American Tech Giants Face Fight in Europe Over Encrypted Data | Hacker News Reader

American Tech Giants Face Fight in Europe Over Encrypted Data

nytimes.com

61 pointshvo10 comments

The article says, "The recent attacks have pushed many Europeans to favor greater powers for law enforcement over privacy," but the only direct evidence for this claim is quotes from high-level government employees.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, there are a number of issues about which surveying congress would give you very different results from surveying the actual residents.

Furthermore, no evidence is presented that the recent terror attacks changed the minds of the politicians quoted in this article; before the recent terror attacks, there were already high-level government employees who thought there should be encryption backdoors, I presume. Are those politicians just getting more press now?

There may be an increase in numbers for those that would now be okay with more surveillance, but probably not very significant. I bet there are a lot more politicians who are now ok with it, though, and they will try to sell it to the population as the "solution" to stopping terrorism - even though, once again, they knew who the guy was, and they could've used a regular warrant to wiretap him.

What pisses me off the most is that after all of these events, it seems nobody from the intelligence community ever resigns or gets fired. Because, of course they must've done their job "flawlessly", and you can't blame them. It's everyone else's fault but theirs.

I hope they won't push for too much besides more public surveillance, though. Because I think the EU could become more of a "safe haven" for US tech companies that want to flee a US government wanting to backdoor encryption or demand that they don't use end-to-end encryption for their services. That could really pay off for the EU economically, in the long term.

> What pisses me off the most is that after all of these events, it seems nobody from the intelligence community ever resigns or gets fired. Because, of course they must've done their job "flawlessly", and you can't blame them. It's everyone else's fault but theirs.

It's absolute transparency for us and an impenetrable wall of presumptive do-gooding and heroism for them.

We know only what they tell us. And we know people with power and no accountability never abuse their positions or violate the public's trust. Only the average joe with a smartphone has that capability.

What pisses me off more is that law enforcement are debating encryption issues while the terrorists are using low-tech devices and attacks to cause the damage.

> Britain .. where expanded powers for the country’s intelligence services are likely to come into force by the end of the year. The legislation is the brainchild of the ruling Conservative Party, which has a sufficient parliamentary majority to enact the regulatory changes.

I wonder how they plan to stop terrorists from using encryption that is available through free and open source software. Censor the entire internet? Scan every memory chip coming into the country and delete any unreadable data? This plan becomes impractical very quickly.

Using RIPA 2000 they can still put you in prison for up to 2 years for refusing to give up your encryption key.

You make an interesting point though. If the terrorists know it is dangerous for them to use the internet using accounts linked to them, then they will just find a way around it. Hack the neighbours WiFi, use public WiFi in Starbucks, go into the public library etc. Good forbid that might just talk face to face or use burner phones (which they are).

The desire for a complete surveillance society is based on a ridiculous political supposition that Big Brother makes our world safer. No more terrorists and paedophiles. It is easier than trying to make the big changes necessary in order to really tackle these problems.

I have no idea how we tackle paedophiles, but with Islamic fundamental terrorism, it would be a monometallic step if we, in the West, could do our meddling and remove or troops from "their lands", which has been a bone of contention since Bin Laden's first attempt on New York.

We aren't the world police force and we also need to stop dealing with countries like Saudi Arabia who prop up our defence industries and military industrial complex.

> Using RIPA 2000 they can still put you in prison for up to 2 years for refusing to give up your encryption key.

2 years for non terrorism related cases. 5 years for anything "national security" related.

e.g. model plane enthusiast with mental health issues? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/ worth reading the whole thing as it does a lot of analysis and gives lots of detail.

Oh God. That's worse than I thought!

So in a bad scenario every country gets its own backdoor. Hundreds of backdoors, each accessible by hunderds of employees. And all those people can access every single aspects of my life at any time.

O yes, I feel very safe now...

For fuck sake, how can you have such a blatantly anti-European headline and pad the article with anti-European propaganda phrasings like "Europe’s attempts to get access to encrypted data" when the same fucking article itself states that major sovereign nations that are both on the European continent and founding members of the EU support encryption as a fundamental right?

The straw man evil "Europe" portrayed in this article quite obviously doesn't exist.

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