Comment by badrabbit
3 years ago
The fact that you are evading surveillance will get you in trouble, on top of that false conclusions about what you were doing could be made. Maybe you were browsing academic content from Iran an example, you get in trouble for using it but also for browsing anti-islam content which you can't disprove but your accusers can make arbitrary false claims by correlating things about you with your evasive actions. Plausible deniability means generation of forensic evidence that serves as a cover. In my example it would be generating traffic that decrypts as harmless content or using stego to hide the real content inside cover content. And bundling the software as a feature of some other browser or extension that has other purposes that allow you to say "I just installed a pdf converter extension, I didn't know it let me read wikipedia with homomorphic crypto as well".
If someone wants to make false accusations, they can do that now? I can see authorities trying to prevent adoption of homomorphic encryption. Once widely adopted I don’t think merely using it could be used against someone. Similarly, regular encryption isn’t _really_ penalised against now that it’s widely adopted.