Do you really think that corruption uses court orders of fabricated terrorism cases as regular means to abuse the system? If that’s true, Europe is screwed up regardless of how a popular messenger handles your ip.
Anyway, “slippery slope” is an extrapolation and not an argument, cannot be used as such. You can naively extrapolate everything, e.g. I was too lazy to take out the trash today … and then I’ll try heroin. I couldn’t get a raise and switched jobs … and then I will be trafficking humans. I disagreed with my spouse … the divorce is imminent. I asked customers what they think of a complex issue … I will sell their laundry to everyone. This is all nonsense.
If a system can be abused, it will be abused. We have seen this play out in America and people are still not learning from these events.
There are other ways to investigate suspects without sacrificing principals of privacy and spoiling it for the majority of 99.5% innocent human beings.
This is a sufficiently general argument against all law enforcement capabilities, though. Give the police any power at all and it's inevitable that someone will abuse it at some point in the future. Typically, most communities nonetheless decide on some level of rules, checks, and capabilities somewhere between "nothing" and "everything," accepting that which risks and tradeoffs are worth it might change over time. It seems to be largely only Hacker News that thinks law enforcement should never get any access to any data at all, ever.
What are these other ways to investigate suspects you're thinking that are preferable to building out networks from Telegram metadata? Bugging houses? Threatening family members to rat people out? Deep cover covert agents? Are any of those less subject to abuse?
This is a strange place to end up; you make a convincing argument against the somewhat unsophisticated and very common capstone of digital privacy. But if you really want to be private online, there are always ways, if not existent, possible, and if not possible, likely being worked on or a product of some future innovation. We end up at the “well you can’t stop it anyways,” point.
Do we only then use digital services to spy on those not savvy enough or careful enough to be private? What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better? We end up having to answer the same question as before: what other methods are possible.
What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better?
They get banned of it eventually, exactly the reason why this thread exists (telegram evaluates an idea of staying in Germany by relaxing some privacy rules, remember? It’s not their decision, but Germany’s). When reality changes, so do rules, they are not set in “capstone”. A couple of demolished buildings and the general public starts asking: why do we have so much of <whatever comes to mind> when it’s clearly dangerous.
Anyway, “slippery slope” is an extrapolation and not an argument, cannot be used as such. You can naively extrapolate everything, e.g. I was too lazy to take out the trash today … and then I’ll try heroin. I couldn’t get a raise and switched jobs … and then I will be trafficking humans. I disagreed with my spouse … the divorce is imminent. I asked customers what they think of a complex issue … I will sell their laundry to everyone. This is all nonsense.