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Germany is not supporting ChatControl – blocking minority secured

(digitalcourage.social)
1120 points xyzal | 4 comments | 11 Sep 25 08:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.038s | source
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ManBeardPc ◴[11 Sep 25 09:27 UTC] No.45209514[source]▶
Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.
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kebman ◴[11 Sep 25 12:17 UTC] No.45210669[source]▶
Is this a good time to plug the creation of chat protocols running over distributed hash tables (DHT) (essentially a decentralized way of creating mini message servers) and with forward security and end-to-end encryption? I made a POF in Rust but I don't have time to dev this right now. (Unless angel investors to help me shift priorities lol...)
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_aavaa_ ◴[11 Sep 25 12:44 UTC] No.45210893[source]▶
It’s not. This is a political problem, not a technical one.
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cherryteastain ◴[11 Sep 25 13:06 UTC] No.45211152[source]▶
People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true. It's still up in the air whether you can defeat a law using technical measures, but it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.

We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.

Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.

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dns_snek ◴[11 Sep 25 13:53 UTC] No.45211704[source]▶
"I can still use GPG" isn't a win condition you seem to think it is. Authoritarian governments will be perfectly happy to let you continue using GPG as long as the remaining 99% of society continues using monitored/censored communication apps.
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1. cherryteastain ◴[11 Sep 25 14:14 UTC] No.45211969{3}[source]▶
Conversely, as long as the people they actually want to target (dissidents, journalists, ...) use non-compromised E2EE it's not very useful for NSA/GCHQ etc to harvest info about all the cat videos everyone else is watching.
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2. Nextgrid ◴[11 Sep 25 14:36 UTC] No.45212219[source]▶
But it makes the people they want to target very easy to spot - just look at who doesn't watch cat videos. The absence of data is data itself.
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3. whatevaa ◴[11 Sep 25 15:15 UTC] No.45212627[source]▶
Yup, that xckd with 5 dollar wrench applies. You will be on the radar.
4. dns_snek ◴[11 Sep 25 18:17 UTC] No.45214517[source]▶
It won't help you with those specific cases no, but Chat Control would be the perfect tool to monitor and stop the spread of information between regular citizens who are trying to organize against the government, just look at China.

It's not your cat videos they're interested in. When people are protesting against the government it's vitally important that they're able to get information out as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. If the government can slow that momentum down then opposition fizzles out. Chat Control would do a great job in service of that goal, it's large scale crowd control, not a targeted attack.