> including just continuing to use illegal encryption.

First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.

Second, what gets talked about in public (the only thing any of us knows for sure, but also definitely not the whole picture) includes foreign governments recruiting locals via normal messenger apps.

More of a problem is that the back-doors can be exploited by both criminals and hostile powers.

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DangitBobby 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.

You're assuming they continue to use monitored channels to carry it out.

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ben_w 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I am assuming that the entire (EU in this case) internet is monitored for un-decryptable messages, and that they use the internet.

Can you square the circle, even in principle, without questions of cost?

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Xelbair 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.

and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so.

> Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.

Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send.

"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.

> policy/economic problem instead

Instead? Everything about this is about groups wanting to act in secret for their best interests, and other people wanting to ensure that only the interests they share get to do that. This is true when it's me logging into my bank and criminals trying to get access to the same, when it's the Russian government sponsoring arson attacks in Europe and local police trying to stop them, and when it's the CIA promoting Tor for democracy activists in dictatorships and those dictatorships trying to stop them.

We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.

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gf000 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.

It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.

It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail. > It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption. It's also economically unfeasible. Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?

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DangitBobby an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.

	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Irrelevant. 1) Illegal telecoms equipment can be seized 2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets never ever went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.

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ndriscoll an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Chat messages are tiny. You can easily put the encrypted signal into e.g. the residual portion of lossless images/sound that you send unencrypted. "That was just a FLAC of me singing". Or innocuous cat pictures. Or whatever.