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Posted by Cider9986 1 day ago

France moves to break encrypted messaging(reclaimthenet.org)
278 points | 133 commentspage 2
budududuroiu 1 day ago|
I'll repeat this over and over:

Most EU politicians are aware of needing to lead from positions of deep unpopularity for the next 10-20 years, they're just setting the stage to have the tools to suppress dissent at their disposal. After encryption, my bet is on reduced rights to protest (see UK wanting to ban protests that repeatedly "cause disruption").

leonidasrup 1 day ago||
EU politicians are still more popular than Russian politicians.
sunshine-o 1 day ago||
Yes, all the Mertz, Macron, Starmer and unelected Brussels ones have officially about 10-20% approval rating.

This is in fact mind boggling and I am still wondering how it is even possible.

My guess is most of those positive approval are boomers who watch TV and are less impacted by their policies because they own their house and receive their retirements, they are highly incentivised to keep the train going. Or people who directly benefit from their policies.

What I still can't explain is Trump can still maintain a much higher approval ratings with in a country with similar demographic profile, even after literally doing the exact opposite than he promised.

So my guess is the support for the current system and the people running it in Europe is probably less than 5% among the population who will still be around in 10-20 years.

So the current political system is literally levitating on a cloud of old people which is disappearing at a rate of about 10% per year. So one way or another this is gonna get ugly.

bgr-co 1 day ago||
Hello, I am French and, with many others, fighting this. It is still a fight - no law is enacted yet - and it is not the first time we have to fight this. To state how utterly ridiculous these politicians are, ANSSI itself - the national cybersecurity agency- published a paper in 2016 clearly explaining why backdooring encryption in messaging apps is both dangerous and useless (https://www.developpez.com/actu/102152/France-l-ANSSI-se-dit...) This position has been clearly restated in 2025 by Guillaume Poupard, a former highly acclaimed ANSSI boss and a cryptographer.
wewewedxfgdf 1 day ago||
But not for French politicians and military, am I right?

Encryption for me not for thee?

pessimizer 1 day ago||
> Mass surveillance, of course, isn’t what the delegation is proposing. The fear isn’t that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message.

French investigators won't care about every WhatsApp message. But they definitely will slurp them all up, process them all with AI, and read them whenever they have an interest. And they will deny they are doing this as they do this.

adrianwaj 1 day ago|
It will become more important over time - Telegram and the TON coin are reintegrating. So messaging surveillance is financial surveillance too? Price is going up too. https://x.com/BSCNews/status/2053046567930937817 Upgraded a month ago: https://x.com/durov/status/2042247948147241072

It'd be interesting (horrifying?) to see something that was once assumed secret go public. Imagine if all chats and payments eventually went public at some point... the Transparity, when nothing can be encrypted anymore so no one tries. Mankind becomes a unit - or it devolves?

With TON, perhaps altcoins will give way to micro coins - tailored especially for apps and their users/founders? ..for micropayments and running on AI infrastructure. Blockchain and AI infrastructure are already interchangeable in large part. So if transaction histories are exposed, the damage is limited. Startups won't look to IPO, they'll look to float a coin to make serious money. Binance did it. Polymarket next? Poly is dominated by Bitcoin as it stands.

I'm not sure if Ethereum tokens would be the same thing.

saltwatercowboy 12 hours ago|||
What a delightfully complex and speculative ecosystem we've developed. Sure do hope that no-one uses the compound key of all of a person's purchases, movements, and interpersonal communications for anything bad. Gee. Just gotta wonder what those eggheads are up to!
fn-mote 1 day ago|||
> […] something that was once assumed secret go public. Imagine if all chats and […] went public

I strongly suspect instead that you would see Polymarket-style insider trading by the few powerful people who have access to the secrets.

adrianwaj 1 day ago||
Yeah, you would also have to trust Poly staff and media outlets.

But also messaging platforms whereby wiretapping has never been so lucrative.

So what's the CEO of ____ saying about an IPO?

https://kalshi.com/markets/kxipo/ipos/kxipo-26

Time to get friendly with the 'tappers or become one oneself, right?

This news story is so pertinent.

Doctor Evil's secret AI prompt >> Train on messaging and then tell me the most lucrative bets in the prediction markets.

motbus3 1 day ago||
I wonder if they remove encryption how can they ensure who are the authors. Will they still apply all the certificates?
hulitu 1 day ago|
You no underestand. They will remove "encryption" but they will not remove the certificates. They learned from the CIA: Who controls certificates, controls the past.
iamnothere 1 day ago||
Time to teach all your friends how to use a one-time pad. Could be a fun hobby for those with the right inclination.
qingcharles 1 day ago|
It's not clear that this would be a legal workaround. Even texting in rare languages, like those in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or perhaps Klingon, might warrant a knock on your door.
iamnothere 1 day ago||
At that point you may as well stop worrying about the knock, assume it will come regardless, and start organizing resistance.

When all means for private communication are cut off, broader oppression isn’t far behind.

uriahlight 1 day ago||
"The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case with freedom, which in a democracy often descends into anarchy... The excessive liberty of the individual in a democracy eventually leads to a desire for authoritarian rule, and out of that desire, the tyrant arises." - Plato's Republic
dweinus 1 day ago||
No fair, we didn't even get the fun anarchy part before skipping right on to tyrrany!
Nasrudith 18 hours ago||
Oh look, an aristocrat patron sponsored is big into aristocracy, what a surprise.
croes 1 day ago||
Let’s start with the smartphones of politicians.
wolvoleo 1 day ago|
They already excluded themselves in the chatcontrol proposals. Typical.
kmfrk 1 day ago||
Chat Control refuses to die.
tw04 1 day ago|
I find it fascinating that a country with citizens that are typically willing to protest in the streets at the drop of a hat don't seem to care. Is it that they aren't technically literate?
tensor 1 day ago||
These sorts of laws have repeatedly failed to pass in Europe due to people protesting. The government just keeps coming back and trying again it seems.

What makes you think French citizens don’t care?

HerbManic 1 day ago|||
I do think they care but you hit on a point. Governments just keep trying to force this and eventually wear down the resistance to it. They can try repeatedly as it only has to work once.
tensor 1 day ago|||
Yeah, this feels like an exploit used by many governments these days. You see the same thing in the US where the Republicans just keep filing appeals or lawsuits until they eventually get what they want. Over and over and over and over.

Governments should probably adopt some sort of "retry" limit for these things. Good luck getting that passed though I suppose.

vkou 1 day ago||
That would just be abused by people who want to permanently enshrine a bad status quo. They'll file X really shitty, bad faith challenges, and when they all fail, everyone will be permanently stuck with a bad thing.

Imagine if women's suffrage failed 5 times, and hey, guess we'll never get it, 5 times is the limit.

novok 1 day ago|||
It's because it doesn't break the political and financial careers of the people who do in the civil service and the politicians. Once it does, you'll see it is not repeated.

Prop 13 in California is an amazing example of this, known as a third rail political issue because it "kills" the politicians who attack it directly. It doesn't even approach even getting put up as a proposition or bill directly. It has a tight feedback loop because the most mobilized voting class, the olds, feel it immediately and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association mobilizes immediately also. So they go for it on the sides, for things like commercial property, or complicated to understand inheritance and so on.

So if you really want to fight back and be effective, you have to (politically) destroy the careers of those who do.

naruhodo 1 day ago||
Prop 13, for those who don't know...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Teever 1 day ago||
Has anyone else noticed a tendency of American users to turn every conversation that isn't about America into one about America?

It would be super neat to not see this turn into yet another conversation about American tax policy.

tw04 1 day ago||||
>What makes you think French citizens don’t care?

...because they haven't protested the proposed law? If they have, do you have a link? I've not seen any coverage in mainstream or independent media.

userbinator 1 day ago|||
Maybe it's time for France to reconsider its relationship with the EU.
Georgelemental 1 day ago|||
The French people did consider that, in the referendum on Maastricht. The politicians ignored the results
0dayz 1 day ago||||
This is France pushing this onto themselves?
palata 1 day ago|||
The French people typically elect far-right politicians to represent them at the EU level, so...
userbinator 1 day ago|||
It's not about left or right, but up and down.
tardedmeme 1 day ago|||
Which are also known as right and left, respectively.

What, did you think right and left were arbitrary? The words are arbitrary, but the meanings are not. They correlate quite strongly with the material interests of the up and down.

userbinator 1 day ago|||
No, I'm referring to authoritarianism (up) and libertarianism (down).
palata 1 day ago||
Right, can we agree on "extremists" then? Takes the far-left, far-right, far-authoritarian and far-libertarian altogether.
novok 1 day ago|||
Stalin & Mao would like to have a word with you.
tardedmeme 1 day ago||
... okay? I thought they were dead. What about the entire rest of the world that is left or right. We're not stuck between a choice of Staln (left), and Htler (right) - there are more reasonable people in the world, even more reasonable politicians.
0dayz 1 day ago|||
That makes little sense if you know some basic political science, the EU is comprised of different political interest groups just like your country is.

Unless you literally belive everyone in the EU belive the exact same thing and there's zero disagreements what do ever.

shakow 1 day ago||
Kind of, at least in France? Our privacy-nefarious laws have been passed by both left- and right-leaning governments. It seems that if there is something the elite agrees upon, it is that the plebeians should be kept in check.
sunshine-o 1 day ago|||
It is true that "far-right politicians" had the most chance to be elected in the EU parliament but this is in fact insignificant.

How individual country influence the EU is there is an invisible battle on putting their people anywhere under the commissioners. There are a lot of career people you will never hear about yielding immense power there and from what I know they do not have a political affiliation how we understand it (left, right, etc.)

If you are a corporation or foreign actor and you need something from the EU you cannot care less about the people elected in the fake parliament. If your chance of influencing or blocking something is in the parliament, you already lost.

Most people have a hard time wrapping their head around this because we actually have a better understanding how the US political system works, individual EU countries or even the CCP.

palata 1 day ago||
Well I disagree.
esseph 1 day ago||
> Is it that they aren't technically literate?

Few are, that is a huge part of it. Most have far more pressing concerns.

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