Posted by Cider9986 1 day ago
> Senator Olivier Cadic, of the Centrist Union, secured an amendment to a separate bill on critical infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity that would do the opposite, writing encryption protection into French law and prohibiting any obligation on messaging services to install backdoors. The Senate adopted it in March 2025.
Telegram doesn't even try to be end-to-end-encrypted by default. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source, Signal is end-to-end-encrypted.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-germ...
So they can spy on them directly?
And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.
Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."
Does make you wonder what kind of people they kill or how many. I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally.
You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B?
What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after?
Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades
The FBI has been much quieter about this though - there has yet to be a Snowden-for-the-FBI, though they would be one of the agencies I would fully expect to be doing similar work domestically.
As this becomes more well-known, I would expect state and county police to start looking into data and metadata as well. In some cases, they already are [0] - even if some aspects of that case are less relevant today (Google Maps no longer uploads location history, though cell tower trilateration is getting more accurate, not less).
It's far more prevalent than most people realize, though I invite you to consider which you'd rather have when building a second-by-second profile of a person's life: the message contents, or the metadata?
Can someone post a link to that?
I sent some people a password reset through them but half of them couldn't get their head around it.
So yeah while it has secret chats, they aren't very useful at all.
so as i read it the article doesn't suggest that all of telegram is end-to-end encrypted only that it has support for it.
It's only afterwards and as a consequence some highly newsworthy disasters occur such as a child abduction or political sex scandal involving a high profile politician come to light that the lay public will get the message that weak encryption is effectively no encryption.
In the meantime criminals will be early adopters of more sophisticated messaging such as steganography.
If someone does a high-profile enough hack, that can only mean more laws and increased police power to target it.
Been there, seen that. That's how Pakistan got nuclear bomb. France was just making friends.
They won't be affected.
The hitherto invisible but very real wall between social classes is just going to become more visible for "First World" civilians the way it's been in "lesser" countries for decades already.
Actual "criminals" have always been able to get around all the restrictions ever put in place since the dawn of civilization, it's just the common folk that get trodded on and kept in their place.
Weakening of the DES encryption by US goverment in 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard
The GSM encryption from 1990s
"Security researcher Ross Anderson reported in 1994 that "there was a terrific row between the NATO signal intelligence agencies in the mid-1980s over whether GSM encryption should be strong or not. The Germans said it should be, as they shared a long border with the Warsaw Pact; but the other countries didn't feel this way, and the algorithm as now fielded is a French design."
Your profile suggests that you’re in Israel, where groups like the Irgun are celebrated as national heroes. Violent struggle against perceived oppressors shouldn’t be an unfamiliar concept.
Israel was founded by leftists, only in the late 1970s did Israel turn to the right. The Irgun was certainly not representative of those values which are typically associated with our people.
K.r.i.s.t.i.a.n.i.b.a.n.i @....
Might be in spam. I don't know. Lol.
How about I take my business to Ireland if you ban encryption or avoid taxes that fund your paycheck, as an individual?
If you aren’t willing to draw non-negotiable lines, you will simply end up ceding more and more of your freedom in exchange for nothing.
echo "Am I doing something illegal, France?" | age -e -r age1ql3z7hjy54pw3hyww5ayyfg7zqgvc7w3j2elw8zmrj2kg5sfn9aqmcac8p -a -
-----BEGIN AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----
YWdlLWVuY3J5cHRpb24ub3JnL3YxCi0+IFgyNTUxOSBjTVQ5VTdMaTlnRkEyT1BY
MHZPc0lncHFvbS9FMTlDa2FkK3JQZy9sQnprClRFN3lNQUtnNzJWK0RxQVlYNE1q
NCtlNFJTUWpwZExJSDMvSGlRL2VHc1EKLS0tIC95bEErRU9NNERJRVVuYlMwUFg4
WUx1R0IyTHd1d2dxQTdqU0NJWlF0MXMKL1x9fz+ZVObYrn3bY/IdVBsd4KYxn78P
aWePVjaRUityGTkndNSy6gg1meVky22iv4rxd9MZ4XYnsGJDfRUmkVZhQcCxag==
-----END AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----Also, if we're only targetting pedophile networks, one option that comes to mind to me is the following : Most of those images are known and have been circulating for a while. By hashing any sent images and comparing them to the checksum of known ones, one could easily flag suspicions senders and proceed to access the phones of those users. Does that seem feasible to you or am I missing something?
- He said thought crime! bots start firing the machine guns
What's of course concerning is that it renders anyone using encryption suspect, which includes pedophiles and narcotrafficants, but also activists and co.
Also, if we're only targetting pedophile networks, one option that comes to mind to me is the following : Most of those images are known and have been circulating for a while. By hashing any sent images and comparing them to the checksum of known ones, one could easily flag suspicions senders and proceed to access the phones of those users. Does that seem feasible to you or am I missing something?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu...
Still, I kind of fail to see how full privacy as a default is a necessity, if and only if it remains a possibility. Furthermore, by using non open source messengers such as WhatsApp, we are blindly trusting Zuckerberg, a random dude who got lucky and rich and wishes to remain on good terms with Trump, to keep our data as safe and as unreachable as he pretends.
I mean how ridiculous is this argument. They want access to such messages to investigate child abuse cases, so they demand French spies, and tax investigators get access to everyone's messages ... Child abuse investigators are not even mentioned.
And it's not just that.
Next, France is famous in Western Europe for being one of the only EU countries where access to, uh, hentai comics, is legal and they're sold in newspaper stands.
If the French state cared about fighting sex-crimes on children they would fund taking care of the children they do "help", rather than catching criminals. Instead, this is what they do:
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250502-french-child-welfare-s...
(at the very least they let it happen, but in practice they also hire people that will do this job at a very cheap wage because it provides access to vulnerable children)
Without fixing this FIRST, the only thing catching criminals will do, obviously, is make the situation of children worse. The French state fails this test.
The situation with French schools, both the immigrant situation AND the constant decline in teacher quality (for at least 3 decades now) show how much the state cares about children's future in general. Again, the state fails the test completely.
And I haven't even mentioned the refugee situation in Paris. Obviously that situation is producing a flood of child prostitution. Again, the state is showing itself unwilling to help children. Again, the French state is exposed as not doing shit to help children, or at the very least, they're totally ineffective.
So no, and sorry to state the obvious, but your suggestion is completely beside the point.
i)> Research suggests that a significant proportion of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is produced and distributed by parents who victimise their children. An online convenience sample of 150 adult survivors of CSAM found that, of those abused by a single perpetrator, 42% identified their biological or adoptive father or stepfather as the offender; and of those abused by multiple perpetrators, 67% identified their biological or adoptive parents or step-parents as the primary perpetrators (Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP), 2017). https://bravehearts.org.au/research-lobbying/stats-facts/onl...
ii) the first one had us do sexual education at age 8 and was gone five weeks after he began, the second had been on the radar for racism and was gone two months after complaints of staring at girls skirts, the third, a sport teacher, disappeared at the end of the semester for systematically correcting girl's stances while squatting and such. In the two last cases, the schools were relatively big and rumors of worse offenses were around, but I don't know if those were true.
(blabla, point is it was parents)
So here is the actual link to the actual study your numbers come from: https://content.c3p.ca/pdfs/C3P_SurvivorsSurveyExecutiveSumm...
In case you seriously don't understand how you're misleading people: this is an organization that is FORBIDDEN by law to investigate cases of CSAM where the parents aren't involved. And CSAM is not their focus. Their focus is placing children.
In other words what have you proven with this study?
If you exclude all perpetrators except the category you want to accuse, then only exactly the people you want to blame are guilty. Proving all ravens are white by excluding any black ones, in other words.
The (wrong) summary study you linked to by the way, when it mentions non-family CSAM studies always has thousands to tens of thousands of cases, but when mentioning parental involvement they have 1 study with 150 examples. The other case of CSAM they mention in Canada is about "sextortion", ie. going further than just CSAM, but using CSAM to force a minor to do sexual acts. It happened exclusively at schools and talks about 23000 cases ...
Let me do the math with those numbers, even if I realize this is not a great way to compare and the numbers are not remotely complete, but let's use the numbers we have: 150 parents involved, 23000 = 0.6%. If that number can be an indication of the ratio, even with 500% error ...
Sometimes online people use these sorts of numbers as justification for that we should just totally stop investigation of biological parents in child welfare because even if you totally prevented ALL biological parent child abuse, you would have barely made a dent in child abuse as a whole. In fact there's studies claiming that because of the focus on biological (especially single female) parents child welfare agencies cause numbers of child abuse cases to go UP, not down.
Note: the study you pointed to clearly states that when it comes to single female parents, NOT A SINGLE ONE was even involved (not even unknowingly involved) in CSAM. Not one.
This is despite that being the main focus of C3P. Child abuse by single mothers is what they spend most of their attention on, how most children get placed, despite not being able to show a SINGLE case of it leading to CSAM.
So there's the problem: states force investigations away from actual child abuse. Here's how it works: Police is legally forced to refer child abuse cases to child welfare agencies, without investigation (ie. they CANNOT decide to investigate by themselves, unless there are other serious crimes). Child welfare agencies are explicitly forbidden from investigating schools, and especially forbidden from investigating the child welfare agencies themselves (despite reporters exposing a "prostitution ring" or the like inside child welfare agencies in every country every few years). You will have no difficulty finding stories of ex-"placed" children who were forced into prostitution, on facebook, tiktok, ... nor will you have problems finding reporters exposing child welfare prostitution with other government employees involved (e.g. Rotherham) regularly.
Another thing about child welfare agencies that get caught prostituting children they're supposed to protect: the numbers are absurd. Rotherham exposed that UK child welfare employees and city hall employees had organized and received payment for 1400 confirmed rapes. Claims that the total number was over 20000 are rife online. One might remark that ALL child sexual abuse cases in London in 10 years is less than 5000. That ONE case of child services sexual abuse made more victims than all other cases in the entire London area (15 million people) for 3 to 20 years COMBINED.
You know how the government refers to the perpetrators, by the way? They refer to child welfare employees and city hall employees by these words in all articles about it "Pakistani men" (and, of course, only about half were actual Pakistani, by the way. Especially in the city hall employees, no shortage of Brits. Also the police officers involved were British)
> The French state is not some cynical entre-soi that protects child abusers who are on their payroll
I've gone to school, not in France, but close enough to hear stories.
> All three disappeared from the schools within months.
Exactly. Well, they were mostly moved from one school to another, I take it? That's the case for the stories I heard. Note that you explicitly DID NOT say punished or persecuted, despite of course committing crimes. You don't even mention they were investigated at all. And they weren't.
One of the stories I heard was about a gym teacher having placed a camera in the women's showers by the way. He was caught, and indeed disappeared from school after a second incident. But ... what do you suppose happened to the videos? Nobody even went looking for them. What happened to all the videos of the ones who weren't caught?
Oh, and, three is a rather large number for one student to encounter, don't you think?
I hope you can at least agree there's a problem here. AND, that giving spies and legally-forbidden-to-investigate police officers access to private messages is very unlikely to help in those cases.
Let's start putting some of these politicians in jail for being stupid.
"If user = foo, then send the on device keys elsewhere"?
Or if those keys are part of a TPM, then a software update that just asks it to send in the decrypted messages?
Can judges not order this now, but can order decryption if the keys are stored centrally?
That's why if you're really serious about e2ee you have to install the app from source.
I wonder if for closed-source apps if governments can not just force the key collection the same way they would force decryption with centralized keys.
But on the other side what I miss is some explanation if forensic analysis helps here? Presumably the messages stay on a phone and you can recover them. If that is the case then it should be enough to fight the crime, i.e if you get a warrant to access the device then you can access messages, which I believe many would agree is fine.