Possibly the biggest privacy story of the year for Europeans and, by extension the rest of the world, has been ChatControl. Chatcontrol is a European Union proposal backed by Denmark for a mandatory backdoor in all online communications. As always with these things, it was touted as a think-of-the-children solution to online child abuse material, but as many opposed to it have warned, that concealed far more sinister possibilities. For now, it seems we can breathe easily as the Danes are reported to have formally backed away from the proposal after it was roundly condemned by the German government, sending it firmly into the political wilderness.
Hackaday readers are likely vastly more informed on this matter than many of the general public, so you’ll have no need for a primer on the obvious privacy and security concerns of such a move. From our point of view, it also suffered from the obvious flaw of being very unlikely to succeed in its stated aim. Even the most blinkered politician should understand that criminals would simply move their traffic to newly-illegal encrypted forms of communication without government backdoors. Perhaps it speaks volumes that it was the Germans who sounded its death-knell, given that state surveillance on that level is very much within living memory for many of them.
The mood in European hackerspaces has been gloomy of late on the subject, so it’s something of a cause for celebration on the continent. If only other governments on the same side of the Atlantic could understand that intrusive measures in the name of thinking of the children don’t work.
European flags: Šarūnas Burdulis, CC BY-SA 2.0 .
The problem with these proposals isn’t just that it’s bad. It will pop up once a decade, until the time when the formulation is clever enough, and you just can’t be against it. I would like to see a counterproposal put into law, something which solidifies the right to digital privacy beyond GDPR. Something closer to confidentiality of correspondence of physical mail for online communications.
In this regard, I really appreciated HaD referencing the Stasi.
That comparison outta be made without hesitation every time these proposals rear their ugly heads. It should end political careers to dare spout this nonsense.
Statements like these from the Danish politicians make me ashamed to be Danish. At least they backed away for now.
Emphasis on “for now”…. Hummelgaard is gonna keep fighting for his wet dream of mass surveillance (politicians excempted)..
Maybe, maybe not – they smart move is probably to propose it, find it gets shot down and then stay quiet and let one of your similarly dystopian control freak neighbours in the EU try it next time. Or just wait for the impact of the UK being well on the way to becoming the UKSR (or worse) to get there and have a bleed through effect so it happens, likely globally, anyway.
The UK is and will continue to be a bad example, to serve as a warning to others.
It’s like California, but worse.
FUBAR.
Don’t do what they did.
Will have to get worse before it can get better.
I blame silicon valley for keeping CA somewhat liquid, despite the abject stupidity in government.
God, visiting the yookay breaks my heart.. I really hope they manage to pull out of it
Don’t worry, it will come back when the masses are distracted by the Taiwan war or the next global/international sports event.
As always, the left will keep fighting for mass surveillance.. not to worry. Our Minister of Justice will keep fighting until all (except politicians) are monitored 24/7
And they still won’t be able to stop that guy with the funny name from stabbing a bunch of kids, but they’ll definitely catch you if you talk about it
So true!
Could do without these political opinion pieces amongst the usual high quality HAD content.
But to keep a sense of balance, it’s not just the Children to think of. Read the recent news of statements about how many recent, major plots have been disrupted to keep you safe.
Taking every power to investigate away will thwart those efforts and then everyone will be up in arms asking how was it allowed to happen and why didn’t people do more.
Personally, I could live with severe embarrassment or my bank account being emptied etc.etc.. if it keeps other people safe.
Let’s stop the polarized views and support a balance between privacy and safety.
Your opinion is polarizing and I don’t agree with how you balance privacy and safety. You act as if the monitors can be trusted to not use these tools for their own ends. There are plenty of cases now where law enforcement has used their access for their own personal agendas.
Right? He might be ok with his bank account being drained, I am not.
Obvious and low quality bait. Do better.
The worst is that even if some politician could be really thinking about the well being of people, their poor technologie knowledge would lead their action to fail miserabily.
Ha! As if that would ever happen
They were really super shady about this. It was basically monitoring on all devices. That way they could claim to not “violate or break end to end encyption”. Yeah because you read everything both before encryption and after it is decrypted.
The eternal (and usually unanswered) question with any proposals like that one is “WHO controls the controllers?”
Some older woman who looks like she’s about to whack you across the knuckles with a ruler. Invariably.
Lady with The Ruler, why yes, I remember her from my second grade piano lessons, when a wrong/erratic finger would receive The Whack. Each note had its proper finger numbered, and there was no exception to the rule (and The Ruler would teach the wrong/erratic finger the lesson it won’t forget).
Then the recursive question would question itself as such: “Then WHO controls The Lady with The Ruler?”
The US killed the SkipJack proposal years ago, not because of political issues or concerns about privacy but because major manufacturers basically said “if you make us do this, we can’t sell our stuff.”
This is a silly proposal and silly arguments. Mass surveillance on channels that are known for mass surveillance doesn’t work for anything but the idiots – those too stupid to know better. That’s why the “secure phone just for criminals” sting was so effective.
I have always found it ironic that GDPR has an exception for state level surveillance — the nine eyes and all that. Both Israel and South Korea have “GDPR adequacy” but the US does not — that’s not because Israel and South Korea are models of political restraint in domestic surveillance but because the US has FaceBook.
Common refrain — the US doesn’t care about private industry surveillance, Europe doesn’t care about government surveillance.
I think the future will be national or geofenced internets as a luxury product. Enjoy the network without EU’s clumsy bureaucratic experiments. Or an internet excluding India from VOIP so they stop constantly and incessantly trying to steal your parent’s retirement fund. There’s several others that people would pay good money to avoid having to share a network.
Like software patents, it will come back.
Governments are voting for their own police services, without any mandate from their own national parliaments.
“riminals would simply move their traffic to newly-illegal encrypted forms of communication without government backdoors”
No they wouldn’t. They’d just keep using the same forms of communication they currently use which don’t have those backdoors. Adding further silliness to this is there is no way to enforce this. If they take down people for violating the act they give away their hand that they were investigating them. So they then just informed everyone of who exactly they couldn’t find evidence against.
Nation states already have a variety of ways to surveil people at either end of a given conversation to give them evidence if there was any real criminal activity going on. Breaking encryption so you can check on all communication much of which has legitimate reasons to be held away from bad actors does not help and certainly will harm.
Seeing how convicted felon suddenly got elected as teh prez makes me think our (US) legal system is full of holes the size of Jupiter. Anything can sneak through unnoticed.
Obviously, criminals don’t even need to get creative, they’ll just hire some kind of juliani to force justice look the other way while they are busy breaking the law. Average Sam, in comparison, will get severely punished for walking too close to the law he is NOT breaking.
“Perhaps it speaks volumes that it was the Germans who sounded its death-knell, given that state surveillance on that level is very much within living memory for many of them.”
This strikes me as undue hubris. Every western country has significant government monitoring of communications. Any centralized / public ‘secure’ service winds up being a target for intelligence agencies, and is compromised (willingly or not, it doesn’t matter). The only way to have true end-to-end encryption is to use PGP (etc) yourself so you know the characteristics of what you’re sending over the line. Whether that’s illegal or not doesn’t seem to matter much, because precious few people bother to do it, and those who do won’t care if it’s legal. The idea that we (whoever we are) live in some privacy-respecting nation just because we aren’t Germans within living memory is a load of hooey.