this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
83 points (92.8% liked)
Privacy
31847 readers
80 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Personally I think there are possible federal wiretapping laws that might have something to say about a telecom that is offering an E2EE secure phone line to someone who is not on duty as a police officer (cop), federal agent (glowie), or other authorized federal, state or local employee (bureaucrat, with data that has legitimate need to be protected).
That's not even considering the entitled political hand-wringing about terrorists, spies, drug dealers, pedophiles and other so called "EVIL" people who "should not have access to such a powerful tool" because "it's our law enforcement's right to catch them in the act." Unfortunately it's a nuanced problem and we can't wave away all of that hand-wringing, even if we think most of it is dramatic and performative. They do have some points.
But...even if we were to suppose for a moment that all of the above issues are not a problem... because something likely happened to wake people up to the need for privacy...we would be facing an entirely new set of technical challenges to hurdle over.
As our current cell networks are structured; we would need to deploy cell phones with phone numbers that do not typically allow routing of outbound unencrypted calls...instead all phone calls would need to be routed over cellular data (AKA LTE or 5G). These calls could definitely be nominally routed by an existing application such as Signal and would require that remote recipients also install the Signal app to receive encrypted calls.
Essentially you'd have a phone which is a Data+SMS only line with a phone number for ease of access. You wouldn't be able to make outbound unencrypted calls or send SMS messages except to emergency services.