I so want to be on the same side of this discussion but the argument is nuanced.
The reason "think of the kids" works so well to justify blocking E2E all the time is because child abuse happens literally all the time.
When someone solves this problem, and I don't think any of us really believe it to be solvable, we can move on. I don't want the government in my private conversations, but I don't want my kids in someone elses either.
To extend this - we recognise a duty of care to our users and their privacy when we build these systems, but if those users plan and carry out an act of terrorism did we not also have a duty of care to their victims to not aid their killers in planning their murder?
We can't shunt this responsibility forever, the public will not take our side down the road - because we are ignoring the counter-argument even if we wedge our fingers in our ears.
Child abuse, terrorism, drug trafficking and professional crime in general is a needle in a haystack compared to boring petty crime let alone normal communication.
Law enforcement entities that try to prosecute these kinds of crimes doesn't do it by building haystacks of data and then combing through looking for needles because that's a waste of their resources relative to the amount of results obtained. They do it by attacking the endpoints where the abuse or terrorism, or other professional crime has to actually happen. They find a terrorist, or a child abuser or a drug trafficker or they find evidence of their handiwork and then work from there. They see where they get their money, their bombs, their drugs, etc, etc and follow the links as much as they can. When law enforcement is actually trying to target crime they don't go fishing, digitally or in meatspace because that's not an efficient way to obtain results if the goal is to go after some genre of professional/organized crime.
Running a mass operation with no specific target (like speed traps in meat-space or dragnet operations in the digital world) is great for padding stats because you can say "look, we got X pounds of meth off the street" or whatever but it doesn't actually do much to target the professional crime because professional criminals take steps to avoid being caught in lowest common denominator type policing.
Neutering encryption (so that cops can continue to run surveillance dragnets) doesn't do anything to help the cops catch real criminals, that's just a talking point made up by the people who want the government to have the ability to put any arbitrary person under a microscope.
Users choose their technology. Technology doesn't choose its users. There's no way to make it impossible for criminals to use some communications service. The same technology that protects the lawful person will protect the terrorist and drug dealer. There's no solution available that doesn't also involve sacrificing the safety of upstanding citizens.
In case anyone doubts the above fact: government agents abuse their surveillance powers to spy on their loved ones.
There's no reason to believe the government is any better than these criminals. Cryptography must be strong enough to defeat even intelligence agencies as well as ubiquitous so that it'll be hard if not impossible to enforce legal limitations or bans.
> child abuse happens literally all the time... I don’t want my kids in someone elses [private conversations] either
93% of the time, the perpetrator knows the child. If you’re seriously worried your children might be victims of abuse, then your first line of defense should be against your own family and friends.
You will always be able to communicate with someone else in an encrypted manner, if you both want to do so, and no legislation that forces popular platforms to go unencrypted can change that. So, no illegal activity will be harmed.
Apparently it's okay for Zoom to shunt this responsibility for its paid users? Even if I were to accept your premise that omitting E2EE is a legitimate trade-off to detect abuse, Zoom's choice to selectively apply this standard for its free users suggests that this is NOT why Zoom chose to do this.
on the other hand, zoom has a vested interest in identifying the people in the call (say to allow linking to a linkedin profile or other revenue-generating reasons).
The reason "think of the kids" works so well to justify blocking E2E all the time is because child abuse happens literally all the time.
When someone solves this problem, and I don't think any of us really believe it to be solvable, we can move on. I don't want the government in my private conversations, but I don't want my kids in someone elses either.
To extend this - we recognise a duty of care to our users and their privacy when we build these systems, but if those users plan and carry out an act of terrorism did we not also have a duty of care to their victims to not aid their killers in planning their murder?
We can't shunt this responsibility forever, the public will not take our side down the road - because we are ignoring the counter-argument even if we wedge our fingers in our ears.