Posted by Improvement 4 days ago
If the writer of this post wants people to oppose it, they really should do a better job of explaining at the very top what "it" is.
Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.
Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.
The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so.
Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you.
Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc.
And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well.
In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc.
In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime.
Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.
It opens it up potentially to anyone with the means to infiltrate these systems - rogue employees of the companies running the messaging and cloud services, cyber criminals who will be able to hack into them, foreign states who will be able to hack it (we very recently saw this how China had infiltrated CALEA backdoors into telephone systems around the world for many years).
Which of course is part of the reason that companies are so on-board with end to end encryption in the first place - being able to ensure that rogue employees can't access customer's private messages and files, and that if cyber criminals hack in and infiltrate data that there are no encryption keys accessible is a huge benefit to them - but the moment you try to open it up to "lawful intercept" you open it up to all the unlawful intercept too...
I was more trying to frame the perspective I think in which these proposals are made. As I think it explains a bit why for some this seems ludicrous while for others it seems a reasonable proposal worth considering.
Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all.
Two approaches with the same outcome, absolutely.
e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.
I promise you you aren't the main character in your friends' lives and they will absolutely give up information on you to save their career and their family.
Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation.
The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)
That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).
If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.
Could it be that this is a last ditched attempt to presumably stop a civil war that seems to be brewing by predominantly muslim vs european populations?
If this isn't a sign that the integration and the multicultural experiment has failed completely in Europe then I don't know what. A free democratic society that is peaceful would never need wide surveillance net like this.
It seems that non of the HN comments touch on the internal demographic tensions that has been going on for quite sometime. Western Europe and Scandinavia reminds me very much of Lebanon before civil war broke out between the Muslims and Christians.