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EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

statewatch.org

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Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#381

Post by damnencryption »

euthrow439 wrote: post #162
Zak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common that people become much more concerned about possible threats to physical safety after having children. That strikes me as reasonable, even if it leads someone to take a different side than I would in a freedom/safety question. With that out of the way, how do you propose stopping criminals from using encrypted chat? You can make it illegal, of course, but making it impossible for someone who doesn't care…

Well, one way: If you do make it illegal: 1. Police finds e.g. a 19 year criminal gang member doing something mildly illegal. 2. Police inspects their phone 3. Police finds illicit encrypted chat app 4. Criminal gang member refuses to cough up password 5. Criminal gang member gets sentenced and cannot hurt the public while they are contained.

Why do you trust the police?

With everything that has been happening in US, Hong Kong, China, Belarus, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, and others. Where does this trust comes from? Media?

I think you are more likely to be brutalized by police in US than terrorist right now. Maybe you feel that your country is better and somehow won't end up like others but what exactly is stopping that?

I really want to know how this mindset works. Maybe people have been living in peace for too long that they don't recognize all the horrible crimes committed by the state.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#382

Post by intricatedetail »

karmakaze wrote: post #373

How practical is any declaration of law? Wouldn't it be feasible to say, have a video streaming site hide messages it its streams and also in its control data? More sophisticated methods are of course possible. Basically "outlawing encryption means only outlaws have encryption." The only use from any such laws is surveillance of the public at large.

What if people use their own language as a form of encryption?

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#384

Post by yogthos »

textgel wrote: post #24
yogthos wrote: post #5

I was told that this only happens in authoritarian regimes like China. Turns out that while everybody was talking about China exact same things were happening here in the West. It's as if the whole focus on China was specifically designed to distract people from what's happening in their own countries.

What concerns me is that with the increase in arguably totalitarian laws and the constant attempts on once sacrosanct principles like the above we're moving in a direction where we'll run out of room to point at that side and say "yes they've got X but I'd still rather us because they have Y" when more and more we have Y as well.

I think we may already be in that situation given how China and the West handled the pandemic respectively. Our governments are quietly implementing all the worst aspects of Chinese authoritarianism and pervasive surveillance without any of the benefits of having a competent government that's able to deal with large scale problems.

China dealt with the pandemic swiftly and decisively and life is getting back to normal there now. Meanwhile, the West had months of warning and vast majority of the governments chose to do nothing. Instead of stocking up on supplies and preparing the public the officials and the media called Chinese lockdowns authoritarian and played down the severity of the problem until thousands of people started dying. Our governments chose to protect business interests and to sacrifice the public for the sake of the profits.

The pandemic is just a small preview of what we can expect to happen with climate change in the coming decade.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#386

Post by yogthos »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #370
ptx wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrorism is ostensibly the reason for what China is doing in Xinjiang.

If you have millions of 'terrorists' to lock up, maybe you're really doing something wrong though ;)

The Western approach is to just kill millions of people in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen instead.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#387

Post by ben_w »

notreallytrue wrote: post #353
ben_w wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is NK is a lot worse, not “a little bit”.

As any other country did something similar to what US did? Can you name one which isn't already bad? Like, I don't know, Spain? Germany? Argentina? South Africa? The greatest democracy and country in the World shouldn't even be in the same business of North Korea style And yet...

There’s plenty of stuff America does wrong, present tense and past, without needing to make hyperbolic comparisons to NK.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#388

Post by mkhpalm »

eivarv wrote: post #30

I'm sick and tired of seeing tech-illiterate decision makers on both international levels attempt to thwart our right to privacy. Does anyone know what we or I can do (in this case specifically) to help fight this idiocy?

Its a bit naive to believe decision makers are tech-illiterate. Why not consider that they are both literate and understand what they are asking for? Is it because we don't like what that means?

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#389

Post by BlueTemplar »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #362
BlueTemplar wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is closed source, isn't it? What kind of assurance do we have that these messages still aren't regularly sent to Facebook, unencrypted ?

Even a closed-source app is never really closed. In the end it's all machine code which is basically source code as well. There's many tools to analyse binaries, like IDA Pro. It's just difficult and often steps are taken to obfuscate what it's doing. Having the higher-level source code just makes it a lot easier. But if WhatsApp did this, it would probably be noticed pretty quickly by experts. But like I said above,…

Would it? This kind of transmission of messages could be hidden alongside legitimate looking traffic like updates...

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#390

Post by ben_w »

dheera wrote: post #334
dane-pgp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer, although it's worth thinking about what the threat model is. If the government is just going to force specific companies to add backdoors, then the process above isn't really necessary, you just need a way to install a client that isn't backdoored. If, however, the government is banning the sending of encrypted messages, then you have to hope that a jury doesn't see your long pointless mes…

> then you have to hope that a jury doesn't see your long pointless messages as strong evidence of using encryption Don't legal people routinely just take few word sentences and rewrite them into long paragraphs of aforementioned hereinafter notwithstanding including but not limited to senseless nonsense?

So long as it looks normal for you, I suspect you’d be fine.

If I started writing long paragraphs of aforementioned hereinafter notwithstanding including but not limited to senseless nonsense, I’d be really obvious — at least to a human, not sure if current AI would notice me yet.

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