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European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

patrick-breyer.de

91–100 of 434 posts

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#91
post #30
post #10

Would any email provider protect me from this, get my emails actually delivered and ideally work with my own domain? Not that I see myself switching after 15 years and 6 Gmail accounts but if I am to I'd rather know who I'd use. And no I won't risk setting it up myself and risk missing on some portion of my emails like I've had happen at workplaces before we'd sigh and switch to Google. For Chat tg/signal seem like t…

> For Chat tg/signal seem like they would but I am less sure what the best option is for email. Something that doesn't store the chats in a decryptable form on their servers is probably preferrable. So Telegram out and Signal, Threema or WhatsApp in.

Friendly reminder that WhatsApp is far out: it uploads all data unencrypted to at least one cloud if on of the participants have backups enabled.

So Signal, Matrix or possible Threema (I don't know it) is in.

Personally though, I use Telegram and I drive an ordinary car, not an armored one.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#92
post #67

This is what people mean when they say “turnkey surveillance states”: you end up 1-3 laws away from almost instant total government surveillance of all citizen activity. The trillion dollar infrastructure was built by you and me for free from their POV (we paid them to do it with taxes), and now they can just say they want to use it

So what do we do?

Pen and paper.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#93
From the article:

> According to police data, in the vast majority of cases, innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes

With this being said, what is the rationale for this?

Its worth noting however, that the current legislation "allow[s] providers of e-mail and messaging services to automatically search all personal messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content and report suspected cases to the police" but does not mandate it yet.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#94
post #6

Do they want everyone to switch en masse to end-to-end encrypted communications? Because this is how you encourage that.

Doesn't help if you don't control the ends of the end-to-end part. We don't control iOS nor Android on most devices.

In general this holds: There's no privacy on the internet.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#95
post #10

Would any email provider protect me from this, get my emails actually delivered and ideally work with my own domain? Not that I see myself switching after 15 years and 6 Gmail accounts but if I am to I'd rather know who I'd use. And no I won't risk setting it up myself and risk missing on some portion of my emails like I've had happen at workplaces before we'd sigh and switch to Google. For Chat tg/signal seem like t…

The problem with email is that it’s federated; any email is as secure as the least secure mail server it’s being sent from or two. Even if you use something super duper secure in a polity that respects privacy, it does you no good if you send an email to Gmail who immediately hands it over to one or more government bodies.

There is an obvious solution, do not send emails to gmail addresses.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#96
post #75
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do we do?

Use GPG. Don't use smartphones, don't use any closed software (especially non-free OSes.) Vote.

GPG doesn’t solve the problem of metadata surveillance. One of the major problems with technological solutions to privacy problems is that metadata surveillance is extremely useful to begin with, and it’s hard to make communication anonymous.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#97
post #67

This is what people mean when they say “turnkey surveillance states”: you end up 1-3 laws away from almost instant total government surveillance of all citizen activity. The trillion dollar infrastructure was built by you and me for free from their POV (we paid them to do it with taxes), and now they can just say they want to use it

So what do we do?

I’m not sure what to do personally, but there are civil and digital rights organizations that have some ideas. I bet they could all use donations

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#98
post #77
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU already has unprecedented control over commerce. Notice how they chopped up the UK during Brexit. EU adopting this measure means the enforcement will likely be corrupt and impossible to enforce standards.

> The EU already has unprecedented control over commerce. Unprecedented compared to who? Every sovereign state has more control than the EU does: US, China, etc. > Notice how they chopped up the UK during Brexit. How did the EU chop up the UK?

I believe GP is referring to the EU 'forcing' the UK to put a border between Britain and Northern Ireland, because the EU wanted a hard border somewhere and wouldn't budge on that.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#99

This is a joke, right? right??

https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...

.pdf:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/docs_autres_instituti...

The votes seem to be here (page 5):

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-9-2021-07-0...

I suppose this will only show up on sites like https://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/eu/abstimmungen or https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term9-european-parliament-latest... later...

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#100
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU gets a lot of stick but deep below, the boring stuff keeps it together. Brexit showed just the enormous depth of high quality glue keeping all remaining countries together. So I don’t think the EU will be collapsing any time soon, certainly not for rational reasons.

Yeah, but how much of that boring stuff requires the full matter of what the EU has become? That’s why I could see a rump sticking around or getting folded into some other institutions, if full dissolution never quite happens.

Again, Brexit shows, imho, that you can’t have the boring stuff without the tight integration. There are no duties because taxes are harmonised. There are no import/export controls because norms are identical pan-EU.

The UK wanted to drop the tight integration and acceptance of common goals, but keep all the tax and trade benefits. But the logical hurdles turned out to be insurmountable. Want to sell fish tax-free? Well let us fish in your waters. Want to sell frictionless to our markets? Accept our standards. So what should the common ground be for digital services?

Initiatives like this, good or bad, represent the EU’s drive to combat big issues facing the world, and again need to be tackled for the EU to remain relevant; it can’t just stick to subsidising farming, that is so 1950s.

I spoke once to a senior economist (can’t remember the name sadly) who made a good point: EU is often compared to national governments, and looks sluggish by comparison. But the real comparisons would be to other enormous bureaucracies: US federal government, China, UN etc. And when you make this comparison, it is in fact quite favourable for the EU. Basically, scaling is hard, and the EU is not bad at it.

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