This is part of why I think politically there is no point trying to co-operate with these people and convince them to maybe not collect so much.
The only way to stop them doing this is for folks in the right places to make it technically impossible.
In a similar note: The fact that its taken years to roll out TLS ECH and DoH which would make a lot of passive surveillance of the internet much more difficult is only enabling bad faith actors like Europol et al.
> The only way to stop them doing this is for folks in the right places to make it technically impossible.
Sure. Then they'll pass legislation making it a crime to implement technical measures preventing such data collection, and simply lock up everyone you are talking about.
Everyone mocked the Australian PM when he said that the laws of Australia applied in Australia, and not the laws of mathematics, but he was correct.
This is peak nerd-delusion to think that the state will somehow be stopped by your cypherpunk schemes. It was already a delusion 20 years ago, and now to make things worse, all those guys that used to hang out in those hacker spaces promoting those attractive but silly ideas work for big corporations and governments.
The state will be stopped by widespread use of anonymous strong encryption.
It's the widespread part that confounds cypherpunks, and why PGP, Signal, Let's Encrypt are important despite the bikeshedding they attract from purists.
In a fight between law and maths, maths can't be arrested up, can't be put on trial, can't be detained at the border. It is intangible, and can be anywhere, even inside the unreadable mind of a traveller.
The only way for any state to prevent the use of crypto they can't break is to wind back all the things that can perform it, meaning all computers, not just all internet banking and other things that are everywhere now and can't be used safely without it.
States are free to do so, because a state can outlaw physical devices, seize them at the border, etc. — but that is what it would take to do this. I doubt they will, but that's the only option.
Unfortunately, we also have the problem that political factions both native and foreign regularly try to undermine states; doing so in secret is a necessary but not sufficient part of this, and thus getting past crypto is IMO absolutely necessary[0] to keep any state from being usurped.
Fortunately (from the POV of a state) "getting past crypto" can also be Van Eck phreaking, not just weak crypto.
Unfortunately for everyone, just as any crypto backdoor is almost certain to be exploited by criminals gangs to get valuable information, so so are the non-crypto surveillance possibilities: not just Van Eck, there's more than one way to use wifi as a wall penetrating radar to violate your privacy; laser microphones can listen on you remotely for pennies; smart dust is just about starting to be a serious possibility rather than a tech demo.
My current vibe here is that each new invention creates a power vacuum that takes 15 years to properly fill, and we're currently creating new tech too fast for either states or organised crime to fill the gaps.
> States are free to do so, because a state can outlaw physical devices, seize them at the border, etc. — but that is what it would take to do this. I doubt they will, but that's the only option.
Another alternative is forcing these devices to be designed in such a way that installing unauthorized crypto tools isn't possible.
We're already very close to this point. PCs have Secure Boot, which prevents installing non-approved operating systems. Windows 11 won't boot unless it is enabled. It also requires TPM, which can prevent modification of system and user files by putting the hard drive in an unencumbered computer. Windows Smart screen really doesn't want you to run apps not certified by Microsoft, although it is still possible. Web browsers are doing more and more to prevent you from visiting websites not secured by TLS, outright blocking some APIs if HTTPS isn't enabled.
The tech is here, all it takes is a regulator to tighten up the screws. It's not unimaginable for the EU to ban all motherboards with Secure Boot that can be disabled, to force Microsoft to refuse uncertified apps, to force Microsoft-certified browsers to require TLS with a specific set of root CAs, and to require those root CAs to only issue certificates to those the EU deems worthy. The EU isn't terribly likely to do these specific things out of right-to-repair concerns, though those concerns could probably be assuaged if the certification was done in a fair way by a third party, possibly the government itself, instead of tech companies.
This way, you can have perfectly secure crypto with your bank while still giving the EU the ability to access your messages at need.
> Another alternative is forcing these devices to be designed in such a way that installing unauthorized crypto tools isn't possible.
On the plus side, this does mean no more JavaScript and no more Excel spreadsheets. Unfortunately we'd have to ban nice things too, as those are only two of the things you'd have to ban to make this happen.
Don't get me wrong, the government behaviour you describe is plausible — turning those screws to make it harder is highly likely IMO — I'm just saying such limited things will never actually allow them to achieve their goals, and that unless they want to outlaw possession of computers at least as advanced as the Z1 from 87 years ago[0], they need to do their surveillance in a different way that doesn't break crypto.
(And that everyone else being able to do that surveillance necessitates substantial social change, but that's a different topic).
> On the plus side, this does mean no more JavaScript and no more Excel spreadsheets
Probably true about Excel (or at least non-cloud Excel), but not JS.
You can apply the App Store model but for websites. Require ID to get a TLS certificate, block anything which doesn't do TLS, allow certified websites to execute arbitrary code with a few technical restrictions. If somebody violates the law and is discovered, through either manual or automated means, they can be blocked via TLS revocation lists.
> to wind back all the things that can perform it, meaning all computers
Beware, they are attempting this.
It's a big project; UEFI, secure boot, and the end of General Purpose Computing. But they will throw absolutely everything they have into this Hail Mary plan, and the chip fabs are a chokepoint...
When I said "all computers" I wasn't being metaphorical.
Do you have something that can XOR two blob of data? Doesn't matter how, if this is JavaScript on a web page, or an app: if it can XOR, it can do a one-time-pad, which is unbreakable encryption.
The hard part of that way of encrypting things has always been sharing the key, but if you're in a criminal gang, or if you're actually trying to undermine a government, you can share the key in person.
None of the things you've listed are even remotely sufficient to prevent unbreakable cryptography. Strictly speaking you don't even need computers: even a handful of transistors soldered up right would do this.
RFCs are not legally binding. Most politicians have no idea what a RFC is. They don't care about the actual technical details. They will just order a result without being aware of how unrealistic and harmful it is. You might be an educated technical citizen, but when you don't comply then there will be all kinds of legal trouble.
The premise is more optimistic than you are suggesting:
1. Mass spying is unpopular. The only reliable support base is a small-ish group of unlikable busybodies.
2. Reducing civil liberties tends to come back to bite the people who implement it. The best part of the Trump backlash is watching the intelligence apparatus come down on the Republicans. Karma in a nutshell, they were one of the major enablers of all that stuff after 9/11. All these ideas like free speech and private communication are ultimately to protect politicians.
3. It is practically difficult to stop. Any country that tries to stop encrypted messengers would have to cripple their own economy by bringing in such limited computers that they can't do anything. And they'd be hopelessly vulnerable to foreign espionage.
This is not that hard of a political fight. They tried to ban strong encryption back in the PGP era and look how that went - SSL is everywhere, encrypted protocols are everywhere, we have cryptographically based assets and every company is encrypting everything they can lay their hands on at rest. The ban-encryption camp has a track record of complete failure. And The Children have been Thought Of and are living in the best era ever to be children.
The solution is more like making sure Technology X is ubiquitous before they can do anything. That makes it significantly harder to outlaw without undesirable political and economic side effects.
Agree. This is precisely why they have stopped attacking cryptography itself like in the previous crypto wars. Now they aim for bypassing cryptography so that they can still claim that the data is kind of end-to-end encrypted.
If I were a government, I would let the police do its job without mass surveillance. Also, not all problems can be solved. Or, if I were a government, I would command all companies and individuals to drop what they are doing and work non-stop on cancer research.
And how do you know upfront that the mass surveillance is worse than the alternative, e.g., a country run by organized crime, children and young women being exploited at large scale? Do you think police can be effective without mass surveillance if the other side has all this technology at its disposal?
Cancer is high on my list of problems that cannot be solved, we’re getting older, old age comes with decline of your body, spending money on a lost cause is a huge waste.
> And how do you know upfront that the mass surveillance is worse than the alternative
That's not a real disjunctive. In my current country, where politicians are accountable and mass surveillance is not (yet) a thing, the country is not run by organized crime, and children and young women are not exploited. But I have lived most of my life in a country with mass surveillance (Cuba. And no, you don't need client-side scanning, a sufficiently high number of police riding bicycles will do just fine.) The chilling effect on public speech and thought has brought untold misery. All politicians are corrupted party-folk chosen from above. Young men and women enthusiastically jump at the opportunity of being sexually exploited for a chance to escape the country. There is the bottom of the dumpster where the slippery slope of totalitarianism takes us.
> Cancer is high on my list of problems that cannot be solved, we’re getting older, old age comes with decline of your body, spending money on a lost cause is a huge waste.
I would recommend you visit the aforementioned Cuba. A cancer prognosis there is better than it was during the middle ages, but far worse than it is in a first-world country. So, cancer is not unsolvable, it's just that there are different levels of progress across time and places. Same goes for aging, but there we have this cultural brick you have so brightly illustrated that says even trying to do something is a "huge waste".
The way you prevent the country from being run by organized crime is by spying on the governing bodies, not the private citizens (those typically don't run the country). In practice, it means we should have transparent data about the people running the country.
As a rule of thumb, good politicians tend to fight for transparency in the government and privacy for their citizens. Bad politicians push the opposite view.
Prevent the country from being run by organized crime by spying on the the people running the country, not the public.
If you inverse it and instead allow those running the country to spy on the public but not the other way around then when organized crime takes over running the country they have an insanely powerful tool to use to stay in power and accomplish their evil goals.
This is something it took me a long time to integrate.
Politicians, especialy politicos with their backs against a wall, face demands to "do something about it" that they can't resist. The result is often a treatment that is worse than the disease.
If that's true, the corrollary is that we shouldn't mock politicians when they come up with "solutions" that are ineffectual - provided they're just ineffectual, and not Trojan horses for some more insidious plan. Perhaps the best answer to "something must be done" is to do something - anything - that doesn't cost too much, and doesn't do much harm.
The only way to stop them doing this is for folks in the right places to make it technically impossible.
In a similar note: The fact that its taken years to roll out TLS ECH and DoH which would make a lot of passive surveillance of the internet much more difficult is only enabling bad faith actors like Europol et al.