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Maybe only the biggest companies should be required to be able to decrypt certain messages if a court warrant is produced. Privacy fans could use services exempt from this requirement, like Signal. But there are laypeople who just use iMessage because it's the default, and you could catch criminals sending bad stuff over iMessage.
I think there are valid concerns on both sides of the argument... but I am just imagining if you have a group of violent people planning an attack over iMessage, I want law enforcement to be able to read those messages.
Can't law enforcement already read those messages by getting a warrant to seize the suspect's phone and attempting to break into it? Why do they suddenly need to preemptively break into everyone's phone?
I guess I think of it like bugging a phone. The technology for bugging phones has been around for a long time, but that doesn't mean the authorities are bugging everybody's phones all the time. Even if they can theoretically listen to everyone's conversations, that doesn't mean they are always listening. There would be too many conversations to listen to.
Bugging a phone involves applying the bug to one phone, right? Backdooring encryption is bugging everyone's phone in advance and then hoping that the bug only ever gets used lawfully.
Also as computing power increases then it becomes more plausible to actually process all of everyone's messages. Maybe they start by automatically flagging certain words, then if you're detected using them you're automatically flagged and a warrant issued to read everything you've ever said.
Maybe I should read more about encryption. I was thinking maybe a company like Apple could just keep the encryption keys stored somewhere. So if needed they could decrypt particular messages. There could be big punishments, prison time, for anybody within Apple who decrypts messages without a court warrant.
You can probably get a better explanation by reading up on encryption, but I think most security people would say that encrypted communications where you don't hold the keys may as well not be encrypted at all. You still have to trust that someone doesn't (accidentally or deliberately) access your data, leak your keys, or otherwise break the process that keeps everything safe.
Fair enough. I will try to read more stuff about encryption.
Word would just get out that you should only use the secure services to communicate anything sensitive. We already have plenty of messaging services that are insecure, but enough people are preferring to use a secure option that it's worrying the UK Government.
Maybe people just use what's popular. Telegram is pretty popular in some countries even though I don't think they have end-to-end encryption by default.
Anyway I guess I don't know what the answer is. Personally I would probably still use iMessage and WhatsApp even if I knew the companies behind them could potentially read my messages by decrypting them. If there's a proper system in place so that messages are only read when there's a court warrant, it's probably unlikely my boring messages to friends and family would be spied on by anybody.
Maybe I need to send more interesting messages and then I would care about the privacy of them a bit more.