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Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

swedenherald.com

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Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#151

Post by throwaway8576 »

dartos wrote: post #93
disruptiveink wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google ultimately did that for China. The outcome in that case is that the domestic market filled in the gaps, while complying to all relevant authoritarian legislation. I do not believe that the same would happen for every market where these stunts are being pulled off, at least not to the same level of quality. Why are European countries trying to pull one off from the China playbook, while simultaneously being sho…

Would you want to be reliant on American companies right now?

[dead]

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#152

Post by zaggynl »

Thorrez wrote: post #91
zaggynl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question the use of an instant messaging service hosted in another country for your armed forces, is that a good idea, especially now? As good as Signal is I mean, you will want something under your control.

Is Signal hosted in just 1 country?

Good question! I assumed it was US only but things have changed a while back after it becoming popular it seems. Going by https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

>Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted, we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and others while ensuring that your messages and calls remain private and secure.

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#153

Post by friggle »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #8

It seems like a lot of these proposals are coming out of Europe—assuming I’m not mistaken (and I may well be), why is Europe cracking down so much on privacy?

Bear with me here, but I think it comes down to believing in a "benign government", coupled with a misunderstanding of the technology.

Under a benign government (as arguably we have in most of Europe), we can have a reasonable assumption that the state will act in the interests of the population. The public sector workers who have chosen that line of work probably believe in what they're doing and want to do it well.

The government has always had the ability to steam letters open, and they will always need to, in order to fulfill their duties to the population.

Of course, requests such as adding a back door to end-to-end encryption are unnecessary when they could take control of one of the devices in some fashion...

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#154

Post by diggan »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #129
diggan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European bureaucrats generally have little understanding of the technology they get paid to regulate I'd agree with you if you just put "bureaucrats" instead of European bureaucrats, what country isn't currently led by a bunch of bureaucrats who don't seem to understand even the basics of the technology they legislate about? I've yet to seen a country to lead the way, no wonder the rest of the countries don't seem…

While I generally agree, the bureaucrats in the US have been somewhat checked by nonprofits who will lobby against this kind of legislative overreach and sue if the legislation passes. Obviously we have all sorts of other problems, but mostly our bureaucrats and legislators aren’t making backdoors a policy as far as ai’m aware (who knows what the CIA and FBI and NSA are up to, though?). I assume it’s just one of thos…

> While I generally agree, the bureaucrats in the US have been somewhat checked by nonprofits

So does Sweden, and have had strong privacy advocates for a long time. Remember that The Pirate Bay came from Sweden? It spawned a political and ideological movement (Piratbyrån & Copyleft/Kopimi) that still has some presence in Sweden and EU although doesn't seem as strong as it used to be, except for Iceland I think.

> I have more faith in Sweden than my own country lately.

Not sure what your own country is, but assuming it's US, they're pretty much equal in many ways (but not all obviously) and Sweden basically copy-pastes US political policy for the last decades, for better or worse.

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#155

Post by undotoday »

microtonal wrote: post #107

What is the state of peer to peer messengers with E2EE? Over ten years ago, Bittorrent Inc. (now Rainberry and Resilio) made a serverless chat client (Bleep IIRC). But I don't think there is anything new that is also user-friendly? (Drop-in replacement of WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.)

Jami is supposed to be encrypted, distributed, opensource, and cross platform, though I haven't personally used it:

https://jami.net/

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#156

Post by genewitch »

ronbenton wrote: post #26

What would even be the point of Signal if there’s a backdoor? This isn’t just principled, it’s necessary for business.

Once Signal is backdoored successfully (in this alternate timeline) you go after WhatsApp, RCS, whatever other encryption you can't bypass. Other countries follow suit because Sweden did it (like an infamous single study out of the Netherlands that affected global health policy.)

The goal is no privacy. Because terrorism. Or the children. Or espionage. Just pick one and speak against them directly and you'll find many arguments why the government needs access for any of those reasons. People love going to bat for giving up rights.

I forget who said it but you cannot have a civilization without secrets.

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#158

Post by TravelPiglet »

einpoklum wrote: post #108

I wonder if there is some connection between the more-spying direction of policy to Sweden's recent entry into NATO ("after 200 years of non-alignment"): https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_223446.htm

Sweden has been sharing info with its neighbours and the US for a long time. See SIGINT Seniors Europe for example

Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

#159

Post by Ajedi32 »

lupusreal wrote: post #142
tuukkah wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also only possible because we use Signal as compiled by themselves and not by trusted third parties from a source kept clean of any future client-side backdoors. The client is open source, right? https://github.com/signalapp (Reproducible builds is a cool technique.)

Yes, this is part of the problem. Application developers and the packagers should be distinct unrelated entities to reduce the chance of a malicious update being pushed to users if the developer sells out. F-Droid and Debian/etc show how this is done.

Without reproducible builds, this just means you have to trust the packager instead of the developer. Sometimes that's a good trade-off, but you still haven't really solved the problem, just moved it.

With reproducible builds, you don't have to trust the packager or the developer as long as you trust at least one person who reviewed the source code.

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