Taking stock of the new French-German encryption proposal | Hacker News Reader

Taking stock of the new French-German encryption proposal

politico.com

51 pointstaylorbuley22 comments

Elections are coming and everyone has to play tough. None of this is targeted at terrorist as is does not even remotely make sense its all about controlling the population.

Let`s see when they propose to ban math.

Mandatory John Oliver on Encryption :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjZ2r9Ygzw

Ignoring the ample amount of ethical and political objections to the whole notion of government (which government, incidently?) backdoors, how does one even start to implement this kind of legislature? You might be able to coerce Facebook or Google to cooperate, but you can't exactly outlaw any alternative that is out of reach of the EU, or any jurisdiction for that matter. These tools exist now, and won't just dissappear. Any terrorist worth his salt will use whatever works, regardless of legality.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:120...

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

Article 8

Protection of personal data

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

Article 11

Freedom of expression and information

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

Article 13

Freedom of the arts and sciences

The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint. Academic freedom shall be respected.

> You might be able to coerce Facebook or Google to cooperate

I doubt it, not for the French or German governments anyway. Simpler to shutter the offices there and put the onus on France/Germany of creating China-like Great Firewalls if they want to block Google/Facebook web access to their citizens. I can't actually imagine that happening in said democratic societies.

This would be EU law, and apply to a market of currently 508 million people with the potential to grow to 750 million people.

I still think and hope it would not be put into place.

These kind of laws also tend not to exist in isolation. There are politicians in both the EU and the US who entertain this notion of cryptographic backdoors. Common sense says that it is impossible for this kind of law to gain traction beyond these kind of probing attempts at finding support; there are just too many practical issues to solve without this law becoming a complete farce.

> Simpler to shutter the offices there

And lose their largest market? The EU is more profitable than the US to Google, Facebook, etc.

Not operating there would cost them a huge part of their profits, so no, not really simpler to close the offices there.

One thing I miss in here in EU is the first amendment and its interpretation. Code should become protected speech, simple as that, and we shouldn't dance around how to "balance" things out. That said, I'd like somebody to point out where in this proposal are mentioned mandatory backdoors (which article mentions and would be an attack on freedom of speech in my view). Maybe the proposal is only about requests for decryption of ciphertext for which key is present on servers to be legally enforceable.

> One thing I miss in here in EU is the first amendment and its interpretation

What makes you think other countries don't have similar laws? Also, code as protected speech isn't even agreed on in the US AFAIK [0]

> for decryption of ciphertext for which key is present on servers to be legally enforceable.

Currently it's not doable by anybody (except sender and recipient), so legally enforceable = legally doable = illegally doable = backdoor. Do we really need to point this out every time? It isn't too hard to understand that maths/cryptography has no concept to differentiate between police man, judge, or hacker.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-fbi...

> It isn't too hard to understand that maths/cryptography has no concept to differentiate between police man, judge, or hacker.

It isn't too hard to understand that half the apps sell snake oil as well. By the standard used by them "encrypted" communication happens if mechanically aes is being used when talking to server.

> What makes you think other countries don't have similar laws?

What makes you think other countries have similar laws. They are vaguely similar. Defamation laws are plaintiff friendly in EU. If you say something and you aren't completely sure it is true and will be recognized by courts as such then you are liable. Then you have attacks that would be unthinkable in US, like proposal for law penalizing utterances of "polish death camps" with 3 years.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/use-phrase-polish-d...

> Code should become protected speech

"Go ahead, share the code as much as you like." It's not particularly useful if running the code is illegal.

> One thing I miss in here in EU is the first amendment and its interpretation.

And the Second Amendment, which neatly deals with encryption-as-a-munition.

I like the fourth amendment too

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