If running a mesh network is illegal, does it matter that the traffic is just math? Without a network, there's no data transmission of that math. The government controls the airwaves. It doesn't matter if you're broadcasting Top40 or encrypted messages, if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.

There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.

In the hypothetical world that you've set out, where surveillance is so extreme and overreaching as to help finish off the entirety of the internet for good, there's no way it would stop at the internet. The goal isn't controlling this set of standards and protocols that defines just the internet, the goal is controlling communication and the internet is the #1 way of communicating between people at the moment.

If people all started talking through letter mail, you'd get Letter Control, they wouldn't just forget about it because it's not the internet. If the people somehow become smart and coordinated enough to move to some cryptographically-secure method of communication, your government will probably outlaw the equipment and actions associated with using it in the first place instead of trying to decrypt all communications.

The goal is control of information, and the way of doing that is to force everyone to use unsecured communication with no feasible alternatives. I wouldn't expect kid glove treatment with that, unlike speeding or minor shoplifting.

> to force everyone to use unsecured communication

Treat social media as any other unsecured channel. You can do e2e on Facebook, you'll just have to do it yourself. I'm only half joking, I'm sure somebody has done this already, they just keep quiet about it.

Lot of probably's and maybes moving at the speed of government in your comment, look how many decades this has been in the works.

Circumventing the Great Firewall in China is against the rules, comes with some risk for vpn operators and users, yet we know it happens regularly.

Buying and selling drugs online is illegal, yet there's always a Silk Road or Empire Market with enough buyers and sellers to make the risk worth it. We already have "letter control" for drugs, but it doesn't stop me from buying a QP of weed and a federal employee delivering it conveniently to my house.

Good luck outlawing the parts and software, maybe they'll get to them when they finally gather up all the fentanyl.

Even if chat control doesn't happen, the social internet is fucked. Just look at Quora for a preview.

running an actively transmitting network is an easy thing for them to come and shut down. you doing any of the other things can easily be done without them knowing about it. you can be flippant about it all you want, but you don't look intelligent by doing so

oh no a guy on the internet called me stupid, such value will be lost if the EU takes this from us

Cryptography is privacy. Privacy can taken away by law.

It is the same as free speech. You can say what you want, but you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing in many countries.

Ah yes, fortunately governments have never in history successfully declared certain large integers illegal and prosecuted people for sharing them.

Shooting someone is also "just physics", yet many governments have been known to frown upon it (depending on the context).

You'll be okay as long as you print them on a t-shirt

Yep, good thing nobody has ever been jailed for wearing a t-shirt with the wrong slogan.

Even a blank sheet of paper I think was enough to get someone in jail.

It is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_paper_protest

More than anything, this is a good lesson in information theory. A blank sheet of paper isn't devoid of information just because it doesn't contain ink - rather, it is the context of the current situation that defines the information being conveyed. This is true in all forms of communication.

This reminds me of a story I read once about when Victor Hugo had just published Les Miserables. Just after publication, he went to his vacation home due to the controversy he was sure was going to follow the publication of the book. Wanting to know how the reception was going, he mailed his publisher a letter simply containing a question mark. The publisher responded with only an exclamation mark, and Hugo immediately understood - he had written an eternal classic.

(BTW, I read this in the book The User Illusion - a fantastic read)

you missed the reference. as a history lesson, the deCSS code was written on a t-shirt and was deemed acceptable. having the deCSS compiled as an executable was deemed not acceptable.

I got the reference. Seems like it worked out quite nicely for the government/court though, given that deCSS isn't much use printed on a t-shirt, compared to in a binary on a computer?

you can't share the compiled binary, but you can share a shirt. if you have the shirt, you can compile on your own. the t-shirt became the sharing network

That’s the thing about speech: It’s very hard for governments to physically prevent it, but attaching consequences to making use of that capability usually works just as well.

The government failed to stop the spread of the DeCSS code and subsequent tools that were developed using that code. That’s kind of the point.

¿Por qué no los dos?