Would be nice, but you know they'll carve out exceptions for themselves or use "unauthorized" messaging channels regardless with no consequences. It is _always_ "rules for thee, not for me" with politicians.

Fight and kill the oppressors instead of letting them oppress, don’t just hope that they’ll decide to call it quits by themselves.

> Seems to me we're going to have to let the anti-encryption mob have their way until things go wrong—bigtime.

Been there, seen that. That's how Pakistan got nuclear bomb. France was just making friends.

> until they witness firsthand the negative consequences of weakening encryption.

They won't be affected.

The hitherto invisible but very real wall between social classes is just going to become more visible for "First World" civilians the way it's been in "lesser" countries for decades already.

Actual "criminals" have always been able to get around all the restrictions ever put in place since the dawn of civilization, it's just the common folk that get trodded on and kept in their place.

In most cases I think the revelation of a scandal involving a high-profile politician would be a good thing. (That is, better than it remaining secret.)

To be fair, the EU governments led the way to an unencrypted future with TETRA and the broken TEA1 encryption scheme. They're just giving back freedom and openness to the people now. /s

Open source would not help without the reproducible builds of Signal (I wonder who check them on each release?). And only builds like Molly include no binary blobs of Google [1], which could IMHO at least be used to extract some metadata. Leaving the OS still as a risk, even for Molly or Matrix clients. Even with transparency around linked devices, I would believe that few people would notice silently linked devices. Simplest thing is I guess social engineering which happened in a coordinated attack on Signal messagers of German politicians recently (I guess there should be an official signal app version not supporting linked devices for such people) [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-germ...

> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source

And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.

Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."

Yes and the secret chats in telegram are super clumsy. Both parties need to be online at the same time for the key exchange, it only works on one device at each side. Nobody I know uses them.

I sent some people a password reset through them but half of them couldn't get their head around it.

So yeah while it has secret chats, they aren't very useful at all.

telegram may not be end-to-end encrypted by default but it does support end-to-end encryption. the generous reading is that this encryption, if used, should be broken.

so as i read it the article doesn't suggest that all of telegram is end-to-end encrypted only that it has support for it.

It doesn't even need to be random. What if you send an instance of a proprietary file format? Is the company required to share the spec and toolchain so that the govt can verify it (probably) isn't an encrypted message?

I'm sure the judge will love your explanation.

of course, nothing magically prevents the app from sending keys or decrypted content to a third party.

That's why if you're really serious about e2ee you have to install the app from source.

They already excluded themselves in the chatcontrol proposals. Typical.

No fair, we didn't even get the fun anarchy part before skipping right on to tyrrany!

It will become more important over time - Telegram and the TON coin are reintegrating. So messaging surveillance is financial surveillance too? Price is going up too. https://x.com/BSCNews/status/2053046567930937817 Upgraded a month ago: https://x.com/durov/status/2042247948147241072

It'd be interesting (horrifying?) to see something that was once assumed secret go public. Imagine if all chats and payments eventually went public at some point... the Transparity, when nothing can be encrypted anymore so no one tries. Mankind becomes a unit - or it devolves?

With TON, perhaps altcoins will give way to micro coins - tailored especially for apps and their users/founders? ..for micropayments and running on AI infrastructure. Blockchain and AI infrastructure are already interchangeable in large part. So if transaction histories are exposed, the damage is limited. Startups won't look to IPO, they'll look to float a coin to make serious money. Binance did it. Polymarket next? Poly is dominated by Bitcoin as it stands.

I'm not sure if Ethereum tokens would be the same thing.

They would have used the "ghost user" strategy.

> "Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state."

These sorts of laws have repeatedly failed to pass in Europe due to people protesting. The government just keeps coming back and trying again it seems.

What makes you think French citizens don’t care?

> Is it that they aren't technically literate?

Few are, that is a huge part of it. Most have far more pressing concerns.

I wish it was just France. That's the problem.