If you’re “innocent until proven guilty”, we only have a few options.<p>One is for pretty much all IT personnel to give the government the proverbial finger: they <i>need</i> our consent to do this, and if we <i>DON’T</i> fail to give it to them (i.e. if we don’t tell them to fuck off) then we’re all more guilty than the worst abusers of human rights.<p>If we all want to permit this, not only do I quit, as in withdraw my consent and support for all the governments involved, but I declare them legitimate targets for anything and everything.<p>We know this fails, in all ways - I’m not even going to discuss the possibility of “it’s perfect and only catches ‘the Bad’” because those of us who are competent know where this stands - but in its failure it exposes everything private to an unaccountable, unelected, black box of people who will get to sift through everything you do that, regardless of whether it’s really risqué or not, exposing your most private, intimate moments for … who knows what they do with it?<p>Save it in case it can be used against you somehow later?<p>Pass it around, as a titillating amusement internally?<p>Build a full-blown “we might just blackmail you with this, because…” in the event that the crazies pass some law(s) with worse religious or morality-police based backing?<p>The potential for abuse is pretty much infinite. If “they” want this, let’s have every one of their emails, phone calls, text messages, and photos publicly available-that’s the level of “legitimate target” I encourage-and we <i>can</i> make that happen to them. Not because we have something to hide, but because they don’t understand basic human rights.
Apart from the dystopian future this suggests, what surprised me in particular was that apparently "Gmail, Facebook Messenger, outlook.com and the chat function of X-Box, [already implement] indiscriminate chat control". I couldn't find a source in the article for this though.