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Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

theregister.com

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#11
What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time.

I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#13
post #2

I'm so tired of these... Is there really no way we can make it technologically impossible for them to exfiltrate user data?

Avoiding centralised services is generally a good start. You could also do something like encrypt any messages through PGP even if the service you're using is already "e2e encrypted" like iMessage or signal

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#14

What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time. I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.

Why is that strange? Technology's proliferation decentralizes political power nexuses, making it a near-existential threat to tyrants^Wgovernments everywhere.

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#16

Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening. EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report s…

Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#17

Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening. EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report s…

In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#18

What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time. I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.

Every Western government is receiving the same briefings from its intelligence and counterintelligence agencies: these powers are needed in case the third world war starts.

Re: Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

#20
post #2

I'm so tired of these... Is there really no way we can make it technologically impossible for them to exfiltrate user data?

I don't think there's a way with a phone that people would actually be willing to use. At some point it has to be decrypted to be displayed to the user and there's always the chance there's a flaw somewhere in the stack from hardware to OS to app etc that will have a gap to exfiltrate the data.
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