That the European Parliament didn't spontaneously disappear in a massive vortex of cognitive dissonance can only mean that most MEPs either don't understand GDPR or this new law, maybe neither.
European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
131–140 of 434 posts
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#132Something I'm wondering is how this will affect Europe's ability to attract and retain top tier talent. Europe already seems to be losing to the US. Will this accelerate this brain drain or slow it? [0] [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-br...
The same law already exists in US and Australia
Australia has a pretty bad drain to the US.
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#133Just to clarify a point for discussion: this is already the law in the USA, and always has been [0]. European privacy law formerly prohibited private entities from reading personal communications, and handing them over warrantlessly to governments (as I understand it (?)); but this was never a thing in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
This makes the EU look pretty hypocritical for striking down the "Privacy Shield" agreement that they had with the US for GDPR.
In fact, I have to wonder if this will put that ruling in danger of being overturned now?
(And how much do you want to bet that the lawyers at Facebook are gearing up for that very fight right now?)
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It mentions in the article that even apps like Signal would have to install backdoors that they can use.
That can't happen with open-source, whether it's "free" or not.
The whole stack needs to be open source and user modifiable, though. Signal is open source, but if Apple is one day compelled to ban non-backdoored versions from the App Store, nobody can use it on an iPhone.
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#135The good thing about this is that within a decade there will be no more corruption, no more forced prostitution, no more corporate abuse. It will be utopia.
I’m genuinely curious how you think that will come to pass. All those things existed before the internet and will continue to do so after this. Is there a missing /s?
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what do we do?
It will probably take another World War before people collectively remember why privacy even existed in the first place.
What would a world war have to do with reminding people of privacy?
World War 2 gave China and Soviet Russia a new sense of privacy?
WW2 made the US worse as a place in most regards, not better. That's what caused the US to build its military industrial complex, to install a massive standing global military, to primarily guard against the Europeans going on rampage again for the nth time (which was guaranteed to happen with the USSR very eager to conquer even more of Europe in the days post WW2).
From WW2 the US got a dramatically expanded (and more intrusive) Federal Government, surveillence state and war machine, encouraged by Hoover's aggressive domestic actions and all the newly minted three letter agencies (CIA 1947, NSA 1952, NRO 1960, ATF 1972, DEA 1973).
A third world war would make the governments even more paranoid, scared, and intrusive, not less.
You wouldn't want to see what the involved governments would do to their people as a war involving the US, Russia, China, and various countries in Europe and Asia broke out. The stakes would be as high as they could possibly be, given the nuclear arsenals in existence now. Privacy would rapidly sink toward zero, and that conflict would be an extraodinary argument in favor of zero privacy (according to the governments): for no mistakes can be tolerated, the dangers are too high, no privacy can be afforded (they would claim).
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#137I'm seeing a lot of responses from fellow folks in the US that seem to imply this EU (proposed?) regulation is unprecedented in the US.
Is that actually so?
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? W…
> Basically, scaling is hard, and the EU is not bad at it.
It's not scaling economically though, is it?
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The backups aren't. Same with iMessage. end-to-end has become a marketing buzzword, any large scale deployment gets backdoored (via either key or plaintext escrow) at the endpoints, to FISA/PRISM providers who have to turn it over to the state without a warrant. China has the same setup with providers in their country. WhatsApp and iMessage simply aren't private when the providers get ~100% of the plaintext transitin…
> [...] as thanks to "Messages in iCloud" (cross-device sync) being on by default [...] Messages in iCloud is off by default AFAIK.
It's not, but in the case of Messages in iCloud being off, the actual plaintext of the iMessages themselves is included in the (non-e2e) iCloud Backup (which I am 100% positive is on by default).
In the case of MIC being on, then the MIC sync key is included in the (again, non-e2e) iCloud Backup.
MIC on = MIC sync key escrow via iCloud Backup (realtime iMessage content decrypt)
MIC off = iMessage plaintext escrow via iCloud backup (nightly)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
Before you mention "but you can turn off iCloud Backup!": these default settings affect all of your conversation partners, too, so even if you disable iCloud Backup, it's likely that your messages are still getting escrowed from the devices of the people you talk to.
Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication
#140Do they want everyone to switch en masse to end-to-end encrypted communications? Because this is how you encourage that.
More end to end encryption use only means more laws banning encryption faster. Or do you really think that when for example DoH gains wider adoption all the countries using DNS based blocking will go "Oh well guess the techies got us".
Good luck with that - the genie's out of the bottle.
End to end encryption is vital to the operations of modern businesses, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.