Remember when the silk road guy got caught in a library by undercover agents because once he closed his laptop lid everything would be encrypted? They literally had to jump him so they had access to the unencrypted stuff.
Anyway I don't like this take, putting in backdoors is some CCP or NSA level trickery that would totally erode the trust of your users.
I offer an end-to-end encrypted service so I have thought about this before. If some government agency approached me and said, we need access to this users data, well they'd be screwed because I can't access it. But if they said, hey this user has distributed illegal content before and here's proof, I would be like OK sure let's suspend his account.
I understand there is a precedent of almost certain abuse and dishonesty regarding backdoors. History shows that even authorities will exploit it.
With that being said, my argument is still that there should be backdoors to authorities AND very strict laws and regulations that determine exactly when and how it can be used. I know this is easier said than done (especially enforcing the regulations) but I believe society will benefit from giving authorities some (controlled and regulated) access to encrypted data. I'm not saying data should be completely unrestricted.
It is also necessary to consider the other side of the coin. For instance, if some organization or group used your E2EE service to orchestrate their criminal activities, would you be comfortable with that? And if you had some restrictions in your T's & C's that state that your service may not be used for criminal activity how would you enforce that without knowing what your service is being used for?
Hmm.
Remember when the silk road guy got caught in a library by undercover agents because once he closed his laptop lid everything would be encrypted? They literally had to jump him so they had access to the unencrypted stuff.
Anyway I don't like this take, putting in backdoors is some CCP or NSA level trickery that would totally erode the trust of your users.
I offer an end-to-end encrypted service so I have thought about this before. If some government agency approached me and said, we need access to this users data, well they'd be screwed because I can't access it. But if they said, hey this user has distributed illegal content before and here's proof, I would be like OK sure let's suspend his account.
I understand there is a precedent of almost certain abuse and dishonesty regarding backdoors. History shows that even authorities will exploit it.
With that being said, my argument is still that there should be backdoors to authorities AND very strict laws and regulations that determine exactly when and how it can be used. I know this is easier said than done (especially enforcing the regulations) but I believe society will benefit from giving authorities some (controlled and regulated) access to encrypted data. I'm not saying data should be completely unrestricted.
It is also necessary to consider the other side of the coin. For instance, if some organization or group used your E2EE service to orchestrate their criminal activities, would you be comfortable with that? And if you had some restrictions in your T's & C's that state that your service may not be used for criminal activity how would you enforce that without knowing what your service is being used for?