[HN Gopher] Suspicionless ChatControl must be taboo in a state g...
___________________________________________________________________
Suspicionless ChatControl must be taboo in a state governed by the
rule of law
Author : nabla9
Score : 245 points
Date : 2025-10-08 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (digitalcourage.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (digitalcourage.social)
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Alright, please now add this to your constitution. Hopefully
| other countries will follow.
| 9dev wrote:
| Germany doesn't have a constitution, but surveillance without
| grave suspicion is already illegal, hence the references to
| rule of law.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| What do you mean, they don't have a constitution (Ger:
| Verfassung)?
| viccis wrote:
| The state of exception wants what it wants, unfortunately.
| kubb wrote:
| Question to Chinese citizens on HN: do you feel oppressed by your
| government? Do you feel that rule of law exists in China?
|
| The notion of encrypted private communication didn't exist a
| couple of decades ago and people are talking about it as
| necessary for rule of law.
|
| There's a missing logical link in there somewhere.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| One of the founders of the United States Thomas Jefferson was a
| pretty big encryption enthusiast. He invented[0] his own disk
| cipher that is on display in the National Museum of
| Cryptography. The concept of Americans sending encrypted
| messages had been normalized since before the United States
| existed. People have always been able to send each other
| handwritten letters securely encrypted with OTP's / etc.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk
| kubb wrote:
| Yeah, they could.
|
| --
|
| You've changed the contents of your comment.
|
| I don't adhere to the American Civil Religion, so I don't
| need to consider opinions of the founders of the project.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And still can.
| alejoar wrote:
| I think you are mixing two separate things: rule of law vs
| privacy.
|
| Sure, we didn't have encrypted communication a couple decades
| ago, but we did have an expectation of privacy: letters, phone
| calls, even in-person conversations.
|
| Encryption is just the modern way of preserving that same right
| in a digital context.
| kubb wrote:
| Am I mixing it, or is Germany's Minister of Justice?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| This comment is an irrelevant distraction. Why should the
| feelings of Chinese citizens have any relevance for a
| discussion of the democratic values of EU policy? China is a de
| facto a dictatorship. Xi Jinping's thoughts have been made part
| of the Chinese constitution.
| heinternets wrote:
| People in China have every packet inspected and injected with a
| malicious payload if it doesnt suit their government. They may
| get a knock at the door if they say something bad. It also
| restricts free access to information.
|
| They dont just "feel" oppressed, they are.
| igor47 wrote:
| Feel vs is oppressed is a two-by-two matrix and people exist
| in every square.
| ok123456 wrote:
| China is a country with a population of 1.4 billion people.
| Where is their Stasi to enforce this surveillance state?
|
| Many people use VPNs and use overseas services. The primary
| purpose of the "Great Firewall" appears to be erecting a
| technological barrier to entry, protecting the culture of
| average people who don't require that sort of access for
| business.
| sph wrote:
| > The notion of encrypted private communication didn't exist a
| couple of decades ago
|
| Nor was pervasive monitoring of our every action, nor were our
| actions and daily lives conducted on a digital system that
| makes data storage trivial.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Referring to "suspicion" at all here is a distraction that
| suggests it would somehow be okay in other circumstances.
|
| There _must not_ be a way to backdoor user devices, under any
| circumstances.
| hackernewsdhsu wrote:
| The "device" is backdoored. People must be responsible for
| their own security. Sad, but true. Learn GPG people.
| igor47 wrote:
| If the device is already backdoored all hope is lost. The
| device can exfiltrate your private key and the password.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| True, but government is not a monolith.
| hackernewsdhsu wrote:
| You must assume it is backdoored. Cell [smart] phones are
| the greatest surveillance network the government has ever
| created.
|
| But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have
| to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you
| phone's location can be hundres of miles away.
|
| Use it to your advantage.... They do.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Current smartphones are already more careful about cell
| modems than they used to be. And in an ideal world, cell
| modems would have even less information than they do, and
| could be (and should be) _powered off_ by the phone until
| needed.
|
| Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive
| cellular _data_ connection that was intentionally
| uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way
| wifi is.
|
| Right now, the only _legitimate_ reason cell networks
| have to identify specific devices to users is for
| billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly
| irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in
| various ways, either by making it a public good, or by
| integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a
| "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data
| connections.
| im3w1l wrote:
| To some extent I agree, but if the modem is off how long
| latency is acceptable for inbound messages? I suppose a
| low bandwidth broadcast "user 0x76abc937* has a new
| message" could work. Devices would filter out broadcasts
| that don't concern them.
|
| * Ideally the user id should be used only once and
| derived from some pre-shared secret.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm talking about two different cases here.
|
| First, in a case closer to the current world, I'm just
| suggesting that disabling the cell modem should _power it
| off_ so it can 't do any kind of location or tracking.
|
| Second, in a more ideal world, the concept of "data
| connection" would be entirely separate from any identity
| attached to a phone or text message, and you could handle
| the latter via whatever connection you have, whether a
| cell data connection or wifi or something else.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| "Learn GPG" is neither a useful nor a _correct_
| recommendation for people concerned about security; if you
| believe the device is backdoored, GPG will not save you, nor
| will anything else.
| hackernewsdhsu wrote:
| A backdoored device can transmit secure comms, if the
| encryption is performed on a protected device.
| Aachen wrote:
| I've read up on this in the context of potentially
| backdoored CPUs and there is fundamentally no way. You
| don't need to trust the router (as you say: a device that
| just relays data can have all the backdoors you want,
| thanks to asymmetric cryptography enabling E2EE), but the
| scenario is that your own device has software from law
| enforcement on it
|
| In which case, the best you can do is use an obscure
| method that the attacker is unprepared for. If they've
| hijacked the AES CPU operation to store the key and
| include it in the output for a later syscall like when
| writing the output file, but you unexpectedly use some
| funky experimental cipher, you'd be lucky until they push
| an update. The device has a mandatory backdoor after all,
| so govt can also decide what new code it needs to run
| now, perhaps under the guise of detecting more situations
| of terroristic content or whatnot. There's no winning
| that game except through obscurity, and I presume
| everyone has heard about how reliable security through
| obscurity is
| quotemstr wrote:
| He's referring to doing something like using a
| compromised device to take a photograph of the ciphertext
| made on a different device or something like that.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Exactly, and "suspicion" is a slippery slope, it can and will
| be defined so vague to become a useless restriction.
| btown wrote:
| Between a surveillance state where _every_ communication is
| siphoned up, fed to LLMs, and used to target random people not
| already under suspicion... and a world where at the very least
| there needs to be some documented
| /auditable/accountable/whistle-blowable process of identifying
| an individual target and serving, say, a warrant to a third-
| party chat company... the second world has something of a
| "damping function" that slows the acceleration of
| authoritarianism. While far from ideal, it's better than the
| first option, which ChatControl was laying the groundwork for.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| We are not obligated to choose a "lesser of two evils" here.
| We should reject both.
|
| I really appreciate Signal's public responses to warrants
| ("sure, here's all the information we have, by design we
| don't have anything important").
| https://signal.org/bigbrother/
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I think, there are warrants to put surveillance software on
| a device under certain circumstances (in Germany, Quellen
| TKU).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Anywhere that a warrant could be used to do something,
| you can be certain that someone is doing that same thing
| without the warrant.
|
| The method that works is to make it technically or
| practically impossible.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Why? How?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| By way of example, if there's a backdoor key, it can be
| stolen or misused. Witness the many examples of companies
| that collect too much data and have that data stolen, and
| many examples of police departments abusing police
| databases for personal stalking and similar misuses.
|
| Any other backdoor mechanism can similarly be breached or
| misused. There is no such thing as a backdoor that can
| _only_ be used for what it is "supposed" to be used for.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| If you can install stuff on the device, how could you
| protect against it?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Depending on the level of security you need, there are
| any number of steps people could take or the industry as
| a whole could take:
|
| - Don't allow remotely installing things on a device,
| only doing so with physical presence on the device.
|
| - Have "binary transparency" mechanisms to make sure that
| you're seeing the same binary everyone else is, and
| you're not getting served a special backdoored version
| nobody else sees. (This doesn't prevent global backdoors,
| of course, but those are more likely to get caught.)
|
| - Relatedly, have multiple independent app stores in
| different jurisdictions, and make sure they are serving
| identical binaries. That ensures no one jurisdiction can
| surreptitiously demand and enforce a backdoor.
|
| - Have signatures from the original app author that can
| be verified, and ensure that intermediaries (e.g. "app
| stores") can _add_ signatures but can 't add anything to
| the package that's not covered by the original signature.
| That reduces the number of parties you have to trust.
|
| - In an ideal world, only install Open Source software
| that's reviewed and subject to multiple independent
| reproducible builds.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| In high security settings, just don't allow devices in.
|
| Also, democratically authorized state actors have a valid
| role to play in liberal democracies.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > In high security settings, just don't allow devices in.
|
| That's appropriate for a SCIF, not for someone's day-to-
| day life.
|
| > Also, democratically authorized state actors have a
| valid role to play in liberal democracies.
|
| They still don't get to have backdoors into everyone's
| device.
|
| Also, many many events throughout history should
| demonstrate that "democratically authorized" is in fact
| laughably bad at curtailing abuses of power, and not a
| substitute for a sacrosanct right to privacy that's
| systematically enforced through _both_ legal and
| technical means.
|
| Make devices secure. When people tell you to make them
| insecure, refuse.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Not sure why why we are talking about everyone's device
| now or even a backdoor as such if it might even need
| access to the device to interfere with it? (My initial
| post wasn't about mass surveillance.)
|
| If you look at history, not sure why technical measures
| would offer much protection against violence based
| approaches against privacy, though.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > My initial post wasn't about mass surveillance.
|
| When you said "If you can install stuff on the device,
| how could you protect against it?", that sounded like it
| was talking about how a device that can have new software
| installed onto it can have a backdoor for later use
| installed onto it, and that led into a discussion about
| how to protect against that.
|
| Were you instead saying "on a device you have control
| over, how can you protect yourself against that?". Or
| something else?
|
| > If you look at history, not sure why technical measures
| would offer much protection against violence based
| approaches against privacy, though.
|
| They can at a _minimal_ level (e.g. steganography, duress
| passwords), but yes, ultimately there is little you can
| do against someone threatening you personally with harm.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > The method that works is to make it technically or
| practically impossible.
|
| The only way is to avoid the jurisdiction altogether
| then, because any app can be remotely updated to disable
| encryption...
| Aachen wrote:
| What does Quellen TKU mean?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Something like source telecommunication surveillance
| _3u10 wrote:
| The "second" world is now western civilization. People in
| government need to get paid, so if the state isn't paying
| them, then you have a defacto free society. When the state
| pays poorly, it aligns the incentives of the people and the
| government. It is the best form of government, and I am glad
| to live somewhere where the rule of law extends to all, and
| not just the elites.
|
| Recently in the country I live some people from interpol
| accidentally withdrew a red notice, after initial
| prosecution, the prosecutor realized several mistakes were
| made and documents lost, so as a country with the rule of
| law, the prosecution withdrew the charges as there was
| insufficient evidence, compare and constrast with a corrupt
| country like Canada where the attorney general was fired for
| wanting to prosecute a company that had bribed Momar
| Ghaddaffi with 2 million dollars. Worse yet, they spread
| their culture of corruption through out the world instead of
| keeping it at home.
| u8080 wrote:
| Remember, that German government made an attempt to secretely
| wiretap Jabber.ru XMPP node without any legal basis:
| https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Electronic communications surveillance shall be governed by the
| same rules that apply to the post.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| And as you are free to exchange unintelligible information
| through the post, you are free to exchange unintelligible
| information electronically.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Backdooring isn't OK because by definition you cannot
| selectively backdoor someone's phone, you need to have it
| backdoored by default to exploit it later, which is obviously
| terrible.
|
| Wiretaping a suspect's phone on the other hand is a fine (and
| often necessary) police operation, as long as it must be
| approved by an independent magistrate.
| hopelite wrote:
| "Suspicionless" is poor translation of "Anlasslose" which would
| more appropriately translated as "unfounded" in order to convey
| the uncommitted nature of "anlasslose". "Anlass" in this
| context is literally "reasons".
|
| Because the language is far clearer in the US, you would and do
| hear "warrantless" being used in both the legal and general
| sense when it comes to these topics, but translating
| "Anlasslos" as "warrantless" would imply far too much
| confidence than is given.
|
| "Unfounded" also reflects the weak perspective on hard
| boundaries of law and limitations on the state that simply do
| not exist in Germany and effectively all of Europe in the way
| that they do in the USA as de facto immovable law of the
| Constitution. "Anlasslos" implies a mental framework and
| conception that defers your rights (free speech in this case)
| to the subjective judgement of various people like politicians,
| judges, technocrats, bureaucrats, regulators, police officers,
| etc., i.e., someone does not like your speech so they will
| monitor your communication with our grandma for the abusive and
| narcissistic, manipulative concept of "hate speech", aka.
| "speech I hate".
| layer8 wrote:
| As an aside, "suspicionless" is a bad translation of what would
| correctly translate to "without cause".
|
| I agree that there shouldn't be a backdoor by default. But, for
| example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the
| device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court
| warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated.
| observationist wrote:
| That's active surveillance and wiretapping, and is not a
| backdoor.
|
| Backdoors are unacceptable 100% of the time, and should never
| be legal.
|
| A backdoor is a lazy power grab that is either supported in
| ignorance by technically illiterate useful idiots or
| supported in full knowledge of the intended partisan abuses
| of basic civil liberties.
|
| Hacking a criminal's phone with compromised software, and/or
| intercepting their voice & data, is not a backdoor. Backdoors
| mandate a violation of informed consent, and as such, should
| be criminalized without exception.
|
| There's no place for backdoors in civilized societies.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > I agree that there shouldn't be a backdoor by default. But,
| for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on
| the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court
| warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated.
|
| Sure. And on the flipside, given the many ways such a
| capability is a security risk and an abusable backdoor
| itself, it's something to develop additional technical
| safeguards against, such as Binary Transparency to verify
| that everyone's getting the same binaries.
| Stefan-H wrote:
| Many consumer devices can be selectively targeted for updates.
| The entities that control the update servers are controlled by
| the states that they are a part of. People seem to have
| forgotten that companies once felt the need to invent warrant
| canaries to warn when they had received non-public court
| orders. Presumably they can also be forced not to remove the
| warrant canary.
|
| Edit: My first read had me interpret backdoor as any undetected
| means of gaining access to a device/system. I have updated by
| definition to mean using a flaw in the system left
| intentionally to gain access. This somewhat negates the need
| for my previous comment, but I'll leave this for illustrative
| purposes.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| How do you make sure that "suspicion based" Chat Control can't be
| exploited? All client side scanning must be explicitly banned.
| The EU had an opportunity to do just that with their AI Act.
| some_random wrote:
| We have infrastructure and precedent for it, you should need a
| warrant.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| That would require trust in the same governments that try to
| pass this mass surveillance law again and again. Needless to
| say I don't share that trust.
| bluGill wrote:
| You have to trust something though. There are people out to
| get you - maybe not you personally, but there are evil
| people. We need to handle criminals, letting them go free
| isn't not a good answer.
|
| You seem to be saying that letting them go free is the best
| answer we have. This may be correct - it is something we as
| society need to debate in great depth. However it still
| isn't a good answer.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| Yes, we should be willing to accept a certain level of
| crime if it means privacy and security for hundreds of
| millions of regular people. Even more so when their cure
| is worse than the disease.
| bluGill wrote:
| Note that other threads in this post have said "with a
| warrant" which is different from general lack of privacy.
| These are things we need to debate as a society and it
| means understanding details not making two sentences on a
| discussion board with less than 15 minutes of thought...
| (I of course have no idea how much thought you may have
| put into this before this topic came up, I only see the
| time stamps on our comments... This is why I hate debates
| - you don't have time to make a well thought response to
| something new and so you can lose to a bad idea if you
| don't come up with the right counter)
| baobun wrote:
| > Note that other threads in this post have said "with a
| warrant"
|
| I think there's some confusion and people talking past
| each other there.
|
| With a warrant, LE can extract messages from devices,
| request and receive data dumps from service providers,
| and attempt to crack encrypted data. In many places they
| can also insert backdoors (server or client side) with a
| warrant. We see some people pointing this out as being
| sufficient.
|
| This is different from every device and citizen (except
| politicians) preemtively having their devices backdoored
| with access granted after a warrant (which you seem to be
| arguing for). Most of us agree that this is unacceptable
| and is already unconstitutional in several EU countries.
| koolala wrote:
| What kind of boogiemen do you mean?
| bluGill wrote:
| There are hundreds of options. Some are imaginary, some
| are very real. The real ones often feel imaginary until
| they affect you (or someone close to you) and suddenly
| you realize how real they are.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| If everyone cooperates, you can catch more criminals, but
| if you force them to cooperate, that's authoritarianism.
|
| "Why don't you want a government camera implanted in your
| eyeballs? Do you want to let criminals go free?"
| electricboots wrote:
| I don't understand where the obligation to trust
| something, aside from the intended recipient, with my
| private communications comes from. It seems to me there
| is no such obligation and giving into surveillance is not
| a requirement, but a choice, and a poor one in my
| opinion.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Warrants do not justify backdooring everyone's encryption or
| everyone's devices.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Any backdoor fundamentally breaks the promise of any end-to-
| end encryption.
|
| This isn't a problem of process like requiring warrants and
| just cause. Even if said process is designed to be perfect
| and is executed flawlessly, it is still hinged on a
| fundamental breakage of the security model a given chat
| software is built on. If a trusted government has a magic
| password that can read anybody's encrypted text messages,
| then it must be assumed more nefarious actors can figure out
| that password and use it themselves.
|
| It creates a single point of failure that would compromise
| _literally everyone_.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You lose some civil rights when you decide to become a criminal
| (or join the Army). ;-) One of the things courts are allowed to
| do to a criminal is force them to wear a GPS tracker on their
| ankle, as a method of enforcing that they are not within some
| distance of an elementary school. It would not be so different
| to force them to install software on their phone, and the
| analogy to forcing _everyone_ to wear a GPS tracker is clear.
| Your civil rights include not being told where to go, something
| you also lose as a criminal (or a soldier, obviously). It is
| how civil rights work in our society. Authoritarians want to
| turn everyone into criminals or permanent soldiers.
| layer8 wrote:
| By requiring a court warrant for installation of a backdoored
| app update (or OS update). This is analogous to tapping a phone
| line.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| The "rule of law" like the "rules-based order" in geopolitics, in
| the net result. is a facade for the rule of the powerful who are
| usually corporations and oligarchs whom are protected by the gov
| because they control the politicians. We all heard about the
| E[stein files, and who is being protected. And we heard about the
| pedophile who was arrested in Las Vegas then allowed to flee. We
| all know that the law does not apply if you hold power. It's all
| about power.
| rasengan wrote:
| Surveillance is the occupation of the mental space and results in
| modification of behavior. Default mass surveillance, or in other
| words suspicionless surveillance, then leads to the end of mental
| sovereignty and, therefore, freedom.
|
| That is not a state governed by rule of law, but instead, a
| peoples being ruled by the power of surveillance.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I am an information totalist. The web/world would be a better
| place if ALL information was free and available to all. You could
| actually make informed decisions for yourself without being
| played by anyone.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Feel free to share all your personal information if that is
| your preference. You don't get to have mine.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I thought the emphasis on ALL was pretty obvious in my
| initial comment.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| And I thought the refusal was pretty obvious in my reply.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| You made it personal while my statement is everything
| but.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm not making it personal. _In general_ , people who
| believe that all private information should be shared are
| free to make that decision for _their_ data but not
| _other people 's_ data.
| baobun wrote:
| If you won't be the change you want to see by going first
| it doesn't seem like a sincere position.
|
| How can I get read-access to your home directory? Do you
| have an open sftp or want to set one up?
|
| Please post your IP and port here so we can take part.
| Aloisius wrote:
| All information? Including private thoughts?
| BoredPositron wrote:
| All of it. I believe the concept of private would vanish
| pretty fast. It would feel more like one consciousness.
| Aloisius wrote:
| The Borg were supposed to be a cautionary tale, not
| something to aspire to.
| xp84 wrote:
| I can agree that this is interesting as a thought
| experiment, and indeed could form an amazing foundation for
| an ambitious work of fiction. But the only way to bring
| about such a world IRL would be by force, meaning that many
| people in such a society would perceive it as a highly
| oppressive state.
|
| To get the paradigm shift you're after, and a collective
| consciousness, you'd have to have buy-in from every member
| of such a society, and to raise children in the same
| principles. Perhaps it could be a civilization on an
| island, or the founding principle of a generational
| starship or something.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| I'm glad I will be long dead when this becomes possible. They
| WILL try no doubt.
| throwaway494932 wrote:
| Until the state itself makes an informed decision on you, based
| on you religion, political ideas etc, and you are no longer
| free to make any decision any more, informed or not.
|
| But more than that, even if you had all the information
| available, it will still be drowned in order of magnitudes
| higher amounts of counterfeit information, propaganda, lies.
| teekert wrote:
| So you have a camera in your bedroom, streaming all the time.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| How much information exactly do we need to make people stop
| believing the Earth is flat?
| gausswho wrote:
| Please enumerate some of the benefits that would come from a
| world where such radical transparency was realized.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > in a state governed by the rule of law
|
| we got any of those? please tell me so i can move there
| bluGill wrote:
| You will not find perfection, but Canada, anything in EU,
| Japan, the US, New Zealand all come to mind (and several more
| that I am not confident I can spell) as places where rule of
| law happens. Countries like Brazil and India probably belong on
| the list despite some faults.
| lucianbr wrote:
| As a romanian, I must tell you that "anything in the EU" is
| overly optimistic.
|
| _Maybe_ anything in Western Europe...
| bluGill wrote:
| The EU varies a lot. However they do have some standards
| and so even the worse is pretty good on the world stage.
| (Though Romania is not the only country in the EU with
| issues, and so if I was to list all countries you would
| probably be closer to Brazil - but understand I'm don't
| have much insight into the state of your country)
| simplyluke wrote:
| A lot of negative comments here, many of which I agree with, but
| Germany opposing this is a net-good thing given how influential
| they are within the EU.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| Yes but this sort of wording might suggest they want just small
| changes. We must keep the pressure.
| r0ckarong wrote:
| Also it would mean that the politicians and lobbyists would be
| subject to that surveillance by default. Can't have that.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| What can we do to make sure any kind of ChatControl, not just
| "suspicionless", doesn't come to pass?
|
| Where should I send my money?
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| Keep up the pressure. Write to your representatives. Write and
| inform the public. Never think somebody else will do it for
| you. Vote for the right party.
|
| https://edri.org/
|
| https://noyb.eu/en
|
| https://www.eff.org/
| defanor wrote:
| Good for Germany and the EU, but how (or why) is the rule of law
| supposed to make it a taboo? Is it thrown in just to sound nicer,
| or did they skip a few steps in the reasoning?
|
| I heard "rule of law" being used to justify roughly the opposite
| (Russian laws, including mass surveillance and censorship), and
| neither that was clear; apparently it worked simply as an
| universal justification.
|
| The usual definition is that there are written laws that apply to
| everyone equally, as opposed to a rule by decree and some kind of
| tyranny, and the laws do not change too often, are not made for
| particular occasions (so they do not turn into decrees
| effectively). So I'd think "suspicionless" -- that is, universal
| -- sounds closer to it, rather than selective/arbitrary
| surveillance on a suspicion. Unless such suspicion is at least
| decided by a court, without rubber-stamping.
| jopsen wrote:
| Just my personal, not fully conceived opinion:
|
| ChatControl cannot exists without criminalizing cryptography
| (crypto with backdoors is not crypto).
|
| When the act of uttering sufficiently complicated mathematics
| is a crime, we entering the territory of absurdity.
|
| Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be
| arbitrary.
| retrac wrote:
| I also think the public generally doesn't understand much of
| cryptography. It's thought of as some sort of dark art. And
| to be reliant on computers. But some dice and basic
| arithmetic will suffice -- though you still shouldn't roll
| your own crypto system.
| jamesfisher wrote:
| Ha, a lovely new meaning for "rolling your own crypto"
| didericis wrote:
| > Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be
| arbitrary.
|
| I am against criminalizing cryptography and largely agree
| about it being infeasible given the extent of proliferation
| and ease of replicating it/am playing devil's advocate:
|
| Laws banning math related to manufacturing nuclear weapons
| can and has been enforced. It's important to take legal
| threats like ChatControl seriously and not just dismiss it as
| absurd/unenforceable overreach, even if that's likely true.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Banning math in relation to nuclear weapons was typically
| very specific and most often involved hardware export
| controls.
|
| The key note with what the previous poster said was
| 'arbitrary', meaning the laws will end up a nonsensical
| mess because the maths have huge amount of industrial,
| commercial, and personal uses and suddenly one range of use
| is banned leads to situation where law enforcement tends to
| go after particular groups for who they are, not what
| they've done.
| renehsz wrote:
| > Such laws cannot be enforced.
|
| Tech companies can certainly be forced to build surveillance
| into their chat applications and operating systems. This
| doesn't have to be about backdooring crypto.
|
| > Enforcement can only be arbitrary.
|
| Sure, but it would be forced upon the vast majority of the
| population. Tech-savvy people will find ways to circumvent
| it, so will criminals, but that doesn't make mass
| surveillance of all others any less scary.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Nope:
|
| The rule of law establishes, first of all, that the Law does
| not distinguish any kind of person from another. This is why in
| order to have a true Rule of Law, the three powers
| (Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary) must be truly
| separated.
|
| Decrees are exactly one way to subvert it: the executive acts
| as the legislative.
|
| Also, in tyrannies (vid. Venezuela, Iran, etc.), the Judiciary
| is a slave to the executive.
|
| The rule of law states, first of all, that people in Government
| are subject to the same laws as any other citizen.
|
| It is obviously an unreachable optimum (like true "democracy"
| is), but that is the basic principle. Not that "Laws" govern
| the place.
|
| Chat Control (and see especially the Danish Minister who said
| "common citizens should not expect to be able to use
| cryptography" or words to that effect) is suspicious under the
| rule of law because it differentiates _ipso iure_ between
| "ordinary citizens" and "the executive".
|
| Edit: whether you agree with him or not, reading "The road to
| serfdom" should enlighten you a lot about this topic.
| defanor wrote:
| What is "nope" about? I understand "people in Government are
| subject to the same laws as any other citizen" to mean the
| same as "written laws that apply to everyone equally". The
| sort of thing Aristotle and Locke advocated for.
|
| As for the separation of powers, it is a related concept, but
| still a distinct one; not sure if bringing it up helps here.
|
| Added "The Road to Serfdom" into my book queue, thanks for
| the suggestion.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > Good for Germany and the EU, but how (or why) is the rule of
| law supposed to make it a taboo? Is it thrown in just to sound
| nicer, or did they skip a few steps in the reasoning?
|
| Don't thank Germany too early. The only reason they changed
| their tune is because a massive number of people reached out to
| the government representatives in the last few days/weeks.
|
| Without that, it would have gone through.
|
| Case and point, you can look at the timeline of each country's
| position on https://fightchatcontrol.eu and you will see that
| Germany went from opposing to undecided to opposing again.
|
| This is the sad state of affairs today. Privacy and rule of law
| have nothing to do with it.
|
| I personally reached out to many German MEPs and the only ones
| who bothered to respond and were against CC were from the AFD.
| Make of that what you will.
| standardUser wrote:
| > Don't thank Germany too early. The only reason they changed
| their tune is because a massive number of people reached out
| to the government representatives in the last few days/weeks.
|
| Well, thank Germany for that then.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| For me the Greens responded, confirming they are against chat
| control, but none from the other parties.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > how (or why) is the rule of law supposed to make it a taboo?
|
| I'd assume because this means someone has to be officially
| suspected of a crime, rather than being targeted just because
| someone didn't like them?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| This kind of mass surveillance is already illegal in Germany,
| and had Germany voted yes, it would have meant that politicians
| act against the law, which would be the opposite of the rule of
| law.
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