Re: [saag] Ubiquitous Encryption: content filtering

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Responding to various parts of the thread:

Q: What is the difference between filtering and censorship?
A: The person who decides to impose it.

Filtering is actually an essential tool for use of the modern Internet.
Without filtering there is no mechanism to control abuse.

Today I received five junk calls. The time is rapidly approaching when I
get rid of the telephone line completely. There is simply too much spam.

The fact that the Russian Business Network has put a machine on the net
does not mean that any machine I own need be able to connect to it. I don't
want their IP address to be reachable, I don't want their DNS names to
resolve.

So the ability to perform filtering is an essential part of every
end-to-end encryption mechanism. But giving control over that filtering to
the government is not. When I was at university there was a club for thugs
who went round smashing up restaurants for fun. One of the members of that
club is now the UK Prime Minister. I am damned if I am going to let the
likes of him decide what anyone can access.

The question is who has control and who is empowered.

I am firmly of the opinion that ubiquitous end-to-end encryption is only
viable if it is accompanied by a robust and easy to use mechanism that
allows for a gap in the stack. If I publish a key for [e-mail]
it will be the key of a service in the cloud that performs anti-malware
filtering. Use of the end-to-end key will be reserved to people who are
expressly authorized to use it.