Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect
theregister.com
theregister.com
Sad how a country that used to have pirate bay have come to this.
From my understanding, every country in the world have always been able to tap to phone lines to listen to conversations whenever they wanted (sometimes surrounded by laws). And now every country is trying to do the same with electronic communications that were evading this situation.
Of course it will be abused, it always was the case and always will.
I see this more as a wake up call that only face to face communication in private settings are legally private.
Privacy was never automatic before 2000`s, it required effort. It seems people forgot that.
> it always was the case and always will
>before 2000`s, it required effort
It seems to be a continuation of historical trends where privacy was never automatic but somehow people always forget it.
Is this fundamentally different?
If I was standing at the loom and I said to the weaver next to me: I don't think we're getting enough of a share of the value of our work, then there was no permanent record of that.
Today, if I ask my colleague on MS Teams what he wants for lunch, IT will probably still be able to process that message automatically 30 years from now.
Without a persistent record, privacy was the default. All messages were ephemeral.
Large-scale automated surveillance power is a contemporary anomaly, and it is currently uncertain whether open and democratic societies will survive this very recent and dangerous threat.
We got so distracted by shiny new tools that we forgot what it was underneath.
My grandfather, before the modern computer era, used to say "words fade, writings stays".
Trying to prevent government from breaking encryption won't solve the underlying issue that we are naive.
No, I am comparing communication in general and it just so happens that in the past all communication was oral and now we all work from home and converse through large online platforms.
If, in the future, people move their communication to brain implants (help us God - any God), then brain implant telepathy would be the method of communication most in need of protection, to preserve or reclaim the important and centuries-old default of private, unmonitored communication.
New forms of communication do not change or diminish the legitimate and important need for private communication.
You and I are both heading towards the same goal, private discussions.
But, I'm saying that it will never happen if there's an electronic device involved and you want it to happen with it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... , written c. 1750 BC.
This is the same with email or IM. I don't go around giving my Gmail password to everyone, but I know that many processes at Gmail read my mails.
I don't consider it indifference to know that every written conversation I make could be read by someone.
Nobody should blindly trust anyone telling you the opposite.
All encryption can (and will) be broken.
I was there when Md5 became obsolete and was replaced with Sha-1 ( made by the nsa) which is now also obsolete.
I was there when all 8 letters password on windows could be cracked in minutes. And discovered that windows kept a copy of the hash locally, unless your password was +15chars.
Don't blindly trust end to end encryption.
Obviously we have parliamentary sovereignty, so if parliament actually wants it done, then it's the law, but they probably would not exercise parliamentary sovereignty in a case like this which would be dubious treaty-wise once there's a legal judgement against in something like the ECHR.
There's a reason this is being considered though, and it's kind of a problem. People probably genuinely believe that unless they can go through stuff that people say, a bunch of the foreigners would cause problems that be dealt with as society is presently organized.