Is this more of a teams app (Slack, Teams) or more of a chat app (Whatsapp, Signal, Messenger)?
BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
111–120 of 278 posts
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#112I find really nice that Europe "as a whole" is starting to share the same solutions to the same problems !!!
Remember "Tchap" (https://www.tchap.fr/), the French Gov messenger system based on Matrix ? ;-)
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, I totally agree that you shouldn't require identification for most services. But, for things like banking, car registration, etc... we require strong ID'ing, and it behooves society to make it secure. I still think municipalities should own their own data rather than have it stored at a central federal level, but we need municipalities to rely on something better than a serially-issued social insurance/security…
Worth calling out imo, in our current world you have recourse and an ability to "recover" from identity theft (to some extent). If the government controls your identity and revokes some piece, what can you do?
What stops them from doing that today? What stops a government from not renewing your driver's license or passport or not issuing a SIN/SSN or leaking your SIN/SSN?
How about just denying you federal services _after_ providing ID? How about putting you on a watch list?
Governments have been using IDs to deny services to oppressed peoples since IDs existed, but I think the options that leaves you with is to fight for a free and democratic government or not have IDs.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#114Quoted post unavailable.
It doesn’t take a religious nut or a conspiracy theorist to see the catastrophically enormous downsides of universally mandated, centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID. Imagine, for example, that upon declaring a protest unlawful, the police could simply scan all the RFID-enabled ID cards in the area and issue everyone a court summons. Not carrying an ID card? N…
This is a strawman, and plainly untrue. Many countries have mandatory id. I have personally lived in Argentina and Spain, both of them have it, for close to a century (89 years in Spain, 54 years in Argentina, but it replaced a pre-exisitng system). The Spanish DNI has RFID.
In neither place, nor any country with mandatory ID as far as I know, you get "no access to anything". The worst thing that can happen is that if the police choose to stop you, not carrying your ID can lead to you being taken to a police station temporarily. Which is not great, but not anywhere near close to what you are suggesting is inevitable. And police can detain you arbitrarily in places without state-mandated IDs, this is just a cute excuse that they can add to their repertoire.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#115I find really nice that Europe "as a whole" is starting to share the same solutions to the same problems !!! Remember "Tchap" ( https://www.tchap.fr/ ), the French Gov messenger system based on Matrix ? ;-)
The article mentions it directly.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is quite a lot of slipper slope going on here. > centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID. Does not necessitate: > universally mandated > No access to anything > felony to do so intentionally > Your 2FA and disk encryption is mandatorily tied to your ID card All the latter things are awful, but we can have the first thing without any of the latter things.
Believe me if you have the first thing the latter things will eventually follow. At least in the EU "universally mandated" has been a reality for a very long time.
There are many places with mandated ID. Can you mention one in which any of the others on the list have "eventually followed"? You are presenting speculation as unavoidable fact.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#117I think messaging is an area where Europe could have an impact. The basic problem with messaging and voice/video comm applications is that clients are not interoperable. It is easy to think that: we've had CUSeeMe, IRC, ICU, AOL Instant Messenger, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, I think more than 10 kinds of Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Paltalk, Yahoo Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Go2Meeting, Discord, WhatsApp…
The impact is not likely to be positive. Nearly every government in Europe will want access to the comms happening, particularly if it's within their borders or with their citizens. Europe is not likely to introduce an end-user-to-end-user encryption. It will be encrypted from end user to the government to the next end user.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is quite a lot of slipper slope going on here. > centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID. Does not necessitate: > universally mandated > No access to anything > felony to do so intentionally > Your 2FA and disk encryption is mandatorily tied to your ID card All the latter things are awful, but we can have the first thing without any of the latter things.
Believe me if you have the first thing the latter things will eventually follow. At least in the EU "universally mandated" has been a reality for a very long time.
That's the definition of the slippery slope fallacy. Those things need not necessarily follow, that's the point.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe this changes too in the future? E-Rezept was supposed to launch in 2022 but has been postponed until mid 2023. Some regions already tested it. It didn't work out well, so some regions dropped out of the testing phase. I'm pretty sure it won't work well at launch and we will have to rely on printed prescriptions for quite some time until all pharmacies and doctors use the new system.
It is always puzzling to me with how Germany has many cultural similarities with us Nordics and is an advanced science nation, yet is always so much slower in adopting new technologies. In Norway we have used electronic receipts since 2013. That is like a decade. But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.
Germany has a different history with surveillance and authoritarian state control.
Not only did the nazis use the resident register to find undesirables, but also the soviet union used any and all avenues to spy and control people.
Privacy and scepticism of making the sate a mandatory middleman is deeply entrenched for historic reasons.
Specifically this cryptographically tight identification, electronic-only payment etc. are very contentious for this reason I believe.
But overall your point is still correct, there is a strong bias towards the status quo and the new thing has a lot of proving itself to do before being accepted.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#120"Real time collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Mattermost, Wire, Threema, WhatsApp and Signal are currently all closed proprietary systems - meaning they are walled gardens whereby all parties have to use the same vendor." Signal is in this list. Isn't this false? The server and clients are here: https://github.com/signalapp
I guess it's a bit debatable. It's more or less open source - apparently there have been long periods when it was closed source (I think when they added cryptocurrency nonsense) and also it's centralised so you have to use their servers.
I would say it's a bit disingenuous to put it in the same list as Teams, Slack and WhatsApp though.