Comment by AnthonyMouse
1 day ago
> They view ending end-to-end encryption as a way to restore the effectiveness of traditional warrants.
Traditional warrants couldn't retroactively capture historical realtime communications because that stuff wasn't traditionally recorded to begin with.
> It isn’t necessarily about mass surveillance and the implementation could prevent mass surveillance but allow warrants.
The implementation that allows this is the one where executing a warrant has a high inherent cost, e.g. because they have to physically plant a bug on the device. If you can tap any device from the server then you can tap every device from the server (and so can anyone who can compromise the server).
They shouldn’t be able to tap any device from a server. I’m guessing they would have to apply for a warrant and serve the warrant to Apple who review the warrant and provide the data.
Putting the panopticon server in a building that says Apple or Microsoft at the entrance hasn't solved anything. Corporations are hardly more trustworthy than the government, can be coerced into doing the mass surveillance under gag orders, could be doing it for themselves without telling anyone, and would still be maintaining servers with access to everything that could be compromised by organized crime or foreign governments.
Which is why the clients have to be doing the encryption themselves in a documented way that establishes the server can't be doing that.