You don't seem to understand the point of these laws. It is not about stopping anyone with enough technical know-how from encrypting their communications. This is possible today, and not something which can be easily legislated away without resorting to a much heavier class of draconian laws (at which point you won't be living in a democracy any longer in any case).
This is about making it hard (or impossible) for some perceived group of miscreants to communicate privately. People sharing CSAM (however you define that) or dealing drugs, and stuff like that. Anyone can encrypt their communication, but most people don't do this consciously; the masses just use WhatsApp and Signal and what have you.
You and your special keyboard are not of interest, and unless you start selling these along with a service to route the encrypted messages to thousands of users, you are not the target of this legislation. Take away Signal and WhatsApp and sending an end-to-end encrypted message to your drug dealer without exchanging keys and agreeing on a protocol suddenly isn't as easy as just opening an app. That's the point of this law.
It's a dumb law, but you won't make it go away by playing silly semantic games.
> without resorting to a much heavier class of draconian laws
They may be coming down the pipe, after the soft version gets people macerated.
> at which point you won't be living in a democracy
But you will be hearing from talking heads that you are, and Russia and North Korea are the real dictatorships.
And maybe they will be right, because what is democracy? The word has different meanings to different people, and it won't be difficult to shape the discussion about what our liberal democracy is all about. Maybe it's about accepting who has power now and about protecting the vulnerable. We have seen a bit of this stance and real capabilities in recent years.
Criminals are using specialty phones or should I say, were using, because this was recently cracked and thus became useless. Catching Taghi in NL was a famous result of that.
Point is that dangerous people will use specialty devices/services and being legal is certainly not one of the requirements.
Again, not what this law is about. This is all about wanting to gather signal intelligence on millions of people automatically. About being flagged when someone uploads CSAM or uses certain keywords. They know it won't stop anyone with the skills and means to use some other encrypted solution.
So they explain it to people as being able to catch criminals, but they known it won’t work against that?
How can you maintain such a position? At some point you’ll have to explain your reasons for draconian measures like this.
That’s why I’m spamming people with “it won’t work” because so many seem fooled by this. You will catch exactly zero people with this. The only people you’ll catch will be the ones that you would have caught anyway, because of their nonchalance.
> So they explain it to people as being able to catch criminals, but they known it won’t work against that?
Why a law is enacted is more complex than just the here and now. Some of these law-and-order types dream of the day they can order Apple or Samsung to completely lock down their smartphones and forbid any user controlled cryptography. Some just want to be able to feel that they are doing everything in their power to prevent children from being harmed, even if the measures only cover naive users. Some just want people to know that they are being watched, and have these laws act as deterrent.
And as a bonus: some parents really like the idea that none of their children or any of their mates are sharing (their own) underage nudes and that this is enforced automatically.
The law will likely work for some of these points, to some extent. It's still a bad law, but the people pushing it aren't idiots; just dangerous.
OK thank you for elaborating. I tend to assume that such laws - "let's listen in on everything you do" - need firm and solid justification. Coming up with a simple counter-example on first try signals to me the problem has not been handled effectively (understatement of the year). I'm not talking about having the perfect solution, just.. something that does not immediately fall down on first try within a few minutes.
This is about making it hard (or impossible) for some perceived group of miscreants to communicate privately. People sharing CSAM (however you define that) or dealing drugs, and stuff like that. Anyone can encrypt their communication, but most people don't do this consciously; the masses just use WhatsApp and Signal and what have you.
You and your special keyboard are not of interest, and unless you start selling these along with a service to route the encrypted messages to thousands of users, you are not the target of this legislation. Take away Signal and WhatsApp and sending an end-to-end encrypted message to your drug dealer without exchanging keys and agreeing on a protocol suddenly isn't as easy as just opening an app. That's the point of this law.
It's a dumb law, but you won't make it go away by playing silly semantic games.