alt Hacker NewsLet's say I invented a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments, I'd go to jail for doing that (Tornado Cash). Let's say I made a secure messenger, I'd go to jail for that (Telegram, EncroChat, SkyECC) or narrowly avoid jail (Session) or be forced to add a backdoor (Anom). Let's say I made an operating system that didn't spy on you, I'd be threatened with jail for that (GrapheneOS). And of course there are more things, for which there will be more consequences (mostly jail) but for things that haven't been done yet there are obviously no examples offhand.
Basically everything that fits outside of existing patterns is illegal one way or another. Only people who are naïve to these consequences will ever be motivated to make these things.
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> Let's say I invented a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments, I'd go to jail for doing that (Tornado Cash)
This is just a disingenuous take.
Tornado Cash founder didn't get criminally convicted for "a genius way go use cryptography to send anonymous payments." He got convicted for operating a money-laundering service.
The fact that his service utilized "a genius way to use cryptography to send anonymous payments" is entirely orthogonal to the actual crime he got in trouble for. He would have gotten convicted just the same regardless of the cryptography usage, because the actual crime here was operating a money-laundering service.
Please don't frame these as technological crimes, nobody has yet been prosecuted for that specifically.
Telegram and Session are never secure by any means. Honestly I'd consider both of them to be intelligence and law enforcement honeypots given how aggressively they marketed themselves as the "secure" option and how little they actually deliver.
I would trust WhatsApp before I trust telegram.