EU plans new mass surveillance law mandating data retention, built-in backdoors | Hacker News Reader

EU plans new mass surveillance law mandating data retention, built-in backdoors

ec.europa.eu

42 pointsiLoveOncall16 comments

If you are in the EU, do contact your representatives. Do NOT stay out of this. Remember that they only need to pass this once.

https://commission.europa.eu/about/contact/representations-m...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

They don’t care. Every single one of them toe the party line. There was the Pirate Party, but not anymore.

Then the Pirate Party needs to sail the seas again.

> If you are in the EU, do contact your representatives

They are all paid by corporations. Remember Huawei spyinng scandal when only lobbyist were charged, but no MP ?

I understand why they think they need it, but it's not really tolerable.

Thankfully it will be resisted, and we already have a legal decision that data retention is illegal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive#Annul...).

More context in a Reddit post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1kvmguc/eu_is_plann...

Data retention is lobbied by storage resellers? Corruption?

It's lobbied by the EU Commission's "High Level Group" (members not revealed even to MEPs). They want to be able to link to you whatever you posted, when you posted it, and the content, for as long as possible in case it doesn't pass EU censorship or laws.

The cost of that storage is significant, can become really expensive, technically and €.

Maybe the corruption is from big hosting since that would kill small hosting, and what about citizen hosting?

And if they want to really do it, they will need to define a set of technical standards and will have to create some sort of state administration big database third-parties could access in order to check the validy of some hardware-provided token from some online user.

Ofc, we know only big tech will be able to create and maintain those systems (because they will go in kludge and bloat), and they will ask for tons of money once state administrations are dependent enough.

EU must manufacture form A to Z such hardware. ASML is not enough.

This makes no sense in relation to Right to Be Forgotten, right? Why mandate a mechanism for a person to be able to legally request being 100% flushed from company databases only to try to pull this?

With AIs, you cannot trust anything anymore on the net. Nearly everything can be forged.

Don't give them any ideas.

They copied the idea directly from decade-old, declassified NSA slides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#/media/File:KS10-001...

If you are an EU resident that uses any American COTS hardware then you don't get a say in whether or not you're surveilled. Just a warm fuzzy feeling as consolation that you voted for something nobody respected in the first place.

> Data retention is lobbied by storage resellers? Corruption?

Yes. They call it lobby.

So the indefinite retention would violate the GDPR? Sure, they can claim it's for legitimate purposes... yeah, right!

> So the indefinite retention would violate the GDPR? Sure, they can claim it's for legitimate purposes... yeah, right!

They already gave the way for Meta. As long as they have access to that data, they will turn a blind eye.

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