A windy screed on "internet privacy"
A windy screed on "internet privacy"
“Internet privacy” via end-to-end encryption is the quintessential modern dilemma. Child pornography is an actionable (prosecutable) non-protected communication. Whereas the actions of Signal to uphold unhindered access to freedom fighters anywhere are noble and admirable, it is a foregone conclusion that criminals use the technology to circumvent law enforcement.
This ability to comport one's self in perfect anonymity facilitates all manner of crime and exploitation. There is literally no way to comprehensively stop online crime without the requirement that users access the internet in a legal format that demands identification.
Child pornography, human trafficking and countless other destructive and malign forces flourish in the quagmire of the lawless net and dark-web. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies must revert to stealth opportunities that supersede and violate some
privacy as a necessity for intervention, another dilemma. One may recall the FBI recently inserting themselves in some company servers to clean out certain stubborn malware disseminated by advanced persistent threats (APT's).
"They are doing it as we sit here." Robert S. Mueller III.
I joined the WWW in 1993 when computers were in the infancy of migrating into the net, it was a mess then and its a mess now. There are many examples of unethical behavior in the net: people that register domain names of trademarked companies then charging a ransom to the companies to retrieve it. Some have made a fortune doing just that. Very unethical but paradoxically legal.
The proprietary machinations conducted to monopolize operating systems by bundling software and bypassing an operators' right to exclude certain software got Microsoft sued. But that wasn't all, so nefarious was their desire to have total control they literally conducted industrial sabotage by dispatching corrupted applets (via Java) to Apple computers accessing MS-PC machines, crashing the Macs and thereby giving the impression that those computers were unwieldy and unreliable and consequently causing bit-rot (the insidious corruption of software not shut-down in a proper sequence). Microsoft resisted Java until they realized they could use it malevolently.
Really sneaky stuff right? Sneaky is the key word for this current zeitgeist. I blindly ideally believed the internet would be a boon for all mankind and in many ways it has. But it is a malaise, a morass of brilliance and corruption. Unless and until everyone accepts responsibility for who they are and what they post or create it will remain so. It's that simple, and that perplexing.