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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

#261

Post by spindle »

michaelmrose wrote: post #244
swiley wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to build apps locally on most smartphones which are the majority of end user devices. Open source practically died with personal computers.

When did personal computers die? Most desktops and laptops are fairly open and although android phones are not as open you can build software on your laptop/desktop for usage on your phone. You could also use something like pinephone or librem. You wont have access to a lot of android tech but the most important functionality. A web browser, sending sms, email, making calls all work.

I agree. Currently not many people use open source on their phones, but that could change, and things like F-Droid are ready to be used.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#262

Post by rsynnott »

verst wrote: post #137

I'm seeing a lot of responses from fellow folks in the US that seem to imply this EU (proposed?) regulation is unprecedented in the US. Is that actually so?

No. This essentially allows providers (Facebook et al) to look at the messages their users are sending. They used to be allowed do this in the EU, and have always been allowed do it in the US.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#263

Post by peterfield »

edrxty wrote: post #53

Are there any primary sources for this? I'm having trouble finding anything talking about any final legislative action involving chat control/ePrivacy etc. that isn't this random pirate party blog.

Yep this https://www.patrick-breyer.de website is the worst example of self-referencing I have ever seen :(

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#264

Post by rsynnott »

throwaways885 wrote: post #98
oblio wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU already has unprecedented control over commerce. Unprecedented compared to who? Every sovereign state has more control than the EU does: US, China, etc. > Notice how they chopped up the UK during Brexit. How did the EU chop up the UK?

I believe GP is referring to the EU 'forcing' the UK to put a border between Britain and Northern Ireland, because the EU wanted a hard border somewhere and wouldn't budge on that.

That’s really more a situation that the UK put itself in. The EU didn’t force it to ratify the Good Friday Agreement.

Given that the UK is a party to the Good Friday Agreement, AND it wants to leave the EU and no longer comply with EU law, the current situation, or something very similar, is inevitable. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#265

Post by rsynnott »

throwaways885 wrote: post #221
estaseuropano wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the issue was not EU control, rather the Ireland situation. The situation due solely to brexit required checks somewhere. Do you want new riots and civil war due to checks within Ireland? Should Ireland accept to effectively leave the common market and all its benefits just so there's no check between UK and Northern Ireland? Or this option. The UK killed all other scenarios by insisting that it wants to freely d…

> Brexit was a slim non-binding referendum run ammock for party-internal politics of the Tories. Absurd from start to finish and now you want to blame the EU for the consequences? I'm not saying that I agree with how things have turned out, nor am I blaming the EU, rather, just pointing out that they do have much control over global commerce. And this is anecdotal evidence of that. The EU could've had an internal bor…

> The EU could've had an internal border within it's own market, but that wasn't an option because they didn't want Ireland to be cut off.

Eh? No, it couldn’t; Ireland would obviously veto that. Outside of the fevered imagination of Boris Johnson, that was never an actual option.

I think there was a Brexiter theory that Ireland would do this voluntarily, and become a sort of UK dependency, but this was never at all realistic.

I wouldn’t discount the possibility that some major brexit figures actually believed this would happen and were surprised that it didn’t, because they’re, well, not winning any prizes for competence (you may remember David Davis believing that the UK could make a trade deal with Germany, say…) But no-one serious ever bought this concept.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#267

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

coding123 wrote: post #232
yarg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that - the genie's out of the bottle. End to end encryption is vital to the operations of modern businesses, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

You'd be surprised then how fast things bend and eventually break under government rule.

This works best if the individuals or companies doing this have a meaningful presence in your country and/or consider it a sufficiently relevant market.

If they don't, your critical infrastructure (Internet) just stops working until you conform to the standards set by those who write the software.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#269

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #201
Dah00n wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's easy to recommend "end-to-end" when you're about to force a backdoor into it. I'm not surprised that HN readers think politicians are all so dumb that they recommend their own staff use Signal and then recommend to break Signal. This kind of news pop up all the time and in almost all instances it turns out it isn't what is actually happening. Discussing it on HN -especially when it is the EU, Russia or China- i…

> We all know that the EU won't have backdoored Signal any more today than the next ten times this gets discussed on HN. It's all smoke and mirrors. How can you say that it's not only the stated goal but they have been making real progress towards it?

Real progress would be something that can force Moxie Marlinspike, who lives in the US, to introduce a backdoor.

They can't easily shut the service down without risking a lot of unwanted public attention. When "why can't I message grandma" is answered with "here's the list of politicians that caused that because they want to spy on your messages", those politicians will have a bad time. I think Signal is popular enough in Europe to be protected by this.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#270

Post by duduuegeh »

fitblipper wrote: post #206
scandox wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a much better source of information than the headline link. It describes how this came about, what its limitations are and just gives a whole lot more context. Of course it fails to advocate - which itself may have become a vice.

Rule of thumb: If something invokes "protect the children" to justify itself or to push it's agenda, it is advocating something. Not only that it is doing so in an underhanded and emotionally targeted way. I'm not saying politico is the primary source of advocacy in this situation, but they are at least echoing it and helping frame the debate around that.

Seems like a rule that fails pretty fast if children actually need protecting.
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