The reality is that plenty of criminals and bad actors use insecure communication channels like phone calls, SMS, and unencrypted app messengers.
Evidence recovered from these channels is constantly used by police and if apps and services all actually switch to secure E2E encryption, a lot of evidence will be beyond their view.
Turn your argument around- if everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows how important e2e is, why are Facebook and SMS and MMS still so popular?
As ordinary people just dont care. They should, but they dont. There is nothing at stake for them. But they are saying that are targeting bad actors who DO care. And now you think that some drug lord (which has seen Hollywood movie about himself using encrypted walkie talkies) with infinite amount of money, smuggling drugs with mini sub (just happened in EU week or two back), the terrorist who is risking air-to-land missile and with oil based money flow is going to use sms/mms? No. The ordinary people will. Maybe potheads.
There's a counter argument here that "ordinary people" represent a much more realistic source of danger than some super-criminals/high-level terrorists. Depressed dude who's read too much bullshit on some forum, so he goes out and starts shooting people is statistically much more likely to happen than another 9/11. This type of lone-wolf lunatics and small groups of ideologically indoctrinated people who operate completely on their own - basically some guys sitting together one night and coming up with the idea that "they should do something about it" - are the future of terrorist threat and significantly harder to spot than large organizations.
Paedophiles too – they target children on unencrypted social media sites. The victims have no desire to switch to a more secure platform, but if Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were to become secure by default then those companies would stop sending law enforcement a continual stream of unsophisticated paedophiles to investigate. Many of them even use emails and IP addresses that are trivially linked to their real identities.
It's true that even the sophisticated bad guys will accidentally leak info and leave a trail that can help police, but it's also true that mass surveillance significantly increases chances for false positives. The idea of all law systems in the world is to first protect innocents, and only then punish the guilty. Mass surveillance works vice versa, they know that it will affect a number of innocents by mistake, but are ready to accept that in hope that it might make police work easier.
Evidence recovered from these channels is constantly used by police and if apps and services all actually switch to secure E2E encryption, a lot of evidence will be beyond their view.
Turn your argument around- if everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows how important e2e is, why are Facebook and SMS and MMS still so popular?
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