I find it endlessly fascinating that the place with arguably the most data privacy protections (EU) are working to hard to remove the ability to protect one’s data (via breaking e2e encryption)
@jerry “Our legal protections are so good only pedophiles would care about technological protections anymore!”
Then again, their general response to the invasion of Ukraine makes it pretty clear they only just heard about Russia last week. Can we really expect them to realize that criminals don’t care about political borders?
@jerry the EU government is often ok with protecting people from criminals and predatory US companies… but many EU countries (like all countries really) would like the ability to spy on their own people.
The US is a good example: Room 641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A and the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center are exactly why people wants to move to quantum resistant crypto sooner rather than later (the US gets SIGINT is a long game and decrypting 10-50 year old traffic can still be useful).
@jerry I wonder what effect it will actually have.
Anybody really interested in privacy is using mostly infrastructure-less messengers anyway and install them vis F-Droid or directly from the code repos. Things like Session, SimpleX. There is no company that can be forced to implement client-side interception.
In the end it will mostly hit people on WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Which clearly is the majority but they tend to be mostly interested in ease of use. Impact on Signal remains to be seen.
@jerry I think a lot of it comes down to a cultural difference between Europe and the US of distrusting for-profit businesses versus distrusting the government, respectively.
@jerry I can explain that. It sounds simple, but I have asked DOZENS of high ups in EU countries (corporate and government) and it's true.
They don't get it.
They see ROT13 and think "Why is this complex thing they want to do better than this? I can't read this, so the bad guys can't read this! If my highly trained expensive spies can read it, that's OK, because I can't!" They give the tech lip service, but if you get their trust and play dumb, they will admit they simply don't get it.
@jerry The EU leadership is very different now; and they are responding to strong populist movements within their member countries. The Economist published a good analysis of this last week.
@jerry I agree. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. It is a thin line, and there is lots of room for privacy rights abuse if the EU rule goes through. But Interpol and other L.E. need tools for take-downs of large-scale, global criminal networks. Let's see how it plays out in the EU. Of course, the bots that inhabit that other S.M. service will be all against it.