I keep thinking when these types of interventions are proposed how homomorphic encryption can solve a lot of the described issues in a more secure and ethical way.
The EU is set to declare war on encryption
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Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#82What are they going to do if one app denies to comply(which will surely be the case)? Sure they can pull it from app stores, but installing an APK shouldn't be that big of a barrier. Also are they telling that companies like whatsapp will have to do it across the globe? What happens to chat between EU region and outside EU.
It's not difficult to imagine mandating signed bootloaders and signed software to be the norm aswell, there is no one who can make chips by themselves.
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#83How is this even slightly consistent with their stance on privacy?
The EU doesn't have a particularly strong stance on privacy from law enforcement. Law enforcement organizations are specifically exempt from e.g. GDPR.
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#84> 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.
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Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#85Well, it has been only few months since when a ""study"" released, ordered by the EU parliament, where the authors were asking for a european firewall similar to the chinese one. Between drowning refugees and immigrants in Mediterranean sea, shooting them at the borders and throwing whoever survive in concentration camps, it's only logical to go after the local dissidents too.
It's doubtful all this would be required just for refugees. Though I've heard of conspiracy theories about taking them in order to justify all-encompassing surveillance to your own populace
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#86This is a nice reminder that the EU isn’t some benevolent defender of human rights; it’s a surveillance state bureaucracy like all the others. They’ve done a spectacular job at branding, I’ll give them that.
In fairness, its don't much better at human rights than any of its predecessors or competitors...
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#87Less just assume that they go ahead, everyone complies... How long until you'd need to revert the law, because all legal traffic is now exploitable, while the criminals are still using good crypto? How much damage does this need to cause before politicians will sit down and understand while their half-assed idea failed?
> How long until you'd need to revert the law, because all legal traffic is now exploitable, while the criminals are still using good crypto? That's a common gun rights argument -- "If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns". How controversial could it be?
Guns are controversial because they kill things and are thus a weapon. Encryption cannot kill anyone, if anything it is a shield. It’s also an infinitely replicable shield, and one that is omnipresent.
I don’t think anyone believes they can ban it, but like tax evasion it’s probably going to be a nice excuse they can use to catch the people they don’t like that do use it. For the rest of us, don’t worry—they’ll make sure you’re always safe and no criminals would exploit your unencrypted communications, and surely no one with access to the means of encryption would exploit it!
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#88oh 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…
Note, the police does not have the key to my front door. And yet, the police can get into my house if they need to. In the world of locks and doors, there is almost nothing I can feasibly do to totally make it impossible for the police to get into my house if I want to keep them out.
Encryption is different. Making encryption that is nigh impossible to break is almost trivial these days. And the police has no recourse.
Whether that is an acceptable change from before is very much up for discussion, but we should be clear that something did change.
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#89Maybe 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…
This is a back-door, since the public key will give you full access to plaintext.
Moreover, how do you audit whether the second cipher-text exists, and whether the second cipher-text actually decrypts to the same plain-text as the first?
There are plausible schemes for creating a common second actor that can access communication with a warrant. But they aren't this simple, and they tend to come with large complexity downsides.
Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption
#90Thankfully 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
Yep, the difference being that at least we might get a chance of influencing the governments approach; where as in Europe.. good luck.