strange, they choose signal to communicate https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european-commiss...
You have listed three things which are all really the same thing. There is no objection to private ownership of motor vehicles or ships. You object to the weaponry.
But we can put aside the whole right to bear arms debate in this case because there is an obvious way to distinguish it. Encryption is a purely defensive technology.
It is totally illegitimate for a government to prohibit things like armor and electromagnetic shielding, even if some of them do, because these things only defend, they do not attack.
I feel quite comfortable classifying encrypted messaging apps in the same category as houses and chain mail, even if the US government has historically disagreed.
Only if that logic is sane, which it isn't.
There is an difference between doing something directly and indirectly. Anything can do anything given enough indirection. There is no plausible way in which your ordinary use of encryption or body armor could directly harm anybody else. There are some immediately obvious ways that your ordinary use of a howitzer could directly harm somebody else.
And the right to defend yourself using indirect offensive measures has no inherent symmetry with the right of government (or lack thereof) to prevent you from defending yourself using direct defensive measures.
And the same attack works if instead of encrypting your data they upload a copy of it to their servers before deleting it. Albeit less efficiently, so we're back to indirect harms.
Somehow these just look so much more elegant than just spamming more bombers and nukes. Maybe because they usually only caused death of the sailors crewing them and other warships in battle rather than city populations like bombers and nukes often do ? (Well, unless you live in Yarmouth or on the River Plate.)
(The Zumwalt-class destroyer displaces ~15,000 tons, which is too large to be considered a cruiser under the terms of the inter-war naval treaties, and is roughly the displacement of a 1910s-era South Carolina-class battleship).
On a more serious note a modern destroyer could sink any of those with long range missiles long before the batlleship could ever get into a range for a proper gun duel.
Not counting modern aircraft with yet more standoof missiles or even the anti/ship ICBMs that are being talked about.
Oh well, battleships were an elegant weapon for a more civilized age...
How does that follow?
I am as free as anybody else in the EU to use any chat software I want.
This is just a proposal and ha no value in itself until it is approved and ratified by the single parliaments in the EU countries.
EU is not some tirannic state, or some hegemonic super power where when the president loses the elections they refuse to leave.
It's a very complex political institution, that works through official channels.
the proposal is public, there will be a discussion, years of debates, they did not hide it under the carpet, it's in the open so that anyone is aware of what it entails and can react by supporting it or opposing to it.
Nothing to be scared about.
And if the citizen of Europe through their elected members of the EU parliament will approve it, so be it.
It's the democratic process at work.
That's not what's happening here.
It might be useful to remember that our communications have never been encrypted before a few years ago and they haven't been less free.
Also: encrypted communication but clear text metadata kinda defeat the purpose of encrypted communication.
If I know where, when and who was involved in a call, I can easily tell that two people chatting and ending up in the same place every time both their partners phones are away from home, could be cheating
If I call an ambulance at the same time and place where an accident happened but the ambulance doesn't report a second vehicle, guess who probably didn't report an accident?
Privacy and secrecy are a broader subject, it's good we discuss about it, it's not good to blindly trust WhatsApp or Facebook with our data.
Bad as it might be, I have more control and trust more my state than a private company on the other side of the World.
First of all, I don't about you, but I am European and have been actively involved in the process of bringing encryption to all of EU citizens, as an obligation to the companies that supply communication software.
I trust the people of EU, on the other hand you seem not to trust other's people capabilities, not even your own parents
> "Apple does know better than the vast majority of its users. It's why I buy, and properly configure, iPhones for my senior citizen parents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032742
I would never talk like that of my mom and dad.
Anyway, back to the point: there is always a tension to find a middle ground between two different opposing interest: one is privacy and secrecy the other is safety.
You probably know technology better than me, you probably know there are technical solutions to the problem that, obviously, involve having some fate that the public servants will exercise the necessary due diligence.
One possible solution that popped out of my mind is to use the same functionalities chat applications use for groups (not because I agree, but because it is possible without compromising too much what we already lacked anyway - secrecy and privacy).
When you have an E2E encrypted group chat every person in the chat receives the encryption keys and messages are encrypted by each sender, signed, sent to the server that than forward it to any participant in the group.
Or you could do it the PGP way, each recipient has its own keys and the message is encrypted for each one of them.
What we need is to add to it separation of church and state.
The state is always participating in these chats, meaning that it always receives a pair of keys, but it has no access to the actual encrypted data, that is stored by the provider and inaccessible by anyone else unless authorized by the justice system.
Nobody, except the key owner, jas the keys to drecrypt them anyway.
It is exactly how it worked before with phone calls, companies kept records of calls and SMS, but they could only be accessed from authorized actors.
Records and keys would expire after a period of time (it was 10 years for phone calls)
objection 1: it means WhatsApp and the other will keep records of my communications -> they are already doing it anyway
objection 2: it would take a lot of space -> they are already doing it anyway
objection 3: that would give the state power over my communications -> it already has it
objection 4: that means anybody could decrypt my messages -> not really, and it would be a crime, you can't prevent crimes by not doing things, in any case it would be easier to steal your phone.