This is completely untrue! Important communications have always been enciphered since language has been created I’d wager, whether that cipher is specific terms (grog means attack that person in 10 seconds!) or a book cipher, e.i. The first letter of a bible verse than the second letter of the next verse etc. Humans have been encrypting communication since communication was possible.
It is now only recently possible to dragnet in mass many communications, store, and analyze them. The past decades have brought new threats to privacy democracy through breaking encryption at the state scale.
> Humans have been encrypting communication since communication was possible.
Were most people encrypting their handwritten letters? Were most people encrypting their messages before sending them by SMS or with WhatsApp? Really?
No, because there was an expectation of privacy. That expectation is no longer there.
Privacy from who? Law enforcement has been leveraging that forever.
But ChatControl won't prevent the encryption for anyone who is not the receiver of the reports. And the receiver is the equivalent of "law enforcement", right?
The scalability of spying has exploded. Back before re-election comms, the government had no way to spy on communications and sieve out opposers - now they do, with encryption the only thing standing in the way.
>Privacy from who? Law enforcement has been leveraging that forever.
Not without legal proceedings. The population would have been absolutely outraged if the government just decided to read all of their mail one random day in the 90s.
There's a reason the whole idea was supposed to be a conspiracy theory, the population literally didn't believe something like that could happen.
I think that there is a big difference, for the population, between "somebody is reading and keeping a copy of all your mail" and "Some algorithm looks for illegal material locally on your phone. If you don't have illegal material, it won't do anything".
Nobody would want to carry a microphone recording them 24/7 and storing everything on a server, but everybody is fine with TooBigTech simply promising that they don't store the data.
We have to accept that people are fine with the idea. The problem (both with the connected mic and ChatControl, btw) is that it can be abused. That's the problem. Again: we have to convince people that it is at risk of being abused. Not that they should be outraged. They just are not.
>TooBigTech simply promising that they don't store the data.
Instead they notify you that you gave them perpetual license to reuse your data.
Not most but some.