This is the worst thing in ages. I’m 50+, very good with IT, and I understand that we MUST act against it.
But I’m tired, boss.
Surrounded by lemmings and sheep that love Facebook and WhatsApp. People are stupid. I don’t have the energy to fight so much ignorance and stupidity - willful or otherwise.
Also, they keep trying. You fight it one year, they’re back the next. Extremely undemocratic.
Precisely. You need to keep winning, while they just need to win once. Would love it if repeat offenders like these would just stop being considered entirely after being rejected multiple times.
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Thank you, kind stranger.
The provided link will let you contact MPs with just a few lazy clicks.
Just a few years older, in IT as a career, and absolutely the same.
You know what though, when encryption was first developed in the form of pgp, the whole point was that it was to sidestep the government being able to spy on you.
Perhaps we just need to accept that we need to take encrypted communication into our own hands and not rely on messaging apps to protect us
The issue came down to ease of usability. PGP simply wasn’t plug-and-play, hell it wasn’t even easy to set up. And most importantly, it absolutely depended on the other person having the same configuration.
As messaging platforms like Signal has shown, security and encryption needs to be transparent and unnoticeable. It needs to be totally frictionless and thinking-free in order for the average Joe to want to use it.
And that is even before other issues such as platform stickiness, which Signal has issues with.
Oh shit - I thought they dropped this! JFC, EU! What TF are you doing?
There seems to be some kind of group repeatedly pushing this crap every other year, with increasingly shady tactics.
I would for sure like to know from where this emanates…
It’s the pro-surveilance people that want to monetize your data. They try and lean on fear and push this “only ISIS uses Signal” narrative that is obviously false.
It’s just so preposterous - businesses and payment processors rely on e2ee just as much as anyone else does. The one time we’re on the same team they just want a carve out for businesses or something I expect.
So that’s why their quiz is stacked this weird way:

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Yeah, classic juked survey. Not objective at all, only someone that is “pro-crime!” would say no.
ISIS also breathes oxygen.
Oh no! Get it all out of here!!! Ah!

I swear that fuckface is part Ellen Degeneres
Not enough people are aware of just how evil Peter Theil really is
Agreed. I’ve tried to tell people about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment but friends and family brush it off like it’s some small cult thing instead of being silently funded by billionaires
This would not break encrypted messaging but forbid it.
What if I just transmit a bunch of random ass digits to someone?
And, now listen, what if the someone has a bunch of these numbers in his backpocket, and by complete chance, when added to your number, it gives a number that might just mean something.
Any Dutch people here? Follow nerdvote.nl, to help decide who to vote for this election. They are suggesting technical minded people should unite and form a block in elections, so that parties will try to cater to us. If you want our vote, come up with plans an proposals to create digital sovereignty and freedom. As a member of PVDA/GL I am probably voting Barbara Kathmann , as she is fighting for digital sovereignty. Without preferential votes she probably won’t make it in so your preferential vote matters!
Ok how do they plan to enforce that?
By banning HTTPS at the ISP level?
Edit: and then how do they enforce GPDR? Because you better believe everyone and their mother is going to snoop on every communication made.
Blocking HTTPS would be frighteningly hilarious. My employer is one of thousands of websites that utilizes HSTS, which tells web browsers to use HTTPS. Our implementation of HSTS, like lots of banks etc. is also listed with HSTSpreload, which means browsers like chrome will only ever use HTTPS with our site.
What if they just do MITM with a Trusted root? Does HSTS provide a method to do cert pinning?
HSTS just enforces HTTPS over HTTP.
I seriously doubt Chrome or Firefox would ever be coerced into trusting a cert like that. If they did then you would see a very rapid shift away from those browsers to one or more of the open source alternatives.
And any CA that issued such a cert that allowed for wholesale MITM access like that would be blacklisted by all the browsers very quickly as well. That would put the CA out of business very quickly.
By forcing Whatsapp Signal etc to implement backdoors
Signal wouldn’t, or if it did, it would be labeled as such as an insecure fork for EU conpliance only and make that fork stale immediately.
Don’t need to ban encryption, just control top level certificate authorities and have access to private keys.
I’d like to see them try to get mine lol.
And any CA doing so would lose their certificate authority status pretty damn quickly.
By banning HTTPS at the ISP level?
I think you might not be aware of it but big institutions like governments and such can basically already circumvent HTTPS encryption by supplying fake root certificates and forcing the ISP to redirect traffic through their own servers.
That is why End-to-End encryption is such a big deal. Because it cannot be circumvented by the government alone. If done right (proper key exchange), it cannot be broken by anyone but the legitimate recipients. The way WhatsApp does it today, Meta could technically break it too, though i’m not sure whether they do.
That’s not necessarily very easy. These certs would have to show up in public certificate transparancy logs for most browsers to accept them. If this happens on a government scale it would surely get noticed, though the question remains what you’re left to do if the government forces it anyways…
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency section “Mandatory certificate transparency”
not necessarily very easy
admittedly, but i still assume that the CIA could do it if it tried.
edit: thanks for the link though, this seems very interesting :D
Operation Rubicon!
This is such a bad idea that even the US stopped doing it to all their enemies (i.e. their allies). Of course they have PRISM instead now which can’t be cracked by their enemies (i.e. their enemies and allies).
One point of hope is that they mandated cross platform chat compatibility too, and every platform is just… Ignoring it and not doing it with zero consequences.
Maybe this just also won’t happen.
Feeling hopeful about giant tech companies ignoring attempts to reign them in is unwise, even when it occasionally lines up with something you personally want. And I even say that as someone with permanent distrust of the big power structures doing the regulating.
Of course chat control would be practically infeasible. But it’s not even about that. It’s about the simple fact that the EU commission ignores the will of the people, when the people have already clearly said NO. It’s about the disrespect that the EU commission exerts against the people. That in itself is unacceptable.
Don’t get your hopes up. The police and secret services don’t care about cross platform compatibility, but they’re chomping at the bit for mass surveillance.
Aren’t Europeans supposed to be the good guys?
There are no “good guys” or “bad guys” in geopolitics, just shades of grey. On quite a few topics, the EU is better, but any government is capable of doing stupid shit.
good take
No, the EU is just as much liberal capitalism as the US. They have a better social safety net and looked better in comparison.
The competition is pretty weak.
the EU commission is absolutely dumb and definitely not on the side of the people though. by the way, it’s also not democratically elected.
The EU’s been veering right for a few years now.
I’m just so tired of it all. At this point I would not be surprised about ending up in prison a decade from now for using encrypted communication.
Thanks for sharing the link to contact the MEPs. Thats actually very useful.

It’s ironic to use a meme from a movie depicting a fascistic government, to protest against a fascistic measure.
I suppose the better meme would be “it ain’t much, but it’s honest work”
In many cases this could be argued as unconstitutional.
In germany, it’s not technically unconstitutional (i checked last week because i assumed it should be) but it definitely feels like it should be unconstitutional. After WW2, there was a consensus to not surveil your own population, and this is a very important constraint to keep in mind.
Where did you check that? The Vorratsdatenspeicherung has been ruled unconstitutional twice for example
Art. 10 GrundGesetz: https://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/10.html
In Lithuania privacy is defined as a fundamental right and it includes correspondence, digital or otherwise.
Would that prevent passing laws enabling chat control? Doubt it, but I can see it as a good legal argument against it.
According to the EU constitution?
According to constitutions of member states.
At least here it’s worded in a way that chat control could be argued as unconstitutional (not a lawyer tho).I would not be surprised that any other sane constitution protects privacy, and by extension digital correspondence, under fundamental rights.
I’ve contacted them yesterday evening. Funnily enough, all the AfD opposes chat control. They’re clever. If chat control were to pass, they could campaign on having opposed it, and then mission creep it once elected.
Also get those MPs imprisoned
The site failed at the last step… Fortunately all my reps are opposed














