Re:Google Will Soon Shame All Websites That Are Unencrypted
by userbinator on Thursday January 28, 2016 @06:34AM
(#10987595)
Repressive governments monitoring and altering unencrypted communications in very sophisticated ways is a reality today
They could easily alter encrypted communications to effectively censor too, thanks to the all-or-nothing nature of encryption with authentication. Because by design, the certificate is presented in cleartext, it would be pretty easy to blacklist CAs and then cut off the connection if one of those is detected. Alternatively, whitelist CA(s) [1]. Analysing plaintext takes more computational resources, especially if things like steganography are used.
[1] Related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10663843
Not to mention that, of course, access to most websites is already gated by a central group of authorities - the domain registries - which can and do seize domains. Using raw IPs is one alternative, but if you're in that kind of position, chances are you want to be a Tor hidden service anyway.