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The EU is set to declare war on encryption

tech.newstatesman.com

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Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#111

Post by vmception »

chowells wrote: post #106
vmception wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are the real crooks? First they came for the data brokers and I did not speak out because I am not a data broker.

This doesn't make much sense when you think about the context of the original work you're quoting. Niemoller was writing about a fascist government. Fascism is inherently built on an "us-vs-them" conflict. The details may change, but a key point is there's always an enemy who is responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. When fascists take power, they set out to get rid of the enemy. Then they find that…

> But maybe the fact that so many people don't understand the context means it's already too late.

final answer?

so. yes, it is a joke. its funny because its Europe and has an unrelatable but likely more relevant 21st century approach to regulating unhelpful industries. I like that they made regulations against the data brokers, who are the enemy even though the data broker's individual actions are fairly benign.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#112

Post by YetAnotherNick »

noodlesoups wrote: post #82
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #79

What 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.

Mandatory signing by government? Even China is not able to convince Apple to do this.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#113

Post by screye »

ben_w wrote: 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.

> “war” for actual wars

Every generation of warfare [1] looks completely indistinguishable from the previous one.

5th generation warfare [2] is "war" in every sense of the 1st principles of war. However, it manifests in a way that is unrecognizable in traditional surface-level manifestations of war. If anything, "not looking like a war" is a primary goal of 5th generation warfare.

> But the next generation of war – the so-called "fifth-generation" – won't feature armies or clear ideas. It will be what U.S. Army Major Shannon Beebe, the top intel officer for Africa, calls a "vortex of violence," a free-for-all of surprise destruction motivated more by frustration than by any coherent plans for the future. [3]

> the fifth-gen fighters' weapon of choice is political "stalemate," contends Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coerr, in a new piece in Marine Corps Gazette.

> 5GW fighters will win by ... point[ ing ] out the impotence of secular military might. ... These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by not winning."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_warfare

[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/20/dreaming-5th-generat...

[3] https://www.wired.com/2009/01/how-to-win-a-fi/

[3]

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#114

Post by upofadown »

rocqua wrote: post #80
marcrosoft wrote: post #8

Let’s say they ban end to end encryption tomorrow in their save the children and puppies act. Guess who is still going to use it? The criminals are of course. You can’t ban math.

Really? How? If you want to enable communication where both parties don't need to be online at the same time, and with easy setup of a trusted system, you will need something very much like the signal protocol. That requires setting up a pretty complicated central service. Moreover, you are going to need to do quite some updating on the end-points of the e2e encrypted communications? Setting up this kind of operation…

>If you want to enable communication where both parties don't need to be online at the same time, and with easy setup of a trusted system, you will need something very much like the signal protocol.

PGP and S/MIME would like a word. Note that PGP is used routinely on the darknets for pasting orders into a web form. There are several detailed howtos available.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#116

Post by rbecker »

Spivak wrote: post #67
rbecker wrote: post #2

> This makes the work of law enforcement and the judiciary more challenging, as they seek to obtain lawful access to evidence. And the ever growing surveillance permeating our society makes it less challenging, but they're not asking for reduced authority to compensate for that , are they?

Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced? “Hey sex-traffickers that know what they’re doing are telling all their people to switch to Signal. Since basically our only tools to connect people are phone location history, call logs, text messages, and maybe surveillance footage if we’re lucky, we’re hitting a massive brick wall in every investigation. Help?” Like go listen…

> Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced?

But that's their argument. "Give up your rights because policing is getting harder", while staying quiet when policing gets easier. If policing, on the whole, isn't actually getting harder, their argument is invalid.

Look at your own example. Despite encryption, the police would still get a graph of connections (even without knowing the message contents), and since surveillance is so massively easier now, they could:

1) Monitor everyone involved, leading them to incriminating locations (surveillance cameras, drones, tracking devices, hidden microphones, facial recognition applied to pictures people post publicly...)

2) Plant targeted (as opposed to population-wide) backdoors on their devices, circumventing encryption

3) Watch them enter passwords on their devices with telescopic lenses

What you call a brick wall is barely a wet paper bag. We should not have to give up our rights and allow mass surveillance of all communication just because police are unwilling to use the targeted tools.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#117

Post by dingaling »

indymike wrote: post #14

This is the same EU that came up with GDPR? Where is the right to privacy thinking on this? Encryption is essential to having freedom. It is simply the electronic equivalent to being able to meet in secret, a right that all humans can and should have.

Like GDPR you'll still have privacy on an individual level unless law enforcement decides that you shouldn't have. It's perfectly parallel.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#118

Post by hyperman1 »

zingplex wrote: post #9

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

AFAIK, more or less the same as with phones or paper mail: No third party is allowed to listen in, except police and other duly authorized parties, after they have a warrant.

The difference is listening to a phone is easy for the police, while breaking encryption is impossible.

I'd assume the result is intended to be identical to phone safety: abuse will be technically possible but legally criminalized and in practice rare.

Now how this works out in the face of the international internet is a whole other can of worms, of course.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#119

Post by astrobe_ »

ergl wrote: post #103
marcrosoft wrote: post #8

Let’s say they ban end to end encryption tomorrow in their save the children and puppies act. Guess who is still going to use it? The criminals are of course. You can’t ban math.

You don't need to ban math to ban e2e encryption in the same way you don't need to ban physics in order to ban murder. You pass a law making it a crime to develop or use e2e encryption algorithms, and punish those who don't follow the law extremely harshly. The rest will comply because they'll be scared to be punished.

I think that it is pretty much the kind of wishful thinking they have. But then steganography. In this cat-and-mouse game, you do end up banning math [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_number

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#120

Post by ajb »

fsflover wrote: post #69

Please support Electronic Frontier Foundation if you want to help fighting this: https://eff.org .

Not sure the EFF is particularly active in the EU? I'd have suggested the Open Rights Group, except being UK based it's now harder for them to lobby the EU. Maybe La Quadrature du Net: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/
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