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Comment by spwa4 | Hacker News Reader

Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.

Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...

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Secrecy of correspondence doesn't necessarily only apply to physical letters as far as Constitutions go. In Finnish constitution it is defined as "The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable" meaning it also applies to any internet message.

Unfortunately large majority of parties in Finnish Parliament do not really care about that provision and have passed multiple laws which create exceptions to it. They do it via the proper protocol (which is essentially the same as modifying the Constitution itself) so it's technically legal.

Secrecy of correspondence still has exceptions. That's what is always lost in these discussions -- every right of every person is not absolute. Just because you have a right to personal property, doesn't mean you don't have to pay taxes or store nuclear material in your basement. That's the hard part.

But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute. It's a new thing and the balancers can't balance it against other rights of other people, so this happens.

> But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute

As it should be. Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around. Not click a button and have the lives of everyone in the entire world revealed to them.

>Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around.

What you describe is clearly not the only possible policy choice.

The opposite doom scenario isn't either.

Based on the past experience, government gonna do their government stuff

The ends still have the decryption keys, so the result is the same as with a physical letter: you have to acquire the physical object holding the key material.

The result is not the same as a physical letter, as you can intercept those covertly (which is resource constrained)

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