All communications were unencrypted because encrypting them would have incurred unduly burdensome processing. Nowadays computers can encrypt and decrypt on the fly for virtually free.
All communications were unencrypted because encrypting them would have incurred unduly burdensome processing. Nowadays computers can encrypt and decrypt on the fly for virtually free.
Sure. Still people considered themselves free and living in democracies. Why wouldn't it be the case today?
We also didn't have AI models that politicians believed could detect bad behavior on a mass scale. Implementing Stasi level mass surveillance would be very expensive back then, even if there was full access to all communication. Now the proposal is to make a model try to categorize your messages and flag you.
I believe that politicians believe that AI models can do this well without negative consequences. But I also think they forget that a model with 99.99% specificity applied to ten million messages will still falsely label 1000 as harmful.
People using online communication system were a niche, not the norm andost people didn't have the tool and knowledge to access someone else's digital communication.
It is not the case anymore.