I don’t understand why folks don’t just point out any back doors in these services will be abused or hacked eventually. Do our leaders want their own personal correspondence—-to their big donors, bankers, brokers, interns, mistresses, drug dealers, coup instigators—-available to the FBI or the media too?
At this point, they don’t care. Plenty of politicians have had criminal investigations and have had zero consequences. Hell, one man won a reelection while he was in jail. Matt Gaetz is still walking around free even.
Leaders are "special". These bans are for people like us, not for them. I'm sure everyone in the government will be using effective encryption. They just don't want the masses using it against them because then it's subversive.
It’s entirely possible I don’t understand how technology works, but I don’t understand how some sort of government encryption backdoor of various protocols would work.
Software, devices, protocols etc are not just used in a single country. They are used worldwide. If a backdoor needs to be supported for a several dozen governments, each with various levels of security practices, there’s no way it stays secret for long. It’s only a matter of time before a country or state like Georgia gets it’s old poorly configured IT infrastructure hacked and the attackers now have access to some backdoor keys. How do governments revoke old keys and create new ones across all applicable devices? It’d be pretty hard to do that without going to companies and saying “fix” or “get me that” with some type of warrant or court order. That is kinda like what we have now which is mostly limited user information located in the cloud somewhere.
I think the larger issue is that there is a coordinated push to get complete government access to everything. This is happening at a time where dystopian surveillance is not only quickly becoming possible, but also profitable. The government has the right to pretty much everything legally, but the potential for misuse in situations where the government gets access everything is really high. The ability for citizens to combat that misuse is reduced the more government gets.
This is my understanding of things. Let me know how I’m wrong.
It's not really about backdoors; they just want everything to go through servers which will archive unencrypted copies of everything so that it can be subpoenaed later.
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