whatever backdoor you put in
- will be used for industry espionage
- will be used against politicians where it's supposed shouldn't apply
- will be used by state actors systematically destabilize EU countries if the relationship with US, China, Russia get's worse (e.g. "ups, I spoofed non encrypted message and no it looks like the prime minister is a pedo" kind of situations)
But that's not to say a human right should not spring into existence as new technology becomes available. For instance, the freedom to receive information (especially radio stations, such as Voice of America) got some attention post WW II.
Encryption preserves our right to have private conversations in the digital era, where such surveillance is ubiquitous.
This still works, by the way.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) states the following in Article 17:
> 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > > 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
The UN declaration on human rights dates back to just after WW II and the ICCPR does not really change anything. Encryption was not widely available and the breaking of things like Enigma was still a state secret. Phone taps were pretty common and the phone system still had human operators that could listen in trivially.
This doesn't mention encryption at all. And that's the problem. It's not covered as a human right under these declarations that lots of countries signed. And of course lots of the signers are taking lots of liberties with these rights. Lawful protection is a very vague label.
Of course, the modern practice of modern business communication happening via things like email, shared files, etc. and the very real risk of foreign nations spying on such communications require a very robust approach to encryption that is generally incompatible with installing back doors and giving arbitrary government agencies wide access to those. Of course such back doors are widely assumed to actually exist anyway but the scope of that is a bit murky. Does the NSA have access to your Google Drive? Maybe, probably. What if you are a business? What if that is hosted in the EU. Probably still yes. It's a valid reason for some EU companies to not want to use Google Drive and a few other US provided tools and infrastructure.
If the back doors leak, you compromise the security communications of all companies and people that use the affected platforms. If that goes unnoticed for a few years, your enemies gain a huge advantage.
When it's Germany vs. the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean intelligence agencies (to give a few practical examples), I'd prefer to not have German government agencies to be the weakest link in my communications. That's the risk that needs balancing.
Even if you trust them to have the right intentions (which is a big if), trusting them to be competent and worthy of that trust is another matter. I'd assume the worst actually. It only takes 1 person to be compromised here for this to go wrong. And with the level of Russian, Chinese, etc. intelligence activity, the only safe assumption is that there are going to be compromised people that will have wide access to information about back doors if not the actual back doors. In fact, for back doors to be useful for policing, a lot of people would need access. Without that level of access, the back doors are pointless. And with that they become a gigantic national security problem.
This could have been achieved at least 15 years earlier, so encryption does not seem to be the main obstacle to investigations. In some cases.
Similarly, all investigations into Epstein related JP Morgan transactions have been obstructed, for example by the firing of a Virgin Islands GA who investigated too much.
Looking forward to some EU politician tweets on these issues.
Here is the original post:
That doesn't sound like the rhetoric of someone who is winning. It sounds more like something someone pushed into a corner, and seeing their project crumbling would say.
But bringing up that it is about civil liberties is an important point, not the way he would like though.
You would think that trying to keep the discourse about criminals and pedophiles would be smarter for his side? I do not follow Danish politics, but I do start to wonder if he is just not very good at doing politics?
"We know that social media and encrypted services are unfortunately largely is used to facilitate many forms of crime. There are examples on how criminal gangs recruit completely through encrypted platforms young people to commit, among other things, serious crimes against persons. It is an expression of a cynicism that is almost completely incomprehensible.
We therefore need to look at how we can overcome this problem. Both in terms of what the services themselves do, but also what we from the authorities can do. It must not be the case that the criminals can hide behind encrypted services that authorities cannot access to."
[...]
"I also note that steps have been taken within the EU towards a strengthened regulation of, among other things, digital information services and social media platforms. For example, the European Commission has proposed a new Regulation on rules for preventing and combating sexual abuse of children."
[...]
"The government has a strong focus on eliminating digital violations – it applies especially when it comes to sexual abuse of children – and supports the proposed regulation, unlike the opposition."
Kids are too intuitive naturally to believe for a minute that privacy and civil liberty are erroneous concepts. They're well aware by this age that it's usually an individual erroneous moron who doesn't understand simple stuff like this, who's causing the trouble and some of them are adults no different than the asinine kids they are quite familiar with.
As everybody knows, most average children by definition are born already having more intelligence than a below-average adult, kids just don't have a paycheck which depends on them having a dystopic point of view.
That being said I don't agree that his is necessary.
Including in the US. The "right to bear arms" doens't cover high-energy explosives.
You can make lots of things legally. The laws are around storage and transport. Where the short version is you 24hours and you mostly can’t transport.
Also when congress de-funded (outlawed) the process for felons to restore their firearm rights, they forgot to do it with explosives. So even a felon can have high-energy explosives legally.
That... Wouldn't be tolerated if this was a 2nd amendment right. Imagine the same limitations applied to firearms.
People that buy high-explosives at scale just have some land outside of town where they can store them en masse. Problem solved. There are huge magazines of high-explosive just outside many major cities all over the US. Very infrequently, one of them goes “boom”, which kind of justifies forcing them to be on the outskirts.
You can own it, you just have to store it where it won’t wreck your neighbors if you are an idiot. Rural land is cheap.
In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.
Just don’t write it down encrypted.
In Germany, it is often illegal to disseminate such material (e.g. for building bombs) by § 130a StGB:
> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130a.html
DeepL translation:
"§ 130a Instructions for criminal offenses
(1) Anyone who disseminates or makes publicly available content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instruction for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1) and is intended to promote or arouse the willingness of others to commit such an act shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.
(2) The same penalty shall apply to anyone who
1. disseminates or makes available to the public content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instructions for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1), or
2. gives instructions in public or at a meeting for an unlawful act referred to in Section 126 (1)
in order to encourage or incite others to commit such an act.
(3) § 86 (4) shall apply mutatis mutandis."
---
For reference: § 126 StGB is:
> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__126.html
DeepL translation:
"§ 126 Disturbance of public order by threatening to commit criminal offenses
(1) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,
1. commits one of the cases of breach of the peace specified in § 125a sentence 2 nos. 1 to 4,
2. commits a criminal offense against sexual self-determination in the cases specified in § 177 paragraphs 4 to 8 or § 178,
3. murder (§ 211), manslaughter (§ 212) or genocide (§ 6 of the International Criminal Code) or a crime against humanity (§ 7 of the International Criminal Code) or a war crime (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 of the International Criminal Code),
4. grievous bodily harm (§ 224) or serious bodily harm (§ 226),
5. a criminal offense against personal freedom in the cases of Section 232 (3) sentence 2, Section 232a (3), (4) or (5), Section 232b (3) or (4), Section 233a (3) or (4), in each case insofar as these are crimes, Sections 234 to 234b, § 239a or § 239b,
6. robbery or extortion (§§ 249 to 251 or § 255),
7. a crime dangerous to the public in the cases of Sections 306 to 306c or 307 (1) to (3), Section 308 (1) to (3), Section 309 (1) to (4), Sections 313, 314 or 315 (3), § 315b (3), § 316a (1) or (3), § 316c (1) or (3) or § 318 (3) or (4), or
8. a dangerous offense in the cases of § 309 (6), § 311 (1), § 316b (1), § 317 (1) or § 318 (1)
shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.
(2) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb public peace, knowingly falsely claims that one of the unlawful acts referred to in paragraph 1 is about to be committed shall also be punished.
It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."
At the absolute worst, OTPs are trivially uncrackable and relatively foolproof, assuming you can exchange keys out of band. Furthermore, it is trivial to generate keys that decode captured ciphertext into decoy cleartext, should the government try to coerce the keys from you.
I'm not saying OTP is practical for regular people in everyday chats (though it certainly can be for text, in my opinion). However, it is apparent to me that if RSA+AES becomes unviable, for example, then it will have nearly no impact on any criminal operation that cares about security.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
All Australians now live with the Assistance and Access Act 2018, where yes in fact if you use the illegal math, receive a TCN and do not comply… straight to jail.
I probably do not have to point out the issue with the soundbite, but I am doing it anyway: The “laws” of mathematics are valid across all of existence. Last time I checked, that includes Australia. As a matter of fact, I have personally stored encrypted communications with an Australian vendor after the law went into effect (not that I knew about that law in particular). And I can confirm that the communications were indeed still encrypted.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w (Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election?)
Thus, 'freedom of speech' is a perfectly legitimate and reasonable answer to 'what right you think society should protect', regardless of what country we are speaking about.
To help you along, you basically have two alternatives:
1. Be intentionally vague, so the definition encapsulates just about anything and can then be applied and enforced at will. This is obviously what they are going for, by the way, and *that* is the word game being played here.
2. Some set of sets of mathematical functions, contingent on some properties pertaining to computational complexity. This is what cryptography is and, as such, is the correct way to go about it. Non-exhaustively, one property we are looking for is that some data can only be considered 'encrypted' if the computational complexity of decoding it without a secret/key is strictly higher than with said secret/key.
As I also said in another comment, I can derive an encrypted message a priori. That makes it fundamentally different from any analogies tied to physics or chemistry.
https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/reu/spm/1426/svar/207...
For those less familiar with Danish: the minister's answer is basically the same spiel about needing to protect children; and how people will still be protected by the legal system (you know, which is little consultation after you've been beaten up, swindled across borders or worse). So this quote is from a year before Denmark had the presidency in the EU and pushed Chat Control forward. (Though clearly they haven't changed their views on this.)
consolation
The truth is that this is just another corrupt politician.
"*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules."
source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Encryption algorithm, source code and ciphertext are also free speech. Here is RSA printed on a T-shirt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(fron...
Those are signs of rot and fungal infection.
As a fellow EU citizen that came from a “third world country” I can’t help but to be surprised about 3 things:
- How slowly but surely the EU and its members are becoming exactly like the governments of said third world countries. (I’ve lived through them, trust me, I know)
- How unaware most citizens are about EU’s power hungriness. The same EU that hasn’t yet apologised for their attempt to clean up the US mess in the Middle East by taking on the displaced people from that region without proper integration plans.
- The fellow Europeans have little clue about the shit-show and corruption in Brussels. It’s rotten.
Corruption and incompetence, solved.
[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2429354-wissen-sms-jes-door-rutte-vol...
It's always either public "servants" in power, or the rich people, putting themselves outside of the rules. If you are an elected official, and make a stunt like this, it should be grounds for immediate dismissal, IMO. But, alas, nowadays these kinds of things are so minor and irrelevant, in the sea of ridiculously horrible stuff they do.
It's at least refreshing that there are still places, like the Netherlands in this case, where there are some (even when it's surface-level) repercussions of such behavior.
I don't think off-the-record communication always implies corruption. I imagine it to be impossibly hard sometimes to get people to agree on anything (which is basically a PM's entire job), if all communication must happen out in the open.
I'd assume many high ranking Western politicians do something similar, while paying lip service to high minded ideals about openness, transparancy and democracy.
no. Regards, Ursula
Our PM at the time of covid "lost" his Whatsapp backups, and his replacement also had problems getting access to Whatsapp messages. How convenient.
If you worked in a regulated industry this would be instant dismissal. For the UK govt its business as usual.
These days I learn not to get attached to my message history
It's not an accident they don't use government email/IM and use WhatsApp/Signal instead.
But then they turn around and want to convince us it's bad when we use it. Because they're the ones handling “acceptable” secrets, somehow.
(Though to be fair, if we’re comparing South American military dictators, he was actually almost reasonable)
So while there are massive issues wrt. compliance and giving a US company control over all of this from a purely security choice they could have done way worse and still f*up compliance.
You really might want to consider however that ‘foreign’ in this case could be anybody from a Russian FSB agent in Moscow, to a pro Project 2025 CIA agent.
It’s not a good idea for a minister in a gov’t to have their ideas spammed to people accidentally or (by hostile action) intentionally that are not within that same gov’t.
Regardless of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, if anything else it’s an operational risk due to misaligned incentives that the voters are really dumb to not make a bigger deal about.
When researchers dumped 100% of Signal's users in the USA, because its contact discovery API has no rate limiting, they found a huge portion of Signal's US userbase has Washington D.C. area codes.
"Signal; Washington D.C. numbers are more than twice as likely to be registered with Signal than for any other area in the US" https://encrypto.de/papers/HWSDS21.pdf
Meanwhile, in Scotland since the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon ran her government with an entirely parallel communication network on WhatsApp, explicitly to prevent her government's discussions and decisions from being discoverable by FoI requests.
There was daily deletion of messages. It was drummed into people by Sturgeon's head civil servant, Ken "Plausible Deniability" Thompson: https://archive.is/jK6Bd
> Thomson was head of the Covid co-ordination directorate of the Scottish government and wrote: “Just to remind you (seriously), this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the “clear chat” button is…”. He later added: “Plausible deniability are my middle names. Now clear it again!”
Sturgeon, just like Boris Johnson, retained zero WhatsApp messages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-67949454
Scotland only banned use of WhatsApp in government 4 months ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8pe585z1o
Before people would go down the pub and have a discussion or in the corridor.
Things were never all discussed through official channels.
Now actually is probably more transparent as some of the WhatsApp messages are leaked and people can't deny them.
"Whatsapp" is the new "talking to the person in the corridor" or "having a quick chat down the pub", it's not the new email, and having them leak is ironically the most accountability we've seen.
I'll use an example of someone I support generally now: Tony Blair was accused of having backroom discussions regarding the invasion of Iraq and secret meetings away from even his cabinet[0]. Since we only have hearsay of what went on, it's very difficult to hold him accountable for this.
If it was up to me, using whatsapp for ANY govt business should be an instant sackable offence. I don't conduct my company business on whatsapp. I conduct it on mainly slack and email. Its not hard.
Decisions are not made in meetings they are made in discussions before the meetings. Going into a meeting and thinking that your comments will change things is being naive.
From that the thing to be learnt is that you have to have off the record meetings first to convince the powers that be.
Now at least some of these meetings are recorded via WhatsApp and leaks before they never were.
Also see how IBM and Oracle get business - they take the senior C level managers out to lunch or golf and persuade them. They don't bother talking to the people who could evaluate if it was a good deal technically.
So re your comment: 'For the UK govt its business as usual', not really.
You do not have to like the government of the day, but don't fall into the trap of believing that they are all the same.
In the Physicists from 1961 (German: Die Physiker, F. Dürrenmatt) the central theme is that scientists cannot "uninvent" something. Encryption is here to stay. Mathematically proven. Period.
The criminals will just flock to the "real encryption" and not the honeypots/backdoored messengers as they are being caught. In the end word of mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is unsafe."
Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.
Defending the innocent law abiding adult Joe, just wanting to send their honey pics in private is a distractor in this argument. I will not sacrifice my western standards just because 0.1% people are inherently evil.
Actually the opposite seems to be true. Criminal gangs are particularly susceptible to honeypots precisely because they don't trust the mainstream services.
2 prominent example was that huge sting operation a couple of years back where a supposedly "secure" service was being run by the FBI. And then you have the infamous pager plot, which is admittedly very different but it perfectly illustrates how shaky alternative communications can be.
>Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.
From the hysteria this has generated you would think it was the most crippling threat western democracy has faced since communism.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617630/German-court-f...
Actually the reality was the honeypots were illegal to use as evidence in court. So these criminals are now smarter and more dangerous as we taught them OPSEC.
We always check the logs and when something goes wrong we vote for the box to explode
So, monitoring them of the job, sure, but they have the right for a private life. Or not, depending on the law...
It is a bit more complicated for high ranking official, where immunities and classified information come into play, and they don't really have 9-to-5 jobs. But for lower ranking public servants, like police officers, magistrates, mayors, etc... that would apply.
The slippery balance is also that the good guys of yesterday are the bad guys of today and vice versa.
But both never stopped development of better, weirder, stranger and scarier stuff that can both be used for bad or for good, whichever you choose. I highly doubt encryption will stop because they outlawed it. There will be even better development of encryption that will be even harder to detect if encryption was actually used.
(Obviously, the difference is in number of users -- not many hams, and lots of internet users, and "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is a difference in kind")
Ham is useful, there are things about it that make it DIFFERENTLY useful than the internet. (see also number stations)
You mean like certain medical issues? You really should tune into a HAM band one of these days.
The construct of government with its many imperfections isn't able to parse and interpret any and all communication.
If he really believes that he should send all his correspondence to Putin and Trump and probably much worse for him: his constituents.
In time, you will find that what a politician means is dependent at least of: political party he is in, amount of lobby/bribes he/she was subjected to, time of day, weather, his souse's mood.
Don't make the priest follow the teaching of Jesus, it won't work.
> Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life edit
> Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...
> "Postal and telecommunications secrecy are inviolable."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Constitution_of_t...
But you know how it goes with law: all you need is a supreme-court equivalent to judge what are the boundaries and exact definition of those articles..
The article 31 is not even protected by the “Eternity Clause” that, ironically can simply be removed by the legislature.
But it seems relatively irrelevant anyways, as all western governments seem to just ignore all fundamental laws if it suits them, let alone regular laws, regardless of constitution or not. And that does not even go into the fact that the illegitimate EU just de facto supersedes all legitimate national laws.
Fact of the matter is that Germany simply does not have anything that can be considered a Constitution/Verfassung no matter how much Germans are bamboozled to believe they have something like a Constitution; a core set of laws that cannot simply be removed by a captured body of government.
If it is a Constitution/Verfassung, what is the obtuse nonsense that "the human dignity is inviolable" in the German basic law, when the German government has done nothing but violate the dignity, not even to mention the rights of the German people? They don't even abide by their own basic law.
What else can you call it when like happened in Germany a few months ago, a government that had already failed, held elections which it lost in the form of clear rebuttal of its policies, and then before ending and then further engaging in undemocratic practices, quickly voted to majority change this fake "Constitution".
Imagine if the US House controlled by Republicans could, after the midterm elections where Democrats take a major number of seats, simply just voted to change the constitution so that Democrats could not take control in a single vote. Would you consider that as having a Constitution?... a fundamental, difficult to move foundation of law that even the legislature had to abide by as it is only very difficult to change?
That is the fundamental difference between a constitution and just a facade of "fundamental law" that acts as if it is a Constitution in Germany.
Again, it also seems to be ignored that this fake Constitution in not even only Germany, but effectively all European countries is being totally subverted and undermined by the illegitimate suppression of EU fake law crated by an entity that was simply imposed on Europe without any objective legitimacy democratic legitimacy.
It sometimes disappoints me just how ignorant Europeans are of not only their own government situation, but even across Europe and America. These are not difficult concepts and not a matter of "I'm better than you", it's simply a matter of objective analysis and people don't like their ugly baby being called ugly.
that is not correct. Grundgesetz = Verfassung: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfassung
changes require a 2/3rds majority, just like changes to the US constitution. the unamendable parts in both are very few.
Did you catch how that might be different than when the last German government quickly removed the debt brake from this fake constitution with a single vote and after new elections had already been had and lost by the current government.
more interesting is the actual contents and the principles that are being covered. debt brake for example in my opinion has no business being part of a constitution or Grundgesetz. it should never have been added there in the first place. that's not what a constitution is for. putting stuff like that in there weakens the Grundgesetz and makes a mockery of it. it reeks of planned economy.
that doesn't mean that the debt brake is bad, or that it should not be protected by requiring a 2/3rd vote to change it. there just should be a different place for that, in order to keep the Grundgesetz focused on issues that you really don't want to change. in other words, even if only a single 2/3rd vote is necessary to approve a change, a change to the Grundgesetz should be a rare exception.
So phone taps are illegal in Germany? Police can't record what you're talking on the phone?
They’re quoting the East German constitution. I think there is a /s missing at the end.
This is regulated in the Telekommunikations-Überwachungsverordnung (TKÜV).
Edit: nvm, I didn't see this was about the GDR.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
ChatControl is a proposed new law, in compliance with the EU Treaty.
... Unless the EU courts find the law unconstitutionally broad.
Really? That reads as the lowest possible bar. The legislature just needs to pass a law that allows for the snooping and it is then in 100% compliance with that section. Not even to mention "necessary in a democratic society", I can't imagine wording more broad than that.
The German "constitution" is simply not very good.
It's really very simple: NO human rights are absolute.
Your right to encrypted communication, if there is such a thing, ends well before it is used to stage a coup or plan a bank robbery.
Last week’s events have me pondering the real value of online anonymity in a civil society.
I understand encryption and privacy aren’t 1:1, but if one goes, so goes the other.
At any rate, I want to hear other opinions. While I agree with the right to privacy, I’m wondering if privacy in ALL contexts is a good and healthy thing.
To start an answer I would say is dangerous territory to say „online must not follow the rules of offline“. My expectantion would be as general principle „onlinity“ is irrelevant. As far as sensible of course.
You could end up having to not only not critique your personal Hitler but praise him to get the right score to work in civil service or not only not only not say pro lgbtq talking points but spout pro bigot positions to qualify as a teacher helping to create first the illusion then the reality of the universiality of these positions.
Imagine how well the French resistance would have gone if all the trouble makers or likelyoffenders had been shot preemptively!
And it's because revealing breaches of social etiquette might lead to conflicts and unrest between serfs. Which lower their economic efficiency in their service to landlords.
Online is not unique in any way. It even should have more privacy because people reveal too much voluntarily already leading to all kinds of unrest.
How many people's economic activity was disrupted because they couldn't keep their cheering of Charlie Kirk's demise in private for example?
Because "online" is just as real as "offline"? It's all people communicating with other people.
In the US, I can do business under an alias, just so long as I'm not assuming that alias with the intent to defraud. In the US, I can anonymously drop a letter in a postbox to be sent anywhere in the US.
However, government agents can certainly discover my "wallet identity" in both of those situations with the application of some effort. Why would it be important to you that people doing business "online" must do that business in such a way as to make it require zero effort for a government agent to discover their "wallet identity"? Why would it be important to you that people who conduct their business electronically have far, far less privacy than people who conduct their business with paper and in-person appearances?
Freedom to speak in person is like a fist; freedom to post online is like a gun. They don't want us to have guns, obviously.
I think an interesting experiment would be to create a social platform where all identities must be verified and public and all messaging must also be public. If you could verify identities well enough, this would create a platform where everyone is saying everything knowing it's traced to their identity. Perhaps the information communicated on such a platform would be considered to have more weight than information spewed on pseudo and fully anonymous platforms.
Facebook and Google Plus (along with research focused on them and other Internet forums that demand one's Real Name or legal identity) have demonstrated that -at best- you get the same low-quality commentary as you do from pseudonymous or anonymous forums. The typical case is that discussion quality goes down as clever and thoughtful folks who aren't interested in setting themselves up to be the target of future witch hunts by expressing potentially-controversial opinions tied to their Real Name leave those forums for less restrictive ones.
Stupid people who are going to spew bilge do it regardless of whether their Real Name is attached to what they say. There are better ways to promote high discussion quality than to demand attachment of one's Real Name to one's forum account.
do you think less online anonymity would've prevented Lincoln's assassination too?
Because governments lack the maturity to judge contents. You would subject private communications to mob justice of populist political discourse. It is not rocket science that it wouldn't work.
In that document it’s article 7.
Everyone's phone call is private, until there's a court order
In principal I have no problem with a court order overriding privacy, it's been that way for centuries
Mandating that all mail should be written in such a way that someone from the government could understand it, is clear overreach.
Online even the stuff that very rich companies struggle very hard to keep private regularly gets publicized in bulk.
You might think in terms of "medium is the message" so you can't directly transfer something that works in principle for one medium to another.
Diego has been part of putting together this open letter from 500+ cryptography and cybersecurity researchers: https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025
The letter's first page looks very low effort, which unfortunately is the first impression undermining the certainly large amounts of work people have invested in this. The note about needing a PhD could well be left to the form instead of sounding extremely elitist right on the first page. Yes, it's shallow and everything but do you want to be right or get your way?
Im not saying the new government building is saurons tower, but there was no need to divert funds to improve it, it was just one of the buildings in a non descript village. I wouldnt normally care, but I know someone who goes to the primary school, and apparently it was a big upset that the funds for it went to this government building instead.
Before anyone thinks I am being mean to DK, a very similar thing happened in the UK, the local library that used to be in a large building got moved to essentially a backwater dark room in a terrible part of town, and the main building converted to bigger nicer officer for the local government.
Its a problem I am seeing all over europe.
Just sat badly with me.
EDIT > WTF everyone always so touchy. Everyone just relax ok this is a public forum.
HAVING said that I also agree with you that EU borders ARE mostly controlled.
I only saying this because I dont like accusations being thrown around, as it inhibits public discourse the ability for poeople to learn vis discussion, EVEN if he sounds like a nutter.
It’s time to talk about elephant in the room instead of screaming “you’re nazi!”
I have some statistics for you: https://infografik.io/kartiert-europas-bevolkerungsruckgang-... (German)
So no more refugees please, qualified foreigners welcome. But there is only one problem - these 5 million fresh refugees made Germany super unattractive for qualified foreigners. Now you can call me a nazi.
Perhaps they're just countries, with their own problems and benefits, just like everyone else.
Or, should I just continue to parrot a delusional fantasy of Scandinavian countries being the promised land, with no problems whatsoever?
False. Buildings higher than 5 stories require municipal council approval (whereas normally it's a functional approval, not a political one), but that's only in Copenhagen. Other municipal councils do not have the same restrictions, and there are plenty of examples of tall buildings in Denmark.
The restriction in Copenhagen is historical, due to the fires that consumed the city; so to increase fire safety, buildings were height restricted. That most of Denmark otherwise don't have a lot of tall buildings is primarily due to a lack of demand.
Thank you for the elaboration though
EDIT > I removed the bit that said where it was ok? relax
you didn't use the claim of ad hominem correctly.
Then I found you seem to think much the same.
Is it? From the outside it looks like a nanny state where every piece of individualism is removed.
I'm sorry but when my own president is hard at work enriching himself and his family to the tune of Billions of dollars at the expense of the citizens here this sounds like a joke.
You don't always have to assign corrupt intent to people who may just be ignorant.
This of course not true.
But instead of going directly after this man our tech inept governments are trying to do the mathematically impossible.
You'd think we never had the Third Reich, Nazis or WW2 with how they're behaving.
This mass surveillance proposal is so dystopian and broken, I’m genuinely ashamed to be an EU citizen.
The funniest thing is how this authoritarian excuse of a human being wants to make his 1984 world a thing worldwide, because he doesn't even care about the pretense of EU agreements. Not only is there no sovereignty but we should all follow his whims.
They see the clowns in power from the right and the left and either decide to completely removes themselves from the political scene or decide that blowing up the whole system is better. And who can blame them?
To me the fact that Chat Control is even entertained is basically a huge betrayal of all the people who want to live in a democracy.
The far right is always infringing on liberty in a hope to bring the world backwards or stop some way society is changing - that is what the right is - traditional.
People are too occupied with ideas of their own comfort and liberty. For everyone who thinks this is such a basic black and white question...
We are on the doorstep of WWIII. China, working through Russia, Iran, Hungary, and others, has built a network of influence proxies.
They use liberty and security as tools to conduct hybrid attacks. Their goal is to undermine the unity of the West, one by one.
Look at the recent extremely well-coordinated multi-vector hybrid attack on Poland.
Some attack vectors:
1. Military vector: They sent military drones to monitor reactions—political, military, etc. It's a milary act but not strong enough to have a military response. Drones had Polish sim cards, and used Telegram protocol to mask their traffic to a simple chat.
2. Political Vector. Vote of no confidence. Once Ursula and the EU decided to respond asymmetrically, they deployed one of their assets, Hungarian Orbán. They tried to remove Ursula, who was advocating for a firm response.
3. Informational Vector. They also started distributing false flag conspiracy theories claiming it was Ukraine, not Russia, who sent the drone. It's a tactic of small bites and proxy attacks internally, spreading propaganda and false narratives.
This is just one of such attacks. Imagine yourself a government worker, trying to fight that. Where left and right your colleagues got bribed , threatent, etc. and you can't even find proofs against them. Your enemy on contrary, knows everything about everyone in their country.
We might want to monitor Zaluzhnyi's messages.
Sorry, the Russia invasion is utterly wrong, but this kind of fear mongering is dangerous.
So yeah, whoever did this, you should say thank you
> Imagine yourself a government worker, trying to fight that. Where left and right your colleagues got bribed , threatent, etc. and you can't even find proofs against them. Your enemy on contrary, knows everything about everyone in their country.
That's somehow an argument to outlaw secure communication so even your enemy can spy on your messages?
Ursula faced a vote of no confidence (with 2 more in October) because she's unfit to lead EU.
Far right and far left in EU Parliament to file separate von der Leyen no-confidence motions at midnight (https://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-far-left-eu-parlia...)
Obviously, foreign spies and threat actors can continue to use encrypted communication. In the worst case for them, they can stop using the Internet and use burst-mode radio transmissions.
So what's your point?
I'm not advocating, I'm just asking a question. what is a tactic if we are really on a brink of a world war? It's subject of debate, but what if the goverment truly believe this way?
The greater portion of his opinion is devoted to the question of whether, in the absence of any legislation by Congress, the Postmaster General has the right to exclude such publications. On this point his conclusion is: "The Postmaster General will be justified in excluding from the mails any issue of any periodical, otherwise entitled to the privilege of second-class mail matter, which shall contain any article constituting seditious libel, and counseling such crimes as murder, arson, riot, and treason." The Attorney General makes a clear distinction with reference to the authority of postal officials over sealed and unsealed mail matter. In conveying letters and newspapers to persons to whom they are directed, he says the United States "undertakes the business of a messenger." He adds: "In so far as it conveys sealed documents, its agents not only are not bound to know, but are expressly forbidden to ascertain, what the purport of such messages may be; therefore, neither the Government nor its officers can be held either legally or morally responsible for the nature of the letters to which they thus, in intentional ignorance, afford transportation."
https://www.nytimes.com/1908/04/10/archives/roosevelt-demand...
Completely different. /s
1) they have per-emptively excluded themselves, and ALL state security agencies. There will be no checking up on politician's messages. There will be no checking up on police communications. No checking up on secret service messages (not even for the many public activities of such services). There will be no double-checking what the IRS tells it's agents. There will be no checking on school teachers.
In other words: clearly these politicians see the value in hiding what they themselves do, and in hiding anything that might result in liability. There is no need to explain this to them.
Rather, the question to ask them is what they are asking us: "Why aren't YOU breaking with the 'totally erroneous perception' that you, a public servant, can't be checked upon?"
2) This even applies to WHAT will phones be scanned for. The politicians see no need to have public discussion of what they'll be searching for. Since they are obviously carefully choosing what to hide and what to show, the question should be framed correctly:
"Why won't you tell us what you're scanning people's phones for?"
"Also, give me your phone, I've got some things I want to check it for ... What exactly? Why do you expect ME to tell YOU that?"
3) Why they are letting foreign companies do the phone scanning? I mean you're going to let the security services scan phones to help secure the state ... and you're getting a FOREIGN company to do this? Again the question should be framed correctly:
"Can you show me what grades you received in kindergarten? Did you ever get your head stuck in a chair for 9 days in a row?"
> "Has been called the worst postmaster general in American history, but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say however that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general -G. J. Meyer
This guy shows up time and time again in Hochshild's amazing American Midnight, to keep careful watch over & to ban various inconvenient political, civil, labor, racial, and anti-war folks from being able to send their letters. Empowered via the 1917 Espionage Act, by a Congress where many members quite loudly vociferously argued for it for letting the government shut down the left's ability to express problems of the world and a desire for a better world. Then as now (at least at POTUS level), to wish for a better state was perceived by the right as hating America, as a form of treason, as propaganda.
Burleson solicited post offices everywhere to send him anything suspicious. He also was a frequent at Wilson's Whitehouse, and would distribute postmaster positions in return for voting certain ways on bills. But in general, banning publications is the main of his legacy as a rotten evil fucker. He banned 15 publications in the first month after passage of the Espionage Act, largely for anti-war sentiment, and sent a huge huge huge chill through what journalism was permitted.
The foes of democracy are legion and oh have mercy, the snowflakes are back in power again. At war with and trying to run out of business a press that reports after them.
Apologies for my shitty post. I'm not worthy. Please please please read American Midnight. It's insane what this country was up to 100 years ago, how lopsided & vulgarly self-dealing & unjust the power was arrayed against the left & speech & progress & peace. Hopefully this trip around to the darker side of mankind is much shorter and much less a cooption of the state for political and economic exploitation.
I'm not usually of a "revolutionist" kind in the slightest, but, when you combine this small example to a lot of things currently happening across Europe and the US - it does increasingly seem like people in power are less and less wary of heavy and serious responsibility their positions hold to the people, and are more and more brazen when it comes to trying to isolate themselves from scrutiny over their self-profiting endeavours.
Historically, there were somewhat regular "correction" events happening somewhere sufficiently close, that made sure that responsibility is stuck in politician's minds for longer into the future, but it's been a long time since.
Edit: My comment is partially fueled by everything that's currently happening in Serbia (grand-scale systemic corruption), but I do think you can see similar movement in much more orderly countries in Europe as well, and all this is unconnected to ChatControl, but I see it as a small ripple from the same source.
I also dare say that current state of affairs in US has emboldened such people everywhere.
Nepal is probably not felt as close enough to have an effect.
And people wonder why young people leave the old continent. Surely not only because of this, but the political class in Europe is more and more dysfunctional.
You could nudge this sort of thing into play by starting with e-commerce. No online shopping unless you’re using a Trusted OS. Ratchet up to cat videos and TV shows. Ratchet again to Trusted News. You’re most of the way there!
The “you can’t outlaw math!” crowd are kind of right but that argument assumes free and unencumbered end user devices, which, as crazy as it sounds, might not be a given in the particularly awful dystopian futures available to us right now.
That future is already here for the substantial number of people who have only iOS devices. Even in the EU where Apple is forced to allow alternate app stores and direct installation of apps, the apps must be signed with a key that Apple can revoke. Google seems to be planning something similar for "certified" Android, and some important apps refuse to run on any other kind of Android.
I'm disappointed so many smart people in the tech world participated in this corporate power grab.
— sent from my iPhone
However, in recent years it's taken a life on its own and people all over the political spectrum are inventing new rights or denying established rights. At face value it seems like a punchy statement that this is a human right or that isn't a civil liberty, but there's usually nothing to back that up. It's nothing more than a vapid slogan used this way.
Then again governments often aren't trustworthy. Germany isn't even able to issue European Arrest Warrants as prosecution here is politically dependent¹. And accordingly I also kind of prefer to have my electronic communication cryptographically protected. But I'm not so naive as to believe that this is a solution. This is just treating a symptom which eventually gets worse if not addressed directly.
1: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/landmark-ruling-european...
I mean sure it's indirect.
But making them susceptible to industry espionage, planting false evidence (encryption also protects against spoofing) or blackmailing executives for dump reasons (idk. sexting in a adulterating manner) is something countries like Russia would do and would endanger financial interests of such companies.
And are Denmarks companies aware about that?
I mean there are so much more important reasons for encrypted messaging (e.g. investigative journalism) but "local companies and with that jobs" being endangered tends to move politicians.
For example: if all encrypted messaging traffic was about innocuous trivialities, support for banning encryption would be absurd. The support for banning encryption isn't because people think encryption is bad, it's because governments propose that encryption makes it too difficult or expensive to enforce other laws like prohibition of CSAM, money laundering, etc.
Other examples: KYCAML, drug paraphernalia, Terry stops / stop and frisk, etc.
"Tommy Robinson" is the nom de guerre that the fascist Yaxley-Lennon uses since it sounds more working class.
With digital artifacts, nations have enjoyed the ability to go to third parties to for the last 40-50 years to get access to individual's writings as a shortcut.
This is just a return to the mean. It is not novel or controversial to say "identify the individual, and get access to their writings" in whatever legal way that nation prescribes. Good luck, since their devices may be locked, but going after the individual is real law enforcement
"Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
It was meant for physicial mail of course. I wonder if a judge would even see the difference.
A message is a message, regardless whether its deliver by electricity or a horse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party.
I wonder how they are going to try to argue that a E2E encrypted message is not ‘sealed’.
A judge can't actually apply the constitution, as article 120 of the constitution forbids that, and The Netherlands doesn't have a constitutional court. In any case, most articles contain the phrase "except in cases determined by law". This means that the constitution is mostly a set of guidelines for politicians that practice civic hygiene, and not a tool to oppose bad laws. It's especially useless to delay and oppose fascists, as they'll just pass laws and/or state of emergencies without basis or changing the constitution.
Judges can apply the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically the right to privacy, but of course lawful exceptions can be made there as well as long as they are proportional and subsidiary. There's a good case to be made that Chat Control is neither.
christkv•4mo ago