Re:Attorney General Barr and Encryption
by sam0x17 on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @11:42AM
(#20696703)
That is a legitimate concern, which is why we have to fight this.
There is also the possibility that using less secure communications hardware and software could be exposing individuals and companies to criminal and civil liabilities due to other legal requirements. In the US this is already the situation with regards to handling classified information.
Despite all of the rhetoric and public statements, the legal burden and actual enforcement seems to be going very much the opposite direction in the US and EU. There is good reason to suspect that the monitoring (and centralized censorship) infrastructure built up in other nations could end up producing the opposite desired goals in the long term.
They only need to lean on relatively few people - the humans who live in the US and who run Facebook, Apple, etc. to put back-doors in their services. Or worse, they put back-doors in their services while denying that they have done so.
The fact that strong encryption still exists will be of little use if it's not what the bulk of people actually use.