At least Florida’s SB 868/HB 743, “Social Media Use By Minors” bill isn’t beating around the bush when it states that it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.” Usually these sorts of sweeping mandates...
Mmmhmm. Apparently the Threadiverse is about to become illegal in Florida.
First, let’s generate a strong public-private GPG keypair for myself and some hypothetical other Threadiverse user, anotheruser@lemmy.today:
And show the tal@lemmy.today public key:
long keyblock
And then show an example of someone else importing it, pretending that they’re anotheruser@lemmy.today (though in my case, I’ve already got the tal@lemmy.today public key in my keyring):
another long keyblock
And now let’s pretend we’re anotheruser@lemmy.today and use end-to-end encryption that doesn’t have a back door, using
sedto prefix each line with four spaces so that we get nice blockquoted Markdown that we can paste into a Threadiverse comment or direct message to tal@lemmy.today:encrypting message with end-to-end encryption
And let’s have tal@lemmy.today decrypt it:
decrypting message
I guess the only option will be to lock up instance admins for violating Florida law, as they’re operating a social media platform with end-to-end encrypted communications with no backdoor.
EDIT: It’d also probably be nice to have browser and client support to make this more-convenient, no copy-pasting. I haven’t used it, so I can’t vouch for its functionality, but for users using Firefox, this Firefox extension claims it can automatically detect and decrypt GPG content in a webpage; if it can pick up on encrypted, ASCII-armored blockquoted text in a Threadiverse comment, that would hopefully let one simply read encrypted messages in Lemmy or whatever without any additional copy-pasting effort (though sending an encrypted message would still require copy-pasting some text):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnupg_decryptor/
Not that I disagree with your point, but Florida law is only relevant within Florida and, to a limited extent, the United States. Admins of US-based instances could likely be subpoenaed and then held in contempt if they refused, assuming they don’t pull a PornHub and just block all of Florida.
That said, this is very worrying since subpoenas have a MUCH lower threshold of legal bearing than warrants. I suspect that Apple will likely challenge this in court or they stop selling iPhones there.