EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

The EU takes a statist approach to privacy. Encryption is always a better protection to privacy than ever changing laws. EP members are either inexperienced when it comes to technology or serve a party or a lobby agenda. The only countries opposing for the sake of opposing are Hungary and Poland and their leaders would love encyption being backdoored as long as their secret services can pry at comms.

Educate the Comissioners? The president of the Comission is an ex home secretary ie. a lady with a policing mindset just like Theresa May, only allegedly corrupt. Somehow her phones were wiped clean when required as evidence in a recent investigation. The irony of this legislation is that it could expose her own doings.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/ursula-...

The Comissioners were told to use Signal after Bezos' phone got trojaned through WhatsApp. Encryption is only good when it's for their own benefit.

While I know I'm just attracting downvotes, your points, in order:

1)

a: It's really not that hard to think of ways to solve backdoor problems with a mix of technical and social approaches. For example, having shared keys burned onto silicon, making physical access mandatory, and split between both the law enforcement and the company, so that both parties must knowingly engage.

b: Most software already practically backdoored already, and it's really not that big a deal. Microsoft can push whatever updates they want whenever they want. They already have the keys to the kingdom! Google doesn't store everything E2E encrypted. They also already have the keys to the kingdom! Things have mostly worked out regardless.

2) That a measure will be imperfect is not an argument that it will be ineffectual. In fact it's pretty obviously false; making abuse harder on mainstream platforms will make abuse less mainstream.

3) This is like arguing governments shouldn't be allowed to regulate weapons, because it would be hypocritical, given they own weapons themselves, and it might normalize other countries taking away their citizens' weapons, which might prevent them fighting back. That seems like an obviously bad argument.

4) Yes, your platform that makes oversight impossible is not compatible with regulations requiring oversight. That's not an accident, in either direction.

The idea later in the post seems not really honestly engaging with the topic, that it's not about ‘someone who believes birthday cake is undesirable’, but about networks which are systematically and in actuality doing things like trafficking children for sexual abuse, and that there is a moral imperative for governments to deal with this beyond just letting people choose not to engage.

1a - Because that worked out so well for HDMI? It'll be what, maybe 90 days before those "law enforcement keys" are public?

1b - If it's already backdoored then there is no need for such an act, the problem is already solved.

2 - It's ineffective for it's stated goal because the stated goal is not the real goal. The goal is to enable a continued abuse of power, one which is already ongoing, and one which produces no actionable results or meaningful outcomes. Five eyes & co is upset that they're losing some of their toys.

3 - Who says governments should be able to regulate weapons? Likewise these days, who is to say they meaningfully can?

4 - Sex trafficking existed prior to encryption. The government failed to stop it then. I strongly suspect that even if the government gets it's way and breaks encryption, sex trafficking will continue exactly at the same rate. Most sex traffickers are not technology ept, nor do they need to be - the track record for capturing them is atrocious. Epstein anyone?

This is a bad faith argument. "Protecting children" and "stopping terrorists" are the siren's song of every government overreach basically since the dawn of time and yet the government remains terrible at solving either problem. I don't think encryption is really the issue preventing those things from getting resolved. I do think encryption is very inconvenient for a very snoop heavy government.

> Because that worked out so well for HDMI? It'll be what, maybe 90 days before those "law enforcement keys" are public?

This is a completely different context to having one copy (or a small number) of said low-bandwidth silicon held exclusively by an agency vested in keeping it exclusive, plus another copy held by the company themselves, such that both copies would need to be broken for security to be weakened.

> If it's already backdoored then there is no need for such an act, the problem is already solved.

Seriously? Microsoft having the ability to install a keylogger on any random person's machine is not the solution to finding networks of criminal activity.

> [government bad]

I'll debate the technicals but I'm not going to argue politics here.

Not many seemed to read through the bug report either.

The bug report was for not being able to screenshot in situations when it wasn't actually disabled.

The fundamental problem that the GP is referring to and that demonstrates the loss of control over one's own devices is that it _is_ possible for apps to disable making of screenshots to begin with.