Can someone how the internet can just… not be encrypted anymore? Like isn’t the internet fundamentally like an open source thing? Obviously the average person can’t hack their way into any website but if the government doesn’t “own” the internet then how can they make legislation like EARN IT and KOSA and such?
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End to end encryption is what a lot of popular communication and social media sites use. This process uses different kinds of keys to “lock” and “unlock” the messages so that nobody but the sender and recipient can access them. When you sign up for a service that provides end to end encryption, you are assigned a “private key” and a “public key” pairing. The private key is not shared with anyone – it’s stored on your device. The public key is shared with everyone – it’s stored on the server which handles these communications. The way these keys are used is best described with an example, so here’s one:
If Mike wants to send Jim an encrypted message, then Mike can use Jim’s public key to scramble the message into something completely unintelligible. The only way to unscramble it is to use Jim’s private key, which only Jim should have access to. For Jim to send a message back to Mike, he just has to use Mike’s public key to scramble the message so that only Mike’s private key can unscramble it.
Theoretically the only other entity that could access these messages is the company responsible for issuing the private-public key pairings, but there are lots of regulations and systems in place to help prevent that. The government is concerned about illegal activity being conducted or coordinated using companies/services that provide this kind of encryption, so they want to add legislation that requires these companies/services to provide the government a way to unscramble these messages despite not being either the sender or recipient.
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