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European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

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Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#171

Post by thaumasiotes »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #66
Quanttek wrote: post #24

For a better understanding: The Court held (in the circumstances of this case) that a legal obligation to decrypt E2E communications is a disproportionate interference with the right to privacy. The law in question specifically obligated messengers such as Telegram to hand over communications alongside the "information necessary to decrypt electronic messages if they were encrypted". To come to that conclusion, it re…

>While a ruling on a specific case (and law), the Court seems quite skeptical towards any "requirement that providers of such services weaken the encryption mechanism for all users". If I were the UK government, I would be quite worried that the UK Online Safety Bill will be overturned by domestic courts (or the European Court) on the basis of this ruling. It's worth noting that UK courts can't overturn Acts of Parli…

> It's worth noting that UK courts can't overturn Acts of Parliament.

Is that true? I thought the UK had semi-recently (2009) introduced a Supreme Court for this purpose.

https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/lessons-from-britains-nation... says this, just a couple of months ago:

> Just this week, on Wednesday, Britain’s Supreme Court struck down the latest attempt to implement the Rwanda plan. (Having a “Supreme Court” that strikes down Acts of Parliament is a fairly recent development in Britain.)

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#172

Post by Aeolun »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #151
sorokod wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not similar to how the US constitution is managed? It was amended and latter un-amended in the case of prohibition (18th and 21st amendments)

The "parliament cannot bind its successors" principle was absolutely (and deliberately) imported into US law, yes. It's more general -- no branch of government can bind its own successors. (With the exception of e.g. presidential pardons which cannot be undone)

I think this is generally true? It’d be weird if there were some laws from 30 years ago that nobody wanted, but were not legally allowed to be changed. You’d just change them anyway and nobody would care.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#173

Post by robtherobber »

kypro wrote: post #42

I realise the article contains the same typo, but the title is bugging me – it needs a space between "end" and "encryption". "Endencryption" is not a word. @dang ?

Ah, apologies about that, I didn't even notice it. Happy to see it corrected.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#174

Post by pmyteh »

logifail wrote: post #119
denton-scratch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only constitution that the UK has consists of Acts of Parliament. So I don't know why it should seem odd; the US courts can't strike clauses of the US Constitution, and the UK courts can't strike Acts. Amusingly, the UK government is currently trying to pass an Act to the effect that black is equivalent to white, i.e. that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent. This is analogous to the Stat…

> that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent Putting aside whether the UK government's approach is a sensible one (which in my view it isn't) we should be aware that: "the UNHCR, with financial support from the EU, has transferred refugees from Libya to Rwanda under a scheme called the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) [..] The ETM offers vulnerable refugees, taken into detention by the Libyan…

The UK courts partly relied on evidence that those asylum seekers were not always treated in accordance with the convention. The Supreme Court judgment noted cases of refoulement (expulsion to the state the asylum seeker is fleeing from) as well as structural deficiencies in the decision-making process. (https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2023/42.html at paragraphs 89 and onwards).

They also suggested that the UNHCR was mostly processing applications for asylum in third countries for ETM evacuees. An obvious difference with the UK scheme is that we expect Rwanda to grant asylum themselves.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#175

Post by pmyteh »

sorokod wrote: post #143
dukeyukey wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parliament is sovereign. Basically, as long as Parliament says so, it can do what it wants, although it can be slowed down by institutions like the Supreme Court or the royal family. There is no real separation powers. Which _sounds_ bad, but the UK has an extremely long history of relative stability compared to basically anywhere else on the planet, so something must be going right.

This stability presupposes a presence of adults in the room.

It's sometimes described as the 'good chap' theory of governance. Everyone is expected to be a gentleman, so flexibility is possible with an absence of formal guardrails.

It obviously handles capture by bad faith actors fairly poorly; the hope is that such people or movements can be stopped before they get that far. Johnson was pretty marginal as a PM from this point of view.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#176

Post by bregma »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #109
denton-scratch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only constitution that the UK has consists of Acts of Parliament. So I don't know why it should seem odd; the US courts can't strike clauses of the US Constitution, and the UK courts can't strike Acts. Amusingly, the UK government is currently trying to pass an Act to the effect that black is equivalent to white, i.e. that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent. This is analogous to the Stat…

It's definitely odd! That's not a reason for UK courts not to strike down acts, or more properly, to have judicial review. Take Canada. Canada has a Supreme Court and no written constitution. The formal divorce between Canada and the UK was not long ago so we inherited the same legal framework (modulo Quebec but it doesn't play a role here). Yet the Canadian Supreme Court can and does strike down federal laws! Actual…

The Supreme Court of Canada does not strike down federal laws. It follows section 52 of the written constitution [0] that states the following.

  52 (1) The Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada, and any law that is inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution is, to the extent of the inconsistency, of no force or effect.
All the SCC can do is rule whether or not a law (of any jurisdiction, including federal, provincial, or otherwise) is consistent with the Constitution of Canada. If a law is not consistent with the constitution, then the law has no force or effect, according to the law. That's not "striking down", since the inconsistent law or portion thereof was never valid in the first place.

[0] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-13.html#h-59

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#177

Post by pmyteh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #171
M2Ys4U wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While a ruling on a specific case (and law), the Court seems quite skeptical towards any "requirement that providers of such services weaken the encryption mechanism for all users". If I were the UK government, I would be quite worried that the UK Online Safety Bill will be overturned by domestic courts (or the European Court) on the basis of this ruling. It's worth noting that UK courts can't overturn Acts of Parli…

> It's worth noting that UK courts can't overturn Acts of Parliament. Is that true? I thought the UK had semi-recently (2009) introduced a Supreme Court for this purpose. https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/lessons-from-britains-nation... says this, just a couple of months ago: > Just this week, on Wednesday, Britain’s Supreme Court struck down the latest attempt to implement the Rwanda plan. (Having a “Supreme Court” th…

We have a Supreme Court. It's the old House of Lords judicial committee with new robes, though: the powers are nearly identical and the legal business of the HoL has been done by the most senior judges since the 19th Century.

The nuance here is that many Acts do not set out a whole scheme: they allow government to make subordinate regulations with the force of law. The Acts are (essentially, kinda) immune from judicial review, but the implementing statutory instruments aren't. (They haven't had full parliamentary scrutiny and are in practice just executive instruments - so can be struck down without parliamentary sovereignty problems as ultra vires the government).

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#178

Post by amirdadp »

ulchar wrote: post #169
klabb3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only California could do a good job starting as many companies as Delaware.

Is Delaware a good place for a startup? Or am I missing the joke.

Many companies incorporate in Delaware for benefits such as loose tax laws.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#179

Post by alkonaut »

pb7 wrote: post #120
scotty79 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do what everyone can do if you can do the thing only you can do? ASML When there's a gold rush, make shovels.

That’s it? One noteworthy company for a population of 440M?

There are tons of large european tech companies. But we forget that because most of them are 50 or 100 years old.
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