reclaimthenet.org/australias-esafety-chief-doubles-down-on-anti-encryption-push-despite-industry-backlash
Australia's eSafety Chief Doubles Down on Anti-Encryption Push Despite Industry Backlash
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I'm torn on this. On one hand, organised crime groups are using these apps to organise murders and extortion. On the other hand, people should be able to communicate without the government monitoring their every conversation. With open source software, there's no way to stop all forms of encrypted communication either.
Considering that most criminals who use these apps are mobile first internet users who wouldn't even know how to even turn on a PC, I think the solution is to backdoor all the commercial apps and make the more sophisticated operators roll their own infrastructure.
Nobody should be trusting their freedom to some rando that promises privacy anyway (see Shadowcrew vpn, Anom, Encrochat etc) and technically skilled people might finally be able to earn a decent wage in this country.
On one hand, organised crime groups are using these apps to organise murders and extortion
They'll just keep using other tools outside of government control with just a bit more inconvenience. Encryption protocols like PGP are public domain, you can't put backdoor in them. I can exchange a key on a flash drive with me cooker mate, and we can just send text files encrypted with PGP on a airgapped machine to each other via any open channel. Incovenient? Hella. Unbreakable? Yes it fucking is, because there's just no backdoor you can put in at the point of where the encryption happens, you'd need physical access to the machine.
I agree, open source means that the genie is out of the bottle and unless we get quantum computers, there's no putting it back in. But these people are stupid and they're using phones for all their business. It can't hurt to make things harder for stupid people as they're the most dangerous.