Hmmm, I suppose in an ideal world, only the party providing the service, e.g., Signal and only Signal would need to be able to decrypt messages, and only messages relevant to the bad things I was talking about and nothing else. Yes, this may be unrealistic because of political, financial and other pressure on Signal, or this may allow bad actors within signal to carry out their malicious intent, but that is why it is an ideal I suppose.
With the funding Signal has, and the and the number of users it wouldn’t be feasible for them to “scan” every message.
It also wouldn’t be E2EE by design if they could.
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Don’t focus on Signal they are simply a random example, the service could be government funded or made, or ideally independent. I don’t know why I am harping on about Signal I should say [insert random service].
That’s exactly what I am proposing in my ideal, but for this to be safe Signal (or anyone else the name does not matter Signal is only an example) needs to be independent, and have a fail safe, like a kill switch or something in the case that they are pressured.
But, although this may be an ideal from our current perspective, chasing ideals is what makes society better and drives technological innovation, so I say go for it!
Even if it were Matrix then, most of those servers are run by a single admin or a couple of admins. In the case of email the encryption might not even necessarily be provided by the carrier/provider. For example Thunderbird includes openpgp.js, but gmail might carry the email. In that case there is nothing that can be done. Matrix is similar in that the server admin might not be element/matrix.org.
The other thing is, what might be legal in one country may very well not be in others, for example Europe. How do you comply with all jurisdictions at once? What do you do if your users are foreign users?
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Very simple, follow the United Nations recommendations, no one should endorse violence, terrorism, lack of education, specific religions etc. These things are objectively harmful.
If some odd countries want to disagree with the above, they can * right off. And, I don’t think any of the millions of products today are compatible with all jurisdictions anyway.
Why are you (OP) focusing so much on technology as an enabler of crime, or of technological solutions to police people to prevent crime? Crime isn’t this thing that will always exist and is exclusively things that are immoral, it’s a social construct of things we as a society consider bad combined with what is useful for those with power to label as bad. The solution to crimes such as CSAM isn’t to just scan everything, that doesn’t stop shit – it just results in criminals moving to other platforms and regular people who just want to send a pic of their kid to the doctor for a telehealth diagnosis get caught instead (seriously, google that incident lol).
For another example. Look at Tiktok having filters (allegedly) and ranking down things in the algorithm that include “bad words”. People just came up with euphemisms for the things they wanted to talk about.
Crime is a social problem, you need to remove the reasons why someone would want to commit a crime that exist in society (e.g., kids being bored as fuck with no jobs, cost of living pressures, cheap shortcuts to be mega rich etc). Same reasoning applies to punitive vs rehabilitative justice, but I think that might be veering a bit too off topic again.
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Not to mention, even if they could read all messages, and do so in a perfectly non-malicious way, it is still simply not possible in the first place for any party to determine the meaning or intent of all private conversations on their platform just based on the literal words.
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I agree, definitely not saying that their aren’t technological hurdles, but how else do we achieve innovation and societal change? It sure is not easy. But even a someone that is technically (computer science) illiterate I can even envisage it as a possibility. I do understand that for people that do not understand how these systems work it is easier said then done, but at the same time I do have some logical understanding as I am curious and active in the STEM field.
The United Nations isn’t a government. If anything, recently we’ve seen differing “opinions” of recent on what “terrorism” actually is.
The problem is some of those countries are large and permanent members 
The UN is a venue for discussion not a government. We’ve also seen that even when a UNSC resolution is passed, often nobody wants to actually enforce it.
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Yes, I agree, I covered this. Again a minor inconvenience is better than no inconvenience, as for the second part I do not advocate for this in my ideal, and if the people moderating are doing it properly the later would not occur.
So how do you stop criminals recruiting someone smart enough to develop an encryption algorithm for them and develop a private messaging application to skirt around “mainstream” ones doing scanning of messaging? (spoilers: you don’t.)
Completely agree, although I might have implied the obvious I did not at all state that I was opposed to this. Again, people seems to be extrapolating or trying to infer arguments that are not all all implicitly or explicitly stated by me.
I mean, your argument seems to boil down to “I can conceive of technological means to completely prevent crime through technology, therefore it must be possible to completely prevent crime through technology” and “Privacy software prevents technological means of preventing crime from working, which is bad because technological means of preventing crime exist and are good”
Again, these are all hurdles, I stated the UN as an example, I am not explicitly saying whether they should be consolidated or lead this theoretical service or anything like that, just a random example. But, here is a universal rule: violence = bad. Hard to argue with that.
What about self defence? What about play-violence in sports? What about violence in media?
Is that really a universal rule though? Some states would argue they perpetrate violence as a form of defense against “the bad people”.
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Would you agree that some inconvenience is better than no inconvenience, also criminals aren’t the brightest.
Sure, but addressing the root cause is even better than putting up a minor roadblock that doesn’t touch that root cause.
Literally untrue lol (look at any list of APTs, there will be both state actors AND organised crime)
What on Earth is play-violence? You can’t pretend violence. There is a fine line between bumping around in rugby compared to stabbing someone with the intent to severely disable or kill. Let’s not play this game.
Documenting violence, is not an act of violence.
The problem is, that isn’t representative of reality. Encryption exists and “bad people” will use it. There is really no putting that cat back in the bag.
Post quantum cryptography is likely to be available long before an actual quantum computer of size exists, capable of cracking encryption too.
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