A few days ago we discussed how end to end encryption and decentralisation were an inherently political matter.
We saw how Signal’s end to end encryption meant that security agencies can’t simply compel the Signal nonprofit to unscramble users’ messages or monitor them. With Bitcoin, there is no central authority to target, and no easily traceable identities, unless you’re a beginner who’s left their cryptocurrency in an exchange’s account. But it’s because they’re inherently secure, they’re attractive to criminals and terrorists. That in turn attracts the attention – and ire – of law enforcement agencies. And turns it into a political issue.
This article in fact describes the use of Jabber-based messaging apps by criminals in Russia:
Jabber’s federation means that anyone can open a server and run it as they see fit. That’s enormously attractive to criminals worried about companies cooperating closely with governments, especially in the United States. And some Jabber servers are set up specifically to cater to criminals.
– Why Jabber reigns across the Russian cybercrime underground
This isn’t a matter of forcing wiretapping phones, or compelling Apple to unlock iPhones, or forcing a bank to turn over account statements. If traffic on this server is tunneled through a VPN, even locating what Jabber chat server criminals use is a huge problem for security agencies. And unlike Parler or Facebook groups, one can simply set up another Jabber server.
It’s the same reason that sites on the Tor network that sell and list torrents and other contraband are so resilient to being taken down.