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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Is it a right to End-to-end encryption or a right to "encryption from everyone except government" ?

Ideally it would be a constitutional ammendent, stating that privacy is a right of every citizen, and a human right.

Legislation to the right to encryption would then just follow from it, but having it in the constitution would make it harder for future governments to pass certain kinds of legislation, or if they pass them, the supreme court would declare them inconstitutional.

> constitutional ammendent

They don't have the necessary majority to make constitutional changes without the CDU, I think. And the CDU is why we can't have nice things.

Which is why it's weird that they keep discussing lowering the voting age to 16. Also impossible without the conservatives, AFAIK.

That is a good example of a misdirection play, a polarizing discussion point that political opponents get hung up on, which you never ever intended to actually pass, and you'll happily drop it later, but it helped relieve political pressure from other potential hot topics. We see typical conservative tactics being employed against the conservative base :)

To be clear, it is already a human right, right of expression association privacy etc. Just nobody defends it

The problem is defining "privacy" though, isn't it? What, specifically, would the amendment require or prohibit under the banner of "privacy"? How could this definition, if enshrined into nearly immutable law, be modified to account for a changing technological environment? How do you prevent such an amendment from suffering from the fate of the US second amendment, which in many places is honored mostly in the breach?

The Germans have a completely different legal system that isn't based on court decided precedent, so the comparison doesn't make any sense.

> human right

This should be the goal. In the days of the internet, mass surveillance, nearly eradicated privacy we need a right to have and use strong encryption without any backdoors.

If I had to bet, I would put money on "you have a right to encrypt, but we can't stop the 5+1 eyes from breaking the encryption for us and giving us the information" … Encryptocon?

Then it is a sham

Knowing german politicians, it's the latter.

It's Germany of course it's the second.

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