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Comment by JmsPae | Hacker News Reader

You know it's a banger proposal when even the Swedish armed forces tells you "Please don't".

European armed forces should know best, given that Signal has seen actual use by Ukrainian military personnel, with Russian forces trying their best to target those encrypted communications (right now mostly by getting those smartphones from dead bodies).

They also have a social engineering attack using the Linked Devices features, which was on the front page of HN recently.

The fact that proposals like this get this far, without anyone checking with the defence department and actual experts is really weird. It's not just Sweden, this is clearly a problem in many other countries.

I'd really like to know why it's so hard for politicians and police forces to understand that backdoors are dangerous.

It will be waring factions within government (which is never unitary in any country) --- here these laws/proposals/etc. probably come from domestic spying agencies and police forces in most countries. I suspect that signals intelligence agencies and offensive forces have probably mostly moved to "encryption is good" stance given the number of foreign attacks upon domestic assets (gov, biz, etc.).

However, we shouldn't underestimate the desire for foreign intelligence agencies to bait one's own domestic agencies into "spying for them". So i imagine there's some pressure from, eg., the US sigint agencies to have the EU compromise EU citizens in ways that even those very agencies may today not wish to compromise their own.

At a complete guess, I wouldnt be supried if, eg., the NSA (, CIA, et al.) were goading EUROPOL which was demanding domestic anti-encryption laws.

As an empirical matter, encryption makes agencies like EUROPOL's jobs extremely difficult -- i imagine also because they probably struggle to get coop from domestic police forces, so cannot easily do "the physical police work necessary" to get device access.

In the end, I imagine we'll have china to thank for the end to this nonesense -- since any backdoor will immediately be a means of mass corp/gov espionage.

> At a complete guess, I wouldnt be supried if, eg., the NSA (, CIA, et al.) were goading EUROPOL which was demanding domestic anti-encryption laws.

The exact purpose of Five Eyes?

I'm shocked, shocked! there's gambling going in here!

It's not the purpose of five eyes, it's a noted tactic.

But at the same time countries realise they are under attack economically and political from hostile cyber warefare... and so there's something self-defeating about this tactic now whereas perhaps 10-20 years ago there wasnt.

It's hard to imagine a US-China war (say by proxy in TW) or a EU-Russia war (eg., esp., by proxy in UA) "going well" under conditions of broken domestic encryption.

Eg., back when the UK mass surveillance law was passed in 2016, I imagine sigint agencies were more on-board... today I wonder if that law would now be "quietly opposed" on grounds of national defence

I think it's part ignorance, part exceptionalism. Backdoors sound simple, and if you're thinking about physical backdoors people are generally pretty good at protecting them. That this is largely because they have a lot of characteristics not shared by digital backdoors is easily lost on most people. These folks also tend to believe that THEY will be perfect stewards of backdoors, and anybody who loses control of them is just less competent.

They haven’t been in a war since 1814, so they’ve had lots of time to develop other competences.

I hear they also make amazing sourdough and can discuss the Beatles catalog at depth.

as a general rule countries that succeed with a policy of neutrality do so by having their military strong enough that they're mot worth fucking with.

> having their military strong enough

That's not how Sweden remained "neutral" though, although I'm not sure I'd agree Sweden been neutral since 1814, wasn't exactly neutral before/during the second world war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II

in your link there are numerous indications that Sweden keeps its military strong enough that it isn't worth fucking with, as in this quote

>Georg Homin, a captain on the General Staff, stated:

> Without a defensive force we cannot follow any policy of our own, our declarations become merely empty words and we leave the country's fate to chance, or to the decisions of others. With a defense as strong as Swedish conditions allow, we secure for ourselves the basis of a continued independent Swedish policy.

obviously strong enough that not worth fucking with is a relative thing, based on a calculation of what do you get for attacking, how much will you have to spend to get that?

Sweden is one of only 10 countries on the planet that has developed its own fighter jet (JAS 39 Gripen, plus retired predecessors).

(At least ChatGPT lists Sweden as one of 10 countries with indigenous fighter jet programs.)

GGGP:

> They haven’t been in a war since 1814

Geography plays a role too I'd think. In a way, located in an icy corner of the world (rather than f.ex. in central Europe)

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