The “Going Dark” Debate
For the past thirty years, we have been watching the same tired movie on repeat.
It goes like this: Law enforcement agencies (like the FBI or Europol) complain that encryption is letting criminals “go dark.” They demand a “backdoor”—a golden key that lets the good guys read encrypted messages while keeping the bad guys out.
Privacy experts and mathematicians scream back the obvious truth: “Math doesn’t care about your badge.“ You cannot build a backdoor that only works for the police. If you weaken encryption for one, you weaken it for everyone, inviting hackers and foreign spies into our digital lives.
We have been stuck in this deadlock—Safety vs. Privacy—for decades. But what if the premise of the argument is wrong?
Moderation Without Decryption
The debate assumes that to find illegal content (like malware or abuse imagery), you must see the content. In the plaintext world, that is true. In the Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) world, it is false.
This is the concept of “Blind Moderation.”
Imagine a messaging app that is fully End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE). The government wants to ensure no illegal contraband is being shared. Instead of breaking the encryption (the backdoor approach), the app could use FHE to check images against a database of known illegal hashes.
The server asks: “Does this encrypted image match any encrypted hash in the illegal database?”
The math replies: “Yes” or “No.”
At no point did the server “see” the user’s family photos. At no point was the encryption key compromised. The privacy remains intact, but the specific illegal content is flagged.
The Political Compromise
This technology offers a rare “Exit Ramp” for policymakers. Legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EU’s Chat Control proposals have faced massive backlash because they threaten E2EE.
FHE offers a diplomatic solution. It allows tech giants to prove they are compliant with safety regulations without betraying the trust of their users. It preserves the mathematical integrity of E2EE while satisfying the societal need for accountability.
Conclusion: A Third Way
The “Crypto Wars” have been framed as a zero-sum game: either we have total anarchy or a surveillance state. Homomorphic Encryption proves this is a false dichotomy. We can have robust, unbreakable privacy and effective safety mechanisms. We just need to stop fighting over “keys” and start looking at the computation itself.