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Chat Control: Incompatible with Fundamental Rights (2022)

(freiheitsrechte.org)
833 points Bluestein | 3 comments | 18 Jun 24 09:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source
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mro_name ◴[18 Jun 24 10:16 UTC] No.40715944[source]▶
I wonder how it can be legal to repeatedly undermine constitution and push or vote for later high-court-nullified laws and be allowed to repeat as if nothing was wrong with that. Like drunk driving forever. We ban counter-constitutional activities outside parliament and authorities. Why not inside?

I am much for 3-strikes here.

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sneak ◴[18 Jun 24 10:34 UTC] No.40716069[source]▶
It’s because we aren’t actually nations of laws. There are certain groups in every nation (yes, even the ones you like or perhaps respect) who operate outside of the law as if it doesn’t exist.

The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Most people in most societies are already under this type of surveillance. This is just to tidy up the small loopholes like Signal etc.

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1. worldsayshi ◴[18 Jun 24 10:47 UTC] No.40716167[source]▶
> The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner.

Do you have a source for this?

Can this be concluded by looking at the app traffic?

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2. Cthulhu_ ◴[18 Jun 24 11:59 UTC] No.40716744[source]▶
"clientside backdoored" is a vague statement, but they may mean e.g. Snowden's revelations that the NSA has secret backdoor access to the big tech companies.
3. sneak ◴[18 Jun 24 21:19 UTC] No.40722273[source]▶
iCloud Backup backs up the entirety of someone's iMessage history (or their endpoint iMessage sync keys, which equate to the same thing) each night to Apple without e2ee.

If you enable e2ee for iCloud/iCloud Backup, all of your iMessage traffic will still be escrowed, simply from the other end of all of your conversations because they still have iCloud e2ee turned off (because it's off by default).

If the endpoint sends the plaintext post-decryption to the middle transit service (Apple) in a way that is readable to that middle service (iCloud Backups contain complete iMessage history and are encrypted to Apple keys), then it's not e2ee. This is called "plaintext escrow".

Same goes for WhatsApp. It backs up its message history to iCloud or Google Drive, which are, in the usual case (99.9%+ of users) non-e2ee.