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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> E2EE overrides current controls in place

There are no controls in place.

This line is becoming quite a pattern in UK (Tory) government rhetoric. They forcefully state wishful thinking as if it were a fact.

There are no controls because there is no possibility of controls, as a matter of mathematics. But by exploiting ignorance, the tories managed to beast parliament into an intractable "just imagine if..." clause in the Online Safety Bill... a law that provisionally exists if and only if the impossible becomes possible.

And then they sit back, fold their arms and call those "controls".

Controls must be effective, otherwise they're just buttons for show, that aren't wired to anything.

The reason nation states are losing ground to BigTech is because they are using 18th century power politics to fight 21st century logic.

I do wish my government would go take some basic CS and cryptography classes.

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> There are no controls because there is no possibility of controls, as a matter of mathematics.

This is kind of true because, for example, the one-time pad is information-theoretically secure, and anyone could choose to use a one-time pad with anyone else given prior arrangements. Or anyone could choose to use RSA for confidentiality with anyone else given a mutual desire to communicate confidentially and an authentic but not confidential channel.

However, there's nothing mathematically stopping a government from punishing people who are observed to follow a protocol to create a confidential channel. Although Eben Moglen has argued that the right to speak PGP is the right to speak Navajo, a government could conceivably choose to punish people for speaking a foreign language.

One might wish (I would certainly wish) that people would be extremely upset by this, but I guess it wouldn't contravene mathematics.

In fact, there are some historic cases where populations were subject to official military censorship in wartime, which included overt government review of some of their communications, and possibly a prohibition on the use of "codes", and sometimes restrictions on the use of foreign languages. One might again wish that this would be both much less acceptable and much less feasible now than in the past, but it's not completely impossible.

> there are some historic cases where populations were subject to official military censorship in wartime,

That's fine, and those may have been legitimate needs at the time. Overcoming the Nazis meant stilling loose lips.

But are we at war? I mean officially according to UN declarations? And if we are not at war, or in an official state of emergency and official censorship re-emerges we need a rethink.

So long as decent people acknowledge that we are under illegitimate censorship accordant with a tyrannical/fascist regime, then they must reposition with respect to resistance and toppling that regime.

What's problematic for me (and everybody else here I think) is the double-think - a widespread belief that we remain in a liberal democracy while in reality de-facto censorship has snuck in.

The better answer though is that it's a misdirect: they're pointing at encryption as the bad guy, the one thing which takes place solely in the digital space and is activity-agnostic - nothing which happens with encrypted bits, by itself, can do anything in the real world.

"Pedophiles and terrorists" on the other hand, have to do a lot of things in the physical world in order to actually be pedophiles and terrorists. And the vast majority of work taking them down is infiltration - which is to say, nobody breaks encryption, they break trust - which is much easier, and has side-benefits like "generating actual evidence".

This "real world" link is missed (intentionally by politicians) by a majority of people because the Internet has become "the great solution". It scales, we can stay seated at our desks and still (claim to) solve crime.

Electronic communications are merely 'theory' to the physical world's 'reality'. It's like the phrase "no plan survives contact with the enemy".

The Internet only contains the symptoms. If you want to know where there are real problems that need solving in this arena, speak to some teachers - but no, children's services remain under-funded and under-staffed whilst we spend more and more on internet surveillance.

Social problems can not be solved by technology legislation.

Nation States are one of Big Tech's best customers.

Nation States love to give legal and regulatory incentives as 'guidelines'.

It's the average joe that loses. The only way out is privacy from both nations and corporations.

If another person knows your technology exists, it will be inexorably wrenched from your hands and controlled by the biggest bully in town. We see it every single day.

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