current complaints aren't exaggerated I do believe police when they say "Because of whatsapp, we are hitting cases where we would normally send a warrant, but now we can't". This wasn't the case before with PGP, and with decent reasons. (PGP is not very user friendly)
I am pretty sure that the darknet users would use something better if it was available. In what ways is it insufficient?