[Cryptography] Licensing of cryptographic services in France

[John Levine]

It appears that Jon Callas <jon at callas.org> said:
>Telegram is not a cryptographic system. 
>
>I repeat, Telegram is not a cryptographic system.

Thanks for this very useful comment.

>Is an E2EE chat room with a million people in it private? Operationally, an E2EE chat with that many people and no
>barriers to joining in is nothing like private. ...

It might be useful to compare it to WhatsApp. Conversations in WhatsApp really are E2EE
using the Signal protocol. The maximum group size is 1024, raised from 512 two years ago.
It's certainly not a million, but a thousand people is a pretty big group.

Meta makes reasonable efforts to try and deter bad stuff. Users can block or report
messages, and they have a technically clever signature scheme that allows them to verify
that a reported message really was from the original sender without damaging the security
of messages otherwise.  The privacy policy is a little vague but it appears that they do
log metadata so they know who you're talking to, but not what you said.

I'm with Daphne Keller here. No matter how loudly you shout "free speech, if you
flagrantly allow your users to share terrorist and CSAM material when you could at least
try to stop it, you shouldn't be surprised when governments intervene.

R's,
John