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European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

patrick-breyer.de

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Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#251

Post by adrianba »

perihelions wrote: post #175
aksss wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that source: In 1986, the United States Congress updated the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 by enacting the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which included an updated "Wiretap Act" and also extended Fourth Amendment-like protections to electronic communications in Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, known as the Stored Communications Act . In Carpenter v. United States…

Think you're glossing over the distinction between compelling material (by warrant, subpoena, &c.) -- what the Fourth Amendment covers -- and private entities voluntarily giving the government material that third parties have entrusted them. Nothing regulates the latter: that's the third-party doctrine.

> Nothing regulates the latter

That's not true. The Stored Communications Act _does_ regulate this. In fact, it was passed in response to concerns that the third-party doctrine would mean that nothing would be protected from the government if it was stored by a third-party service provider.

The law says that the contents of communications may not be divulged unless certain conditions are met, even voluntarily. See 18 U.S. Code § 2702.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#252

Post by bwindels »

Dah00n wrote: post #66
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Europe will allow end-to-end for much longer?

Yes. Saying otherwise is hyperbolic. The European Commission uses and recommends Signal themselves. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...

Hypocrisy is not something our governments are immune from, and the words of commissioner Johansson are not encouraging:

> She wants tech companies to face mandatory detecting and reporting obligations

> “The problem is that many of these communications are now being end-to-end encrypted,” she said, whereby only the users exchanging messages have access to the content.

> While encryption is "really important," she said, "we don't want pedophiles to be able to do whatever they want, to not be seen, we have to protect [children] so this is not an easy challenge to tackle.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/encryption-could-hinder-chil...

As long as politicians pretend that you can have both I'll assume they are either disingenuous or ignorant and I won't be at ease.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#253

Post by novok »

Scandiravian wrote: post #195
cvwright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep repeating this trope about metadata being worth more than content. Where does this come from? I can understand that metadata is valuable -- of course it is. You can learn a lot from metadata. But more valuable than the actual content ? Give me a break. Something can be bad without being literally the worst thing ever. Pointless exaggeration like this does nothing for the cause of privacy.

I think it's important to consider scale when discussing metadata vs raw content Getting high precision is difficult when done on "all content", especially considering the multitude of languages and dialects in Europe. At a certain point, more data does not result in better output, sometimes it's actually detrimental The patterns that arise from metadata are much more generalisable and there's less of it, so it's eas…

Metadata interesting lets you hone in on what you want to inspect full content on. It's definitely an upgrade

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#254

Post by [deleted] »

graeme wrote: post #158
sneak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backups aren't. Same with iMessage. end-to-end has become a marketing buzzword, any large scale deployment gets backdoored (via either key or plaintext escrow) at the endpoints, to FISA/PRISM providers who have to turn it over to the state without a warrant. China has the same setup with providers in their country. WhatsApp and iMessage simply aren't private when the providers get ~100% of the plaintext transitin…

For the purposes of an eu law requiring facebook to scan messages, facebook can’t scan icloud backups.

[deleted]

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#255

Post by mhitza »

buran77 wrote: post #154
ashtonkem wrote: post #61

You do have to wonder about the long term stability of a nominal democracy where 72% of citizens oppose digital monitoring, while 77% of their representatives vote for laws they emphatically do not want. Put more bluntly, is this even a democracy in anything other than the trappings?

This is the misunderstood part of democracies as we have them now. The only democratic parts are the process of electing your representatives, and the decisions taken between the representatives. Of course that's still a (small) win, and there's the reasonable assumption that a representative will at least partially represent the interests of their voters. But in reality there's a massive disconnect between the princ…

Maybe just maybe some day we will be empowered again when digitalisation leads us to a Liquid Democracy.

Ah, who am I kidding, no one in power wants to give the plebs more power.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#256

Post by ArkanExplorer »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #151

It's becoming scary how dangerous legislation is passed under the guise of protecting against "child exploitation". It's basically political suicide for politicians to vote against it (since the public cannot understand the nuance).

EU Politicians pass anti-privacy legislation to 'protect' us from terrorism....

Which is caused by the open borders and migrant settlement programs promoted by the EU in the first place.

Convenient isn't it?

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#257

Post by BjoernKW »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #246
BjoernKW wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the EU so far has been home to a significant tech industry anyway. With GDPR, a notoriously convoluted set of rules and regulations that fails to achieve what it set out to, yet at the same time pesters SMEs while allowing large corporations with legal departments to continue to do as they please in terms of privacy, the EU has made sure it stays that way. Laws like this one are just the icing on the ca…

Whats convoluted about GDPR?

See these articles, for example:

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/5/25/17395210/gdp...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/22/17378688/gdpr-general-dat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/gdpr-europe-data-...

Becoming GDPR-compliant is no small task if you take it seriously.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#258

Post by mhitza »

CameronNemo wrote: post #108
ashtonkem wrote: post #61

You do have to wonder about the long term stability of a nominal democracy where 72% of citizens oppose digital monitoring, while 77% of their representatives vote for laws they emphatically do not want. Put more bluntly, is this even a democracy in anything other than the trappings?

How is it not a democracy? It is representative, sure, but it is still more democratic than many other nominal democracies which do not even have proportional representation. Perhaps people just do not consider this an important issue, and do not factor it in to how they choose their representatives very much? What do you suggest as the alternative? Direct democracy? Anarchy? https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/z…

Funny, just posted this to a parent comment thread on a whim.

Representative democracy is really not that good, when you can't recast your vote; and you're forced to pick X/Y for Z years. Your options are vote a representative, don't vote a representative, become a representative yourself.

I personally am a firm believer that due to the proliferation of technology, Liquid Democracy can become feasible for our generation. But I doubt those in power would let the democratic process evolve in that direction.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#259

Post by collaborative »

soziawa wrote: post #30
Tenoke wrote: post #10

Would any email provider protect me from this, get my emails actually delivered and ideally work with my own domain? Not that I see myself switching after 15 years and 6 Gmail accounts but if I am to I'd rather know who I'd use. And no I won't risk setting it up myself and risk missing on some portion of my emails like I've had happen at workplaces before we'd sigh and switch to Google. For Chat tg/signal seem like t…

> For Chat tg/signal seem like they would but I am less sure what the best option is for email. Something that doesn't store the chats in a decryptable form on their servers is probably preferrable. So Telegram out and Signal, Threema or WhatsApp in.

A bit of self-promotion, why not: also Collaborative Groups in :-P

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#260

Post by sorenjan »

iknowstuff wrote: post #120
sorenjan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram supports E2E encrypted secret chats. https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-secret-chats-different

Which noone uses. Even Facebook Messenger supports "secret chats". Telegram is not secure.

I don't know what kind of usage numbers their secret chats have, but if that's the case maybe that's a sign most people prefer the convenience of non E2E chats to the security of E2E? And if someone is just a tiny bit interested and motivated the secret chats are there if they want them.

In fact, I'd argue that it's better to use encrypted chats in a common chat client than having to explain why you use a specific encrypted client if you ever find yourself in a situation where that's necessary, like a border crossing or police interaction.

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