Attempting to quell encryption is a waste of time, suggests Status‘ security chief
It is not a scarce resource like nuclear energy, whose proliferation is more easily suppressed.
Corey Petty, director of security at Status Messenger, told Bitcoin Surpreme that he believes there is no way to link end-to-end encryption with the kind of backdoor access that law enforcement agencies continue to push for. He also believes that any prohibitive or restrictive measures will be unsuccessful as encryption is an abundant and readily available resource, unlike nuclear power:
„If we take as an example nuclear control around the world, and the success it has had in terms of preventing us from destroying ourselves, we have been able to do so because the development of nuclear weapons is very difficult and depends on advanced chemistry that uses limited and scarce resources in the world. You can control that kind of thing.“
He acknowledged that governments might be able to enforce their desired policies against a centralized enterprise within a specific jurisdiction, but stated
„It’s not going to stop people who are motivated to do bad things from creating their own media based on standard technology that is open source.“
Petty said that Status has been trying to organise itself in a way that is resistant to government pressure. Its ultimate goal is to continue the development of the project without the need for a core team.
From a technological perspective, Status is generally seen as a decentralised protocol. Even so, it still depends on perceived oligopolists like Google and Apple to reach its end users and, as we have seen recently with Huawei, TikTok and WeChat, the US government can put pressure on these companies to support its political programme. The amount of power exuded by these aforementioned gatekeepers has led Telegram to file an antitrust complaint against Apple’s App Store with the EU.
Petty acknowledged that decentralised applications remain vulnerable to these corporate restrictions, but said the project is „actively seeking alternative means of distribution for software“. A beta of the Desktop Status application for all major operating systems was recently launched. Petty revealed that Status is also working on its own application shop. He said they hope to have a proof of concept, or POC, for this project available by the end of the year:
„We will have a PoC, probably by the end of the year for the distribution of rudimentary applications for some of our services, such as the desktop and Android mobile application that will lay the foundation for a larger application shop distribution for Status and potentially other larger distributed applications that like to go on our platform.“