Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those apps that provide end-to-end encryption are a problem Are they though? There will always be a means to communicate without surveillance. Backdooring encryption is fundamentally incompatible with privacy, and will be abused - at scale. For any real cases, the security services have a multitude of other ways of getting the information they need regardless - for example, they could gaining physical access to the…
> Backdooring encryption is fundamentally incompatible with privacy, That's a very bold claim. Lawful wiretapping exists because it is accepted (and reasonable) that privacy should stop in specific circumstances, e.g. a criminal investigation. As I wrote before seeing this in black or white is naive. Wiretapping is useful for society. The key is to have proper oversight. By the way, to lawfully wiretap a phone the au…
When a weakness is introduced into that defense, even if it's a secret key held only by trusted governments and only (they promise) to be used in emergencies, that key is a method of attack that anyone, anywhere can use against everyone. The only defense is that the secret key remain secret, and there are an endless number of ways it could be comprimised, ranging from human error, phishing, or plain old brute forcing. A single key for all Whatsapp conversations is a valuable enough prize for criminals all over the world to invest serious money in custom hardware to crack it.
Currently, encryption schemes like Whatsapp's rely on generation of new keys for every message, making the value of attacking any one message limited. Without this defense, Whatsapp will be cracked, sooner or later. And once someone publicly reveals that key, every single message sent before that point becomes compromised. Maybe even publicly exposed. Would you be okay with that? Exposing your private message history to the internet because governments wanted to snoop?