I expect many people might read this and think "yep, fair enough, I have nothing to hide and nothing to say" and still not understand why either privacy or free speech are valuable.

And the things that are perfectly okay today might be the things you want to hide tomorrow. Abortions and pregnancies, thoughts about labor rights or climate, sexual orientation, ...

Fuck me, that’s good

I’m stealing that

Yeah. Also we don't have good guys either, but, that sounds nice.

Isn’t Sweden trying something stupid too?

Although not in the same way, the US is leading the charge on that front.

Well, they gotta fight about something...

Almost seems like they're afraid of us or something

It could be enforced for the majority of people just by blocking the download of non-backdoored software from well known sources. And then for the relatively few tech-literate types who still obtain and use E2EE messaging software, the government will have a ready way to prosecute you whenever you do anything inconvenient, or look like you might do something. So it can be a serious problem even if it can't technically be enforced for everyone.

The law is enforceable. If the options you're given is "put a backdoor in your product or stop operating in the country", it'll happen. And even if you reply "then I'll go away", laws like this, stupid, dangerous, breaking everything, will keep popping in one country after another until it's too late.

It not making sense have no bearing on whether it can be enforced or not. And the mere existence of the law may be enough to later put you in hot water if you have some de-facto illegal software on your phone or computer, for example. It would not be automatic everywhere, but another tool to just legally have something against most people.

That's being too generous. Some may not fully understand, but many do and simply don't care. Not sure if better or worse, but its not entirely lack of understanding.

Signal has already threatened to pull out of both Australia and the UK when they were talking about passing similar laws.

But then what’s stopping someone in France from sideloading the app and using a VPN?

The need for a phone number and SMS verification to create an account. Signal should do something about that.

There are ways around that, but the goal isn't to stop everyone from using E2EE; it's to make E2EE non-mainstream.

It is possible to do, to some extent. Everything's possible. But then, when people that are on both side of this encryption barrier wants to talk, then both must use unencrypted messages. You'd also have the obvious case of someone having a phone/device/account from country A temporarily crossing through country FuckingFranceOrUK, so what do you do in that case?

You'd need to implement that, add UI features to know if you're using encryption or not, and above all, it's fucking stupid and against what most sane messaging solutions wants to do.

I'm sure it's possible to find people that would gladly do all that. Hopefully those people are not in the business of making all the useful communication services we currently use.

I haven't seen that show, but it sounds like it has a basis in reality: there has been a real concern that quantum computers might be able to break much of current encryption because they are far quicker than classical computers at problems like finding the prime factors of a number, and widely used schemes like RSA encryption depend on that being hard to do. And that could be fairly catastrophic, not only for current communications and for data encrypted at rest, but because communications data can be collected now and decrypted later when the technology becomes available. As far as we know, no one has done it yet, but quantum computers are developing rapidly so the day may well come. So there's a reason to move to encryption algorithms that are hard for quantum computers, even before such computers become a practical reality.

I can invite someone over to my house and talk about anything I want with no risk of government meddling. Why should it be any different in online communication regardless of the country?

It sounds like you haven't observed the conversation.

And it's not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You're asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You're asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.