No, they could not monitor all conversations. They could only listen to as many calls as they had agents to listen to them. It was not possible for them to listen to everyone at once, nor could they use this as means of discovery. They had to suspect someone in the first place in order to decide to expend the human resources to listen to their calls.

This is fundamentally different from modern technology where they can have a computer listen to every single call, pick out whatever keywords they're looking for, and flag it for later review. Technology now makes it possible for them to truly listen to everyone at once. This is why end-to-end encryption is necessary for everyone.

Politics is not going to solve this problem. A lot of what America's police and intelligence agencies do is already illegal. They don't care. They're going to do anything they can with the technology.

If you can't fix the politics it's _not going to matter_. The politics will just make the technology illegal. That's what's happening in China.

It's a weirdly blinkered concept to say "America's agencies already do illegal things and their politics is broken but what will save us is American corporations deploying technology".

(The "we need universal E2E to protect our freedoms even if there are downsides" is not, in logical form, a million miles different from 'we need guns everywhere to protect us from the government and damn the negative consequences of having guns everywhere', frankly)

What if we fix the politics and forget about the technology, then the politics later become broken again? We won't be able to take back those private unencrypted conversations that could be used to retroactively incriminate us.

I actually believe that technologies such as strong encryption are creating important checks and balances that make our democracy stronger. They are not subverting it like you are implying.

>The "we need universal E2E to protect our freedoms even if there are downsides" is not, in logical form, a million miles different from 'we need guns everywhere to protect us from the government and damn the negative consequences of having guns everywhere', frankly

I agree, and I agree with both of those. Giving up freedom/privacy for safety is almost always a losing bet.

The actual trade-off is giving up safety to gain the illusion of freedom.

With guns, the state will always outgun you. So the gun-riddled society sees children in its schools murdered staggeringly often, while its (supposedly free) citizens are tear-gassed with impunity by a state for nothing more than a photo opportunity.

That was not a winning bet for that society.

It's similar with E2E. It can't protect you from the government, because the protection is illusory – it protects just you so long as the state wants it to. When it no longer wants it to, it makes it illegal. Administrations are already heading in this direction.

Meanwhile E2E enables a number of proven harms, from lynchings to child abuse. Is that a worthwhile trade-off just for the protections it gives from corporate or illegal privacy invasion? Would it lose all of those benefits if legitimate law enforcement were allowed access? There is at least a debate to be had, there.

I see it as the exact opposite: giving up freedom for the illusion of safety. Using the tear gassed protesters as an example, when there have been protests where a large number of protesters were openly carrying firearms, nobody gets tear gassed. Neither the cops nor the protesters get remotely violent.

The people with the guns aren't attending the current protests, and you can see how that has worked out.

You can't do physical harm with encryption (unless you want to count superficial burns acquired from touching a Bitcoin-mining GPU), though. The presence of guns is a necessary and pretty much sufficient condition for certain classes of physical harm, which in the eyes of many _does_ make or qualitatively different.

One of the defences Facebook uses when confronted with WhatsApp-orchestrated lynchings in India is that e2e encryption means it can't know what people are talking about or help police track the source of the messages.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and...

Your point? If those lynchings had been orchestrated by people meeting up in person instead, nobody could know what people are talking about or help police track the source of the messages either.

In either case, to actually lynch someone, you still need to go there physically and actually do the deed. WhatsApp chats don't kill; dudes with weapons do.

The point is the scale. Law enforcement was scaled and equipped to meet the challenge of in-person lynch mob formation. In-person meetings are risky, finding like-minded people can be a challenge, etc.

Encrypted comms gives a huge asymmetric scale benefit to those who have these crimes committed. What it hasn't scaled is the ability of law enforcement to respond. And that's a choice, one which is open to criticism.

>No, they could not monitor all conversations. They could only listen to as many calls as they had agents to listen to them. It was not possible for them to listen to everyone at once, nor could they use this as means of discovery. They had to suspect someone in the first place in order to decide to expend the human resources to listen to their calls.

I think you're taking this a bit too lightly. As a side topic, I am surprised to what extent state surveillance was a thing here in the telephone era.

The secret police had about 50k full-time agents, 600k double-agents and about 400k-500k informants. From a population of 18 mil, that's about 1 in 18. Consider an usual family. You have a brother or a sister, two parents, 4 aunts or uncles and 4 grandfathers. Odds were in favor of one of them being at least an informant.

For your community? There definitely was an informant or double agent among them. Just knowing that the threat is there has a massive effect in how people communicate and bond with each other, effects that can still be felt to this day.

You're saying this was in America? Sounds more like Cuba or former soviet states.

You are correct. This is in a former soviet state.

We can work on fixing politics AND fix technology. We don’t have to choose between them.

What stopped the Stasi until politics was technology. And I think the encryption used helped to bring about the political change. If the Stasi had what Zoom is offering then perhaps the wall wouldn’t have fallen for 10,20,30 more years.

Consider: prior to the telephone, to monitor a conversation government had to actually send people to where the conversation happened, and that meant that they could barely monitor any conversations - and yet society continued to function.

The government still can send people to watch people use their phones or computers. On the other hand, it seems hard to dispute that all our most efficient examples of totalitarian states are post-telephone.