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Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/21/ireland_wants_to_give_police/
74•jjgreen•2h ago

Comments

zexodus•1h ago
I'm so tired of these...

Is there really no way we can make it technologically impossible for them to exfiltrate user data?

a_paddy•1h ago
The problem is they'll legislate for the providers to insert back doors, negating cryptographic hardness.
TingPing•1h ago
They have to make custom software illegal at some point.
0xTJ•53m ago
Given how many of these stories have been coming out, I'm sure they're considering it.
voxic11•1h ago
You can make it technologically impossible, but they can also come and arrest you just for using such technology. So its not really a technical problem, its a social/political one.
jMyles•37m ago
Sure, but then they need to send a physical person, which is expensive and impossible to scale. Making it extremely expensive is probably good enough.

(Feels like we have this same discussion over and over on HN.)

mghackerlady•20m ago
Avoiding centralised services is generally a good start. You could also do something like encrypt any messages through PGP even if the service you're using is already "e2e encrypted" like iMessage or signal
rtkwe•10m ago
I don't think there's a way with a phone that people would actually be willing to use. At some point it has to be decrypted to be displayed to the user and there's always the chance there's a flaw somewhere in the stack from hardware to OS to app etc that will have a gap to exfiltrate the data.
Froztnova•1h ago
Feels like we're headed back towards governments attempting to control the sharing and usage of cryptographic algorithms again.
budududuroiu•50m ago
Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening.

EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...

alistairSH•12m ago
Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.
NoMoreNicksLeft•5m ago
> (unless that person is in government custody)

Someone please correct me, but do they ever much bother to protect those in custody?

JasonADrury•3m ago
They certainly seem to be willing to spend a lot to keep Luigi Mangione safe.
JasonADrury•4m ago
Per the DOJ, there's also this:

>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.

>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.

mothballed•3m ago
Which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact they do have an obligation to stop anyone from protecting other people from crime (see Uvalde, where orders from above were to block parents from saving their children).
mothballed•12m ago
In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.
simion314•6m ago
From my memory this case can actually be used to support spyware, I remember all the media complaining "how is it possible that the police or the secret service can't instantly locate a phone very precisely" , same when that airplane crashed and the people were calling for help but the authorities could not get the coordinates and searched for hours , the media was demanding that the police or other services have the technical ability to locate any person in distress.
hopelite•38m ago
The people who hate Europeans are hard at work again, hoping they can prevent the backlash for their evil deeds this time.
shevy-java•35m ago
What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time.

I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.

DetectDefect•16m ago
Why is that strange? Technology's proliferation decentralizes political power nexuses, making it a near-existential threat to tyrants^Wgovernments everywhere.
pixl97•9m ago
conversely

>Technology's proliferation centralizes political power nexuses

cjs_ac•11m ago
Every Western government is receiving the same briefings from its intelligence and counterintelligence agencies: these powers are needed in case the third world war starts.
pixl97•9m ago
I mean, because the world is connected via a large global network with instant communication.

It's kind of like asking "Why did the world kind of destabilize politically during the 1910s". Massive technological change swept the world and fast travel changed the dynamics of the world.

Our world has changed from one of bulky analog data (paperwork, pictures, remote places) to one where any information can be digitized and sent anywhere in the past 2 decades. This data can be stored pretty much forever. This is as much of a change as what occurred in WWI and WWII. The political dynamics of the world are completely different in the data regime. He who controls the data controls the world.

This is a very difficult trend to counter, just because you decide not to control said data, doesn't mean that others aren't capturing that same data and using it against you, in which they'll take power.

There is a distinct possibility that rights and ever growing capabilities of technology are fundamentally incompatible. This is going to present a growing problem for human societies.

Ylpertnodi•2m ago
> . In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy.

You found out why.

josefritzishere•28m ago
Ireland wants to turn their police into the CIA.
alistairSH•10m ago
s/CIA/NSA/g (probably)
hiprob•14m ago
Oh look, it's the copy of the UK acting up again!
cranium_melter•8m ago
That's terrible, people really gonna stand for this??
cranium_melter•7m ago
That's terrible, people really gonna lie down for this??

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