End to End Encryption (E2EE) - Computerphile

End to end encryption, government ministers are again talking about stopping it. What is it and why might that be a bad idea? Dr Mike Pound explains.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[Cryguy]

"does this make you bob?"
"it does"

made me smile

[rich]

Criminals think about a crime before committing a crime, that is unacceptable. Therefore, we should ban thought.

[Locuts]

"I don't have anything to hide". Oh except maybe all my health records, my credit card number and financial history, some of my browsing history depending on the person reading it, some of my contacts from some of my other contacts, some of the stuff I've said from my current and future employer, some of the stuff I've said from some of my family and friends depending, yeh I guess there's actually quite a lot come to think of it. You don't have to be a bad person to want privacy. And I realize that's the point of what was said.

[vladomaimun]

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because
you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care
about free speech because you have nothing to say.” — Edward Snowden

[unixbash]

This should be shown on BBC to educate the politicians about the problems they have "solutions" for, without understanding the issue itself!

[lithium]

thats like allowing the post office to read all the mail i send. thats not a good thing

[apburner]

Why not just make it illegal to commit crime? Problem solved.

[janski]

"I don't care if the government sees what I'm doing I'm not hiding anything after all."

That's a very dangerous thing to say

[tobortine]

Alice and Bob - Well done. Proper encryption.

[Anpanator]

One of the more obvious, non-technical issues here is that how are you going to prevent criminals from simply continuing to use secure E2E encryption, even if you enforce policies that require backdoors or whatever? You can't, really. If criminals want E2E encryption, they can get it. The knowledge is already out there, there are many different applications and libraries for it and it is entirely unrealistic to think you can prevent access to it.

[ghelyar]

The Mike Pound videos are the best on this channel. He's the only one that seems like he's actually worked in industry or has any real-world experience (at least in recent decades).

[Mrlacklp]

There is another problem with this proposal: Alice and Bob can just use their public keys on a different level, by directly encrypting their messages for example and not the channels at which point this whole idea is broken again, so in the end even if you introduce it it only hits those who are not actually trying very hard to hide something.

[XnecromungerX]

In summary: Social Engineering always wins.

[inquaanate]

The government isn't a secure entity, making a backdoor for them would make it insecure period.

[raingram]

"I have nothing to hide" is a terrible argument. Would you be happy for me to walk into your home and take photos of it then? I mean, you have nothing to hide, so you won't mind me just walking in whenever I feel like, right?

[ACTlVISION]

"I have nothing to hide"
Awesome, make a video sharing all your account passwords please

[LewisCostin]

"I have nothing to hide" = people who need to hide the fact that they have things to hide.

[whitslack]

I'm shocked that Dr Pound didn't mention Signal, the open-source app that invented the encrypted protocol that was later adopted by WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Signal solves the problem of data at rest on your device by allowing you to encrypt your message database with a passphrase that is independent of your phone's passcode lock.

[iAmTheSquidThing]

Even if messaging services did collaborate with governments to add a backdoor, nefarious users could just switch to an alternative system that didn't have one. So there's not really anything we can do to stop this.

Mike Pound's videos are always a pleasure to watch