cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/31093
I’d like to hear what people here think about China’s state surveillance practices, as well as their presumably planned backdoor mandates for encryption with there recent law*. Since almost all the leftists in Western capitalist countries are very big on the use of e2ee and highly against Western state surveillance, what do you think of China doing this and if it differs from your opinions on Western nations doing the same thing, why?
*Sources on Chinese encryption laws, they were the ones with least Western bias as I could find: 1, 2, 3 (actual encryption law text in Chinese), 4 (English summary of encryption law), 5. Basically, as far as I can tell, China requires/plans to require any commercial encryption tech to be approved by the government before it can be be made available, which most people have taken to mean backdoors will be mandated. Whether this will also prevent open source non-backdoored encryption like GPG from being accessible in China is still unclear.
I don’t think western countries are “for e2ee”. The states themselves are neck deep into widespread surveillance. A subset of end users are concerned about privacy but they are not the.majority.
I do think China implementing asking for backdoors is different from for example USA asking for backdoors. USA recently had another whistleblower charged. China is far from perfect but it isn’t a bunch of corporations in a trench coat. Even then I don’t support secret backdoors but the context matters.
That being said I don’t see any explicit mention of backdoors in the first link. I am not sure if it’s a good idea to assume that bsckdoors are implied. But I guess we will find out in the future.
