Cassie Heart
@cassie
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk/ This is why you have to make it impossible, not a feature out of the good graces of a company. If Quilibrium receives an order to do this, we couldn't fulfill it.
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Ashoat
@ashoat.eth
hmm the article describes a government order that compels Apple to introduce a backdoor to make all “fully encrypted material” viewable to the UK government seems like something that’s impossible to protect against with software
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
How do you compel a decentralized protocol that can communicate over too many mediums to censor?
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Ashoat
@ashoat.eth
I’d guess that the techniques used to shut down Tornado Cash, techniques used to bring Pavel Durov into compliance, etc. are generalizable against pretty much any software project I’ll admit we’ve never seen it tried on a blockchain project with massive scale/traction. purely hypothetical, but I wonder what would happen if the Feds issued arrest warrants on Vitalik, all major ETH devs, all large node operators, etc. probably still couldn’t fully take down Ethereum, at least not without more governments onboard but for Q… if the British government extradited you for not complying with the same order they gave Apple, what would happen to the project?
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
Good luck extraditing an American for refusing to comply with British law when they do not operate in Britain. I can't be compelled to write code. I won't be compelled to follow laws of a country I don't live in. And if the interpretation of the law treats cryptography as a munition, the 2A agrees I should be able to possess and use it, and the 1A agrees I should be able to publish it.
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
Q is an open source protocol, and there are many more countries than Britain who have people who would be very incentivized to see the network live on if for some reason darker days were ahead that enabled such extradition.
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Ashoat
@ashoat.eth
respect you and your views, and I may be uninformed in some way, but it strikes me those things applied to Tornado Cash too: decentralized protocol, open source, many devs wanting the network to live on the one clear difference to me is the legal argument, which as an American I very much hope you’re right on sadly the UK government is maybe the worst violator of privacy as a civil liberty in the “free world”, and I really hope the US doesn’t play along with their schemes
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
One distinction: tornado cash wasn't fully decentralized, and the reason they could successfully stop use of it was by virtue of Ethereum being a public ledger. If Q traffic is indistinguishable from other encrypted communications, the only notability would be that they can't decrypt it in this hypothetical. Are they going to also implement a great firewall? It goes over LoRa too. They can have fun stopping radio waves. I’m in my bonus round in life. This is my final fight. If the country changed and tried to blatantly violate the constitution so deeply and actually succeed at using said force, I will gladly be a criminal under such laws.
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