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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

#361

Post by ben_w »

Datagenerator wrote: post #332
WalterBright wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know what those fundamental rights are? By observing what happens to societies that have various formulations of rights. The societies that thrive are closer to the mark than societies that are mired in misery, despair, and death.

The ten commandments as benchmark and foundation applies to many common situations.

There are at least 8 ways to divide up the “ten commandments” passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy into a total of 14 commandments, the Quran has a different set (not being a religious scholar I can’t meaningfully assert how different, given linguistic drift and translation challenges).

Bushido (or the form of it on Wikipedia) has a fairly different and also interesting set.

Anton LaVey (Church of Satan) has an interesting, albeit stereotypically American, eleven.

The philosophers in this list seem to focus on commandments of rationality more than morality, but that’s not something I find hugely surprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Ten_Comman...

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#362

Post by ben_w »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #256
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?

EU internal borders are open, the external ones are not. It’s a bit like the USA in that regard, biggest difference is our versions of California and Louisiana have their own national languages.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#363

Post by ben_w »

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.

Sure, and then the governments are forced to tell the intelligence agencies they can no longer afford all the we-told-you-so consequential successful hacks that happened because of the back doors they demanded.

And the competent criminals will still be able to roll their own encrypted communications from existing open source libraries.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#364

Post by ben_w »

pydry wrote: post #242
trainsplanes wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people do not care. Politicians will say this is to stop pedophiles, and if you speak up against surveillance, you’re labeled as a pedophile and ignored. Plus, let’s be real, end to end encryption doesn’t exist if you’re using any sort of pre-built app. It’s encrypted-looking to most people, but the people who matter always get back door access.

Don't care or don't perceive the threat clearly?

I’ve seen both when trying to advocate against the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#365

Post by ben_w »

netr0ute wrote: post #198
oblio wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to revive this conversation. States have access to "a monopoly of legitimate violence". We grant them that in order for them to be able to keep the peace, you know, law and order. Everything else can be boiled down to this. No matter how many bits of encryption keys are used, someone with a chloroform infused rag and a wrench can visit any of us at any moment. And it's actually part of what we, collectively, as…

> someone with a chloroform infused rag and a wrench can visit any of us at any moment That's where engineering comes into play, maybe materials science to build suitable systems to defend against such physical attacks. And, you can't just ban engineering.

Unless I become Robert Johansson[0], my imagination and capacity for material engineering is not going to be enough to simultaneously have a life and protect against a single sufficiently motivated individual, let alone a nation state putting a lawful (by its standards) order against me.

I’m only even safe from nutcases because the nation collectively has enough experience dealing with people who think they know better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_E._Taylor

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#366

Post by fnord123 »

imtringued wrote: post #350
WalterBright wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If governments bestow rights, then the citizens have no business revolting against an oppressive government.

Because the government would never bestow them with the right to overthrow it?

That's literally what elections are.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#367

Post by account42 »

toast0 wrote: post #216
aembleton wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... or to domains that use gmail. Possible to find out using dig but not as simple as avoiding gmail addresses.

Only if the domain uses google's MX as the public facing MX. If it delivers to an intermediate MX for filtering or archiving or ??? and then redelivers to google, it's not visible. Of course, if you don't set the public MX to google, blackberry phones won't use the right SMTP for outgoing mail, and then mail will fail DMARC, because you can't actually configure the SMTP server anyway. Hope they fixed that in BB10, be…

> If it delivers to an intermediate MX for filtering or archiving or ??? and then redelivers to google, it's not visible.

That is a) a very odd and theoretical setup b) probably would cause Google's MX to reject most messages for SPF failures

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#368

Post by eitland »

nybble41 wrote: post #180
eitland wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that WhatsApp is far out: it uploads all data unencrypted to at least one cloud if on of the participants have backups enabled. So Signal, Matrix or possible Threema (I don't know it) is in. Personally though, I use Telegram and I drive an ordinary car, not an armored one.

No matter which chat service you use, any recipient could potentially upload the unencrypted data to a cloud backup service. If you don't trust the intended recipients with the data then you shouldn't share it with them in the first place.

Have my upvote.

This is a great - and often forgotten I think - point.

I guess my point is that in WhatsApp it is so easy to stumble into doing it, and that it sends it directly to the cloud.

For clarification: I'm certainly annoyed at Google for a number of reasons, but I don't think their security record is worse than everyone else's. Quite the contrary.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#369

Post by csomar »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #169
koolba wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world has a poor history on banning the application of math.

laughs in Mandarin Well, I shouldn’t do that. Suffice to say, it’s simply a fact that China bans VPNs, and pretty much everyone goes along with it. People fear jail. It’s hard (but not impossible) to imagine Europe and the US doing that. NordVPN is practically a household name, at least on YouTube.

VPNs are not illegal in China and are part of doing business/daily life. China is authoritarian, but at least smart. They understand that the great firewall can reduce the free flow of information to a respectable degree and thus they implemented it. They also understand that going after VPNs is futile with the current technology.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#370

Post by AnssiH »

bitdivision wrote: post #148
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.

I have not been able to find anything about final legislation either, though I did find some references [0] to the chat control legislation from June: [1]. I haven't read through it all, but the notable paragraph seemed to be: This Regulation therefore provides for a temporary derogation from Article 5(1) and Article 6 of Directive 2002/58/EC, which protect the confidentiality of communications and traffic data. 'der…

> I have not been able to find anything about final legislation either

It's here:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-0319...

Looks like it has a more restrictions and a reduced time period (3 years) than the proposal you linked, and some requirements to feed statistics back to monitor the performance of the law.

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