New German Government Is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors | Hacker News Reader

New German Government Is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors

schneier.com

53 pointsrbanffy13 comments

I hope they stand by this because the EU commission is pushing hard for "ChatControl" involving mandatory backdoors. This German government change couldn't have come at a better time. Luckily Germany has a strong influence in the EU so I really hope they stick with this and not negotiate it away for something else.

Unfortunately we have seen too much of governments lying to the public or even under oath to Congress and violating existing laws with impunity. The Obama administration and the head of the NSA James Clapper lied to Congress about breaking the law:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/06/fire-dni-james-c...

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This is the link that the Schneier (who explains some very complex stuff really well) post is based on:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/data-protection/interview/g...

It'll be very hard to keep this secret since the EU was planning to mandate each chat network to implement backdoors in their E2E encryption.

If that's the case so many people will know about it that it will leak quickly. Especially as some of these are open source.

Perhaps I'm too cynical but if you were a government trying to have effective back doors in place, wouldn't you want to keep it hush hush and advertise yourself as pro-encryption?

Just like with the all the other stuff they are promising right now: I'll believe it when I see it. Talk is cheap.

Easy: can't backdoor a fax based system.

Fax is in fact still used a lot in Germany and Austria because it has some special legal status that EDI and other digital order entry methods don't have.

It's a real PITA having to do OCR on a crappy low res document without grayscales and if course every customer uses their own layout. Things like "13" being interpreted as "B" are super common.

Communications from old tech are much more legally protected than new ones. Fax is still used a lot in the US too for a variety of industries.

Yeah I know, I it's just think it's a bit stupid because a fax has no digital signature, is unencrypted and it's easy to fake because of the low resolution. It should have less protection than modern secure alternatives.

A real signature on paper can be analysed for style, pressure, ink etc but a fax is just a really low quality scan with only 1 bit of colour depth. Anyone with MS Paint can fake it.

Let's see if this holds... This is something none of the parties have a really consistent internal line on sadly.

But still not going to do a thing about Russia...

There are rumors of a backroom deal with the new government where the Nordstream 2 pipeline is going to be cancelled or unused in an event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps not sufficient to dissuade Putin from invading, but not nothing and it would amount to significant economic sanctions.

> There are rumors of a backroom deal with the new government where the Nordstream 2 pipeline is going to be cancelled or unused in an event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Wow... This level of appeasement would make even chamberlain blush.

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