About the only thing I can think of is to mandate the use of (flawed) AI to identify messages that seem nonsensical and refuse to pass them, and then to play a game of Chinese-style DPI whack-a-mole in an attempt to suppress open alternatives.
If you have the ability to run custom software—even if it’s a bash script—you can develop secure alternatives. And even if you somehow restrict open source messaging, I can just use good old pen-and-paper OTP to encrypt the plaintext before typing it in, or copy/paste some other text pre-encrypted in another program. But even then, all this will do is kick off a steganographic arms race. AI generated text where the first letter of each word is the cyphertext may be nearly impossible to identify, especially at scale.
If anything like this were to pass, my first task would be making a gamified, user-friendly frontend for this kind of thing.
If you have the ability to run custom software—even if it’s a bash script—you can develop secure alternatives. And even if you somehow restrict open source messaging, I can just use good old pen-and-paper OTP to encrypt the plaintext before typing it in, or copy/paste some other text pre-encrypted in another program. But even then, all this will do is kick off a steganographic arms race. AI generated text where the first letter of each word is the cyphertext may be nearly impossible to identify, especially at scale.
If anything like this were to pass, my first task would be making a gamified, user-friendly frontend for this kind of thing.