EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

No, there's really no comparison.

A justice system, with reasonable information to infer a crime, seeking a warrant, using rules and regulations that have integrity, oversight, sanctioned by a Judge, following specific rules of access with certain, proportional criteria - is nothing like 'China'.

In fact, we are already subject to that, everywhere in Europe, just not your messaging apps.

It is not totalitarian whatsoever - there is just the risk of totalitarianism creeping in. A risk, which quite frankly is overstated. There is almost zero material harm that comes to innocent individuals as a result of these policies in states with lawful civic infrastructure. There can be, but it's rare and again, the 'problem' is more expansive and that an authoritarian takes power and uses the system for unlawful purposes.

China does not have an independent legal system, or much concern for human rights. The CCP uses these things to censor every day speech on a variety of topics - even for the most innocuous things like comparing Xi to 'Winnie the Pooh' let alone for discussing things like Tibet, Hong Kong, or Taiwan privately.

The CPP uses these controls as an 'total and complete information and thought control system' that interjects into every aspect of life. If you talk bad about Xi on your 'chat'- that will literally go on your file. It could affect your credit, promotional opportunities, how the justice system treats you etc..

They have successfully suppressed and controlled dialogue on a variety of issues - this system is frankly the CCP's most powerful means of control, far more so than anything physical like the 'police' or the 'army'.

Western governments want to use it to go after people making bombs, sex traffickers, and tax evaders. There is no chance that the German government is going to send police to your house because you said 'Angela Merkel is a clown and needs to go!' to your buddy on WeChat. There is a chance some future government could to it, for the wrong reasons, and that's cause for come concern, but it's not pragmaticaly the issue.

On any scale between a human lifespan and the whole of human history, now is a pretty safe time to be alive.

A writer from Earth visits a space station in another solar system called "Paradise". The space station is ruled by a tatalitary regime on the grounds of safety of the inhabitants as the plannet they originally went to settle truned out to be uninhabitable.

As a results the space station inhabitants live in cramped conditions in rooms with glass walls with no privacy and a computer system analyses their every word for signs of dissent. If some digression is detected, the system automatically lowers social score of the ofeending person.

Lower score means less priviledges and a shitty job and the lowest score means forced labor in dangerous mines on the planet surface "for the good of all". Sometimes people survive that and come back though.

So what have ortinary citizens devised to combat this opressive nightmare ? Steganographic peoetry! It even has its own page on the Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang

Due to the shear amount of material the spzing is done bz computers, so people speak a combonation of metaphors and poetry in a way that can convey meaning to the other party but not to the machine listening in. Its not that easy though, as the spy system is self learning, so one has to continually adjust and not repeate the same methapors ot the computer might get the meaning.

Still the question is - why are they doing this ? Its almost as if the opressive regime ruling the station was not telling the truth and was working hard to cover something very fundametal up about the Paradise station...

We had this book on our highschool reading list and it left quite an impression.

My home country is Norway, it looks safer than all of Eastern Europe, sometimes by an order of magnitude.

• By ensuring there is always an opposing power.

• By maintaining democracy, by which I mean the tenet of electing governments from the citizenry as well as by the citizenry, and specifically rather than any of the oligarchical forms.

• By maintaining the rule of law.

The consequences being, if all encryption is backdoored, then any encryption used by politicians is by definition eavesdroppable by their opponents and enemies. Since all politicians thrive in a web of mendacity and confidences, they have a strong incentive for strong encryption, and will eventually terminate/abandon legislation that weakens it.

Any politician that threatens otherwise is therefore a) grandstanding, and/or b) using the issue to leverage/negotiate something else.

Corollaries:

• Any government seriously implementing such a plan is operating as an oligarchy rather than a democracy, and will have plans to defend themselves from the surveillance imposed on the citizens.

• The first instinct of every would-be oligarch is to undermine the machinery of democracy and compromise the rule of law.

c.f. Utopia (Australia, 2014) Season 4 Episode 4 "Mission Creeps", and probably at least one Jim Hacker moment.