Could we have a little sincerity and truth on this matter of encryption, please, and not pretend that people speaking foreign languages or fighting for freedom could be dinged by this.

That's the excuse I keep seeing the opensource extremists making on the forums, and it's fake.

Corporations that want to encrypt chat go behind a firewall. There are solutions for this now, they use them.

That's not what this email was directed at. This was directed at people on the main SL grid encrypting chat -- and also being associated with, or suspected of, or liable to commit criminal acts, most likely, otherwise it wouldn't have necessarily come to the attention of the Lab.

Given the RAMPANT criminality already involved in the third-party viewers, there's no stretch of the imagination here to see that encryption isn't for "corporate communications" but is more likely for illegal activity.

The people using encrypted chat are more likely to be motivated by the desire to conceal financial fraud or engage in illegal activities like child pornography than they are to use it for "corporate communications" -- if they are genuine corporations, they're not on the main grid, duh, they're on Nebraska.

That's why this entire discussion is so fake.

It's disconcerting that the platform provider has the ability to scan and save and exploit chat without any framework of law. I'm totally with you on that -- but you're a newcomer to this concern suddenly when it impacts your God-given right to indulge in any opensource extremism, and were Missing in Action when I would raise it as a human rights concern more generally.

It seems to me that the company has to retain the right to prevent crime just the way the U.S. government has to retain the right to prevent and pursue crime with national telephone and Internet systems. And that means there must be civil rights restrictions applied on this and judge's court orders sought and all the rest. The Lindens must have an analogy to that sort of protective regime. There can't be anarcho-techno-communistic extremes on this, saying that the partisans get to encrypt all their chat "just because they can".

No, there is no reason to hand the grid off to fraudsters and child predators in the name of human rights. You can protect civil rights but still have scanning when there is probable cause and with due process. And that means encryption should only be something done behind firewalls in agreements with LL for those specific corporate programs.