Comment by ndriscoll
6 hours ago
If you're dealing with an authoritarian state they don't need to burn anything or care about cert logging. They can:
1. Make it illegal to distribute a browser that distrusts their CA
2. Make it illegal to run a browser that distrusts their CA
3. Block all encrypted traffic that they can't MITM and notify police that you are running illegal software
“Make it illegal to…” that has never in human history prevented anything from happening. Cannot increase the risk? Of course, but laws do not stop humans from humaning.
Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
[delayed]
Sure, a state can do that, and some have tried at various times. But even authoritarian states have a number of competing aims they have to balance. And CT makes authoritarian goals harder; they can no longer do as much surreptitiously.
This is unnecessary, they already have the problem controlled better. They just outright block foreign services, and the domestic ones they can request data from freely.
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.