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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

#321

Post by dane-pgp »

klodolph wrote: post #96
swiley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use GPG. Don't use smartphones, don't use any closed software (especially non-free OSes.) Vote.

GPG doesn’t solve the problem of metadata surveillance. One of the major problems with technological solutions to privacy problems is that metadata surveillance is extremely useful to begin with, and it’s hard to make communication anonymous.

For what it's worth, implementations like Delta Chat support encrypted subject lines[0].

Also, it would be relatively simple for mail providers to act as two halves of a Cypherpunk remailer[1]. By that I mean that when alice@sender writes an email to bob@recipient, the sender server only sees "remailer@recipient" as the recipient and the recipient server only sees "remailer@sender" as the sender.

That approach just requires some onion-layering of the emails with encryption, and a reserved key-pair advertised per mail server.

[0] https://delta.chat/en/help#how-does-delta-chat-protect-my-me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remailer

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#322

Post by jollybean »

dane-pgp wrote: post #311
jollybean wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the 'carrot' for Spain, France, Italy that goes beyond what the EEC provided? Why would a 'really great trade agreement' not provide 'most, if not all of the carrot' with respect to economic upsides? Does the EU political apparatus an ECJ, i.e. beyond comprehensive trade agreements, provide carrots?

Well, one carrot for Spain was the assistance it received during the last financial crisis[0], and France probably likes being able to project its influence onto neighbouring countries through its position in the EU. Less reductively, I think that a major benefit of a political union is that it gives some degree of democratic legitimacy to decisions made about difficult region-wide issues like trade policy, consumer…

Those are not very good carrots.

Why bother with barely a vaneer of legitimacy at the EU level which has a democratic deficit?

Why not have an EEC that casts flexible treaties over immigration, environment and anti-trust on as as-needed basis, with actual elected represented 'regular' national MPs dedicated to those issues at the European level? i.e. Boris would have 5 Cabinet Ministers for major European level issues and a European ministry?

That way have the benefits of some degree of coherence without the sovereignty problem.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#323

Post by dane-pgp »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #118
swiley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use GPG. Don't use smartphones, don't use any closed software (especially non-free OSes.) Vote.

With so many places in the world with flawed democracy by first past the post, it seems like voting is more or less irrelevant. The first thing that the digital revolution should have fixed was our variously flawed democratic systems. It might be the last thing.

Rather than fixing our democratic systems, the digital revolution may have just made them worse, by encouraging societies to entrust the counting of ballots to machines, and then unsurprisingly stop trusting those machines as soon as they give an answer that half the population don't like.

Even in societies that still rely on analogue vote counting, it is unclear whether instant access to digital information has made societies more informed or misinformed on average.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#324

Post by dane-pgp »

adventured wrote: post #136
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably take another World War before people collectively remember why privacy even existed in the first place.

What would a world war have to do with reminding people of privacy? World War 2 gave China and Soviet Russia a new sense of privacy? WW2 made the US worse as a place in most regards, not better. That's what caused the US to build its military industrial complex, to install a massive standing global military, to primarily guard against the Europeans going on rampage again for the nth time (which was guaranteed to happ…

If we accept the (unconventional) view that the Cold War was WW3, then it could be argued that the countries which escaped Russian domination learned the value of privacy (even if their appreciation of it has waned over time).

You're right, though, that it's probably not worth getting our hopes up about what sort of societies would exist after WW4 (based on that numbering system).

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#326

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

When you have bills with 70% and higher disapproval getting 70% of the MPs voting for it, then “narrowest interpretation” seems like a cruel joke.

To be blunter still; systems of government can collapse and be replaced in function but not in form. The early emperors of Rome ruled surrounded by the trappings of republicanism, even though we now know that they were autocrats who had killed the republic whose skin they wore. I wonder if later generations will consider us to be oligarchies and not representative democracies, considering how little the will of the voters seems to matter to those who nominally rule on our behalf.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#327

Post by ashtonkem »

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #95
ashtonkem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with email is that it’s federated; any email is as secure as the least secure mail server it’s being sent from or two. Even if you use something super duper secure in a polity that respects privacy, it does you no good if you send an email to Gmail who immediately hands it over to one or more government bodies.

There is an obvious solution, do not send emails to gmail addresses.

You can give out this advice, very few people will follow it. Given the choice between giving up some privacy and the convenient of sending an email to a friend or colleague using gmail, the vast majority of people will choose the latter. Meaningful improvements to privacy must come with negligable convenience tradeoffs if you want people to actually adopt them.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#328

Post by ashtonkem »

raverbashing wrote: post #273
shoeffner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In [1], pages 10 and 11 are the actual directive, the rest is the reasoning. And, although I don't know the previous directives and regulations, it reads as if this is essentially an extension of an exception to the ePrivacy directive for another five years. Birgit Sippel says in her statement to the president of the parliament [2]: > Dieses Gesetz ist eine Übergangslösung für drei Jahre. Die Kommission hatte verspro…

Yeah, this is a fair assessment. The main article is sensationalistic and overblown.

People react strongly to such things because we’ve all lived long enough to see new powers targeted at bad actors eventually abused by law enforcement.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#329

Post by sifar »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #302
briefcomment wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No rights are objectively fundamental. It's subjective. If people in power don't agree to act as though certain rights are fundamental, they cease to be enforced, even if lip service is paid.

Excellent point. So I’ll ignore “fundamental right” next time I read it. I note that the United States uses “inalienable rights”, meaning ones which can’t be given or taken away. The only things that can’t be given or taken from me without a lobotomy are my education and internal thoughts and beliefs (that includes things like self-worth and dignity).

I tend to see rights as temporary privileges.

A right by its name can be given or taken away. I feel the discussion about fundamental rights is moot as it always depends on the powers that be. In that sense I prefer dane-pgp's explanation of these being more foundational rights.

Your thoughts and beliefs and your actions are what you are and not a right.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#330

Post by josefx »

bwindels wrote: post #215
josefx wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a "think of the children" law, the last time the European Commission pushed a law under that reasoning it turned out they were targeting mainly political activists. Back then the super secret list of child porn sites they cited as impossible to take down through sane means contained two things: child porn sites that were taken down within 24 hours of the list becoming public and the sites of political activists…

do you have a source for this?

Seems like it has been a bit longer than I thought, also these kinds of laws seem to pop up every other quarter, making it near impossible to find information on a specific event. Most I can currently find are sources on the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz which was partially driven by the same Politicians trying to install an EU wide blocklist. While the source does not mention the blocking of political activists (a change that the content of the list would be confirmed by an independent board is mentioned) it does cover the success of deleting over blocking and lies like "India does not have laws against child pornography". [1]

[1] https://netzpolitik.org/tag/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz/

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