I am very pleased to see that the _current_ administration came to their senses and listened to reason. However, this is a fight i am afraid we will always have to fight over and over again unless right to encryption is codified in EU constitution or a similar document.
"Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications."
On the short term a change to the treaties of the Union is not realistic, in my opinion. So I am afraid we might be stuck with having "to fight over and over again", using the above as a foundation. I guess I think of it as educating the politicians.
Fortunately the pro-privacy voices in the EU seem loud enough. For example, in this case the Belgian national privacy authority had already complained about the proposed law. And Germany seems to have adopted the right to encryption in its latest coalition agreement.
This is the crux of the issue: the so-called "pro-privacy" camp wants absolute privacy of communications.
Law enforcement and intelligence services are not against privacy, they are against systems that provide absolute privacy because these systems prevent even lawful interception.
Voice calls on your smartphone are private but may be lawfully intercepted. This is so because mobile networks are in the hands a few licensed and heavily policed operators. On the other hands, we've reached a point where it is simple to develop and publish software apps that allow anyone to communicate in a way that is impossible to intercept as far as we know.
This is not a simple issue. There is a valid concern but at the same time the potential ways to address it (e.g. backdoors, etc) are not very satisfactory.
This doesn't follow. We can require law enforcement to need a valid warrant before they can decrypt this information.
We have that requirement in the US, but if they have the capability, they use it, warrant or not.
Imagine the uproar if a person being shot and killed during a court approved raid turns out to be completely innocent. Now imagine the silence when the same person just has their private chats or nude pics decrypted and seen by investigators.
The right to a private home is the most basic right a creature is compelled to protect.
Name a LE or IS that hasn't repeatedly been caught doing surveillance for personal or political reasons and we'll talk.
In the US at least, they keep telling us that there are many cases that they thwart that they can't tell us about. However, we do see lots of "known wolf" attacks and shit-shows like Epstein.
What about the other way around? What makes you think it's not police hackers who value privacy just like us, and who strive to protect us, who requested this to politicians? That seems more likely.
Our near-term future has both unbreakable encryption and omniscient surveillance in the hands of low-budget and non-technical people, and in a fight between the two, surveillance wins.
I don’t know where the world goes from here, but I’m confident the status quo won’t be for much longer.
Electromagnetic Eavesdropping Risks of Flat-Panel Displays
Masking.
Masking has effectively been normalized in the western world thanks to COVID. Masking is a huge win for a free society. Before COVID, it was actually illegal to hide your face in some US States and many countries [1]
Mask + sunglasses, and you should be effectively anonymous in public.
Until you start looking at things such as height + weight + gait.
1) the claim that the wearing of masks would impede law enforcement, including the passing of statues especially against masks on demonstrations
2) the claim that Muslim women wearing full religious head coverings could not be tolerated in public spaces because it was obvious that it would make it impossible to judge the mood or other psychologically important signals normally exchanged in public
None of this seems to have been true. Sure, there probably is some small validity to some aspects of those claims, but they seem to have been hugely exaggerated.
I was waiting for the anti mask crowd to challenge mask wearing in court by citing this law.
No idea if it's been amended or not. But it definitely used to be illegal to cover one's face.
I'll say our efforts are not without hope for now.
IE, "we" need to walk away from a win with something more than "status quo defended." Otherwise, the situation is "hold ground until we fail."
The efforts to ban encryption won't stop here.
We need actual workable ideas, not empty statements. It is frustrating that this fight doesn't end. If you have real suggestions, I'd like to hear them.
How is this supposed to work? Can't the bad guys just send each other encryped emails anyway? Or hack together some peer-to-peer messenger?
You’d likely be disappointed by the 18th century interpretation of the first amendment, for example.
Our modern understanding of rights is not wholesale received from the time that the constitution was written. The concept itself has evolved over time into what you cherish now. 200 years ago, the constitutional protections one received were far more limited than they are now.