I am amazed at the current steady flow of intercepted phone calls that are leaked in some form or shape. Take the phone calls of the Turkish prime minister, the leaked phone call of the US diplomat who found quite strong words for the foreign politics of the EU or the phone call between the EU foreign representative and the Estonian foreign secretary discussing the situation in the Ukraine as prime examples. What few reports are asking is who intercepted those calls, who might have leaked them and what was their motive in doing so? Leaving the political questions aside in this post I think it is save to assume the majority of those phone calls were not lucky intercepts by a teenager but the work of professionals in the employment of one state or another. Also, I think it's a safe assumption that these leaks are just the peak of the ice berg. A nice thing of leaked phone calls is that they litterally speak for themselves compared to documents who's authenticity is much harder to prove to the public.
In the meantime it must dawn on most politicians that they simply have to assume that the majority of their calls are intercepted and recorded if no end-to-end encryption is used. Not that they don't want to use devices that offer end-to-end encrypted calls but from what I can tell they are still cumbersome to use and interoperability between devices of different makers is virtually non-existent. But perhaps this constant flow of leaked phone calls will trigger people to rethink their position and create a bigger demand for interoperable and easy to use devices and applications for end-to-end encrypted calls that are not only affordable for them but for the general public as well. I for one would welcome it as I think it's not only politicians who in the meantime have no privacy anymore when making a phone call.
Being someone who is really interested in privacy i am actually happy that these information is leaked.
Remember the time when the NSA scandal took off in june 2013?
It was not a major issue to our german top-politicians until it became clear that Angela Merkels phone was also spied on by NSA.
After that it became a big pain point.
(it also showed that spying on citizens is okay, but spying on members of the government… no way! because they are simply more equal…)
Now that Erdogans and that one US Diplomats calls were leaked it maybe is something like a wake up call.
The more politicians are shown that mass surveillance breaks human rights and makes every human beings right for privacy, they might consider its the wrong thing.
I still have some hope that in 10 years we will have a better society, but the constant insistance by politicains on Network Filters (of course only for really really bad and illegal activity like terrorism or child pornography!!!!!111 and not for unwanted but legal websites of online gambling or other political views!! ) makes me fear that they still dont understand the issue….
I understand that the internet should somehow be not its own world without any rules or laws.
But the way of enforcing shuold not be mass surveillance and network filtering where no independent instance checks the legalness of filtering…
I guess you could discuss this topic for days without moving forward 😉
Coming back to your post: The Problem with end2end encryption for phone calls is always the simplicity.
Like you have already pointed out in your postings about email encryption: if you lack friends and relatives who are not as paranoid as we are, you simply can forget about it.
Its also with privacy… see facebook. Simply by people that know you and upload their addresbook/phonebook to facebook they already know you and your social network without the need that you sign up to their service personally…
so.. i’m stopping now…
Well, and even if, some day, everyone uses e2e encryption, we’ll realise that the attacker is already *inside* the phone. Who writes the phone OS? And who else can plant an additional trojan into it, if he’s not already controlling the phone OS vendor?