[HN Gopher] France rejects backdoor mandate
___________________________________________________________________
France rejects backdoor mandate
Author : hn_acker
Score : 927 points
Date : 2025-03-21 20:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| phtrivier wrote:
| Though it is a good piece of news (and those are not that common
| nowadays), some caution about the political context is warranted
| here.
|
| The National Assembly is very divided a the moment, and the
| Minister defending the backdoor amendment is from a minority
| party at the AN, that just happens to have majority in the other
| chamber.
|
| Also, he is preparing for a presidential bid, and has a fair
| share of ennemies, both in and out of his party.
|
| So, all in all, it was a relatively "cheap" move from the MP who
| voted against it :
|
| - it's screwing up with a powerful opponent
|
| - it's easy publicity given that "spyping in whatsapp" would made
| bad headlines
|
| - there has not been a massive terrorist attack recently, so the
| measure will not look urgent.
|
| I'm pretty sure that some of those MPs, asked to vote the same
| thing by a president of their party, after a terror attack, would
| vote for the backdoor.
| palata wrote:
| Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate
| change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just
| not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course
| they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also
| not have no clue at all.
|
| Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me
| it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how
| encryption works.
|
| Especially these days in Europe, it seems completely insane: it
| is already a problem that most companies use US services, given
| that the US have become hostile to Europe. The sane way to go is
| to try to get better privacy for European companies/people, not
| worse. Adding backdoors just makes it easier for adversaries to
| access private data.
| miohtama wrote:
| But think of the children
| WJW wrote:
| The children are not benefited by Putin and Kim Jong-Un being
| able to read their messages.
| dataflow wrote:
| > they should also not have no clue at all. Over an over again,
| politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that
| they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works.
|
| Unless you're claiming that it's literally impossible to
| construct a cipher with multiple decryption keys, I don't see
| how you're implying that asking for a backdoor "proves they
| don't understand the very basics of how encryption works".
|
| Their stance differs from yours due to their values being
| different from yours, not due to inferior literacy.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It is impossible to construct a cypher with just one key,
| such that the good guys (spanning several allied nations,
| dozens of government agencies, perhaps even local police) can
| use the key, but bad guys (spanning several opposing nations,
| dozens of intelligence agencies, thousands of hacker groups,
| tens of thousands of individual cyber-criminals around the
| world) cannot. We are talking about every single person who
| can buy a copy of a piece of paper carried out of HQ being
| able to read all of your personal and professional
| correspondence: no doubt a possibility.
| dataflow wrote:
| You're missing my point completely.
|
| These folks very well understand that bad people can steal
| keys. Stolen keys have been a thing since antiquity. It's
| not rocket science they don't understand. Every single key
| in history has had a risk of theft and this is no
| exception.
|
| The truth is a lot of them understand this just like you.
| But unlike you, _they are willing to accept this risk_. You
| aren 't. That's fine. You have a value disagreement -- you
| don't think the risk is worth it, and they think it is.
| Which is why you make arguments about the merits of the
| issue, instead of attacking the other side on their basic
| literacy. Just because you disagree on values that doesn't
| mean the other side is stupid or illiterate about the
| basics.
|
| This isn't about politeness either, it's actively
| counterproductive to your own cause: insulting people and
| showing that you lack a basic understanding of their
| position is a sure-fire way to make sure they dig their
| heels in and continue to oppose you regardless of the
| merits of the situation. i.e. it's a grest strategy for
| losing in the end.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't believe that France is actually willing to accept
| that every opposing intelligence agency will obtain the
| key...
| dataflow wrote:
| Maybe they don't think it's as likely as you think. Or
| maybe they think the time horizon is long enough that it
| is worth it. Whatever it is, I assure you they are not
| too stupid to realize this is a possibility. They just
| differ on either the degree of the risk, or on the value
| they get in return. In which case, logic dictates that if
| you believe the actual risk is higher than they would
| tolerate, to find a way to convince them of that.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's a matter of facts rather than values. The
| "impossible promise" is that a private company can keep a
| kilobyte of data out of the hands of every spy agency on
| Earth for any length of time.
| immibis wrote:
| Why does this concern apply to the French intelligence
| agency but not, say, the code signing certificate for
| Whatsapp?
| whatshisface wrote:
| On one level it does apply to certificates.
|
| On another level, pushing a compromised update to every
| phone in Europe (to gain access equivalent to having a
| copy of the backdoor) would be noticed by the publisher,
| and the binary difference would quickly be found by
| security researchers.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And yet the immense majority of the population accept &
| use messaging platforms operated by "not France" where
| the operator would be able to obtain everyone's key with
| a couple clicks. (Yes, this includes Apple's).
| whatshisface wrote:
| That makes sense because it has been brought about as a
| consequence of consumer preference. It wouldn't make
| sense for it to have been required by the government.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Unfortunately, last time I heard, consumers actually
| dictate what the government cares about.
| immibis wrote:
| I think they think when that happens they'll change it.
| Or they'll change it on a schedule... "Just use HTTPS" is
| good enough for every website and web app on the planet
| (including ones that handle more messages than the entire
| country of France) but not a state intelligence agency
| can't keep their TLS keys secret?
| whatshisface wrote:
| "Just use HTTPS" sends French messages directly to NSA,
| insofar as those platforms are concerned. In that case
| there's not even a copy of any encryption key...
| immibis wrote:
| France is giving everything they receive to the NSA
| anyway, so there's not much difference.
| kyralis wrote:
| This is spot on.
|
| They're not concerned about their own security. They
| believe that they will have access to tools that will
| make them safe, but that "those people" will be deterred,
| and it is acceptable to give up some basic safety for
| many to catch "the bad people."
|
| And, historically, they weren't necessarily wrong. The
| problem is more that all of the tradeoffs and
| probabilities from history have been thrown at the
| window, because it is now trivially easy to phish the
| majority of a population and getting a master key gives
| you access to hundreds of millions of individuals that
| you can reach from around the globe rather than a couple
| dozen that you can get to in person from a particular
| apartment complex.
|
| Understanding encryption is not the problem.
| Understanding _scale_ is the problem.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _It is impossible to construct a cypher with just one
| key_ [...]
|
| Technical nit:
|
| I (mis?)remember reading in a cryptography book (by
| Schneier?) that the NSA has at least one algorithm where
| the decryption key is different than the encryption key,
| but my search-fu finds no references to it online. The
| application would be for devices in 'hostile territory'
| where there was a risk of capture of the unit and so you
| didn't want the other side to be able to alter
| data/firmware since the cipher that is available is decrypt
| only.
|
| However, see perhaps:
|
| * https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/abstracts/traitors.html
|
| * https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/39397/one-
| encrypt...
|
| Also, see _n_ -of- _m_ algorithms:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| the problem with backdoored encryption isn't making a cypher
| with multiple decryption keys. It's keeping secret that's
| worth billions of dollars and shared among 10s of thousands
| of people. The difference between backdoored encryption and
| no encryption is whether the backdoor is known to the public.
|
| There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no
| encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption".
| tshaddox wrote:
| > There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no
| encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption".
|
| While I oppose building backdoors, I don't really agree
| with this claim. There's nothing incoherent about
| developing a threat model.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think some threat models, like one that doesn't include
| hackers, are not coherent relative to reality.
| tshaddox wrote:
| A threat model can include hackers while not taking every
| action that could prevent every conceivable attack from a
| hacker.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Your government isn't the only one out there. If your
| government can have a backdoor, so can every other
| government. If the US, EU, Russia, and China all have
| backdoors to everything, who are you keeping it secret
| from?
| cmonreally123 wrote:
| The powers that can't pay? If the US, EU, Russia, China
| all have nukes to everything...
| drdeca wrote:
| Could it be possible to make a cryptosystem where messages
| can be decrypted either with the recipient key, or by
| sequentially applying say, 100 different backdoor keys,
| such that the different backdoor keys could be stored on
| different machines without ever being present on the same
| machine?
|
| If you increase the number of backdoor keys needed to
| decrypt by enough, and have these keys be stored only on
| hardware that is meant to make it infeasible to extract the
| key from it, and if these machines are distributed among a
| sufficiently large and varied group, maybe that could work
| as reasonable oversight to prevent the backdoor from being
| used outside of select cases?
|
| Edit: to be clear, I don't _want_ this. Just trying to map
| out what positions could reasonably be held / what options
| there are.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I would like to know what the public opinion on these issues is
| before blaming politician's ignorance, considering that to them
| the relevant knowledge is knowledge of what voters will support
| or tolerate. The impossible promise of backdoors that France
| can enter but no other country, organized criminal syndicate or
| petty government-employed stalker can find is only one
| impossible promise among the many we can hear from the world's
| parliaments. In fact, the impossible promise is something of a
| stereotypical tactic.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| French want less criminals and immigrants in the street.
| Whatever it takes.
|
| I'm french, i have not heard any people, work, street, even
| television or internet speak about that.
|
| The sad truth is that it wouldn't even solve the issue,
| criminals will always be able to use encrypted
| communications. there are open source software that can't be
| tampered with, software that doesn't use a single server
| where backdoor can be put, or they could even simply encrypt
| their text message. i could do that from my mac terminal and
| Bruno Retailleau isn't going to put a backdoor in my mac
| terminal...
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| > French want less criminals and immigrants in the street.
| Whatever it takes.
|
| What about using the probability that a specific race or
| religion will commit crimes then target those people with
| aggressive tactics.
|
| As for the public they could make those people feel
| unwelcomed through constant harassment in the hopes they
| leave the country.
|
| Thus reducing the crime rate by any means.
|
| ----
|
| I checked the murder rate and it's been on a downward
| trajectory for the last 30 years
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/global-
| metrics/countries/fra/fra...
|
| I haven't check other stats but what if your views on crime
| are being manipulated by people who have agenda that
| normally wouldn't be possible if the true reason was
| revealed?
| outside2344 wrote:
| In France, like a lot of other countries, they are
| blaming everything on the immigrants.
|
| Crime? Immigrants are doing it. Retirement age?
| Immigrants are spending the money.
|
| These things are not backed up by data, but just like the
| US, or Nazi Germany, nobody cares, simply easier to
| choose an easy "solution" and blame immigrants.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| Immigrants commit a bit less crimes than the locals in
| France.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Yes, but inmate population is mostly immigrant
| descendants (for various reasons, poverty and been unable
| to work are the main ones).
| rixed wrote:
| The morally lazy racist explanation is helped by the
| famous logical fallacy that if most criminals are of
| foreign origin, it must be because most foreigners are
| criminals.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > In 2019, 82% of the people implicated by the police and
| the gendarmerie declared themselves French and 18%
| foreigners, while they represent 93% and 7% of the
| population in France respectively.
|
| https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5763585?sommaire=576
| 363...
| _ache_ wrote:
| > I haven't check other stats but what if your views on
| crime are being manipulated by people who have agenda
| that normally wouldn't be possible if the true reason was
| revealed?
|
| That is a known fact. Criminality rate drops but french
| people are feeling more and more insecure.
|
| There is a media oligarchy in France (by billionaires)
| that pushes anything but left ideas (the left want an
| exit tax and a wealth tax, the last one is the Zucman
| tax). The idea that immigrants are criminals is easy to
| spread as the prison population is clearly different than
| the mean population of France (for various reasons). They
| are pushing it so hard that the population is feeling
| insecure even if the criminality rate drops.
|
| Source about media oligarchy by billionaires: https://upl
| oad.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/M%...
| orwin wrote:
| > I haven't check other stats but what if your views on
| crime are being manipulated by people who have agenda
| that normally wouldn't be possible if the true reason was
| revealed?
|
| Actually, you're right about murders, but you're wrong
| overall i'd say. Organized crime is on the rise since
| 2004? Maybe a bit before.
|
| Politicians "reformed" the police, removed our "proximity
| police" which were basically social workers with physical
| and weapon training, who also were a great point of
| contact for future informants as it built a lot of trust
| in some cities (mostly western and northern France: it
| didn't work as well in the south and in Paris, but it
| worked truly great were i lived and their removal killed
| a lot of initiatives. My bet is that the failure in
| Marseille and Paris killed the initiative which worked
| great in small to medium cities).
|
| And then circa 2008 they added another police reform that
| basically pushed police towards targeting petty
| criminals. Petty criminals turned to organized crime "en
| masse", and nowaday you have basically 3 crime families
| who run most of the crime in France. They reached Paris
| around 2011-2014, divided it cleanly around 2017 (i've
| heard multiple people talking about a missile launcher
| sighted in the 93 around 2015-2016 when i lived there, in
| at least 2 different location) and now politicians act
| surprised.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Can you provide some stats?
| achenet wrote:
| Moi aussi je suis francais.
|
| > French want less criminals and immigrants in the street.
| Whatever it takes.
|
| Maybe it's because I spent most of my time in big cities
| hanging out with relatively well-educated, often left-
| leaning, relatively young people, but I'm not getting that
| vibe at all.
|
| Yes, you do have pathological cases of badly integrated
| immigrant communities - for example the quartiers Nord de
| Marseille, and yes, I've known more working class people
| who have to endure abuse from anti-social immigrant drug
| dealers to express some pretty far right views, but I'm not
| sure that reflects the majority of the French population. I
| don't watch the news much, but when I do I don't see
| anything about issues with integration, mostly stuff about
| Ukraine and Trump.
| berkes wrote:
| You could , and should, make the point about criminals
| and drug dealing affecting "normal citizens" without
| using imprecise and often wrong terms like immigrants.
|
| Yes. Many people feel unsafe, are affected by crime, or
| feel they are. Yes, people are afraid. Whether they are,
| statistically actually more unsafe, or not (most often
| aren't) matters little. If people have a problem with
| criminal behaviour or abuse, they have a problem with
| criminal behaviour or abuse. Regardless of where that
| comes from. Being beaten up by three Moroccans hurts just
| as much as being beaten up by three Frenchies whose great
| grandparents were also born in Marseille.
|
| It honestly doesn't help. First and foremost because many
| people will now dismiss the problems you may adress,
| simply because they are drowned in what appears racism,
| or at least ignorance.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > French want less criminals and immigrants in the street.
| Whatever it takes.
|
| If that were true, France would have a vastly different
| immigration policy. It would even have an explicit,
| drastic, and targeted emigration policy.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Since when the general population are the decision
| makers? /s
|
| Well, half /s anyways. Working class don't want them
| because "they're taking our jobs". Middle class don't
| want them because "blah blah security". Upper class want
| them because that's cheap labour. And as it happens, the
| upper class is the class in power.
|
| Most french don't care. But this still creates tensions,
| even between immigrants, say for like housing. As we say
| in french, it's a "bourbier".
|
| In the end, it's the same situation as in any other
| country where immigration has taken over the frontline of
| the political debate.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Open source software can definitely be tampered with if the
| maintainers aren't vigilant enough. Look at what happened
| with XZ/LZMA debacle a few months ago. Yeah it didn't make
| it into most distros but still...
|
| And the sad reality, the maintainers for most useful OSS
| projects are essentially paid employees of a company. Which
| can be easily enticed/forced by governments.
|
| And then there's the hardware manufacturers. Even the most
| hardened software running atop compromised hardware becomes
| worthless.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > to them the relevant knowledge is knowledge of what voters
| will support or tolerate
|
| That's relevant knowledge. It's not _the_ relevant knowledge.
| Another piece of relevant knowledge is facts about complex
| things like political science, cryptography, etc. Since
| politicians actually need to decide and implement things, as
| a side gig to being popular, lack of the proper knowledge to
| do so is a shortcoming.
|
| > I would like to know what the public opinion on these
| issues is
|
| Not big sample sizes, but I regularly ask and interview
| people from all sides of life, and to a simple question like
| "Do you think the police should spy on you if that catches
| criminals?" the answer is always a resounding "no".
| Especially young people. They just way "No way. We're not
| criminals". They "arguments" may be choppy, muddy waters, but
| I don't think peoples feelings about being spied on is much
| of a mystery.
| grvbck wrote:
| Here in Sweden the answer from the general public often is
| "yes, I am honest and have nothing to hide".
|
| Unlike French media, Swedish media does not have a well-
| developed tradition of confronting those in power and/or
| demanding accountability.
|
| I often get frustrated by how easily interviewees dodge
| direct questions by answering something completely
| different, and get a "thank you" from the journalist in
| return, instead of a follow-up question.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That sounds like the US in the postwar era, under
| Eisenhower. It broke down quickly, as the journalists
| were not slow to catch on when the leaders abused that
| trust.
| achenet wrote:
| It's not just our media, it's our culture.
|
| We have a _looong_ and storied tradition of not liking
| the government, starting with our first revolution in
| 1789, continuing in 1830 and 1848, and further reinforced
| by the Nazi occupation during WW2. When I went to
| England, I heard the joke "where are all the French
| people? Oh right, probably on strike again".
|
| I feel like some people would probably go out and protest
| if the government went so far as to suggest that maybe
| regular tooth brushing might be a good idea, just out of
| principle.
| grvbck wrote:
| Yeah we don't do that here. Our culture was Pirate Bay
| and nation-wide torrenting until the government said it
| was stealing and people stopped because we are Honest
| Citizens.
|
| No revolutions, unless explicitly permitted by the
| government.
|
| Actually makes me a bit worried given the recent
| geopolitical development in the world.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| One problem is that public opinion is also often at odds with
| facts. It's not hard to find a sequence of "Do you want X or
| Y" type questions that will send many people into a circle of
| intransitive preferences.
| m463 wrote:
| With things like this I think of the bill that tried to change
| the value of pi:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It seems to me the bill tried to charge royalties on maths
| and that a result would have been state sanctioned
| calculations would contradict the value of pi.
|
| The Wikipedia article notes that the redefining of pi was
| specifically not an aim of the bill, pi not being mentioned
| in it.
| hartator wrote:
| > Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and
| climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the
| politicians just not understanding enough to take rational
| decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography,
| but they should also not have no clue at all.
|
| They would argue about the damages drugs do.
|
| I think they know what they are doing. Digital privacy has no
| lobby outside of EEF. We donate more than $10k to them
| annually.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The "war" on drugs is what brings all of the violence and
| crime associated with drugs, not the drugs themselves. But it
| finances the police industrial complex and so many people
| would lose out (or be forced to focus on _actual_ crimes
| rather than people consensually trading plants or chemicals)
| that it will never happen.
| achenet wrote:
| The pharmaceutical industry has a pretty big lobby, so does
| big tobacco, and don't even get me started on the alcohol
| industry.
|
| If one of them finds a way to patent drugs that are
| currently illegal or otherwise profit from it, legalization
| will happen.
|
| Honestly, in many places, legalization _has_ already
| happened, look at the coffee shops in the Netherlands and
| the dispensaries in North America.
|
| The police industrial complex might be attached to their
| cash cow, but everyone else in the capitalist system wants
| to get rich too, and I suspect in the long run that'll win
| out.
|
| Also, much as how after a few thousand years of
| civilization people eventually wised up to human sacrifice
| wasn't actually a good idea and was not in any way required
| to make the sun come up, maybe at some point in the future
| we'll realize that harsh criminal penalties don't actually
| solve the drug problem.
|
| France has some of the strictest laws against cannabis use
| in Europe, and also some of the highest rates of
| consumption, or at least it did last time I checked.
| tiltowait wrote:
| > The "war" on drugs is what brings all of the violence and
| crime associated with drugs, not the drugs themselves.
|
| Some of it, certainly, but I doubt it's all. Violence
| committed by druggies trying to scrape up enough for their
| next hit would still happen.
| hollerith wrote:
| Also, violence caused by a sociopath's giving a desperate
| addict $50 in exchange for the addict's shooting one of
| the sociopath's enemies would still happen.
|
| Also, addicts stealing from their moms would still
| happen, which is regrettable even if it is not violence.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| The syringes thrown away on lawns and playgrounds
| probably also won't disappear just because the drugs get
| cheaper.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder how much crime _is_ done by people trying to get
| another hit of alcohol or cigarettes. They are pretty
| addictive, but I haven't heard of this becoming a problem
| with legal drugs for whatever reason.
| lstodd wrote:
| Do you not see that you're contradicting yourself?
|
| If drugs were not prohibited, they would not cost so much
| as to cause "scraping up enough".
|
| How come I can buy 50 liters of isopropanol (99.(9)
| whatever, dehydrated, better than medical eth) for like
| 20 euro, but no luck for ethanol. Even while ethanol is
| that much cheaper to produce?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Violence committed by druggies trying to scrape up
| enough for their next hit would still happen.
|
| Portugal (mostly) decriminalised possession and use of
| all illegal drugs in 2001. (Ref:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal)
| This should be an ideal country for study. Do you know if
| violence from drug users declined after this change in
| Portugal?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| How much violence do you see from people trying to scrape
| up enough to get the next drink or cigarette?
|
| It's almost none, because those things don't cost enough
| to ruin a person's life. Even for most of the serious
| addicts.
| amelius wrote:
| > To me it just proves that they don't understand the very
| basic of how encryption works.
|
| Even if you don't have the encryption keys you can read
| messages by breaking into a phone and taking screenshots, for
| example.
| meesles wrote:
| If you've broken into the phone/app, you've got access to the
| key...
| amelius wrote:
| But it's only useful if you understand how encryption
| works.
| daniel-s wrote:
| These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking
| for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a
| priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would
| much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with
| individual freedoms and privacy, especially European
| politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom
| as the anglophone countries.
|
| What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in
| public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional
| athletes of lying and obfuscation.
| econ wrote:
| I sort of agree with them. I want all privacy abolished for
| politicians. Think about it, if we live stream them in the
| shower we might get some much needed young people to take the
| job. Let them keep the ad revenue. Only fans suggests it
| should be the best paid job out there and the workers are all
| about public approval.
|
| no more naughty business!
| verisimi wrote:
| That is not how it works. Politicians will vote for special
| measures for themselves, but citizens need to have their
| data easily presentable for inspection by government
| agencies. Think of the children/terrorists.
| bambax wrote:
| > _These aren 't dumb people._
|
| Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your
| comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want
| generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.
|
| But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of
| anything technical.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _especially European politicians that don 't come from the
| same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries._
|
| Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at
| limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop
| in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even
| have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was
| American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
| bananalychee wrote:
| The UK and Australia are ahead of countries like France in
| restricting freedom, so this sounds like a poor attempt to
| avoid complimenting the US specifically.
| thomasfedb wrote:
| What freedoms are you referring to wrt Australia?
| chgs wrote:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46463029
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disru
| pt_...
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "These aren't dumb people."
|
| they are, most tech worker didn't know how cryptography works
| under the hood and yet you expect politician to know it???
| nah its just intelligence agency make a request to parlement
| of some shit
| usrnm wrote:
| Are you actually trying to say that understanding
| cryptography is a prerequisite for intelligence?
| anthk wrote:
| You mean UKUSA? Echelon? Patriot Act? SSL and encryption
| 'bans' making the vendors get OpenSSL from the Canadian
| OpenBSD?
| mrweasel wrote:
| OpenSSL = OpenSSL Software Foundation Inc / OpenSSL
| Software Services Inc (In the US)
|
| OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada).
|
| OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.
| anthk wrote:
| OpenBSD had a SSL stack too, not bound to US licenses and
| restrictions on exporting.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Before the LibreSSL fork? I did not know that. They've
| shipped OpenSSL for as long as I can remember, and then
| forked it, in 2014.
|
| How long ago was that?
| anthk wrote:
| OpenSSL built on Canada was fine. Get NetBSD from US
| mirrors and you got a TLS-challenged OS until the 00's
| when the restriction exports on tech 'as weapons' were
| nonsense.
| mrweasel wrote:
| No dumb perhaps, but very very short sighted and it pretty
| clear how other decisions can be so very wrong, once you hear
| them get quizzed on encryption.
|
| "We should have a backdoor for law enforcement", okay but
| what if that abused by some regime that doesn't like Jews,
| Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, communists, authors,
| journalists... you? Obviously THOSE people shouldn't have
| access to a backdoor. Okay, but if you do it EU wide then
| Hungary will have access to it. Okay, only Western European
| nations should have access. What if AFD wins in Germany or
| Groupe Rassemblement National in France? Okay, in THAT case
| the backdoor access should be revoked. Who decides that?
|
| It's very clear that politicians want backdoors in
| encryption, but only under a very specific set of
| circumstances. Those circumstances are almost completely tied
| to their own parliamentary seats. If questioned long enough,
| most of them will see it issue, they probably won't admit it
| though.
|
| So no, not dumb, just incredibly short sighted on almost
| irreversible decisions that can and will hurt the wrong
| people.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The problem is, that many of the politicians in high positions
| are corrupt, bought by companies, and/or only went into
| politics, because they couldn't get a productive job. There are
| politicians, who never in their life had a proper job, were
| born wealthy and never had to work like someone in a productive
| proper job has to.
|
| There may be exceptions, of course, but over and over again,
| when one checks the background of politicians in high
| positions, one finds out, that they simply inherited a lot, and
| never worked in the field they are making decisions about, nor
| actually in any other field. They "just became politicians".
| And even then they misuse funds, cars for private trips, first
| class tickets on means of transportation, let themselves be
| bought by lobbies, have prospect of some corporate board later,
| have even more side income than they are being already paid for
| their badly done job as a politician, and so on and on. Many
| one could outright call despicable.
|
| The problem is, that we let them do it. Going into politics is
| such a clusterf' that no normal person even wants to do it any
| longer. It only attracts those kinds of person we see there.
| Others are sidelined or never join politics in the first place.
| Then we also don't vote/kick/protest them out of office the
| moment we hear about their crimes.
| latexr wrote:
| > To me it just proves that they don't understand the very
| basic of how encryption works.
|
| Hanlon's razor isn't always true, sometimes it really is
| malice. Considering EU ministers want to exempt themselves from
| Chat Control, that suggests to me they do understand enough of
| the basics.
|
| https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...
| artursapek wrote:
| I love the combination of them naming this evil bill "Child
| Sexual Abuse Regulation Proposal" to make it sound like an
| obviously good idea, and them asking to be exempt from it. So
| are you implying you are abusing children?
| ozmodiar wrote:
| Especially considering that governments such as the UK (I
| know they left the EU but I'm more familiar with them than
| the current EU members) have a pretty grim history of
| exactly that.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Using their own bullshit excuses against them, that might
| actually cause their heads to explode. Of course the
| rebuttal will be something something national security
| yadda yadda.
| kgwxd wrote:
| It's far more often malice than stupidity, when talking about
| overreach of power. I absolutely hate Hanlon's Razor, it's
| how we got here.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> given that the US have become hostile to Europe
|
| I'd like to comfort you that this is not true for the majority
| of Americans. We are having a hard time wrapping our heads
| around what our new government is doing.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| It kinda doesn't matter; Individuals aren't making foreign
| policy decisions day-by-day, Republicans leaders are. Until
| we effect change in our government, we are hostile to most of
| our allies.
| noduerme wrote:
| It matters to me, as a person who travels frequently, that
| people in the countries I visit don't believe that
| Americans writ large voted for the foreign policy we see
| being enacted. Even among the ones who voted for Trump,
| there seems to be a lot of shock at the aggressive posture
| toward our allies. I think it's important to convey that a
| majority of Americans are not on board with this 180 degree
| turn in our position toward Europe.
|
| But yes... individuals don't make foreign policy, and we
| are subject to the whims of our polity. That's exactly what
| I'm asking the parent poster to take into account.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| It matters to me too. However, it still doesn't negate
| the fact that we _are_ hostile.
|
| There is always good news and bad news in the world. Our
| judicial branch is (so far) working to reverse illegal
| moves by the executive branch. People are protesting
| across the US and across the world. Our allies are
| currently putting pressure on us that is reversible.
|
| The bad news is that our country is losing trust every
| day. We voted this person into office twice. We are
| deporting people for voiced opposition to the regime.
| There are now travel warnings to the US from multiple
| countries. Ironically, it's now harder to leave the US.
| MAGA is trying to spread into other countries given the
| foothold it has gained here.
|
| There isn't a lot of comfort to give when the guy who
| holds the nations nuclear codes is questionably coherent
| and actively hostile.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >Even among the ones who voted for Trump, there seems to
| be a lot of shock at the aggressive posture toward our
| allies.
|
| Source?
| csomar wrote:
| > it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not
| understanding enough to take rational decisions.
|
| That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the
| politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-
| systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.
|
| That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under
| different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of
| expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm sure some of them do but encryption is pretty unusual as
| a lock that police can't break. If a judge orders a search of
| your house and the incriminating evidence is in a safe they
| will break it open if you refuse to open it for them.
| Governments aren't exactly happy that for digital assets
| there's ready made mass-market systems where the response to
| any search warrant will be to pound sand.
|
| When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by
| the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE
| messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence
| (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to
| sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the
| whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against
| speech or whatever.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Governments aren't exactly happy that for digital assets
| there's ready made mass-market systems where the response
| to any search warrant will be to pound sand.
|
| Which is to say they understand the situation perfectly and
| are acting with a firm intellectual grasp of what is going
| on.
|
| The issue isn't that they don't understand encryption, it
| is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to
| resist the state. Which is cool and all, authoritarianism
| is always with us to some extent. But at its core they see
| this from the viewpoint that the state is fundamentally in
| control and sometimes it grants people the privilege of
| privacy because it doesn't think what they are saying is
| important and therefore they can be humoured. They'll
| pretend technical ignorance if it gets the liberals off
| their backs, but the only people they are fooling are the
| credulous.
| pca006132 wrote:
| The issue is that something like this will not affect the
| criminals, they can just use something with encryption.
| bambax wrote:
| Listening to the debates in the lower chamber (Assemblee
| Nationale) and the arguments of those arguing in favor of
| backdoors clearly show they do not have a clue how any of
| this works. They are not clever players doing double-bluffs.
| They are ignorant stooges.
| csomar wrote:
| First, the constituents on the chamber are supposed to vote
| along the party lines. Yes, they do not understand what is
| going on but that does not obviate their responsibility.
| Negligence can be criminal. I am specifically talking about
| the people pushing this (as in planning, writing,
| orchestrating its ascent to become law and then enforcing).
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Why do they need to understand how encryption works ?
| They're mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be
| broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will
| tell you that these things are already possible in the
| physical world today.
|
| In other words they're fine with intruding upon citizens
| privacy - this doesn't require any understanding of
| encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their
| answer would be 'ban encryption')
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| This is incorrect. They will quite often claim that it is
| possible to do without breaking encryption, as required
| for banking and such. They do believe it is possible to
| have a backdoor that will _only_ be accessible to the
| government. Completely ignorant of how quickly that
| backdoor will be found by hostile state actors.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Well, hostile state actors can ( and do!) already wiretap
| lots of things in the physical world, in theory
| wiretapping / surveillance is only possible for
| governments etc. And the NSA semi-successfully inserted a
| backdoor through carefully chosen elliptic curves a few
| years ago ( DUAL_EC_DRBG ) by convincing folks to use a
| weak PRNG.
|
| I'd say that the problem isn't so much related to
| encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be
| industrialized very quickly, and that the 'if it goes
| wrong' scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your
| backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
|
| From a lawmaker's perspective, it's just a different kind
| of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly.
| In some ways I see it as closer to people
| misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large
| amounts of data : it's not related to the inner workings
| of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers
| provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything
| is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at
| the same time, and read by people you don't want.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| The article clearly states that it was pushed by the
| Interior Ministry. Those in there know exactly what they
| are doing.
|
| On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no
| clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblee. This
| is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think
| Darmanain was an exception)
|
| We have to remember that, while the minister changes with
| the government and thus is by definition a politician
| (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from
| education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit
| stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of
| people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by
| government changes. Those are the ones making the calls.
| And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and
| DGSE).
| Propelloni wrote:
| > Those are the ones making the calls.
|
| No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones
| writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in
| France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of
| experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The
| minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician --
| makes the call.
|
| And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be
| an expert on all the things that come up in a single
| ministry, let alone the parliament.
| z3phyr wrote:
| On paper. But it is easier to get influenced by
| intelligent "Subject Matter Experts" and they usually
| know how to nudge the public representatives their way.
|
| This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership
| in democracies.
| chgs wrote:
| The question is who is feeding them that information.
| nelox wrote:
| No, it is theatre. They are masters of their craft. They
| are pushing an agenda to convince the public. They pose as
| ignorant and relatable, so that the ignorant and relatable
| keep voting for them.
| regularjack wrote:
| That is a very cynical take.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| This is the line of Russian propaganda. But don't try to
| explain by malice if it can be perfectly explained by
| incompetence.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Unbelievable. What does Russian propaganda of all damn
| things has to do with this? Especially considering that the
| power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way -
| people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive, which
| I'm telling you as someone who tried to resist that
| takeover. Yes, your politicians - _all_ politicians,
| regardless of the country - would have been happy to have
| more power over you and need to be kept in check. They are
| never naive, only you can be naive by assuming that. If you
| forget this for a second, you 're done. This is not some
| kind of controversial issue all of a sudden, that's basic
| democracy.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > What does Russian propaganda of all damn things has to
| do with this?
|
| They welcome Europeans thinking their government is out
| to get them
|
| > Especially considering that the power takeover in
| Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the
| politicians are dumb and naive
|
| People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in
| Russia were conditioned by decades of violent
| dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or
| actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy
| in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
|
| > your politicians
|
| Putin?
|
| > need to be kept in check.
|
| Keeping in check != assuming the worst. Assuming the
| worst from everybody is how no one would get anything
| done. e2ee, like any tech not bad or good inherently
| helps both goodies and baddies. Not turning blind eye on
| this is important first step. Even if your gov doesn't
| get a backdoor now they will keep at it until they find a
| way _because voters who are not extremist libertarian
| techbros want them to_. Your way out is to help them find
| a good enough way witg a compromise.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in
| Russia were conditioned by decades of violent
| dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or
| actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy
| in power is actual ex KGB. There 's a difference_
|
| I'm sorry if I'm blunt or rude but you have _zero_ idea
| what you 're talking about, and judging by this answer
| you're unlikely to even attempt to find out. It saddens
| me that people who have actual chance to avoid neo-
| feudalism learn nothing from the experience of my own
| country (Russia), because hey that's Eastasia and we've
| always been at war with Eastasia so it can be discarded,
| "we" are not like that, surely "we" are not "them" and
| can do better, it can never happen here. Well, good luck!
| You'll need it.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| What you quoted is reality. People who care are in those
| two categories with rare exceptions. If you are actually
| russian like me you'd know that 95% of people are in two
| of the above groups I described. Literally everybody you
| ask either voted for Putin or did not vote (if we pretend
| elections were real)
|
| And you I guess have no objection to my main point. e2ee
| helps crime as much as good guys, maybe more because it
| helps scale crime. And non stupid government would see
| that. If what a democratic government is doing to fix
| this looks like censorship, then it does not mean the
| government is bad. There is other context. A good
| democratic government can be instructed by competent
| experts make better tradeoffs. You cannot expect
| politicians to be competent experts.
|
| It saddens me that every now and then even well
| intentioned(?) fellow russians act like every government
| is like that. You're not the only one. The legacy and
| history of how people came to power is completely
| different. Yes it's hard to believe but there are
| governments who are different.
|
| If you want to see how actual surveillance would look,
| check out russia. Chinese firewall tech, TSPU boxes at
| every ISP, making VPN illegal etc. Unlike EU there is
| historical context and evidence in which it is clear that
| the government is not doing this to fight crime.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| TSPU is just the consequence of a failed attempt to bring
| it under control, which happened much much earlier (no
| point in getting into detail here). And yes you're right,
| I actually have no objections to proportional response
| and keeping trust where it's possible, you can't get
| things done without it. Just keep in mind that "it cannot
| happen here" attitude is dangerous and you're always one
| step from what you've thought is impossible. Opposing to
| E2EE strikes me as similar to unified IDs in some
| European countries that are proud of safety and
| convenience it brings, dismissing the reality that they
| are now one regime change from the total control. (not
| even the unlikely change, considering that certain EU
| countries historically lean "right", for simplicity).
| unification_fan wrote:
| What I don't understand is this:
|
| Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit
| and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And
| how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held
| accountable?
|
| Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit.
| Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are
| generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can
| be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not
| trusting because they _know that it is malice_. In fairness
| you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-
| examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
|
| I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious.
| They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what
| I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned
| civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we
| are... have we learned nothing at all?
| sitkack wrote:
| > Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography
|
| We could be seeing the effect of France's top notch level of
| mathematical attainment in how their politicians are behaving.
|
| Education lifts all boats.
| hkt wrote:
| On the other hand, people can _believe_ experts without
| _being_ experts. Perhaps the French parliamentarians just
| listen better.
| sitkack wrote:
| Not trying to debate club you here, but it could also be
| that higher educational attainment creates parliamentarians
| that _can_ listen.
| raincole wrote:
| What politicians want (and what they think average people want)
| is very different from what HN users want.
|
| Politicians: a backdoor that can be used by the police for
| investigating crimes, but not by criminals themselves.
|
| HN users: no backdoor at all, _especially_ not a backdoor that
| can be used by the police.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| also politicians want a backdoor especially for tracking
| treason / spying possibilities, which in a way comes under
| police investigating crimes but is more national security
| apparatus protecting the state.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| Politicians: technology that strengthens the power of the
| state, against crime, but also militarily, for spying on
| enemies both foreign and domestic.
|
| Citizens: defensive architecture that prevents the state from
| preventing free speech.
|
| This is especially relevant in the era of AI, where the cost
| of mass surveillance is virtually zero, and is incredibly
| powerful at sentiment analysis and summarization. Free speech
| is threatened when any statement can and will be used against
| you.
| zazazache wrote:
| They know, they just don't care. And they have learned if they
| just ignore problems, then most times they'll get away with it.
| Like for example all their responsibilities to stop an ongoing
| genocide, or to combat apartheid
| agent327 wrote:
| The US have not become hostile. So far it has made two demands
| of Europe, and both of them are reasonable:
|
| 1. Europe should not rely entirely on the US for its defense
| (stated by Trump numerous times).
|
| 2. Europe should stop its mad self-destruction and descent into
| totalitarianism (stated by Vance on several occasions).
|
| Were they incorrect? Were they unreasonable? Sometimes you need
| a friend to tell you a harsh truth. Hearing that truth does not
| make that friend into an enemy; quite the contrary.
| hkt wrote:
| And tariffs are the the act of a friend too? Let's not be
| silly. Trump's is America first: the upshot of which is
| everyone else can be a subordinate or a rival. Europe is
| wisely choosing not to subordinate itself to the US quite so
| much. It'll be interesting to see if it becomes a real rival.
| TFYS wrote:
| 1. And made it clear by threatening to take land from a
| European country by force.
|
| 2. That's funny coming from a person who is building a
| totalitarian system. He was supporting parties that would
| make a similar development in Europe possible.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| It is anecdotal but during Covid and the crypto boom I was
| chatting with someone living in France. He told me he was
| happy to have a few crypto since he has been using one of
| those exchange to buy illegal drugs.
|
| Basically he told me that over there people just go on
| websites to order drugs, pay with crypto from a centralized
| crypto exchange and then have it delivered in they physical
| mailbox. And this is not the Silk road thing this is local
| business, shipped by the national postal service from an
| address in France from France.
|
| I also read an article once saying drug stores on the
| internet and social media are very common over there.
|
| My conclusion was that, selling most drugs had become de
| facto decriminalized in France.
|
| Strangely France is also by far the country where I have been
| systematically harassed by the police and customs (at the
| frontier and within the country). They are very aggressive
| and it is to the point that I now avoid that country as much
| as possible.
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| > but they should also not have no clue at all.
|
| they usually talk to experts in those areas. Who those experts
| are can vary quite a lot though.
| bboygravity wrote:
| "the US have become hostile to Europe."
|
| 1. I don't believe that anything changed in recent months/years
| other than the US _repeating_ the statement that maybe EU
| should take care of its own defense. Not exactly a new sign of
| "becoming hostile" IMO.
|
| 2. If this would even be true then they have always been
| hostile to Europe and only just recently started becoming
| honest and open about it (but again, I dont see any sign of
| actual change). Five eyes, NSA, etc is not exactly new and have
| super obviously been used and are still being used by the US to
| do economic and political espionage on Europe for at least
| decades. The leaked news of NSA spying on German chancellor
| Angela Merkel's phone is like 10+ years ago by now?
|
| My opinion is that every EU company that uses Onedrive, Teams,
| Outlook, Google etc (99 percent of them is my guess) are
| basically paying to give away their trade secrets to their US
| competitors. "but the terms of the contract say..." yeah
| right...
| graemep wrote:
| Its just become harder to stick European heads in the sand.
|
| Is government agencies to. In the UK the NHS uses AWS, courts
| use Teams.... IT security is just ignored - its only recently
| that it occurred to the govt to remove Chinese cameras from
| sensitive sites.
|
| European militaries are heavily dependent on the US too and
| have a lot of equipment that is reliant on US supplies or can
| only be used in line with agreements with the US.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Plus apparently there are things that only USA can
| currently do, awacs radar support and other recon I think
| ojl wrote:
| I believe there are several non-US awacs systems out
| there, although the American ones are probably the most
| common.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| They have alienated their allies for sure and this time it
| seems different and it seems that it will have a lasting
| impact. Including for tech companies.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic
| of how encryption works.
|
| Chats being encrypted between multiple participants is a normal
| use case of cryptography. Giving limited government access can
| be part of a cryptoscheme and doesn't mean that encryption has
| to be disabled.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _it is already a problem that most companies use US services,
| given that the US have become hostile to Europe._
|
| Risking a potential flame war here but I think it's important
| to cool down hysterical rhetoric whenever it's pushed.
|
| The US has not become hostile to Europe, and it's quite silly
| to say this in contrast to, say, a certain country next door
| that is currently invading a European country.
|
| The US is in the midst of a many decades "pivot to Asia." This
| is not hostility, but growing indifference.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Every good idea needs powerful PR. How about we start rallying
| around the term "software equivalent of cancer" which Tim Cook
| coined to describe encryption backdoor.
|
| Speech matters. "Software cancer bill" sure sounds less
| appealing than "catch terrorists bill".
|
| Nobody has to understand the details about why encryption
| backdoor is impossible to implement without breaking the
| encryption. It is too hard of a topic. I only understand it
| vaguely. Does it matter? You don't need phd in silicon design
| to know that chips are important.
| joostdecock wrote:
| I am not here de defend politicians, but...
|
| The title says "France rejects backdoor mandate" but TFA makes
| it clear that France is not a hive-mind:
|
| - The rejection was by the French National Assembly (think
| parliament/congres) - Ths happened despite pressure from the
| internal ministry (the government)
|
| I find it interesting that it is often a similar story at the
| EU level where the European Parliament puts a stop to the worst
| impulses of the European Commission.
| tw04 wrote:
| > given that the US have become hostile to Europe
|
| That's more than a bit of an overstatement. One faction in the
| US government has started being less loyal to Europe. Most
| Americans consider Europe to still be our closest allies and
| friends.
|
| Furthermore the US businesses are not stupid and have shown
| they will stand up to government pressure around data
| sovereignty. Anything less will drive both US and global
| customers back to on-prem infrastructure.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/legal/microsoft-sues-us-gove...
| timbit42 wrote:
| > Most Americans consider Europe to still be our closest
| allies and friends.
|
| The feeling isn't mutual.
|
| > Furthermore the US businesses are not stupid and have shown
| they will stand up to government pressure around data
| sovereignty.
|
| Only until it threatens their livelihood and family. Don't be
| naive. The majority of both Democrat and Republican members
| of the Senate and Congress, and many judges and other people
| in high positions in the government are afraid of the
| repercussions of crossing Trump. The US is screwed.
| ziofill wrote:
| I've lived and worked in France for three years. There are many
| things I've learned about it, some good some bad, but certainly
| one of them is that France is a country that can show real
| leadership.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I've found the original debates video on the National Assembly
| website. My French is good enough for that (not enough for
| cooking et al. though), so I believe I understood. I'm positively
| surprised by some deputies remarks. But Bruno (interior minister)
| Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his
| advisors as well, or is a liar. "We will apply the math
| selectively, only for those that are a threat and when the big
| brother approves"... In every country it's the same narrative.
| This time it was not about children, but "Freeing France from the
| drug trafficking trap" ("Sortir la France du piege du
| narcotrafic"). And it looks like it was not the main point and
| they tried to pass it as a minor subnote or something. ... They
| will find dozens of other issues to cancel the math.
|
| https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.16453163_67dc786...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments
| for decades.
|
| It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership
| courageous enough to put country first. So, in fact, it is a
| fairly typical European country...
|
| The spread of "narcotrafic" is an example of that, there are
| others. If you follow French news you'll see many.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I live in France for the last 5 years. Been to many places in
| the world. France is OK overall.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Well I am French. "OK overall" is obviously good but at
| global scale this means better than the "third world", so
| context is important.
|
| The context of my previous reply is France's "direction of
| travel", which negative like most other European countries.
| This is a key metric on any meaningful timescale, which is
| what ultimately matters.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I beliebe you are talking about the first derivative. I
| want to believe the second is all right lately.
|
| The scariest thing in France I've seen is ~20yo voting
| for Mel-the-leftist-egocentric-schmuck so that they could
| keep doing nothing but taxing productive people. Other
| that that the "direction of travel" is dual: either drown
| in the mire of ever increasing taxes or kick ass. My
| feeling is that France has everything for the later, but
| for some weird reason prefers the former. Yet, in the
| meantime, it's OK. And the very latest geopolitics
| headlines are nice, if they ever come true.
|
| My original point was about individual rights. I'm glad
| the country stands firm on that.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I agree with you. On individual rights I would qualify
| that by saying that France has never been leading on
| them. The state is what matters and individual rights
| have always in practice been restricted to that effect.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I admit ambiguity, but I meant 180 opposite. I believe
| France is and has been the top at individual freedom.
| That perception is an important reason I'm there, so I
| acted on it.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| How can you say that when individuals are not allowed to
| show religious symbols or wear religious clothing in any
| government-affiliated setting?
|
| I don't see how state-enforced irreligiousness
| (secularism/laicite) doesn't completely contradict with
| individual freedoms.
| buybackoff wrote:
| Cela s'appelle la laicite.
|
| If you have problems with that there are so many 3rd
| world countries that care about medieval stuff more than
| development. I think laicite is one of the coolest
| words/concept, France should only really enforce it
| further.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Whatever floats your boat. But claiming that France is
| the pinnacle of maintaining individual freedoms
| contradicts with a nanny state that polices religious
| expression. You can't have it both ways.
| buybackoff wrote:
| It's water that floats anyone's boats. It's the
| physics+linguistics. The problems start when people try
| to substitute the meaning of things.
| realusername wrote:
| Keeping religion out of the state is a good thing, the
| previous statu quo in France before that used to be that
| the Christians were policing everybody.
|
| We can see now in the US how not having this concept is
| creating a lot of social issues with Cristian
| fundamentalists running the state.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| There's a significant difference between separating the
| state's concerns from religious dogma, and restricting an
| individual's ability to dress in accordance with their
| belief system. I have wondered if jeans would be banned
| in France if one made a religion with only wearing jeans
| in public as its dogma.
|
| And before I get any questions about it, I say this as a
| lifelong atheist.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > I believe France is and has been the top at individual
| freedom.
|
| You could not be more wrong.
|
| However, I am not surprised you would believe that: I
| have quite a few French friends who believe the exact
| same thing because they've all drunk the kool-aid that
| was served to them during their school years, namely that
| France is the country who invented human rights, freedom
| of speech, etc...
|
| Nothing could be further from the truth (England is a way
| better approximation to "invented free speech" than
| France ever was, where do you think Voltaire discovered
| what Freedom really meant if not during his exile years
| in England?).
|
| Even today, your average Frenchmen is dead convinced that
| freedom of speech in France is one of the best in the
| world and a fundamental value of French society.
|
| If you compare it to Iran or North Korea, fair enough.
| But then go look up what happened to a guy named
| Dieudonne if you want a perfect example of there being no
| freedom of speech whatsoever in France.
|
| Compared to global standards, France is _really not_ high
| on the individual freedom / freedom of speech scales,
| but then you have to be able to properly compare things
| to make vaguely correct calls on such things.
|
| And if you have never left your country nor master
| English well enough to understand what goes on outside
| your tiny cultural bubble, and you have been
| indoctrinated by the French school system since day one,
| it's a perfectly normal thing to believe.
| MITSardine wrote:
| Could you give concrete examples of situations where your
| freedom is restricted in France?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Could you give concrete examples
|
| I thought I already did, but here it is again
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieudonn%C3%A9_M%27bala_M%2
| 7ba...
|
| The dude kept on saying completely outrageous things on
| public channels, none of which should have been an issue
| in a country with normal free speech laws.
|
| Here's another interesting case, where a TV channel was
| outright shutdown because they said things that the
| powers that be didn't like. I guess Moscow isn't that far
| east of France:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/french-tv-
| cha...
|
| Here's another interesting aspect of life in the land of
| stinky cheese: cash is by law legal tender, as in:
|
| https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-
| of-p...
|
| However, it is illegal to buy anything with cash if the
| transaction is more than 1k euros:
|
| https://www.service-
| public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999?...
|
| These are just off the top of my head, the list is very
| long and quite sad.
| MITSardine wrote:
| Excuse me? C8 would be right in its place in Moscow, on
| the contrary. It's a propaganda channel owned by a
| billionaire FN backer. Cyril Hanouna is basically a
| Russian TV host that speaks French. The embodiment of bad
| faith.
|
| At any rate, one of the main reasons was the repeated
| offenses of the channel, having beaten a record of fines,
| and never having done anything to correct their course.
| Fines are not a cost of operation, they are penalties for
| breaking the law. You can't break the law systematically
| and then cry about not getting your license renewed.
| Though I'm sure Hanouna has painted himself quite the
| victim in this affair.
|
| These fines were often for things I think most people
| would view as legitimate, such as verbal assault, threats
| or hate speech.
|
| About cash payments, I think you're making a caricature.
| From your source:
|
| > There is no limit to the amount paid in cash between
| individuals (e.g. car purchase). Written text is required
| beyond EUR1,500 for to prove payments.
|
| This written text is just a proof of sale, not a
| justification as to the use of cash or its provenience.
|
| The 1000EUR figure is when dealing with professionals,
| among other reasons to avoid VAT fraud. Many countries
| implement similar measures, often more stringent.
| Regardless, I'm almost sure your chauffagiste or mechanic
| will accept a cash payment of any amount. There is the
| theory, and then the practice.
|
| I really struggle to see how this affects your life in
| any way.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Excuse me? C8 would be right in its place in Moscow, on
| the contrary. It's a propaganda channel owned by a
| billionaire FN backer. Cyril Hanouna is basically a
| Russian TV host that speaks French. The embodiment of bad
| faith.
|
| What you say may or may not be true, I wouldn't know, I
| don't watch French TV.
|
| It is, at any rate entirely irrelevant: if that TV
| channel was advocating that people should tattoo a
| swastika on their forehead, they still should be allowed
| to do so, however retarded that is.
|
| That's what free speech means, however horrible and
| shocking that may be to you. People are free to make up
| their mind about the channel and not watch it.
|
| The government has strictly no business, in a truly free
| country, to decide who can and cannot broadcast.
|
| > You can't break the law systematically and then cry
| about not getting your license renewed.
|
| Why in heaven's name would you even need a license to run
| a TV channel? Do you need a license to create YouTube
| videos?
|
| > I really struggle to see how this affects your life in
| any way.
|
| This tells me you and I likely don't live the same kind
| of life.
|
| But if you're happy living in a society where every
| private transaction you make is monitored by your
| government, hey, what can I say: more power to you, after
| all, complete and utter surveillance of the plebs is also
| what happens in Russia. They also likely think it's
| normal to have your every move monitored over there.
|
| When you've lived your whole life in a prison, you end up
| not seeing the walls anymore.
|
| I'm personally very happy I don't have to suffer living
| in a place like France.
|
| > The 1000EUR figure is when dealing with professionals,
| among other reasons to avoid VAT fraud.
|
| Every coercive power there ever was has always had that
| kind of "won't you think of the children" or "this is for
| your own protection" bullshit message to wrap their
| coercion of basic freedoms in a nice package. This is no
| different.
| MITSardine wrote:
| I think this is naive regarding propagandists. These TV
| channels don't "express views", they manipulate and
| fabricate opinion to serve the interests of their owners
| (in this case a multi-billionaire industrial family with
| a far right ideology).
|
| Rather than offer viewpoints, they suppress any
| constructive discussion and recenter the debate on bogus
| issues to rile people up and garner votes for populist
| parties that are friendly to their stakeholders. They are
| a poison to democracy. The riling up itself also has
| direct and violent consequences.
|
| In such situations, the freedom of the perpetrators is at
| odds with the freedom of the victims. There is no
| solution that prevents a lion eating a gazelle that
| doesn't involve restraining the lion. As children are
| taught, "my freedom ends when the freedom of others
| begins".
|
| I doubt any country in the world allows you to manipulate
| someone into murder and then walk away with it once the
| deed is done. Punishing hate speech is that but on a
| larger scale. I struggle to see the issue, really. The
| only matter of discussion is the definition of hate
| speech, but the principle itself is sound and necessary
| in my opinion (and of the majority of people who welcome
| that such laws exist).
|
| By the way, you mentioned England in your initial
| comment, but the UK has similar laws in this regard. Were
| you thinking of the US as a freer nation? For having
| lived in both, I'll have to beg to disagree, I've never
| felt as surveilled as in the US. Private companies store
| your whole card number and any details you were
| unfortunate enough to share with a given retailer (such
| as email address) are shared across nation-wide networks.
| But it sure is convenient when WholeFoods knows you have
| an Amazon Prime subscription. Or does it not count when
| it's private companies, only the government?
| immibis wrote:
| This is pretty much the same way Americans view America,
| right? Dead convinced that American freedom of speech is
| the best in the world, even while people get their
| permanent residency revoked for making Israel look bad,
| and other people get denied entry for texting their
| friend that they aren't the best fan of Trump. It also
| happens to be the way North Koreans view North Korea
| (understandable for them, since they're shot if they
| don't).
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| What key metric and what's your source
| kergonath wrote:
| > France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic
| governments for decades.
|
| What are you on about? What does the "unpatriotic" bit have
| to do with anything?
|
| > It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership
| courageous enough to put country first.
|
| Right. What would "putting country first" mean? France is
| doing what it wanted to do for decades, which is
| consolidating European power to its advantage. Is that what
| you consider unpatriotic? If so, I have bad news for you:
| France is a great country, but absolutely does not have the
| resources for its ambitions on its own.
|
| > If you follow French news you'll see many.
|
| If you follow sources related to reality in any way you'll
| see that some things are getting better and some things are
| getting worse. What does not change is the agitation about
| safety and security to make people afraid of their own
| shadow, even as the situation is quite clear: the country is
| safer than it has ever been.
|
| You have a valid point hidden somewhere, it's that the people
| were shortchanged and that inequality is rising. You are
| badly misguided if you think that this has anything to do
| with patriotism. In fact, the people pushing this narrative
| have their own interests to look after in the class struggle.
| They might make you think that they have the same enemies as
| the people but they are just looking after their own. Just
| look at any country in which the local nationalists came to
| power.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Good attempt at caricature or is it humour?
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| > the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than
| it has ever been
|
| False.
|
| https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/135975/10767
| 2...
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| Crime is under-reported in France because most people know
| that wasting your time to go to a police station to report
| a small crime is basically useless as nothing will come out
| of it.
|
| I have talked about it on this forum. I have had my car
| broken into multiple times in France, and each time I had
| to file a police report. Guess how many times the culprits
| were caught? A big fat zero.
|
| So the statistics look good. But what about the reality? Do
| you think a women coming home at night is felling safer now
| than she would have been 30 years ago? I don't think so.
|
| Not too mention the rampant Islamism that has taken over
| entire suburbs were women are not free to wear what they
| want and the cops don't go there unless they have the CRS
| (riot police) with them to protect them in case something
| goes wrong.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I found the Front National guy!
| hansvm wrote:
| Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find
| recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality
| than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll
| alter my country and language for search engines when searching
| for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French.
|
| Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from.
| Especially if you know some French already, I think you'd get
| good results dropping your recipes into an online translator
| and trying to make the most of it.
| buybackoff wrote:
| What I had in mind is that I go to a local market every
| Sunday to buy some nice fresh food. But e.g. for the
| fish/meat I still only understand 1/3 or 1/2 of the
| names/terms. Nevertheless, I have read some lengthy tax code
| sections more than once in details... I do not cook like a
| French, and - oh - they cook really nice! :)
| yodsanklai wrote:
| As a French, English is my default language for most queries
| on the web, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look up for a
| recipe in English. I also find that we have a lot of good
| science/maths youtube channels.
| Symbiote wrote:
| If searching for recipes in English, you need to add "UK"
| or maybe "Australia" to avoid the American recipes.
| (Avoiding US measurements and processed ingredients.)
|
| But even then, there's still a lot of spammy or dumbed-down
| content. I look for sites I recognise.
| shabgzer wrote:
| Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German
| writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared
| to for instance Dutch writing.
| hansvm wrote:
| I might. I hardly know anything about the German language
| though right now. Do you have a rough sense of how much I'd
| need to study to be able to supplement with automatic tools
| and do something useful with German sources (50hrs, 500,
| ...)?
| zxexz wrote:
| Probably closer to 50 than 500, assuming you've done
| something similar before and you have "native"
| proficiency with another germanic language. Honestly,
| just read the Dover First German Reader, watch a few TV
| shows end to end with captions a couple times, turning
| them off and on and rewinding whenever. Read some german-
| language forums, and watch some German language talks.
| That won't get you anywhere near conversational
| proficiency nor develop any speaking skills, but more
| than enough to get great value out of written text and a
| lot of talks, especially with some tools to help.
| achenet wrote:
| As a Frenchman, this really grinds my gears.
|
| Our state is already one of the biggest arms dealers on the
| planet, and, like all modern nation states, fundamentally a
| coercive protection racket (note that I don't actually have a
| problem with coercive protection rackets. You remember that
| scene in The Godfather where everyone is thanking Vito Corleone
| as he saunters through the street? That's me thanking the
| French welfare state for taking my taxes and giving me
| universal healthcare and environmental regulation).
|
| Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut
| the dealers and start a government monopoly like Sweden has
| with alcohol?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves,
| undercut the dealers
|
| That was tobacco, but they blew it by never going for
| alternatives nor providing healthier/better products. With
| the pharma knowledge we have now, we surely could have
| developed a legally acceptable drug with few enough
| downsides.
|
| Otherwise, they are of course getting in on the drug trade,
| just not under the framework we'd want to:
|
| https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-
| juge...
| cship2 wrote:
| But once it is legal, they can't use it to deal weapons
| anymore
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair
| bambax wrote:
| The level of math and/or tech understanding in the French
| political "elite" is abysmal. These people graduated high
| school, and went on to college without doing any math AT ALL
| after 10th grade ("seconde"), and probably sucked at math even
| then.
|
| And they have nothing but contempt for the people who do
| understand those issues ("les techniciens").
| palsecam wrote:
| Vladimir Arnol'd (the famous Russian mathematician) touches
| on that subject in his essay << Sur l'education mathematique
| >>
| <https://smf.emath.fr/system/files/filepdf/Gaz-78-Arnold.pdf>
| (in French; Arnol'd also taught in France).
|
| According to him, mathematical teaching has become overly
| abstract, leading to students being disgusted by maths,
| seeing it as disconnected from reality. Some of these
| students then end up being ministers... Original quote:
|
| _<< Comme de telles mathematiques scolastiques, separees de
| la physique, ne sont adaptees ni a l'enseignement, ni a
| aucune application eventuelle a d'autres sciences, les
| mathematiciens se sont fait hair des lyceens (dont certains
| ensuite sont devenus ministres) et des utilisateurs. >>_
| mariusor wrote:
| I think most of the people in the "making decisions" business
| don't really care about how or even if something is possible,
| they leave it as an exercise in compliance for the "boffins"
| and "les techniciens".
| buybackoff wrote:
| France has great engineering tradition. One of the left
| leaders is PhD in math. As I mentioned, multiple comments by
| members of National Assembly were quite educated. The problem
| is with key politicians having perverse incentives and
| misrepresenting bad things to the less educated public.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > Freeing France from the drug trafficking trap
|
| This reason just like all the other reasons that have been used
| to try and strip away every shred of privacy that we have
| (think of the children, fight terrorism and so on) is complete
| bogus.
|
| My mom was working as an admin person in a police station in
| France back in the 90s and from the many conversations she had
| with the cops, knowledge was never the problem. They already
| knew back then where all the drug hot spots were but truth be
| told there has been a lack of enforcement of the law.
|
| Why you ask?
|
| Simple, in most of the suburbs were drug trafficking happens,
| you have high unemployment, people low education and very few
| prospects for their future, so it has been said that the
| government has avoided coming down too hard on drug traffickers
| because they don't want these areas to erupt in chaos and start
| rioting.
|
| In a way, the French government has used the drug money to
| indirectly buy social peace.
|
| If the French government wanted to fight crime and get rid of
| these drug traffickers, it could simply legalize pot like in
| Germany and Canada and kill the black market.
|
| Instead, it chooses once again to go after the sellers and the
| buyers. It makes zero sense because unless you are going to
| enforce the law by punishing the traffickers with the death
| penalty like in some countries, we know from all the data of
| the last 30 years that you cannot stop the flow of drugs.
|
| We can't even keep drugs and cell phones out of jails/prisons,
| how is it that we think we can keep them out of entire
| countries?
|
| The solution is simple, you legalize it and tax it and make it
| hard for kids to get it just like we do today with alcohol and
| tobacco.
|
| That is the only sensible approach. What do you think the drug
| cartels fear most? The cops or legalization?
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| It's still true today. A cop friend of mine told me "if you
| arrest all the drug dealers, the whole city will burn in less
| than 24 hours."
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| You think legalizing pot will solve the problem? Its the
| harder drugs that's where the money is. No country has
| legalized hard drugs.
| palsecam wrote:
| _> I 'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks._
|
| Not personally surprised, but I agree, they talk sense and
| understand the matter quite well. Thanks for finding and
| sharing the debate video, btw!
|
| _> Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with
| his advisors as well, or is a liar._
|
| Sadly, gotta agree here too. M. Retailleau seems off the mark.
| He looks (to me) like he speaking in good faith tho, and that
| he "just" doesn't get it.
|
| Nevertheless, he has a point when he mentions Apple and CSAM
| (Child Sexual Abuse Material). Apple has shown that using
| homomorphic encryption could be 1) actually practical, and 2)
| helpful on such matters. Cf. https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... &
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
| & https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0.
| ...
| fisian wrote:
| Denying math has a tradition among politicians:
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality
| law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use
| encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to
| intercept their communications.
|
| makes sense to the average non tech people.
|
| The sad truth however is that it wouldn't even solve the issue,
| criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications:
| there are open source software that can't be tampered with,
| software that doesn't use a single server where backdoor can be
| put, or they could even simply encrypt their text message.
|
| i could do that from my mac terminal, encryption is basically
| mathematics. Bruno Retailleau isn't somehow going to put a
| backdoor in every device that could be used to encrypt. People
| even used to encrypt communications before computer.
|
| The only looser of that law is the normie, you and me, who use
| whatsapp or signal to chat and couldn't ever push their relative
| to use things like pgp encrypted email.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Wouldn't law enforcement just use Pegasus style zero-days to
| spy on the their targets? So why all the hubbub about making
| backdoors that become vulnerabilities for nefarious users too?
|
| Like why bother convicting Signal to create a backdoor for you,
| when you can put your nations geniuses to find some RCE bugs in
| Qualcomm or Apple modems or SoCs, and spy on them that way?
| This way nobody's the wiser.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Governments around the world do not want to stop at the
| identifiable target. They'd like to imitate the US and China,
| obtaining special deals with service providers that allow
| them to collect summary statistics and identify individuals
| computationally from the total of all communication.
|
| Here are a few uses for total surveillance:
|
| 1. Public opinion can be monitored on a much more objective
| level than polling provides.
|
| 2. Discontent can be identified long before potential
| protestors are aware of others who share their views.
|
| 3. People whose views are significantly outside the usual
| range can be picked out and targeted in advance of any crime,
| even when no crime would occur.
|
| 4. Serious attempts at labor or protest organization can be
| resolved into definite schedules with more basis for
| comparison to other events than the participants themselves
| have access to.
|
| 5. There would be no more electoral surprises.
|
| From this list, you may notice that states that are presently
| democratic have even more of a use for this capability than
| the others.
| bdelmas wrote:
| I feel like they would reserve this type of hack to
| international criminal organizations (plus terrorists and bad
| countries) but not for smaller fish.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The smaller fish, as you say, could just talk in person
| like they used to.
| stop50 wrote:
| There are still methods that are unbroken.
|
| Onetime pad: messages are encrypted using an key that has the
| same length as the message
|
| An enigmalike machine: the enigma has some problems, but that
| can easily be fixed. If someone uses more complicated keys
| than AAA they should be safe from reading the messages.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| I think the interior minister pushes for the easier solution.
| What you talk about is most likely illegal currently (and law
| enforcement usually cannot do illegal stuff unless explicitly
| permitted by law and a supervised by a judge) and requires
| highly qualified staff. Hooking an AI to a backdoor is just
| easier and cheaper.
| jbm wrote:
| While I generally agree with your position, this is the same
| unconvincing argument I've read for a long time.
|
| Even if there is a specific criminal gang that is sophisticated
| enough to use a properly encoded open source application, the
| majority aren't, and there is enough of a overhead and
| annoyance factor that will allow the majority not to use them.
|
| If any open source application gets enough people using it,
| there will be plenty of opportunity for the maintainers to be
| bullied into submission to the state. Then the fragmentation
| will begin ("You need to use this branch, that branch is
| compromised").
|
| If 10-20% of your full time job as a criminal is keeping your
| communication encrypted, that's probably a win for the
| government.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Then the criminals will just talk in person about all the
| information they downloaded about us. ;-)
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Your assertion that criminals are idiots or lazy might hold
| true in the case of the high school weed dealer but i'd argue
| strongly against that case for the international drug trade
| or traffickers. The more sophisticated the crime, usually the
| more money, the more incentive to keep it hidden. These laws
| aren't written about weed dealers, they're written about
| traffickers. The justifications are always the high level
| traffickers and related peoples, the people most likely to be
| locked down anyways.
|
| And besides all that, let's invoke the slope, would you
| install a camera in your home? Even if you would, are you
| willing to force that upon every other person, regardless of
| their feelings or wishes?
|
| Sure, let's think of the children. Can we also think of the
| potential future regime jailing/torturing all their political
| opponents? Why must we always be asked to think of only one
| side of the harms?
| vladms wrote:
| Even it would occupy them 20% of their time, the issue with
| such a backdoor is what it can do to non-criminals (ex: loose
| the backdoor to an enemy nation state that would allow spying
| on all citizens, or allowing some party to eliminate
| opposition).
|
| I always find this "war on drugs" strange, considering they
| are so many buyers to make it worth.
| Annoy/treat/educate/understand the buyers, if enough people
| want something you will not make it go away by reducing
| supply. Or make it legal and make money from it as a state...
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| I would argue that organized crime benefits from economies of
| scale - and that's what they're saying this might somehow
| alleviate. It's really not that hard to find one OSS e2ee app
| that is only updated for severe security issues when you have
| millions flowing through.
| orwin wrote:
| You don't know how organized crime families are nowadays in
| France. French gangs are led by 3 "families". Or rather, 3
| groups of families who now are friendly with each other and
| divided their territory nicely and stopped fighting each
| other ~7 years ago. You might catch some minor gang member
| trice removed from the Hornec (And i've heard the Hornec are
| not the leading family, too exposed, so i would guess getting
| to the true boss is even harder), but you won't catch any
| leader like this.
| letsownmeansofp wrote:
| the conversations seem to stay focus on e2ee good or bad; it's
| important to question - is this the correct focus? Drugs should
| not be illegal in the first place; decriminalising them is
| known to have good results, (look at Portugal) it weakens
| organised crime and black markets, less costs for the justice
| system, less health issues and less need for public health
| money to be spent on dealing with resulting issues, the list
| goes on. E2ee is essential for a society to protect itself
| against internal threats like tyrants.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > Drugs should not be illegal in the first place;
| decriminalising them is known to have good results, (look at
| Portugal)
|
| I have no knowledge on the impact of that policy. On the
| other hand bruno Retailleau said at National Assembly that
| this kind of policy doesn't work. What happens is that there
| are expensive legal drug and cheaper illegal drug that
| organized criminals provide.
|
| Hence there are more drug user but barely less income for
| drug cartel.
|
| He gave for instance the tobacco example. It's legal in
| France yet it's so expensive that black market has never
| flourished so much.
|
| Without knowing much about that subject, I must admit it
| makes sense.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| Tobacco is expensive because the French government is using
| the taxes on it to make up the overall shortfall of tax
| revenue. See the budget deficit from last year.
|
| Obviously the French government is saying that this is for
| health reasons but that reason has gone out of the window
| when a pack of smokes is 13 euros.
|
| So the black market flourishes.
|
| You can't keep increasing the price of a good without
| making sure that it can't be imported from elsewhere and
| since France is part of Europe and it no longer has any
| border checks, it very easy to smuggle cigarettes from
| Portugal or Spain.
|
| This tactic of increasing the price of cigarettes or
| alcohol works in a place like Australia where it's orders
| of magnitude harder to smuggle things since stuff has to
| come either through airports or boats which are both
| watched carefully by the state.
| letsownmeansofp wrote:
| Good point. Lots of reasons to love France. Also some
| good amount of things they get very wrong. Inheritance
| tax hitting the low class a lot these days, especially as
| house pricing is up through the roof.
| agilob wrote:
| >The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality
| law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use
| encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to
| intercept their communications.
|
| Terrorist attacks in Paris were coordinated using SMS and play
| station network.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Tangentially, France has had the CNIL [1] since ~1978, following
| a scandal about creating a national citizen's database, and
| exists to prevent exactly that. (I believe the objection stemmed
| from memories of the Petainist fascist regime during WW2)
|
| The CNIL is why France (and now Europe) has "Right to Forget"
| laws. It is the direct ancestor of stuff like GDPR.
|
| Unfortunately, I feel like the CNIL is fairly neutered nowadays.
| Nevertheless, it serves as historical precedent, for those who
| remember it exists.
|
| [1] "Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes" ~=
| "National Commission of Computing & Liberties"
| mocamoca wrote:
| This goes well beyond historical precedent. The legal system is
| complex, but even when Parliament approves a law, it can still
| be struck down if it violates fundamental principles.
|
| For matters concerning IT and privacy, the CNIL (French Data
| Protection Authority) could spearhead such cancellation
| proceedings.
|
| And companies doing business in France should watch out--CNIL
| sanctions are no joke!
|
| Are there specific events making you feel it has been neutered?
| vladms wrote:
| I wonder if not having such state database is not causing today
| more issues than it defends from.
|
| In the 80s I would get it, the state was the only one able to
| build such a database and people were afraid of what it would
| do secretly with it. Nowadays, "everybody" has a database with
| millions of people (ex: facebook, linkedin, x, tax offices,
| etc.) and discriminatory actions are done based on
| whims/stupidity rather than on actual good data.
|
| People will do horrible stuff because they believe in it, not
| because they have good data.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The CNIL is doing a ton of work to limit private databases
| and cross-checking as well.
|
| It can be hard to believe from more business focused
| countries, but the agency setting precedents has had
| dissuasion effects, and most companies do end up caring about
| their data retention and management policies. I've been in
| enough meetings where UX proposal gets entirely reworked
| because of a simple link to the CNIL's guidelines.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| France has rejected _this_ backdoor but keep in mind that France
| is still in favor of chat control (mandatory on device scanning
| of your communication). There 's now a majority among EU
| countries and the proposal is expected to pass. The next meeting
| is April 8th.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I hoped that was a part of this EU debate. It's sad if not.
| orwin wrote:
| France government is a minority government. The proposal their
| finance/interior minister do to the council of Europe is a
| minority opinion in France.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| Does that make a difference? The proposal has France's vote.
| thomasingalls wrote:
| This seems like one of those situations that's going to turn
| regular people into outlaws. How could anyone vote in favor of
| something so foolish?
|
| Also how would that even work, would your device get
| compromised by connecting to a wireless network inside French
| borders?
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| And as usual, the french politicians will change their tune in
| a few months and go on TV and say that the EU made them do it
| even though they did not want to.
| contravariant wrote:
| Ugh, no wonder they don't mind missing this one. Chat control
| is far more pervasive than what amounts to a digital wiretap.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is a good reminder that regardless of what country you hail
| from, freedom and liberty are like love -- continuous activities
| that you do every day, not something that you achieve once and
| then you're done. There will always be those who wish to
| consolidate more power to themselves than is good and always
| those who wish to impose their will on others. These people win
| if you, specifically you reading this, don't do something. So
| always choose to do something.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| If the general public is given a choice between super secret
| internet messaging, or the current status quo, they will go for
| the latter. This is because the former hampers law enforcement's
| ability to track down criminals and terrorists.
|
| And the better informed non-techies are about the tech, the more
| they will support backdoors.
|
| No large service will survive providing E2EE. In the near future,
| there is bound to be some widely publicized incident where E2EE
| plays a pivotal role in a big atrocity or financial calamity.
| Then the public will demand that government, for whom it is
| already a worry, do something about it.
|
| It just seems like a pipedream to me that unfettered E2EE will
| last in big tech.
| stephen_g wrote:
| E2EE is very much in the interest of providers, because if
| their systems are breached in a cyberattack, E2EE is the only
| thing that stops that stolen data being useful. People can be
| educated about that.
|
| Terrorists used planes as the key part of the attack in 9/11,
| and nobody called for a ban on all air travel. It's not a
| forgone conclusion people will be fine keeping E2EE!
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Judging by post 9/11 airport security SOP, if an alternate
| means of mass transport had been as fast as air travel,
| America would have banned commercial flights forevermore on
| 9/12.
|
| The only benefit E2EE messaging offers the public over
| partially encrypted messaging is a _lower_ chance of being
| spied upon. That 's nice, but intangible.
| fuzzzerd wrote:
| That seems a plausible outcome. Pretty dystopian for sure, but
| plausible.
|
| Sadly the cat is out of the bag, so banning it for the general
| public means that only the bad guys have it and they're already
| presumably doing illegal things so why do they care about using
| illegal software too?
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| "If the general public is given a choice between super secret
| internet messaging, or the current status quo, they will go for
| the latter. This is because the former hampers law
| enforcement's ability to track down criminals and terrorists."
|
| I don't know where you live but that's not my experience
| thankfully. Why? Because the opinion is (including mine) that
| the vast majority of crimes should not be crimes at all (in
| this case all drugs should be freely available for adults to
| buy) and terrorist acts will happen whether you spy on citizens
| or not anyway.
| spapas82 wrote:
| > provision that would have forced messaging platforms like
| Signal and WhatsApp to allow hidden access to private
| conversations.
|
| The fact that this could have been possible is the reason why the
| pgp/gpg way ( _you_ manage your certificate and _you_ choose
| whose certificates to trust) is still the only way to have true
| encrypted communications.
|
| Using centralised services to encrypt important data is a joke.
| precommunicator wrote:
| PGP/GPG by default have no perfect forward secrecy though.
|
| In Signal you can check the certificates checksums in
| conversation settings, to compare them e.g. when physically
| present to the other device.
|
| There are other solutions that use Signal protocol or that have
| PFS that are decentralized. And you can build your own, it's
| open source at the end.
|
| Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain
| markets than violate their security (e.g.
| https://swedenherald.com/article/signals-ceo-then-were-
| leavi...)
| spapas82 wrote:
| Yes, if you care about forward secrecy then pgp is not a good
| solution.
|
| > Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain
| markets than violate their security
|
| You still need to rely on a third party's goodwill to keep
| that promise. Also even if they are willing to keep the
| promise it is possible that they won't be able.
| 3np wrote:
| The point was not really about using PGP specifically but
| referring to its web-of-trust model, I believe.
|
| Forward secrecy does not require centralized key distribution
| and/or trust lists.
| upofadown wrote:
| If you keep your messages around in some form then that
| effectively defeats forward secrecy. In any case where the
| attacker can get your secret encryption key material, they
| will be able to get any messages you still have access to.
| Most people want to keep their old messages around. So for
| messaging, forward secrecy is of little practical value. If
| you _do_ keep your messages around, then PGP 's encrypt
| once[1] scheme is much better than what most other systems
| do. The message is encrypted and stays encrypted. It is never
| in a decrypted state unless the user wants to look at it.
| This normally involves the entry of a secure passphrase.
|
| Contrast that with typical instant messengers where the
| security of retained messages is entirely up to the device
| security. The implementation of a forward secrecy scheme
| ironically makes this more likely. Once the session key is
| deleted, the easiest way to keep the message around is to
| leave it as plaintext. So the user either has to turn on self
| deleting messages and lose those messages, or has to leave
| those messages available to potential attackers.
|
| BTW, "forward secrecy" is a terrible term for usability.
| Something like "message burning" much better fits with a
| typical users conceptual context.
|
| [1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:encryptonce
| immibis wrote:
| There's a form of deniable authentication where you have
| the ability to forge the signatures of messages once you
| receive them, so you could alter them on your device.
|
| It's irrelevant, though, because no chat app actually has
| this feature, so no criminal does it. And the cops don't go
| by the encrypted bits, anyway - they go by what it says on
| your screen, or their screen. (Which does mean that if you
| hack into your own app's database and forge messages, you
| can convincingly incriminate people, yes) Research into
| deniability protocols is cool research, but with no
| relevance to the real world of cops vs robbers.
| grej wrote:
| France is shining brightly on many levels at the moment.
| econ wrote:
| I forsee that the future will bring us LLMs that can reasonably
| precisely find incriminating chats while keeping everything
| perfectly unreadable for those naughty untrustworthy humans.
| roschdal wrote:
| Vive La France!
| rixed wrote:
| Probably just step one of a multi step journey toward European
| wide mandatory backdoor.
| hoseja wrote:
| Just don't ask what happened to Telegram :)
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| this was a battle not the war, they will come back sooner or
| later.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| They keep trying to impose an all seeing all knowing state and
| people here have already bought into the "age verification, think
| of the children" rethoric.
|
| After seeing how gleefully people accepted totalitarian anti
| constitutional covid laws, It's omly a matter of time. Wait for
| the next "crisis".
|
| Good one for France, though.
| zkmon wrote:
| Any grouping (such as nation) of individuals arises from some
| loss of freedom, income and privacy for the individuals. The loss
| of individuals or the contribution is the element that powers the
| nation or a community. 100% privacy means zero privacy-related
| contribution towards legal enforcement. So the question is all
| about striking a balance between loss of privacy and the need for
| legal enforcement. The negotiations would continue, to arrive at
| the acceptable/needed level of privacy loss.
| dtquad wrote:
| In 2017 Copenhagen had a wave of gang shootings with 1-2 daily
| fatalities during the worst weeks. That is nothing compared to
| the most violent US cities but it was completely unprecedented
| for a Danish city.
|
| The gang warfare was stopped by massive police surveillance
| operations. This included military surveillance and signal
| intelligence planes [1] and helicopters to aid the police.
|
| It worked. I know it goes against left-libertarian talking
| points on HN/reddit to suggest that police and surveillance can
| actually stop crime but it did in 2017 in Copenhagen.
|
| Looking at the gang problems still facing Sweden I'm fine with
| Danish authorities going full surveillance mode back in 2017
| instead of letting the gang violence grow to Swedish levels.
|
| [1]: https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-
| vaaben-...
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| I don't think anyone is opposed to police surveillance at
| least in public areas or with some warrant.
|
| The questions are 1) proper judicial oversight in the latter
| case and 2) governments making it illegal for anyone to
| distribute more effective (assumed) privacy
| stingraycharles wrote:
| The problem in this case is that the actual criminals will just
| move to a more obscure, properly encrypted solution, and as
| such the normal population that uses Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal
| will be the only users being monitored.
| dfawcus wrote:
| Chat Control may well give them a second bite at the cherry, if
| it get through.
|
| It keeps getting resurrected with slight variations, and if
| passed, then they'd be obliged to implement some form of back
| door.
|
| So I guess all one can say is that the war continues, just one
| battle has been won.
| rr808 wrote:
| The dumb thing is you know the USA has a backdoor onto
| everything, probably including Tiktok by now. European states are
| trying to play fair when everyone else broke the rules a long
| time ago.
|
| What we really need is a European social media company to use
| instead of this US dominated **show.
| smogcutter wrote:
| I would reject a backdoor man date too, but to each their own.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| > The proposed law was a surveillance wishlist disguised as anti-
| drug legislation.
|
| So the fact that people break one law which violates their basic
| human rights, the right to privacy and to decide over what they
| put in their own bodies, suddenly becomes an excuse to violate
| their right to privacy even further.
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