This entire article is... Nonsense? It categorically dismisses e2ee, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, other than the notion that a provider might push a update that doesn't encrypt messages anymore.

It's on the level of "you can't trust your OS unless you wrote it yourself" -righteous sounding but utterly stupid in practice

As a developer, when some company says that some platform is end-to-end encrypted, you know that it means "the default client provides encryption, by default" but you know very well that they could selectively turn it off for anyone, at any time and it may be impossible to know that they did this this unless the target was tech savvy and actively monitoring their network packets during the brief period that encryption was turned off... Especially on the web, they could just serve a different JavaScript library with a backdoor to a specific IP address only and the target would have no idea.

Articles like this remind me that non-devs think "end-to-end encrypted" means it's always the case and they can't turn it off at will. This is not the case.

If, say, Signal was completely controlled by the CIA[1] and was thus evil, then having incoherent cryptography as described in the article would be a feature, not a bug. Being able to reject law enforcement requests would produce a false sense of security for the people the CIA was interested in surveilling. Responding effectively to law enforcement requests would reduce the value to the CIA of the ability to secretly backdoor Signal.

This effect was seen in the Apple vs FBI incident described in the article. The public perception of Apple as a brave defender of user privacy was greatly increased due to that dispute. For all we know, the FBI was in on the conspiracy. In return they might receive the fruits of such surveillance with the only limitation that they would have to disguise the source with parallel construction[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Two problems I see with the authors argument. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chip in to correct me if I'm wrong:

1. Aren't E2EE systems designed to prevent decryption of content already created in the past sitting on the vendor's servers? Yes, the vendor could go rogue, but, assuming they currently have implemented E2EE right, it means any change to the client can only compromise content created in the future from that point onward, no? So why is the article implying Apple could have provided a back-doored iOS to bypass the encryption for existing content?

2. I also don't find the argument that E2EE is only a legal trick fully convincing. There are several other incentives for a vendor to implement it apart from avoiding legal issues: preventing insider abuse, reducing liability, improving customer trust, and resisting mass surveillance

These are real engineering motivations. The threat model is not: "Protect you if <vendor> becomes actively malicious tomorrow." Its more like "Protect messages stored on <Vendor>'s servers from attackers, employees, hackers, routine legal requests, and passive surveillance."

I’d rather make up my own mind, read the docs/code. All I read was unsubstantiated claims, with zero real world evidence.

Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?

A sophisticated actor might as well also control the application that ends up on my device. It does not have to be the same delivery mechanism as long as I did not write it myself.

So all cryptography is snake oil?

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I mean I kinda sorta get the point and there would be some merit to discuss there, but the weird framing makes that very hard to do.

Of course it's easier to break web e2ee if you are for example cloudflare compared with someone also having to compromise the Debian repos.

But that's not what snake oil means.

I'm confused, is the argument that it doesn't work because Google is fueled by surveillance capitalism? If so what about Apple which is only partly so? What about Firefox and in particular its de-branded ones without Google search as default?

I think what makes the Web special is precisely that there are different browsers beyond Chromium. If the Web was Chrome I would tend to agree but even though popular I do not think it is fair to conflate it to be the Web.

Before reading this article, I used to believe that IT companies deeply respected users’ human rights, spending millions of dollars to build end‑to‑end encryption. But thanks to this very article, I learned that they were actually saving tens of millions in administrative litigation costs – costs they would otherwise have had to pay every month to respond to wiretap warrants.

Some might call this a “cryptographic innovation.” I call it “the technical outsourcing of legal disclaimers.” Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a Harvard Law School legal team on my side.

Reminder: iMessage claims to be e2ee, but the on-by-default iCloud Backup on iOS backs up material that is sufficient to defeat this (either the endpoint keys, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" disabled, or the messages themselves, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" enabled).

This means that, in practice, iMessage is not e2ee.

Before you say "But what about Advanced Data Protection that enables e2ee for iCloud Backup?" - virtually nobody has this on, Apple prohibits you from turning it on in the UK, and even if you enable it - the people you iMessage with don't, so your conversations are in their backups. This means that if either endpoint of the iMessage conversation is in the UK, and both parties have iCloud Backup enabled (the default), then your iMessages are not e2ee as a non-endpoint has an escrowed copy of the plaintext or keys.

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