That’s why I put the conditions “if the system was transparent, open, and provided an easy way to get false positive sorted” on there. That’s like saying “if people were good, I’d believe in communism”. In the real world, these conditions will never be met.

We have antivirus software and it works just fine without sending samples to the mothership (though it does work a lot better if you let it upload stuff to their sandboxes). The theory behind the system is solid and well-intentioned people working together can make a real difference.

A big problem I’m seeing with this debate is that politicians aren’t going to give up on trying to enforce scannability of all messages. “I don’t want nothing of the government on my device!” is how you get a 2030 law banning Linux on the desktop. Every politician of every political party has heard every argument by every activist. Everyone in the general public has heard how bad the concept is. Nobody is capable of stopping the inevitable legal attack on properly private messages.

I think we can get more people behind this if messenger apps are willing to work together and show people the implications in terms they understand. If WhatsApp shows “Ursula von der Leyen (EU) has been added to the chat” to every chatroom and adds a label “No problem, only x% chance of child porn content” on every image or meme shared (where x is just the percentage of pixels with a skin color hue), people would riot. Maybe add random emoji responses by “Ursula” too just to remind everyone that she’s watching. Of course no app will ever want to spook their users like that, but I think it’s the only way to stop this movement.

I’m very pessimistic about the future. We’ve had useful encryption for about 20 years after it being considered a military secret for hundreds or even thousands of years, and I think we’ll eventually lose it again.