Matthew GreenIt is remarkable to think that only in the past 15-20 years have we moved most of our private communications to digital channels with centralized storage & the processing power to perform bulk scanning. Coincidentally that’s nearly as long as encrypted messaging has been around.
Many folks in law enforcement and politics seem genuinely confused about the popularity of end-to-end encrypted messaging, like we all just decided to become anarchists or something. That’s not at all the dynamic we’re seeing here. The entire basis of our communications infrastructure shifted in a direction that’s inimical to privacy; encryption is the obvious solution.
Sheogorath@matthew_d_green I think an important factor is: 20 years ago, the main thing that stand between you and surveillance was a law that said "unless a judge allows it" and the organisational inability to actually read all letters.
Nowadays the latter isn't given anymore and the former was replaced by commercial services.
But the big problem for law enforcement that end-to-end encryption poses: There is no more "unless a judge allows it" clause.
The attempts change that are however horrendous.
@sheogorath I honestly think the main thing that stood in the way was cost. Most eavesdropping required time and human effort that couldn’t be scaled to millions of people. That’s not true anymore.
@matthew_d_green That's basically what I meant with "organisational inability". Some states like the German Democratic Republic actually tried anyway(~30-40 years ago), but with limited success, thankfully.
@sheogorath The difference between the West and the GDR is that they could afford to devote half their resources to mass surveillance and we couldn’t. (And they couldn’t afford it in the end.) But the economics are different now.