EU legislation allows emails, messages and other communications to be scanned
edri.org
edri.org
Do not expect privacy, unless you took measures for it, like entering your house and closing doors and windows. There's no expectation of privacy in a public place, or in an office.
Same applies online: expect no privacy unless you took measures. Expect no keeping secrets from governmental agencies unless you took really serious, possibly exceptional measures, and your opsec is top notch. Everything else will be visible, at least to some degree, if the government needs that badly enough.
Of course, most of the time your government doesn't care about private details of your life. This gives you some modicum of security by obscurity. But you never know why you might end up in the limelight. Extraordinary things, like epidemics or acts or terror, happen, and then you might draw interest along with hundreds and thousands who just happened to be in a wrong place at a wrong time.
If you think I'm suggesting to wear a tinfoil hat, I'm not; tinfoil hats are useless. A certain amount of civil action, from petitions to street protests, may help a bit. Use of encryption, etc, can help a bit. But there's no way back into the society where you could mostly expect privacy by default. It's time to get used to a more transparent, more observable, fundamentally less private society. So it goes.
As long as there is a need for something like FOI for non-classified goverment activity, we have a problem.
It seems the usual child pornography argument was used to push this through. Kind of baffling as most such people have long known to avoid any unencrypted channels. As do terrorists, criminals, and basically everyone with an incentive to keep their communications private. So this won't accomplish anything.
The scary discussion is the one where governments will challenge your right to secure private communications. I don't think there's popular support for that though. Until then use Signal or similarly end to end encrypted channels and avoid the default unencrypted channels like email or popular chat platforms without default end to end encryption.
Yeah, we might be practical paranoid weirdos, but at least it gives us the illusion that it is possible to avoid the leviathan.
* Atari ST 520 with 4 MB RAM
* Floppy Drive and Gotek (a Floppy drive "emulator" that uses USB Sticks to store Floppy images)
* Ultrasatan (SD Cards as Harddrive)
* some other accessories (Printer, Scanner) that makes life more productive
For mobile work i use an Atari Portfolio, which turned out to be a real handy tool if your work involves often to hook up to a serial console of industrial machinery.
To exchange data with friends: Just pack everything you want to share on a USB Stick and send it via DHL or - better - just drive over and hand it out.
And yes, i have an "modern" PC too, but this is only used for the unimportant stuff (watching youtube, unimportant internet usage... lets call it "noise generation")
My friends and i are experimenting with setting up a private Dial-In BBS. It IS still possible to use a Modem over a VoIP line, so... it may be unencrypted, but the few weirdos who uses such communication vectors may be to unimportant and to far under the radar for "Saurons Eye" of the governments to monitor...
What do they plug the USB Stick into? A computer with an internet connection?
In some cases it might be a good idea to put people under such surveillance, but I think that authorities should be able to explain why this was a good decision.
Yeah, you're not getting more than a boilerplate reply.
Some people may suffer but that's a risk the authorities are willing to take.
Hell, the people working there won't even know it. "It's the law", "such is the system", or at best "I'm just doing my job".
If you are going to a public toilet, you keep the door open or why do you wear clothes? Something to hide?
But for sure will not make life harder for criminals, who has resources to send encrypted messages in thousands different ways (like adding some encrypted message to a funny cat JPEG sent from some hijacked/abandoned account of some other person put somewhere on FB, Instagram, chat, etc.).
Good job EU.
Because Telegram has headquarters in London, United Kingdom (legal domicile) [1] and becuase conversations on Telegram are not E2EE, does that mean that they could voluntarily scanning them?
Durov brothers and a small core team live in Dubai. Other developers are working remotely.
And I guess they have a bunch of legal entities all over the world to bootstrap the advertising accounts they recently announced.
Now, question is, because there is a London-based company, are they allowed to read and store all messages?
[1] as above
I'm from the UK and, given what we know has been happening for a decade or so (mass snooping, collection, analysis), this actually does give me some pause for thought. In theory, this closes a loophole the Tories/UK state have been pushing at as a justification for ever deeper intrusion for years now. Obviously it won't apply here anymore since we left the EU, but this bill by itself doesn't fill me with utter dread.
There must be a mechanism where we can discuss this as people and try to revert this vote.
EU parliament can't revoke bad legislation without the push first coming from the commission.
Opening USPS mail requires a warrant, and it is a federal agency that protects their jurisdiction and customers.
Back when I did drugs, and back when I bought them off the silk road, many US based distributors used USPS overnight mail, because intercepting and opening a package took a court order, whereas FedEx and UPS retain the right to inspect their packages as they see fit (which may include at the request of authorities).
[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...
This legislation merely means if the provider has cleartext access, they can voluntarily scan for CSAM. This basically creates a loophole in the GDPR for CSAM processing with some protections for both users and the provider.
Sadly I was proven wrong, most commenters read the title, skip the content and then run off with US-based narratives about Snowden and PRISM or some other new noun that the conspiracy people use to scare people off their political platform.
But it is yet an interesting question since the reason for GDPR is that privacy is considered a basic human right according to the European Convention of Human Rights.
Keep informing people everyone, the truth will eventually reach everyone(or at least those interested in it).I just wonder if it'll be too late and we will just enter 'a new cycle' without changing our paradigm about basic things that are the pillars of our civ.