Countries need to stop undermining encryption!
On a broader scope with the real world scenario using KryptEY.
Written in 15-04-2025/04-15-2025 7:30 PM UTC and Published in 15-04-2025/04-15-2025 11:30 PM UTC
Switzerland, Florida, Sweden, and—at worst—the EU (with Chat Control/ProtectEU [potentially]) are all trying to undermine encryption without considering the implications at all. The UK is the worst offender, with Apple being forced to disable Advanced Data Protection for new users, and soon to require existing users to either disable it or lose their data. While I'm not affected (outside of the whole EU one) if the rest pass such measures, we really can't overlook this issue for the people who need encryption the most.
What I will say is that Em at Privacy Guides made a great article called Encryption is not a crime which honestly covers most of what I could have said, but what people (not people who understand it but average people like the "normie") could not understand is how dire the consequences would be without taking a real world demonstration on the technical side of things and thanks to KryptEY we are able to demonstrate it as I will do below.
The Demo
For starters, take a look at this conversation
What are you thinking when you see this? A likely response would be "Someone and Judi telling a weird bedtime [or fairy tale] story". And you would be correct. But actually hidden in that fairy tail conversation is a conversation that we can't see between that Someone and Judi and we will never have an idea because the conversation is end to end encrypted and therefore only both can see it. With apps like Signal, the metadata, down to the name, is also never known to any third party, nor can Signal tell, down to the stickers and stories too, everything is end-to-end encrypted!
Now I'll reveal, that "Someone"? Is me, that Judi? Let's pretend it's another person who agreed to this, with THIS being the actual conversation in order, and this being what happens when government agencies undermine it.
I have to say that I intentionally made this kind of conversation, and to demonstrate what happens if those messages were scanned (either on-device or before it gets encrypted), that "killing" phrase I made could have triggered the quote on quote "scanning messages" system and falsely classified me as a murderer or something like that, if the rest of the context wasn't revealed, but even then, if they had the context, if the government agencies were to trust the algorithms instead of using their own thinking and/or justifying only part of the conversation, I would be badly screwed. Despite the context, by the way, was actually about a mistake in my wording, and that the killing I meant was to do it in the video game "Marvel Rivals" to have some fun! And we did play a fun Marvel Rivals video game with Judi, you can ask them and me!
I think you're starting to get the point, even I'm feeling a little bit of a real panic about possible false accusations and I'm sure some brain dead people would take it that way and if so it proves even more of the point I'm trying to make. Also seriously, I made up one thing and I didn't make up another, the someone, it's true, that's me, that Judi? was actually an alt and I was using SimpleX's incognito feature!
Ok I am convinced, what can I do to stop it?
For one, Em again makes great suggestions in the same article, and to add a little—which, more or less, Em did mention—you can call your local representative in the country where you oppose this as a whole, which would make the most impact the more people do it!
Exercise and convince more people to use E2EE (excluding WhatsApp or Messenger). Yes, that includes telling that friend to encrypt your Discord conversations or stick to using their voice chat, which is E2EE. Also, using E2EE RCS instead of SMS helps a lot! But otherwise, use platforms that prioritize users and/or ones where you don’t have to trust the provider at all—only yourself (in this case, you hold the key to decrypt, not the company. For example: Proton/Tuta instead of Gmail, Signal/SimpleX instead of WhatsApp or Discord, etc.). When you and many others exercise proper E2EE, you send a message to these companies that you want this as a whole. They might try to fight back once they realize it, but otherwise, pushing back against Undermining E2EE goes a longer way than this!
I am still not convinced
Read from there then: https://blog.gorujokun.cy/analogizing-digital-privacy-to-realsticish-scenarios/#idc-or-sketchy
Closing Note
We still have a long way to go from 2025, but hopefully you now have a better understanding of the whole point and theme of privacy with E2EE and why we hate it when government bodies start undermining what is, to be honest, essentially super complex mathematical calculations or something that looks like nonsense on the outside but is normal to the intended end-to-end recipients.