This sums it up: "This bill takes popular rage at social media companies’ immunity under Section 230 for public speech on their platforms, and twists it into a backhanded way of punishing messaging service providers’ use of encryption for private conversations." (emphasis original)
seems sort of pointless when players like Cloudflare have already twice voluntarily censored content on their networks they personally deemed too provocative. Not to mention this does nothing in the event a service provider with end-to-end crypto is implicated in some dastardly deed. The mathematics of crypto still win.
the Signal protocol used on platforms like Whatsapp provides confidentiality, integrity, authentication, participant consistency, destination validation, forward secrecy, post-compromise security (aka future secrecy), causality preservation, message unlinkability, message repudiation, participation repudiation, and asynchronicity. Using the protocol on something like TAILS OS basically turns the conversations participants into living ghosts.
Prosecutors would have one hell of a time proving a provider did anything, and if it started to seem like this could bite "providers" in court or jeopardize their 230 status, they could just release the entire thing under the GPL and patch it to use blockchain or TOR mesh networking after the fact. The name of the program is still tangentially associated with the brand and people on your social network will still talk about it and advocate its use.
To name one thing wrong with this comment: WhatsApp doesn't use Signal. This is just technobabble with sentiment; an attempt to sway, not to communicate.
