I suspect you're underestimating the ability of criminals to obtain communication tools with sufficient plausible deniability to prevent detection by the local police after the first few prosecutions for that.
I suspect you overestimate the bespoke firmware-altering abilities of the average local criminal gang.
He is wildly _underestimating_. There won't be any prosecutions even, criminals would buy already 100% working tools on a darknet forum.
My german isn't that good, but from what I understand and from the translation below, the source seems a bit conspiratorial. I completely agree with the concerns raised elsewhere in this thread, but I'm not sure I see the clear link to recent events in Vienna etc claimed here. Here[0] is an earlier document from 21 october which the article seems to take some screenshots from, so it seems that this has been coming ei…
Switzerland is not part of the european union but has to follow some rules to have access to their market. If Whatsapp breaks E2E it will possibly affect multiple countries.
I want to also give some perspective why this is bad even IF we can make sure that only governments will have the keys. We have just uncovered an organized crime at the top levels in Slovakia where even the President of police is part of it and they influenced many court cases and were accessing secret information and databases on citizens, basically a mafia. And we are part of EU. I don't trust our goverment to use they keys only for good purpose. And I speak from the recent experience.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix... is our attempt at Matrix to spell out what a catastrophic idea it is to backdoor end-to-end encryption (and to provide an alternative proposal in the form of using decentralised reputation to mitigate abuse. We're kicking decentralised reputation work off in earnest tomorrow, so watch this space to see how it goes). I guess we'll be weighing in on the EU…
Matrix is awesome. Also, doesn’t the French government use Matrix? Are they trying to outlaw their own policies?
Several EU governments use Matrix - so yeah, there's a paradox here. On one hand Element (the company set up by the core Matrix team) depends on government work to keep the lights on for Matrix work, but on the other hand we feel a clear responsibility to push back on backdoors, given backdoors are intrinsically flawed and dangerous. This is why we're proposing a (hopefully) better alternative instead (and this is also why we're soliciting funding to support reputation work via the Matrix.org Foundation at funding@matrix.org, just in case any YC billionaires happen to be reading this...)
What can someone like me do to help? Someone who know little about politics or policy, who k ow little about encryption, but who is concerned about the development? I live in the EU but I am not even sure who my representatives are to whom I could raise my concern. Where in the EU is this being worked on?
You can look up who won in the last EU election in your country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_European_Parlia... Just drop them a letter or call their office (both works fine).
They are actually quite responsive when ypu write them! While it was not enough in the end to stop it I had a 50% response rate when I wrote to the Czech representatives in the european parliament due to the article 13 last year.
> Don't assume that "we" are happy about that. You might be; others are not. I don't want to suggest everyone is happy with the status quo, but it's at least not one of the top items on everyone's agenda for change. > Unbreakable encryption should be available to everyone, and straightforward for everyone to use, and used by default rather than only for "sensitive" information. Unbreakable encryption should be so wid…
One of many angles is "perhaps you trust your government (or perhaps not), but do you trust every government with a backdoor? Do you trust everyone who has gotten hold of it? Do you trust that it can't be broken or stolen or abused?" We need to very clearly and universally make the message clear: there's unbreakable encryption, and there's broken encryption, nothing in between. Anything that purports to be in between…
I trust my current government, I don't trust most foreign ones and I don't even trust my own next government. I think we now have the two key pillars of the dilemma: we can never have back doors (broken encryption which is as bad as no encryption), and neither the public (I'm guessing) nor authorities will allow a situation where even a court order doesn't allow eavesdropping. And between these two there is no middle ground.
> Governments have all sorts of things like machine guns, tanks, and battleships that (rightfully) aren't allowed for the general public. You have listed three things which are all really the same thing. There is no objection to private ownership of motor vehicles or ships. You object to the weaponry. But we can put aside the whole right to bear arms debate in this case because there is an obvious way to distinguish…
Secure communication is not a purely defensive technology. It allows you to safely coordinate an attack.
By this logic home ownership is an offensive technology because it allows you to safely coordinate an attack.