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The EU is set to declare war on encryption

tech.newstatesman.com

41–50 of 167 posts

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#41
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.

>"Think of the children"

Not when they come from Moria...

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#42
> The paper said EU member states have “called for solutions” to allow “law enforcement and other competent authorities to gain lawful access to digital evidence”, without weakening encryption or breaching privacy and fair trial guarantees.

This is interesting because if we consider EU27 and the Press Freedom Index we discover that 8 countries have a good situation, 11 satisfactory, 8 noticeable problems...could the 8 countries (Romania,Croatia, Poland, Greece, Cyprus North, Malta, Hungary) be somehow beneficial from the encryption weakening? Bulgaria

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like e2e is heavily utilized must-have for crime either. Tons of crime happen through regular unencrypted text messages, and nobody gets caught. But this isn't about protecting in the first place, so it isn't all that relevant.

e2e is a heavily utilized must-have for any organized crime these days, and this is very frequently a wall that law enforcement hit and cannot get past. I don't think banning encryption or something silly like that is therefore the solution, but minimizing the problem is not helpful in understanding why there's such a heavy push from all sorts governments, democratic and authoritarian alike, to "deal" with the proble…

>but this isn't malevolence. It's fear and lack of competence.

I'm not sure which is worse. We absolutely need people with the expertise in the area to make these kinds of decision. It's like giving a gardener the position to launch nukes. I'm sure they're very capable at trimming bushes, but that isn't exactly useful here.

e2e is really not a must-have in crime. It's a nice-to-have, but people can and often do very well without it. If we aren't capable of catching the lowest hanging fruit, how is this even of any use? At the same time we're not giving out the right signal about the state of surveillance already in place by not utilizing it to it's maximum potential.

Power corrupts, and the effects can be seen all over. Imagine what absolute power does

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#45
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.

"The government" and "criminals" are not distinctly separate sets.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#46
Maybe technical solution to this without backdoors would be to encrypt everything twice and store both?

One is for intended target and second time with public key provided by law enforcement.

And perhaps there should be a third independent actor who would hold the private key (in hardware without extraction possibility hopefully) and on request basis would decrypt something for law enforcement and provide supervision and statistics for citizens. Ok one problem would be then that if that machine breaks there is no way to decrypt anything encrypted for that public key :D.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#47
post #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…

It seems like what they want is not so much breakable locks, but for you to have locks that can all be opened by a common master key. And they pinky swear that the master key will be kept totally safe and all the thousands of law enforcement officers they share it with will also keep it totally safe, and they will never ever use it except for intended purposes, and no bad guys will ever be able to get a copy of it.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#48
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.

“Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.

The banks service all of them and nothing much happens to them. Who are the real crooks?

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#49
post #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.

This comment needs to be upvoted. The title of the article is completely misleading. How can a call to 'stimulate a discussion' somehow get characterized as declaring war? This looks to me like the EU doing its typical thing of issuing memos to generate more memos, that will then generate more memos ...

> This looks to me like the EU doing its typical thing of issuing memos to generate more memos, that will then generate more memos ...

Last time we had this shit, we ended up with Article 13. EU parliament has historically been rather unimportant so many parties, especially the conservatives, took pride in using the parliament (and the commission, see Oettinger) as dumping ground for toxic waste politicians or for party soldiers who needed a stable income.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#50
I can't wait for the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" refrains to be trotted out yet again.

Inverted totalitarian klepto-plutocracy wins against any individual who doesn't take extra-ordinary measures when it builds a panopticon. "Let's see your 30 year search history and find a crime in there to persecute, I mean, prosecute you with. Or even a professional technical illegality would suffice. Searching all records." It won't be used so much to target the "baddies," but for unaccountable, omnipotent, NSA-style mass-surveillance.

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