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.
I’m overwhelmed by this stupidity and collective ignorance all the time. Not just in data privacy regards.
Some days I just want to give up and say “screw it”. But damn, I can’t. And a lot of others will not stop. If you do, thats alright, it is okay to rest.
Thank you, kind stranger.
The provided link will let you contact MPs with just a few lazy clicks.
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.
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
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.
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 capitalisim 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.
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”
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.
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?
Yes, the right to privacy is a fundamental right in the eu charter.
I yhink the declaration of the rights of man and citizens is in there somewhere. But I haven’t really looked at it since the Schengen treaty mess.
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.
Also get those MPs imprisoned
EU politicians are probably the only ones who ought to be scanned
If it passes in the EU, it will pass in the United States. This affects all of us.
The site failed at the last step… Fortunately all my reps are opposed
I’m not an EU citizen yet, and as a non-citizen brown man, i doubt the MEP would listen to me. How can I do my part anyway?
This is why Russian, Chinese and other messaging apps (good one is Telegram) are spiking in EU. The kremlin will have my chats, but I never plan on travelling to Russia anyways.
