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The EU is set to declare war on encryption

tech.newstatesman.com

21–30 of 167 posts

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#21

Thankfully the UK is leaving so we won't have to comply with this; though our government hardly has the best record on data privacy.

hahaha - the UK government has been insrumental in paving the way in 'banning encryption' and other such laws. Thankfully they (UK Government) has proven over and over again that they are pretty inept when it comes to doing much with technology. I've worked on a number of Government projects including the recent Test and Trace debacle and they are always a shit-show.

I'd agree that outsourced national infrastructure initiatives that are either ad hoc or politically-motivated tend to be debacular in their nature - but I have a sneaking suspicion the real power houses that focus on all thing cryptographical (ie. our security services) are possibly world-leading.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#22
post #9

How is this even slightly consistent with their stance on privacy?

I don’t mean to be glib, but it’s a common fallacy to expect consistency.

Consistency might happen for a stretch, even a long one, but the first principle is to keep and acquire power.

The people who don’t prioritize power above all don’t hold office long because they lose out to people who do

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#23
post #17

> EU home affairs officials have grown increasingly concerned about international paedophile networks and in July unveiled plans to force technology companies to take greater responsibility for reporting them. "Think of the children" cliché will never die.

Especially given the abysmal state in cross border law enforcement. The Europol is mainly a purely administrative entity; police has to fax stuff around and gets results via physical mail.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#24
Maybe they don’t realize that e-commerce wouldn’t exist without trustworthy encryption. They’re taking about sabotaging trillions of dollars of economic transactions in lieu of just doing real police work to find the criminals.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#25
The headline doesn’t seem to be backed by the content of the note they’re quoting.

I do wish papers would reserve “war” for actual wars; while I would be appalled if this goes all the way through, a note saying “we want to have a chat and this is why” is slightly further from even a metaphorical war on encryption than Farage is from an actual war on Brussels.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#27
post #24

Maybe they don’t realize that e-commerce wouldn’t exist without trustworthy encryption. They’re taking about sabotaging trillions of dollars of economic transactions in lieu of just doing real police work to find the criminals.

E-commerce would go on just fine even if the government gets a backdoor into the communication.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#28

Thankfully the UK is leaving so we won't have to comply with this; though our government hardly has the best record on data privacy.

>though our government hardly has the best record on data privacy.

especially since founding The 5-Eyes program in 1941

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#29

Thankfully the UK is leaving so we won't have to comply with this; though our government hardly has the best record on data privacy.

The concept of a multi-national bureaucracy that has a massive budget and little accountability has very little appeal to me.

I get that it enabled mobility for EU citizens and the potential for combating large scale problems like climate change, but with human nature being what it is corruption and overreach is unavoidable

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#30
oh god, please teach these people about encryption: what they're trying to do - it does not work like they think it works (as it seems to be).

> Locking the door of your house (with near impossible to break locks) prevents us to find out what you're doing/keeping in your house, so we can't know whether you're doing/keeping something illegal in your house. So we are going to ban the making and using of unbreakable (or infeasable to break open) locks for locking the door of your house.

Do you like this analogy?

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