DOJ – International Statement: End-to-End Encryption and Public Safety

I don't understand it. Their conclusion says "we challenge the assertion that safety cannot be protected without compromise," which the way I read it means something along the lines of "we believe it is possible to protect public safety without compromising privacy." But the rest of the letter seems to imply they want to find a way to in fact compromise that privacy.

How do they envision this working and yet protecting communication in oppressive regimes? Facebook can't very well offer the US the ability to pierce the encryption veil then beg innocence to the Kremlin when it wants access.

Of course, decentralized open source solutions in this space will always dominate. The oppressive governments can attack big tech economically. The Kremlin can shut facebook down in Russia if they won't give a back door. Whereas volunteer devs with no expectation of profit are immune to that kind of attack. Even better if there is no defined server to block.

I say this as someone who is not generally super enthusiastic about open source, not decentralized tech, nor is anti- big tech. This just seems like an area where big tech cos cannot compete efficiently.

Maybe they just think that Facebook should not be operating in countries with lots of corruption or oppression? And maybe they have a point. Maybe it is not possible to run an ethical communication business in a place that criminalizes what we value as protected speech.

Anyway, I doubt they will be able to accomplish this goal by asking nicely. They will need to pass a law and then there will need to be a fight about whether the law is constitutional.

as was flagged to death earlier this week: DOJ is 100% capable of embedding humans deep within criminal enterprises that pose genuine security risks to the federal government. Combine that with regular old-fashioned things like those novel legal devices called "search warrants", and FBI does just fine at getting inside secure comms without fundamentally lying about the nature of mathematics at the same time.

Maybe we need to advocate for changes to US law such that citizens maintain their expectation of privacy when sending messages through third parties. Then it would be like it used to be when law enforcement needed a warrant to obtain an individual’s communications, which is then served to that individual rather than to a third party communications provider.

Also, it seems like it’s time to remind everyone that only totalitarian governments want to read everyone’s mail all the time to look for crimes. Our bill of rights expressly forbids this. I really don’t understand why the DOJ would write a letter like this that to me, a layman, reads like it is plainly in violation of the 4th amendment.

Exactly. This is an impossibility.

A “lawful request” is determined by whatever state has jurisdiction. As they say, encryption is vital to human rights activists in China or democracy supporters in Belarus, however it would be destroyed because these countries can indeed make “lawful requests” for the information.

For thousands of years, humans have been allowed to communicate privately with each other. We should not regress that. Criminals will always exist and we should do our best to identify and bring them to justice, but not at the expense of free society.