If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?
There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).
There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.
For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.
This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.
Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat
Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.
Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.
This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm
This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.
There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.
It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.
There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".
more effective tools for law enforcement
in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text?
(Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)
More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies
Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:
…
· A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
· A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.
"See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.
Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".
There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.
It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.
But if law enforcement wants to be lazy, they can say, look, this whole search warrant business is so tedious, and even then it might take time before the owner capitulates, so why not just pass a law that requires all locks to have backdoors in them so we can open them? Then we can just let ourselves into someone's home whenever we feel like it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave a bona fide need to do so in order to protect the public.
The latter is what the EU Commission is trying to do.
The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.
This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.
You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.
The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.
And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!
There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.
Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.
So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years
It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well.
IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.
A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.
The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.
So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.
[1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.
Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.
It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.
Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet".
That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.
Funny given it's not and was never supposed to be a "democracy" or a federation for that matter.
> That disappeard, now EU is fascist
Not necessarily? Mass surveillance is something integral to totalitarian states of any leaning.
The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.
Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.
> now EU is fascist.
Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...
Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...
Here is small excerpt:
The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.
War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.