German government comes out against Chat Control

Unfortunately, that's not a "German conservatives" thing, but very much a "German politicians" thing.

>>I have over 50% of my income taken from me into a collapsing welfare state/pension system

That's incredibly high - where do you live if you don't mind saying?

>>Why they are okay with calling out the far right but not okay calling out the far left I will never understand

So help me out here. "Far right" is usually full of brilliant ideas like lets round people up and deport them without due process, doesn't matter where - or starting to look into getting rid of people with fully legal right to stay, or saying that they haven't seen a single white face in a town somehow isn't racist and is a perfectly normal thing to say.

In the meantime far left is doing.....what exactly. Saying that we need to tax the rich? That everyone should have healthcare? That people should be free to decide their gender?

Honestly, help me out - what are those "far left" ideas that you say should be labeled as "extreme"?

Propaganda is painting this as something different than it is. Here we consider speech for what it is: something you can express freely, within the limits of civil society. If you pass those limits, then you incur in problems. Germany let someone speak freely a tad too much in the twenties and thirties, and they don't want to make that mistake again. I understand the point of "absolute free speech", and I would subscribe to it if it wasn't that groups like AfD, or Trump's flavor of conservatism, hide behind it to achieve their authoritarian goals. To avoid that authoritarian result, you have to police certain types of speech like Germany does.

I say it again, it's nasty and needs a very strong set of counterbalances, which Germany - unlike the US - still has. Therefore this remains a much more freer country than Say-whatever-you-like-on-Rogan America. Freedom for us is free healthcare, a welfare state, an ethics-based concept of societal rights and obligations. We don't market ourselves as the beacon of free speech and FREEDOM by making both empty words fueled by extreme individualism. We still believe in Solidarität and on social-oriented policies, both on the right and left side of the isle. We have ferocious political battles about topics that are too violently policed, by the way, like right now about Palestine and Israel, and people take to the streets FREELY, despite some despicable police brutality episodes. We do have the contradictions and complexities of any modern western society.

Yet we don't have too many runaway billionaires that are more powerful than governments, and we are still ALL a bit better off because of that. It's boring, but it works.

AfD is against all this, and it is because it's provenly funded by Russia and other enemies of the west. They appeal to the Volk, but in reality are infested by double-standards, hate, and a specific type of political individualism and authoritarian views that need to be stopped with all legal and societally-acceptable means possible.

    > Wiretapping a chat if the citizen is suspected of a crime AND after a judge 
    > has reviewed the evidence and green-lit such surveillance is - imho - more 
    > acceptable. We do that with phones, why would we not do it with chats?

The problem is that it's not technologically possible. Many major messaging apps - including WhatsApp, which is the market leader by far in Europe - provide end-to-end encryption, and have done so for years. After a judge has ruled that an individual's WhatsApp chats are to be surveilled, how would you achieve this? In the current situation, there's just nothing you can do. You might try to wiretap the phone, but there's really not that many zero-days left: both iOS and Android are quite secure these days, so this isn't even an alternative.

The only way to make court-mandated surveillance possible is to ensure that nobody's chat is encrypted to begin with, such that after a court order has come in, the data can be easily read. So to outlaw end-to-end encryption entirely is what this proposal is really about: break privacy guarantees for everybody to enable surveillance in a few outlier cases.

Of course, once encryption has been broken, three-letter agencies the world over will be reading your chats whether they have a warrant or not.

There is no way to have private communication for good people only. Either you have freedom for all, or freedom for none.