That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.
That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.
In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)
I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.
On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblée. This is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think Darmanain was an exception)
We have to remember that, while the minister changes with the government and thus is by definition a politician (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by government changes. Those are the ones making the calls. And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and DGSE).
No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician -- makes the call.
And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be an expert on all the things that come up in a single ministry, let alone the parliament.
This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership in democracies.
When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against speech or whatever.
Which is to say they understand the situation perfectly and are acting with a firm intellectual grasp of what is going on.
The issue isn't that they don't understand encryption, it is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to resist the state. Which is cool and all, authoritarianism is always with us to some extent. But at its core they see this from the viewpoint that the state is fundamentally in control and sometimes it grants people the privilege of privacy because it doesn't think what they are saying is important and therefore they can be humoured. They'll pretend technical ignorance if it gets the liberals off their backs, but the only people they are fooling are the credulous.
But by doing that, they make it easier for adversaries to spy on their own citizen, which is a national security issue.
That's why it sounds like ignorance to me: I understand that they really want a backdoor just for themselves "because they are the good guys" and "for national security", but they don't understand that if they have a backdoor, then their adversaries will eventually have it, too.
The people in government have a hierarchy of threats. Social challenges from within their own nation always higher than those from foreign countries. Most politicians are perfectly happy to sacrifice national security to be able to see what their citizens are saying, they just won't articulate it in plain language because it sounds bad.
We can tell this because they're signing off on narratives around being "the good guys". Anyone pushing that sort of narrative spin isn't a good guy. That isn't how law enforcement works in practice and anyone in high political power knows it if they have even a shred of intellectual honesty; they've seen how the sausage is made and are well aware that the real world is all various shades of what happens when a family breaks down and siblings start fighting with each other.
Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?
Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?
They welcome Europeans thinking their government is out to get them
> Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive
People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in Russia were conditioned by decades of violent dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
> your politicians
Putin?
> need to be kept in check.
Keeping in check != assuming the worst. Assuming the worst from everybody is how no one would get anything done. e2ee, like any tech not bad or good inherently helps both goodies and baddies. Not turning blind eye on this is important first step. Even if your gov doesn't get a backdoor now they will keep at it until they find a way because voters who are not extremist libertarian techbros want them to. Your way out is to help them find a good enough way witg a compromise.
I'm sorry if I'm blunt or rude but you have zero idea what you're talking about, and judging by this answer you're unlikely to even attempt to find out. It saddens me that people who have actual chance to avoid neo-feudalism learn nothing from the experience of my own country (Russia), because hey that's Eastasia and we've always been at war with Eastasia so it can be discarded, "we" are not like that, surely "we" are not "them" and can do better, it can never happen here. Well, good luck! You'll need it.
And you I guess have no objection to my main point. e2ee helps crime as much as good guys, maybe more because it helps scale crime. And non stupid government would see that. If what a democratic government is doing to fix this looks like censorship, then it does not mean the government is bad. There is other context. A good democratic government can be instructed by competent experts make better tradeoffs. You cannot expect politicians to be competent experts.
It saddens me that every now and then even well intentioned(?) fellow russians act like every government is like that. You're not the only one. The legacy and history of how people came to power is completely different. Yes it's hard to believe but there are governments who are different.
If you want to see how actual surveillance would look, check out russia. Chinese firewall tech, TSPU boxes at every ISP, making VPN illegal etc. Unlike EU there is historical context and evidence in which it is clear that the government is not doing this to fight crime.
And remember authoritative governments don't care about trust and they get things done while west is squabbling.
To say gov does it to spy is not constructive. What can you do? If they are against you you lose, they hold all the power. This reminds me of attitude of most people in Russia. But to say government does it because it doesn't know is constructive. Because it (and the public) can be educated. There are democratic processes for this.