What do they do if I send: AFBC67CEDA7AD?
Ban all “non-intelligible” content?
Who can stop me from hiding information in very normal looking sentences?
If you want privacy, there will always be a way.
Ban all “non-intelligible” content?
Who can stop me from hiding information in very normal looking sentences?
If you want privacy, there will always be a way.
You can just send anyone you want an encrypted e-mail or message, but Signal can't facilitate that without the required provisions set out in those laws. If these dumb laws get enacted, Signal cannot get away with just pretending you are sending gibberish whilst providing true end-to-end encryption without any client-side scanning or whatever to you, but you are well within your rights do so yourself on top of Signal (if that's even possible); they just can't provide an automated means to do that for you.
What I'm wondering is whether two separate applications can be set up to communicate automatically, with one handling messaging and the other being responsible for encrypting and decrypting the data.
What would be against the law in that case? The messaging app? The encryption app? Or the interaction you are doing in that moment?
That might be the next step. Banning encryption. We live in a strange world right now.
What some law-and-order types (globally) want, is the means to scan, peek, or otherwise access private communication, especially if that communication is provided by a service used by millions. You can encrypt all you like, but if you use WhatsApp or Signal, laws like these force those services to create a way to eavesdrop. How is probably not defined in the law. Client-side scanning before encryption, having those services act as men-in-the-middle for each conversation; this is all fine, and can use encryption as usual. As long as certain agencies get to have a peek somewhere between those strongly encrypted tunnels.
Of course these laws are dumb, but that doesn't mean they can't be (mis)used to get the desired effect.
Does Android facilitates IPC and services?
You can already install a mail client with PGP-support. Will K-9 Mail get in to trouble if a million users in the EU started privately exchanging keys and using GPG with K-9 Mail? Who knows. These laws are not about such practical details. This is about unlocking massive amounts of signal intelligence to do… who knows what, and those large communication platforms are juicy targets. All it needs is a law to coerce them to cooperate.
Don't expect reasonable arguments from the proponents of such laws, and don't expect to be able to avoid them for millions of users with clever tricks; you'll still fall foul of the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
Actually police and various agencies do, because when most people aren't encrypting, the few that do are suddenly interesting. Some of them will turn out to be organized crime, but some of them are just adults who want to communicate privately.
I understand Signal is handicapped now, but I couldn’t care less about Signal. I only care about being able to communicate in private. Why don’t we implement this stuff at a lower layer?
Surely the guys on top must see this is an endless game that they will never win? It’s not an arm’s race, it’s fundamentally impossible.
This is about making it hard (or impossible) for some perceived group of miscreants to communicate privately. People sharing CSAM (however you define that) or dealing drugs, and stuff like that. Anyone can encrypt their communication, but most people don't do this consciously; the masses just use WhatsApp and Signal and what have you.
You and your special keyboard are not of interest, and unless you start selling these along with a service to route the encrypted messages to thousands of users, you are not the target of this legislation. Take away Signal and WhatsApp and sending an end-to-end encrypted message to your drug dealer without exchanging keys and agreeing on a protocol suddenly isn't as easy as just opening an app. That's the point of this law.
It's a dumb law, but you won't make it go away by playing silly semantic games.
They may be coming down the pipe, after the soft version gets people macerated.
> at which point you won't be living in a democracy
But you will be hearing from talking heads that you are, and Russia and North Korea are the real dictatorships.
And maybe they will be right, because what is democracy? The word has different meanings to different people, and it won't be difficult to shape the discussion about what our liberal democracy is all about. Maybe it's about accepting who has power now and about protecting the vulnerable. We have seen a bit of this stance and real capabilities in recent years.
Point is that dangerous people will use specialty devices/services and being legal is certainly not one of the requirements.
How can you maintain such a position? At some point you’ll have to explain your reasons for draconian measures like this.
That’s why I’m spamming people with “it won’t work” because so many seem fooled by this. You will catch exactly zero people with this. The only people you’ll catch will be the ones that you would have caught anyway, because of their nonchalance.
I don’t know anything about law but I know tech.
Why a law is enacted is more complex than just the here and now. Some of these law-and-order types dream of the day they can order Apple or Samsung to completely lock down their smartphones and forbid any user controlled cryptography. Some just want to be able to feel that they are doing everything in their power to prevent children from being harmed, even if the measures only cover naive users. Some just want people to know that they are being watched, and have these laws act as deterrent.
And as a bonus: some parents really like the idea that none of their children or any of their mates are sharing (their own) underage nudes and that this is enforced automatically.
The law will likely work for some of these points, to some extent. It's still a bad law, but the people pushing it aren't idiots; just dangerous.
This world confused me sometimes.
Or ... they develop their own darknet webrtc based chat lol, like its silly to enforce this on the general populace when its so obviously circumvented by the people looking to do scary shit.
If this sort of surveillance stuff gets accepted, in time, you're gonna get noticed, put into database, and maybe called for questioning. Why are you using encryption, people that have nothing to hide do not use it.
“The semester begins in three more weeks. We've obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts and the faculty of engineering.” — Mohamed Atta
“Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down. What is it?”[2] — Mohamed Atta
“The first semester commences in three weeks. Two high schools and two universities. ... This summer will surely be hot ...19 certificates for private education and four exams. Regards to the professor. Goodbye.”[2] — Abu Abdul Rahman
Even in China with extreme surveillance and censorship in place, Chinese people have been quite creative in their ways of circumventing censorship. An example approach is cutting and pasting official political videos together in a way that changes their meaning ever so slightly. Automatic censorship algorithms are fooled, and human analysis and censorship are necessary and very expensive to carry out. Other examples are playing with the sounds of words, or using memes or rapidly-changing euphemisms.[3] It's too difficult to automatically censor stuff where people have taken a normal word such as "chair" and send each other images of chairs as a sign of protest. An image of a chair and a birthday cake with a number of candles could indicate a date of protest. Or a chair in a picture with a number of ducks in the background, or a number of chairs stacked on top of each other. And if censors start blocking all chairs, everyone just shifts to buses, or pieces of paper, or bananas, or whatever.
[1] https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/docpreview-s/00-00...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/business/technology/on-th...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_COVID-19_protests_in_Chin...