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German government comes out against Chat Control

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Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#91

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

dylan604 wrote: post #76
JohnLocke4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't but luckily no government is powerful enough to govern math and therefore cryptography. Mathematics is more of a liberator than the second amendment in this respect. Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.

If running a mesh network is illegal, does it matter that the traffic is just math? Without a network, there's no data transmission of that math. The government controls the airwaves. It doesn't matter if you're broadcasting Top40 or encrypted messages, if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.

> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.

There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#92

Post by IlikeKitties »

sunaookami wrote: post #72
shevy-java wrote: post #45

This is strange, because not long ago it was Germany (!!) that pushed heavily for mass-sniffing of people. I don't trust this. People should watch very, very carefully what Germany is actually doing next. I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking.

Never trust the CDU. They were the ones pushing for the illegal data retention (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) and von der Leyen from the CDU is big on censorship and mass surveillance. They are just against it now because the country has bigger problems and the CDU has the worst approval ratings in history.

> Never trust the CDU. > Never trust the SPD.

I'm borderline not joking that there should be warning labels like those on cigarettes on the ballot when voting.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#93

Post by eqvinox »

bgwalter wrote: post #44

"anlasslose Chatkontrolle" => Chat Control without cause . Ok, maybe these are not weasel words in this case. The CDU probably wants to present itself as a friend of the people using a popular issue that they don't really care about. My suspicion is that this is exactly why the ChatControl issue is brought up yearly. It distracts people from wars, the economy etc., there is a big discussion and finally the government…

I mean, there is already "Quellen-TKÜ"¹ for the "with cause" situation… however bonkers that one might be on a modern secure Apple or Android device…

¹ Quelle = source, TKÜ = Telekommunikationsüberwachung = telecommunication surveillance. aka installing trojans on your devices.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#94

Post by NobodyNada »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #49
qwopmaster wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing opinion here seems to be that we’d really like for there to not be an omnipresent panopticon because protect the children or terrorists or, apparently, malware. If your imagination is particularly lacking on how this might be weaponized just remember that antifa is now designated as an terrorist organization in US, so you better not be a suspected member of it — as in, you best not have sent a buddy a…

> an omnipresent panopticon OK, sorry to keep repeating myself here, but... I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl. What I would like to see, is, say, Signal complying with lawful interception orders in the same way that any EU telecoms provider currently does. So, provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party, for a limited time, by judicial order, for a clearly…

> I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl. What I would like to see, is, say, Signal [...] provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party

Those statements simply aren't compatible.

Right now, Signal is designed by cryptography experts to provide the best privacy we know how to build: messages are only readable by you or the intended recipient. "Lawful intercept" necessarily means some additional third party is given the ability to read messages.

It doesn't matter what kind of legal framework you have around that, because you can't just build a cryptosystem where the key is "a warrant issued under due process." There has to be a system, somewhere, that has access to plaintext messages and can give law enforcement and courts access. The judges, officers, technicians, suppliers, and software involved in building and using this system are all potential vectors by which this access can be compromised or misused -- whether via software or hardware attacks, social engineering, or abuse of power.

Maybe your country has "functioning rule of law", and every single government official and all the vendors they hire are pure as snow, but what about all the rest of us living in imperfect countries? What about when a less-than-totally-law-abiding regime comes into power?

You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#95

Post by seabass-labrax »

awesome_dude wrote: post #58
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom will not ever be finally settled in this life. Laws can be changed, constitutions amended, and of course the law is only as good as willingness to enforce it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as nice as it would be if that wasn't so.

At issue here is... what exactly "freedom" is Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that. It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allo…

I'm not sure that's relevant to Chat Control. What's at stake here is not a definition of 'acceptable communication' in public, but the possibility of all private communication being scanned.

That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.

We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#96

Post by tavavex »

MYEUHD wrote: post #69
sfdlkj3jk342a wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works until the government and media successfully push the narrative to the public that anyone using encryption is supporting child molesters and terrorists.

The government itself uses encryption. In fact the proposed chat control law has an exception for government agencies

That doesn't counter the argument. The people arguing against encryption would just liken it to the government being able to use military equipment that you, as an individual, can't have. "Free communication is a dangerous tool, only the government can be entrusted with the power it provides" and so on.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#97

Post by lucianbr »

lxgr wrote: post #78
dylan604 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be okay as long as you print them on a t-shirt

Yep, good thing nobody has ever been jailed for wearing a t-shirt with the wrong slogan.

Even a blank sheet of paper I think was enough to get someone in jail.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#98

Post by lxgr »

dylan604 wrote: post #87
lxgr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, good thing nobody has ever been jailed for wearing a t-shirt with the wrong slogan.

you missed the reference. as a history lesson, the deCSS code was written on a t-shirt and was deemed acceptable. having the deCSS compiled as an executable was deemed not acceptable.

I got the reference. Seems like it worked out quite nicely for the government/court though, given that deCSS isn't much use printed on a t-shirt, compared to in a binary on a computer?

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#99

Post by ZeroConcerns »

ori_b wrote: post #24
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want the police to regularily intercept and check your signal chats for fraud No, that's not how lawful intercept laws work. I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity. ChatControl is not that, and it's one of the…

The law enforcement of which countries, under which sets of laws? Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws, for example? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Th... Who gets to decide what gets made available to who?

> law enforcement of which countries, under which sets of laws?

We're taking about ChatControl here, so law enforcement of EU countries, under their respective laws, into which EU law should have been incorporated

> Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws

Same answer as "should Thailand be granted arrest rights to enforce ": they submit a legal assistance request to the country where the alleged crime occurred.

In the case of a lawful interception request for "lease[sic] majeste" reasons, I'm pretty sure this would be immediately rejected.

But, if not, the EU subject of such interception would have lots and lots of avenues to get redress.

Again, and I'm getting sort of tired from repeating myself: "lawful interception" does not mean "indiscriminate surveillance at the whim of whomever" -- it is a well-defined concept that has been used to determine which telegrams and mail pieces to open and which telephone calls to record for ages now. Your country absolutely does it, as we speak, no matter where you live. It's just that modern technology has far outpaced the scope of this legislation, and things like ChatControl are (incompetent) responses to that.

ChatControl is not a good idea, and has very little chance of becoming reality. But to stop dumb proposals like this from coming up over and over again, something has got to give.

Re: German government comes out against Chat Control

#100

Post by echelon »

thewebguyd wrote: post #83
shevy-java wrote: post #45

This is strange, because not long ago it was Germany (!!) that pushed heavily for mass-sniffing of people. I don't trust this. People should watch very, very carefully what Germany is actually doing next. I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking.

> I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking. That's the problem with these proposed laws. We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again. The nations that want this mass spying only have to win once. We need a way to permanently stop these proposals once defeated the first time so that they cannot just continue to try over and over again un…

> We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again.

We do have a way to reinforce our position, though!

We can design and consume technology that makes this hard.

We can stop working for companies that build centralized platforms for messaging.

We can teach our neighbors how important rights to privacy and speech are in language that they understand.

There can be enough friction that this becomes harder for politicians. Remember the Reddit Sopa and Pipa protests? - that was pretty epic! I don't think Reddit will help us in its current state, but we can absolutely mount those defenses on Wikipedia, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.

And we should continue to move off of platforms that don't align with our freedoms. And build our platforms in a way that encourages "normies" to join.

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