No they don't, they just force the police to do regular police work and infiltrate the group the old fashioned way rather than using mass surveillance.

They do. The reality is that there's plenty of non-secret, boring warrants which go nowhere because the police can't decrypt the traffic or read the phone memory (and here in Germany, they have less access to fancy tech).

At the same time, an unprecedented amount of private conversation happens using phones, raising the stakes and the default expectation of privacy.

The pendulum swung from insane dragnet surveillance to widespread availability of tech that is resistant to all but the most sophisticated surveillance efforts.

Interesting times!

Talking quietly at the local pub is resistant to all but the most sophisticated surveillance efforts too.

It's only very recently that people have been communicating over the internet, allowing the mass surveillance. All encryption does is return us back to the pre 1990s in terms of surveillance capabilities.

Exactly. Or going for a walk in the forest - many of these conversations are now happening online.

On the flip side, even ordinary phone calls and messages are often encrypted by default now, which used to be much more readily available to law enforcement.

It's such an interesting situation, society-wise.

> even ordinary phone calls and messages are often encrypted by default now

[citation needed]

In Europe, outside of business, WhatsApp messages and calls have almost completely replaced regular phone calls and SMS.

> and here in Germany, they have less access to fancy tech

Interestingly, there’s a sort of perverse incentive going on here. If cops and governments hadn’t historically abused phone taps and sms interception - then strongly encrypted e2e tech like Signal wouldn’t have become “necessary” in the minds of non criminal users concerned about privacy, and we probably wouldn’t have had well known and widely used services/platforms like Signal and Telegram already in place for people to flock to when WhatsApp made their privacy blunder.

I’m sure GreyKey and NSO are perfectly happy with a cyber arms race requiring cops to buy more and more expensive “fancy tech” every year...

Interesting times indeed.

I'm not sure I buy this, but it depends how we define targeted attacks. If we include getting access to the device, which I think is reasonable, it obviously doesn't stop targeted efforts. Not to say it doesn't make it more difficult. Remotely, are we only talking Signal or the system as a whole? AFAIK nothing is unhackable, only difficult to hack. But as long as we're playing the cat and mouse game I'm happy. Improving defensive technologies shouldn't ever be stopped or hindered. I'm not sure why this isn't seen as a national security issue but that's a bigger discussion.

But my main point is that most people are afraid of large organizations of terrorists or bad actors will be able to discuss things without the ability for the FBI to surveil them. Well you can't have "large" and "vet everyone to an extremely high degree." Sure, this will make it more difficult to stop small groups, but those have been notoriously difficult to find and stop in the first place.

My personal perspective is that if a Three Letter Agency becomes specifically “interested” in me, I’m fucked. No matter what I do. Even if I fake my own death and live in a submarine...

What I can do, however, is take measures to protect myself against less powerful or sophisticated attackers.

Where I come from, “communications metadata” is required to be kept by all telcos and isps. This metadata is them “available to law enforcement” - which is not just investigations into child abuse and drug running, as the proponents of the laws made out when advocating for them, but includes agencies such as the Taxi commission, various local councils, and state fisheries departments.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2018/11/14/comms_alliance_me...

Using (trusted) vpns and e2e encrypted messaging will reduce the chance of a local council or a fisheries inspector being able to get as much information from my metadata as they might from non VPN and secure messaging using people.

(Of course, it might backfire and just paint a big target on my back... One potential privacy advantage of COVID and widespread wfh is that many many more people are using VPN tunnels for ordinary and mundane purposes. Adding extra hay to the haystack my needle is trying to hide in is a good thing. So long as it’s not Mossad looking for my specific needle...)