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EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

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Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#411

Post by hughw »

romanoderoma wrote: post #122
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.

You were told a lie. USA has been doing it as long as the second war started and never stopped. And they consider strong encryption a weapon. Are you familiar with the Zimmermann case?

The Zimmerman telegram was from WWI and was intercepted by the British, not the Americans.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#412

Post by kenniskrag »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #332
dogma1138 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If WhatsApp breaks E2E in Europe every other country will jump on the bandwagon.

WhatsApp is hardly safe from prying eyes anyway. Sure, there's always-on E2E encryption that is really well designed. However, WhatsApp constantly prompts every user to back up to the cloud, which is much less well secured. Thus, it's pretty trivial for the authorities to get to it there, I'm sure they can get into iCloud and Google Drive if they want to. It only takes one person in the conversation to have this opti…

Whatsapp was just an example. There are other messengers out there and also the Email with SMIME and PGP is possibly affected.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#413

Post by HideousKojima »

hated wrote: post #395
GekkePrutser wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is hardly safe from prying eyes anyway. Sure, there's always-on E2E encryption that is really well designed. However, WhatsApp constantly prompts every user to back up to the cloud, which is much less well secured. Thus, it's pretty trivial for the authorities to get to it there, I'm sure they can get into iCloud and Google Drive if they want to. It only takes one person in the conversation to have this opti…

Which is to say WhatsApp is perfectly secure as long as the hostile actor cannot access the WhatsApp backups. Only nation state actors might be able to do that.

>Only nation state actors might be able to do that.

Nah, all it takes is a good spear phishing campaign like the iCloud celebrity nudes leak a few years ago

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#415

Post by Arathorn »

skissane wrote: post #372
Arathorn wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we think it will help meaningfully help detect and reduce abuse - mainly because it's shamelessly mimicking the way society works in real life. Many (most?) abusive communities are at least adjacent if not overlapping with publicly visible communities. Simply put, they need a way to advertise and recruit. So, just as in person you might stay away from a given political party / religious institute / youth club be…

> Unrelated: one particularly dark dystopian outcome we've been wargaming is: what if someone (not us!) used decentralised rep to seed a GPT-3 style bot to locate abusive communities, and then automated the process of infiltrating & investigating them... only to then end up ascending the ranks while preserving its cover and accidentally triggered some atrocity. So, um, let's not do that.) I think you greatly overesti…

Sure - "GPT-3 style" here meant "something along the lines of GPT-3" rather than anything specific to GPT-3 actual capabilities. The context being dystopian sci-fi thought experiments :) (That said, I suspect you could train GPT-3 to automatically get vetted into some fairly nasty places if you so desired).

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#416

Post by notreallytrue »

intricatedetail wrote: post #396
romanoderoma wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I've made - very minor - contributions to the 2017 proposal to enforce mandatory E2E encryption (as a technical consultant, I have no political role of any kind) How does that follow? I am as free as anybody else in the EU to use any chat software I want. This is just a proposal and ha no value in itself until it is approved and ratified by the single parliaments in the EU countries. EU is not some tirann…

They literally are proposing to kill the freedom to communicate and you say there is nothing to worry about?

Overreacting is equally dangerous, I could argue that if they were really killing the freedom to communicate we should fight them as we would fight an enemy, possibly going to war, armed.

That's not what's happening here.

It might be useful to remember that our communications have never been encrypted before a few years ago and they haven't been less free.

Also: encrypted communication but clear text metadata kinda defeat the purpose of encrypted communication.

If I know where, when and who was involved in a call, I can easily tell that two people chatting and ending up in the same place every time both their partners phones are away from home, could be cheating

If I call an ambulance at the same time and place where an accident happened but the ambulance doesn't report a second vehicle, guess who probably didn't report an accident?

Privacy and secrecy are a broader subject, it's good we discuss about it, it's not good to blindly trust WhatsApp or Facebook with our data.

Bad as it might be, I have more control and trust more my state than a private company on the other side of the World.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#417

Post by supportlocal4h »

nix23 wrote: post #399
supportlocal4h wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do live in a dangerous world. Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. It's amazing to me that so many of my peers survived childhood. It is pretty stupid to try to jump a car on your bicycle without a landing ramp. Or play catch with lit M80s. And those weren't our dumbest ideas. When I was a kid every 8-year-old pushed a lawn mower around once a week. And rode in the back of a pickup truck. Today I don't…

>Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. Yeah that's called life. >Today I don't let my kids ride in the back of pickup trucks, and I'm nervous about the lawn mower. That's because you already infected with fear. It's not your Children's fault that you don't trust them with a lawn mower..it's you and probably your society that is the problem. >Some dangers and some fears need to be met head on. Yes like wear…

Perhaps you missed my point. Lawn mowers didn't get more dangerous. The level of danger hasn't gotten worse in that one respect. The level of trust might have changed. The acceptance of risk might have changed. I don't think that keeping my kid away from the lawn mower in order to protect them makes their life overall better or even safer.

Lawn mowers are dangerous. But that doesn't mean they should be banned. As you wrote, that's life. The solution isn't to think they aren't dangerous. The solution is to recognize the danger, then act appropriately. We just all have different ideas of what's appropriate.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#418

Post by jcranmer »

m4rtink wrote: post #250
treis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Governments have all sorts of things like machine guns, tanks, and battleships that (rightfully) aren't allowed for the general public.

Sadly, no one actually has any battleships these days, not even the governments... :-(

We call them "destroyers" nowadays.

(The Zumwalt-class destroyer displaces ~15,000 tons, which is too large to be considered a cruiser under the terms of the inter-war naval treaties, and is roughly the displacement of a 1910s-era South Carolina-class battleship).

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#419

Post by Arathorn »

rkagerer wrote: post #320
Arathorn wrote: post #43

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix... is our attempt at Matrix to spell out what a catastrophic idea it is to backdoor end-to-end encryption (and to provide an alternative proposal in the form of using decentralised reputation to mitigate abuse. We're kicking decentralised reputation work off in earnest tomorrow, so watch this space to see how it goes). I guess we'll be weighing in on the EU…

Interesting read, though it sounds more like decentralized censorship. It's a little unclear where you're talking about reputation of individuals vs. reputation of content.

Censorship implies that information has been invisibly removed by some absolute authority. Whereas here we're talking about empowering users to filter out the stuff on their terms - i.e. subjective/relative reputation. It's possible that a server admin might apply unilateral filters, but a) the user would be able to visualise those (assuming the server admin doesn't maliciously withhold that info), b) the user can switch to another server with different filtering rules. So, I definitely wouldn't characterise it censorship (although I can see why many have a kneejerk reaction of "ooh, this sounds a lot like censorship").

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#420

Post by lawn »

CivBase wrote: post #409

They keep saying "encryption is important" and "law enforcement needs to be able to access relevant data" without ever elaborating why encryption is important, why law enforcement needs access to the data, or even what data law enforcement needs access to. It's just a collection of assertions without any of the insight necessary to have a useful conversation on the subject. They also completely fail to address the el…

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.
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