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European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

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Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#31

Post by rdm_blackhole »

yyny wrote: post #15
petre wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's linked in the second paragraph of article. More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data: … · A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement, · A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with…

"Law enforcement need lawful ways to enter a home" "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks" Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.

No that is not what they are doing.

This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.

You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.

The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.

And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!

There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#32

Post by jbstack »

With all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less.

This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#33

Post by microtonal »

throw0101a wrote: post #26

Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS. It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well. IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these propos…

FWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't.

A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.

The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.

So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.

[1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#34

Post by jbstack »

throw0101a wrote: post #26

Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS. It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well. IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these propos…

As someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it.

We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#36

Post by rdm_blackhole »

watwut wrote: post #20
tokai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.

It has nothing to with EU itseld and a lot of to do with far right trying to turn people against EU. EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk. They want to push it over the line and break down. Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA we…

> with far right trying to turn people against EU.

The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.

Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.

> now EU is fascist.

Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...

Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...

Here is small excerpt:

The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.

War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#37

Post by VorpalWay »

throw0101a wrote: post #26

Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS. It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well. IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these propos…

There are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block.

In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#38

Post by rdm_blackhole »

throw0101a wrote: post #26

Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS. It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well. IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these propos…

There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#39

Post by ETH_start »

nekusar wrote: post #14

I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin. There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar. And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego tha…

Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.

The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.

Re: European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

#40

Post by rdm_blackhole »

tonis2 wrote: post #35

Stuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.

If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls

Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.

It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

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