Denmark's Justice Minister calls encrypted messaging a false civil liberty | Hacker News Reader

Denmark's Justice Minister calls encrypted messaging a false civil liberty

mastodon.social

453 pointsbelter294 comments

Here at the computer science department in Aarhus, some of our professors and our head of department are doing their best to try to talk some sense into our politicians. See this post (apologies for linking to linkedin): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cs-au-dk_dkpol-eupol-krypteri...

Diego has been part of putting together this open letter from 500+ cryptography and cybersecurity researchers: https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025

This is very laudable!

The letter's first page looks very low effort, which unfortunately is the first impression undermining the certainly large amounts of work people have invested in this. The note about needing a PhD could well be left to the form instead of sounding extremely elitist right on the first page. Yes, it's shallow and everything but do you want to be right or get your way?

This "it's only right that we, the humble and fair politicians, are exempt from this forceful control we're exerting over everyone" aspect of ChatControl is beyond ridiculous.

I'm not usually of a "revolutionist" kind in the slightest, but, when you combine this small example to a lot of things currently happening across Europe and the US - it does increasingly seem like people in power are less and less wary of heavy and serious responsibility their positions hold to the people, and are more and more brazen when it comes to trying to isolate themselves from scrutiny over their self-profiting endeavours.

Historically, there were somewhat regular "correction" events happening somewhere sufficiently close, that made sure that responsibility is stuck in politician's minds for longer into the future, but it's been a long time since.

Edit: My comment is partially fueled by everything that's currently happening in Serbia (grand-scale systemic corruption), but I do think you can see similar movement in much more orderly countries in Europe as well, and all this is unconnected to ChatControl, but I see it as a small ripple from the same source.

I also dare say that current state of affairs in US has emboldened such people everywhere.

Nepal is probably not felt as close enough to have an effect.

My response: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that politicians' communications are private."

I think Bill Maher did a good summary about Europe getting worse in every perceivable way on civil liberties.

And people wonder why young people leave the old continent. Surely not only because of this, but the political class in Europe is more and more dysfunctional.

Ran across this interesting NYT article from 1908. After President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, Teddy Roosevelt demanded action against anarchist publications being sent through the postal service. And yet he clarifies this does not apply to normal mail - "sealed documents" - explaining the government is "expressly forbidden to ascertain, what the purport of such messages may be":

The greater portion of his opinion is devoted to the question of whether, in the absence of any legislation by Congress, the Postmaster General has the right to exclude such publications. On this point his conclusion is: "The Postmaster General will be justified in excluding from the mails any issue of any periodical, otherwise entitled to the privilege of second-class mail matter, which shall contain any article constituting seditious libel, and counseling such crimes as murder, arson, riot, and treason." The Attorney General makes a clear distinction with reference to the authority of postal officials over sealed and unsealed mail matter. In conveying letters and newspapers to persons to whom they are directed, he says the United States "undertakes the business of a messenger." He adds: "In so far as it conveys sealed documents, its agents not only are not bound to know, but are expressly forbidden to ascertain, what the purport of such messages may be; therefore, neither the Government nor its officers can be held either legally or morally responsible for the nature of the letters to which they thus, in intentional ignorance, afford transportation."

https://www.nytimes.com/1908/04/10/archives/roosevelt-demand...

Unfortunately the postscript to liberty being writ clear like this is quite dark. Merely a decadeatter Albert Sidney Burleson became postmaster general.

> "Has been called the worst postmaster general in American history, but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say however that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general -G. J. Meyer

This guy shows up time and time again in Hochshild's amazing American Midnight, to keep careful watch over & to ban various inconvenient political, civil, labor, racial, and anti-war folks from being able to send their letters. Empowered via the 1917 Espionage Act, by a Congress where many members quite loudly vociferously argued for it for letting the government shut down the left's ability to express problems of the world and a desire for a better world. Then as now (at least at POTUS level), to wish for a better state was perceived by the right as hating America, as a form of treason, as propaganda.

Burleson solicited post offices everywhere to send him anything suspicious. He also was a frequent at Wilson's Whitehouse, and would distribute postmaster positions in return for voting certain ways on bills. But in general, banning publications is the main of his legacy as a rotten evil fucker. He banned 15 publications in the first month after passage of the Espionage Act, largely for anti-war sentiment, and sent a huge huge huge chill through what journalism was permitted.

The foes of democracy are legion and oh have mercy, the snowflakes are back in power again. At war with and trying to run out of business a press that reports after them.

Apologies for my shitty post. I'm not worthy. Please please please read American Midnight. It's insane what this country was up to 100 years ago, how lopsided & vulgarly self-dealing & unjust the power was arrayed against the left & speech & progress & peace. Hopefully this trip around to the darker side of mankind is much shorter and much less a cooption of the state for political and economic exploitation.

dejoy is likely to usurp that title. or maybe not, if history is written by the victors and the trumpists annihilate truthful record keeping -- and they're sure trying

A few details to note: The quote is from August 2024 (last year), and the question (from an MP) to the minister is from September 2024 and so is the response, which can be read here:

https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/reu/spm/1426/svar/207...

For those less familiar with Danish: the minister's answer is basically the same spiel about needing to protect children; and how people will still be protected by the legal system (you know, which is little consultation after you've been beaten up, swindled across borders or worse). So this quote is from a year before Denmark had the presidency in the EU and pushed Chat Control forward. (Though clearly they haven't changed their views on this.)

> consultation

consolation

Oops, seems the quote is an old one, and not news. That invalidates my original post somewhat, and I'm sorry that I didn't do proper due diligence.

Here is the original post:

That doesn't sound like the rhetoric of someone who is winning. It sounds more like something someone pushed into a corner, and seeing their project crumbling would say.

But bringing up that it is about civil liberties is an important point, not the way he would like though.

You would think that trying to keep the discourse about criminals and pedophiles would be smarter for his side? I do not follow Danish politics, but I do start to wonder if he is just not very good at doing politics?

Rest assured, he's also trying that route. That mastodon article links to parliamentary requests for clarification of aforementioned quote. In article 1425 he responds (google translate):

"We know that social media and encrypted services are unfortunately largely is used to facilitate many forms of crime. There are examples on how criminal gangs recruit completely through encrypted platforms young people to commit, among other things, serious crimes against persons. It is an expression of a cynicism that is almost completely incomprehensible.

We therefore need to look at how we can overcome this problem. Both in terms of what the services themselves do, but also what we from the authorities can do. It must not be the case that the criminals can hide behind encrypted services that authorities cannot access to."

[...]

"I also note that steps have been taken within the EU towards a strengthened regulation of, among other things, digital information services and social media platforms. For example, the European Commission has proposed a new Regulation on rules for preventing and combating sexual abuse of children."

[...]

"The government has a strong focus on eliminating digital violations – it applies especially when it comes to sexual abuse of children – and supports the proposed regulation, unlike the opposition."

Even a 5 year old can tell right off the bat that it's a Minister of False Justice. Give me a break, more like an intrusive creep their parents want them to beware of. Most kids are taught not to lie, and they can smell it a mile away. Which is a bit more than a kilometer. Some adults just can not set a good example of what justice is, it's actually completely disgraceful when it gets to this point. Trying to be a bad influence on a younger generation. What's wrong with some people?

Kids are too intuitive naturally to believe for a minute that privacy and civil liberty are erroneous concepts. They're well aware by this age that it's usually an individual erroneous moron who doesn't understand simple stuff like this, who's causing the trouble and some of them are adults no different than the asinine kids they are quite familiar with.

As everybody knows, most average children by definition are born already having more intelligence than a below-average adult, kids just don't have a paycheck which depends on them having a dystopic point of view.

From the European Convention on Human Rights [1]:

> Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life edit

> Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...

From the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic, Article 31:

> "Postal and telecommunications secrecy are inviolable."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Constitution_of_t...

Same for Italian constitution.

But you know how it goes with law: all you need is a supreme-court equivalent to judge what are the boundaries and exact definition of those articles..

Germany does not have what could be considered a constitution, or a Verfassung in German.

The article 31 is not even protected by the “Eternity Clause” that, ironically can simply be removed by the legislature.

But it seems relatively irrelevant anyways, as all western governments seem to just ignore all fundamental laws if it suits them, let alone regular laws, regardless of constitution or not. And that does not even go into the fact that the illegitimate EU just de facto supersedes all legitimate national laws.

You've not reading GP carefully, they're quoting the East German constitution.

I didn't catch that, but my point not only still stands as it applies to both Germanies, and really only makes my point even more salient.

Fact of the matter is that Germany simply does not have anything that can be considered a Constitution/Verfassung no matter how much Germans are bamboozled to believe they have something like a Constitution; a core set of laws that cannot simply be removed by a captured body of government.

If it is a Constitution/Verfassung, what is the obtuse nonsense that "the human dignity is inviolable" in the German basic law, when the German government has done nothing but violate the dignity, not even to mention the rights of the German people? They don't even abide by their own basic law.

What else can you call it when like happened in Germany a few months ago, a government that had already failed, held elections which it lost in the form of clear rebuttal of its policies, and then before ending and then further engaging in undemocratic practices, quickly voted to majority change this fake "Constitution".

Imagine if the US House controlled by Republicans could, after the midterm elections where Democrats take a major number of seats, simply just voted to change the constitution so that Democrats could not take control in a single vote. Would you consider that as having a Constitution?... a fundamental, difficult to move foundation of law that even the legislature had to abide by as it is only very difficult to change?

That is the fundamental difference between a constitution and just a facade of "fundamental law" that acts as if it is a Constitution in Germany.

Again, it also seems to be ignored that this fake Constitution in not even only Germany, but effectively all European countries is being totally subverted and undermined by the illegitimate suppression of EU fake law crated by an entity that was simply imposed on Europe without any objective legitimacy democratic legitimacy.

It sometimes disappoints me just how ignorant Europeans are of not only their own government situation, but even across Europe and America. These are not difficult concepts and not a matter of "I'm better than you", it's simply a matter of objective analysis and people don't like their ugly baby being called ugly.

Germany does not have what could be considered a constitution, or a Verfassung in German

that is not correct. Grundgesetz = Verfassung: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfassung

changes require a 2/3rds majority, just like changes to the US constitution. the unamendable parts in both are very few.

That is clearly not correct, hence why it is not called a Verfassung, but rather a Grundgesetz. You can rationalize it all you want, but not, it is not the same as in the USA, where not only do you need a constitutional amendment proposed and agreed on by not only the House but also 2/3 of the Senate. Then it still does not pass until 3/4ths of all the states also ratify the amendment all across the USA.

Did you catch how that might be different than when the last German government quickly removed the debt brake from this fake constitution with a single vote and after new elections had already been had and lost by the current government.

you are right about the additional layer of needing ratification by US states, but other than that, i see no difference. in the end it's just a name for a specific concept, and the concepts of Grundgesetz and Verfassung are not different enough to argue over which name is correct. i disagree that the difference is the reason why germany named it Grundgesetz. they could have decided to name it Verfassung instead, and nothing would have changed. we would still have the same rules to change it. there is nothing in the name that forces a different approach.

more interesting is the actual contents and the principles that are being covered. debt brake for example in my opinion has no business being part of a constitution or Grundgesetz. it should never have been added there in the first place. that's not what a constitution is for. putting stuff like that in there weakens the Grundgesetz and makes a mockery of it. it reeks of planned economy.

that doesn't mean that the debt brake is bad, or that it should not be protected by requiring a 2/3rd vote to change it. there just should be a different place for that, in order to keep the Grundgesetz focused on issues that you really don't want to change. in other words, even if only a single 2/3rd vote is necessary to approve a change, a change to the Grundgesetz should be a rare exception.

> > "Postal and telecommunications secrecy are inviolable."

So phone taps are illegal in Germany? Police can't record what you're talking on the phone?

> phone taps are illegal in Germany?

They’re quoting the East German constitution. I think there is a /s missing at the end.

If the police has a warrant, they can present it to your phone provider who are then required to send the data they have about you and your phone calls. This data may include the actual recorded conversations if allowed by the warrant.

This is regulated in the Telekommunikations-Überwachungsverordnung (TKÜV).

Edit: nvm, I didn't see this was about the GDR.

the GDR phrasing is much stronger and less ambiguous than the ECHR one. however, given what we know of the Stazi I'm skeptical they honored it.

Somehow you overlooked that Article 8 has a second clause, even though it comes right after the bit you quoted ?

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

They shouldn't have even bothered with the first part.

That doesn't say what kind of interference, nor does it say anyone is required to provide assistance to them.

There’s no such clause in current version (and it’s article 7, not 8).

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng

And now you overlooked article 52 ?

It's really very simple: NO human rights are absolute.

Could you link the version you're reading. I don't see anything saying this in the version linked above. It reads to me like "there may be limitations put on these rights but only to protect other rights, and even then the essence/spirit of the law should be maintained".

And that's precisely it.

Your right to encrypted communication, if there is such a thing, ends well before it is used to stage a coup or plan a bank robbery.

I overlooked nothing, just pointed out that you are referring to a wrong document. But since you mention article 52... it cannot be taken out of context of the whole title VII. Yes, human rights are not absolute. It does not mean that they can be restricted arbitrarily. In case of digital surveillance there are already some legal precedents in EU (I know that in EU precedents are not binding, but they may serve as indication of possible decisions). E.g. in Germany installing spyware is now allowed only to investigate serious crimes, according to recent decision of the Constitutional Court.

Genuinely curious, why must privacy extend to online?

Last week’s events have me pondering the real value of online anonymity in a civil society.

I understand encryption and privacy aren’t 1:1, but if one goes, so goes the other.

At any rate, I want to hear other opinions. While I agree with the right to privacy, I’m wondering if privacy in ALL contexts is a good and healthy thing.

Last weeks events were a huge tragedy. But lets assume mass spying and no encryption, how would that have stopped it? A schizophrenic with a knife, or a political extremist with a gun, isn't something that necessitates coordination.

Which school shooting are you talking about?

I was referring to Charlie Kirks assassination and the ukrainian girl being murdered on the train. But there was also a beheading in dallas and a school shooting in colorado this week. I dont think any of these wouldve been stopped by spying.

Genuine question: why not?

To start an answer I would say is dangerous territory to say „online must not follow the rules of offline“. My expectantion would be as general principle „onlinity“ is irrelevant. As far as sensible of course.

Having a ready made list of everyone's thoughts on every topic and the ability to sift through every tedious mountain of data with software to classify everyone according to every sort of ideology would certainly be handy if your nation ever became a fascist dystopia.

You could end up having to not only not critique your personal Hitler but praise him to get the right score to work in civil service or not only not only not say pro lgbtq talking points but spout pro bigot positions to qualify as a teacher helping to create first the illusion then the reality of the universiality of these positions.

Imagine how well the French resistance would have gone if all the trouble makers or likelyoffenders had been shot preemptively!

You can ask yourself why privacy is beneficial at all?

And it's because revealing breaches of social etiquette might lead to conflicts and unrest between serfs. Which lower their economic efficiency in their service to landlords.

Online is not unique in any way. It even should have more privacy because people reveal too much voluntarily already leading to all kinds of unrest.

How many people's economic activity was disrupted because they couldn't keep their cheering of Charlie Kirk's demise in private for example?

> ...why must privacy extend to online?

Because "online" is just as real as "offline"? It's all people communicating with other people.

In the US, I can do business under an alias, just so long as I'm not assuming that alias with the intent to defraud. In the US, I can anonymously drop a letter in a postbox to be sent anywhere in the US.

However, government agents can certainly discover my "wallet identity" in both of those situations with the application of some effort. Why would it be important to you that people doing business "online" must do that business in such a way as to make it require zero effort for a government agent to discover their "wallet identity"? Why would it be important to you that people who conduct their business electronically have far, far less privacy than people who conduct their business with paper and in-person appearances?

Governments are more scared of "online", because their shenanigans could be exposed instantly, and to many more people than with the "tech" available before (speaking in person, or paper letters).

Freedom to speak in person is like a fist; freedom to post online is like a gun. They don't want us to have guns, obviously.

Privacy in sealed mail is different than privacy when you are shouting on the street corner.

I think an interesting experiment would be to create a social platform where all identities must be verified and public and all messaging must also be public. If you could verify identities well enough, this would create a platform where everyone is saying everything knowing it's traced to their identity. Perhaps the information communicated on such a platform would be considered to have more weight than information spewed on pseudo and fully anonymous platforms.

Or it'll have a chilling effect and it'll leave much unsaid. Something artificial like LinkedIn.

I don't disagree. It's just a thought experiment.

> If you could verify identities well enough, this would create a platform where everyone is saying everything knowing it's traced to their identity.

Facebook and Google Plus (along with research focused on them and other Internet forums that demand one's Real Name or legal identity) have demonstrated that -at best- you get the same low-quality commentary as you do from pseudonymous or anonymous forums. The typical case is that discussion quality goes down as clever and thoughtful folks who aren't interested in setting themselves up to be the target of future witch hunts by expressing potentially-controversial opinions tied to their Real Name leave those forums for less restrictive ones.

Stupid people who are going to spew bilge do it regardless of whether their Real Name is attached to what they say. There are better ways to promote high discussion quality than to demand attachment of one's Real Name to one's forum account.

I assume you refer to the killing, which was done offline with a physical weapon.

do you think less online anonymity would've prevented Lincoln's assassination too?

> Genuinely curious, why must privacy extend to online?

Because governments lack the maturity to judge contents. You would subject private communications to mob justice of populist political discourse. It is not rocket science that it wouldn't work.

You are quoting outdated document. There’s the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union which was proclaimed in 2000 and came into force with Lissabon Treaty in 2009 [1].

In that document it’s article 7.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng

Everyone's post is private. Until there's a court order which allows it to be opened.

Everyone's phone call is private, until there's a court order

In principal I have no problem with a court order overriding privacy, it's been that way for centuries

If they get a court order then they can start trying to break the encryption.

There’s no regulation on content of the post, so you can encrypt your message, print it and send it by post. Equivalent of the court order in digital world is the permission to obtain whatever version of the content is available.

Mandating that all mail should be written in such a way that someone from the government could understand it, is clear overreach.

I agree with the argument on the logical level, but in practice I don't think it should be used be used, at least not as the first argument. For the general public, talking about encrypting a physical letter makes you look even more paranoid / malicious than when talking about online encryption.

It’s HN, the public here is slightly more educated in digital affairs, right?

In practice there are physical limits on how much phonecalls or snail mails can be improperly publicized.

Online even the stuff that very rich companies struggle very hard to keep private regularly gets publicized in bulk.

You might think in terms of "medium is the message" so you can't directly transfer something that works in principle for one medium to another.

But you're not obligated to make it easy for law enforcement to enforce any potential court orders, though. It's perfectly legal to install a safe that is impossible to open without destroying its contents, for example.

One Swedish-Kurdish man in Iran who is working for the Iranian government is using Telegram/Signal and Monero to intentionally cause carnage in the streets of Sweden and has been attempting to expand to Denmark.

But instead of going directly after this man our tech inept governments are trying to do the mathematically impossible.

Right, to catch a predator managed to catch people without needing to backdoor stuff. These people are just lazy and incompetent, potentially intentionally.

How would they go about that without violating other laws/rights? The state cannot act on rumors alone.

Even worse, they're setting up Europe for a fascist takeover. To protect us. Just what?

You'd think we never had the Third Reich, Nazis or WW2 with how they're behaving.

One would wonder why this doesn't lead into inquiry into the obvious other things things that made one singular such man capable of causing such disturbance.

Something I think is often missing in this evergreen debate: governments have banned encryption before, in amateur radio. See e.g. https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/72/encrypted-traffic...

(Obviously, the difference is in number of users -- not many hams, and lots of internet users, and "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is a difference in kind")

I don´t see the relation to this debate. HAM Radio communications do not need encryption, as they have a fully different purpose. You would not discuss private/sensitive matters anyway as the whole thing is just a hobby/learning/experimentation or sport. Your life´s important decisions don´t depend on this type of communication. Besides, I think one of the most important motivations behind this restriction is to avoid misusing frequencies for commercial purposes.

Uh, there is nothing stopping a crazy guy with a cell of white supremists in idaho for communicating with another sell of malitia guys in utah via ham. If I were said crazies I would certainly want to encrypt that traffic. Given a rural enough compound it might be one of the only ways that they can communicate, certainly starlink exists these days but you catch my meaning.

Ham is useful, there are things about it that make it DIFFERENTLY useful than the internet. (see also number stations)

> You would not discuss private/sensitive matters anyway as the whole thing is just a hobby/learning/experimentation or sport.

You mean like certain medical issues? You really should tune into a HAM band one of these days.

It's contested, in the USA the spectrum is allocated so the FCC regulations seem to allow an abridgement of first amendment freedoms in exchange for use of the regulated spectrum. Is that constitutional? Why are broadcast airwaves censorsed, but the cable companies that were built with public right of ways contracted to private companies because they're natural monopolies allowed to swear on cable channels? It's not clear to me this is just.

Note that this only applies to amateur radio bands. It's perfectly legal to encrypt your Meshtastic comms, for example (again, unless you transmit under ham rules).

I look forward to soon reading about Peter Hummelgaard's leaked private emails in the newspapers. Let's hope (for him) that he was right about not needing any privacy or encryption. And let's hope his friends/family agree.

Well according to the Chat Control legislation proposal, politicians are, of course, exempt from monitoring.

Note that he said "everyone's civil liberty". It means that he thinks that it is not everybody's right, not that it is nobody's right. They want to keep the right for themselves.

Politicians' work emails are exempt, but private ones as citizens aren't

I think (or hope) that the point of the parent was to leak his emails anyway just so he gets a taste of what it's like for citizens to live in the society he wants to create. Personally I get the sense that politicians are too narcissistic to learn a lesson from that but it would still be fun.

Because everybody knows that politicians are immune to the temptations of child porn...

it's very ironic that they don't realize that this really doesn't work that way in practice

whatever backdoor you put in

- will be used for industry espionage

- will be used against politicians where it's supposed shouldn't apply

- will be used by state actors systematically destabilize EU countries if the relationship with US, China, Russia get's worse (e.g. "ups, I spoofed non encrypted message and no it looks like the prime minister is a pedo" kind of situations)

Nope. That's not true. There is a provision that exempts people working for state security (e.g. spies), not politicians. Please don't make up stuff: this proposed law is already bad enough.

those are the only people who should never be exempt

I think i get what he's trying to achieve: To get the bad guys (faster) by disallowing things the bad guys can use to get away with stuff.

The slippery balance is also that the good guys of yesterday are the bad guys of today and vice versa.

But both never stopped development of better, weirder, stranger and scarier stuff that can both be used for bad or for good, whichever you choose. I highly doubt encryption will stop because they outlawed it. There will be even better development of encryption that will be even harder to detect if encryption was actually used.

just a random thought, since AI can now simulate conversations, it can be used for steganography. you can hide the real conversation in a simulated one without effort.

Denmark, is a great country, however even I notice problems here as there are in other countries. Corruption and poor decisions. For example a local government office has a brand new facade finish ( amongst other work) that has taken about 4 years to do, its an entire building. Tall buildings are banned in Denmark so its actually surprisingly imposing. Trouble is, they did not use the tax funds to improve the local school for children. I am not joking, its a literal portacabin. Yes there are normal schools in buildings, but the main primary school for this village, ( and bear in mind this is denmark where most things are still carefully constructed and beautiful), is 2 literal portacabins / part of a small modern house, in dire need of upgrading.

Im not saying the new government building is saurons tower, but there was no need to divert funds to improve it, it was just one of the buildings in a non descript village. I wouldnt normally care, but I know someone who goes to the primary school, and apparently it was a big upset that the funds for it went to this government building instead.

Before anyone thinks I am being mean to DK, a very similar thing happened in the UK, the local library that used to be in a large building got moved to essentially a backwater dark room in a terrible part of town, and the main building converted to bigger nicer officer for the local government.

Its a problem I am seeing all over europe.

Just sat badly with me.

EDIT > WTF everyone always so touchy. Everyone just relax ok this is a public forum.

Maybe Denmark isn't as beautiful as you describe and you are simply biased.

The scandinavian countries are widely upheld as some of the best and most civilized countries in the world second only to japan and switzerland. Sure countries are complicated affairs and we can bicker for years about these kinds of opinions, but it's not some kind of weirdo niche to think denmark is a far above-average country.

They were. Currently I would avoid Sweden: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/sweden-immigrants-crisis/ Other European countries will follow. And yeah, I am against uncontrolled immigration. That’s probably the single way to destroy developed country very quickly.

What do you mean "uncontrolled"? Surely EU have border services, so almost all immigration is controlled.

I don’t want to open this can of worms. It is just not controlled.

You are spreading typical AfD misinformation

I am an immigrant, and not "white" depending on who you ask. I was easily able to travel between schengen countries without having my ID checked ( I am lawful EU citizen). So in answer to your question no, border controls are not tight. Depends on the day.

HAVING said that I also agree with you that EU borders ARE mostly controlled.

I only saying this because I dont like accusations being thrown around, as it inhibits public discourse the ability for poeople to learn vis discussion, EVEN if he sounds like a nutter.

I have some statistics for you: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/235965/umfrag...

It’s time to talk about elephant in the room instead of screaming “you’re nazi!”

These are the future adults that pay your pension. Or do you have a more efficient idea on how to counter population decline?

I have some statistics for you: https://infografik.io/kartiert-europas-bevolkerungsruckgang-... (German)

The thing is that I have no new citizens around me in white collar positions. I don’t see them in production hall downstairs either. This is valid for my last 3 jobs. It’s dumb statistics. My friends and ex-colleagues see the same situation. I guarantee, these future adults will have no positive impact for my pension. They will only consume the exorbitant high taxes I pay in Germany right now. And I may work until 75…

So no more refugees please, qualified foreigners welcome. But there is only one problem - these 5 million fresh refugees made Germany super unattractive for qualified foreigners. Now you can call me a nazi.

But several not so pretty aspects were just pointed out in detail.

Perhaps they're just countries, with their own problems and benefits, just like everyone else.

Or, should I just continue to parrot a delusional fantasy of Scandinavian countries being the promised land, with no problems whatsoever?

He literally just said "Denmark is a great country", relax man..

Relax?

Yeah relax

> Tall buildings are banned in Denmark so its actually surprisingly imposing.

False. Buildings higher than 5 stories require municipal council approval (whereas normally it's a functional approval, not a political one), but that's only in Copenhagen. Other municipal councils do not have the same restrictions, and there are plenty of examples of tall buildings in Denmark.

The restriction in Copenhagen is historical, due to the fires that consumed the city; so to increase fire safety, buildings were height restricted. That most of Denmark otherwise don't have a lot of tall buildings is primarily due to a lack of demand.

I know bro I am just keeping it simple for people who arent danish.

Thank you for the elaboration though

I don't get the point of your comment. Some random municipality construction case has nothing to do with this story.

I see the point very easily? It's about directing government funds to improving the work lives of the officials (the ones who decide where the money goes) instead of towards the education of their children, which most people would agree should be a much higher priority. It's an example of government working for themselves, not working for the people, as is their remit.

You believe that because you don't understand budgeting in danish municipalities. There are several bins of funds, and dictates from the state on how much can be used on what. Money from a construction budget cannot be used on schools, and so on. Its a much more complicated piece of bureaucracy, and not something that is relatable to a minister of justice going off in the deep end.

Why was everyone upset then? Why was it in the press? Why are you talking as if you know anything about it? Why are you so upset about it? I literally have no idea why you are upset that someone brought up something that bothered them on a public forum. Are you working for the Danish gov in some capacity and terrified of any criticism. Like wtf man., its just a comment , soon this thread will go away and you can get back to your gov funded cupcakes or whatever it is ur protecting. You just attract attention by being so touchy.

EDIT > I removed the bit that said where it was ok? relax

You seem be the one that needs to calm down. I'm just straightening things out. You shared an anecdote about governance in Denmark, that is not related to the current discussion. Don't get riled up about something you clearly isn't that clever at.

No need for the ad hominem attack at the end there but ok point taken all good

learn to read the room better. this is a discussion about a specific topic, not a place for your random anecdotes.

you didn't use the claim of ad hominem correctly.

Are you severely autistic? My comment got double digit upvotes which means it was appreciated and a good contribution to the room.

As I read through the first two paragraphs of your comment I was thinking "that sounds like the sort of thing that happens here in the UK" and I have often though there is a general deterioration in the Europe (and as far as I know north America too).

Then I found you seem to think much the same.

> Denmark, is a great country

Is it? From the outside it looks like a nanny state where every piece of individualism is removed.

>Denmark, is a great country, however even I notice problems here as there are in other countries. Corruption and poor decisions. For example a local government office has a brand new facade finish ( amongst other work) that has taken about 4 years to do, its an entire building.

I'm sorry but when my own president is hard at work enriching himself and his family to the tune of Billions of dollars at the expense of the citizens here this sounds like a joke.

I don't know if it's 'corruption' or just a different sort of 'common sense' that needs to be corrected. There is a reason that 'if you've got nothing to hide why not consent to the search' is ages old and still present.

You don't always have to assign corrupt intent to people who may just be ignorant.

> Tall buildings are banned in Denmark

This of course not true.

Im simplifying the complex rules for the crowd , you didnt pick up on that but its ok bro I appreciate the clarification.

Actually, having encryption defeating mechanisms makes a lot of sense when its limited to public servants, like the Denmark's Justice Minister. Those people are trusted with a lot of public resources, in fact all the public servants should have a monitoring device like a black box on them all the time and when something goes wrong that blackbox should be decrypt-able so we can look at the logs and see what went wrong.

Corruption and incompetence, solved.

Chat Control proposal excludes politicians themselves from Chat Control.

Former Dutch PM used to have an old Nokia with a very limited capacity to store messages[0], so he could always say he had to delete messages so he could keep receiving new ones.

[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2429354-wissen-sms-jes-door-rutte-vol...

Eschewing responsibility through these kinds of "tricks", where the person obviously thinks themselves so above everyone else that they can make them idiots to their face, makes my blood boil.

It's always either public "servants" in power, or the rich people, putting themselves outside of the rules. If you are an elected official, and make a stunt like this, it should be grounds for immediate dismissal, IMO. But, alas, nowadays these kinds of things are so minor and irrelevant, in the sea of ridiculously horrible stuff they do.

It's at least refreshing that there are still places, like the Netherlands in this case, where there are some (even when it's surface-level) repercussions of such behavior.

> makes my blood boil

I don't think off-the-record communication always implies corruption. I imagine it to be impossibly hard sometimes to get people to agree on anything (which is basically a PM's entire job), if all communication must happen out in the open.

Yes, and now he's the NATO Secretary General. As PM, he employed the obvious and straighforward defense against the Dutch version of FOIA of keeping the most important communications in-person behind closed doors[1].

I'd assume many high ranking Western politicians do something similar, while paying lip service to high minded ideals about openness, transparancy and democracy.

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutte-doctrine

messages could be (and usually are) stored server side. Plus SMS is not secure at all and easy to eavesdrop on.

I think the parent commenter was aware of that and was deliberately flipping the tables on these self-serving politicians.

> all the public servants should have a monitoring device like a black box on them all the time and when something goes wrong that blackbox should be decrypt-able so we can look at the logs and see what went wrong.

no. Regards, Ursula

Several years ago the UK government started being defacto run via Whatsapp. I was absolutely furious about this, but seemed to be in a tiny minority of people who cared about it!

Our PM at the time of covid "lost" his Whatsapp backups, and his replacement also had problems getting access to Whatsapp messages. How convenient.

If you worked in a regulated industry this would be instant dismissal. For the UK govt its business as usual.

It may seem like it's "convenient", but whatsapp is truly a nightmare when you try to move it literally anywhere in any way. Huge backups, needing to transfer phone numbers, having to restore from backups, having and moving those backups in the first place, the way it's designed in that regard is the most inconvenient for a platform that doesn't even necessarily provide more security or anything for that to be worth it at all, particularly for people who don't even seek that kind of security or even know about it and just use it for "texting and stuff". Not to defend that or say that it isn't just a convenient excuse (it can be for sure), but just to say that whatsapp is possibly the most annoying app in that regard. It's such a pain in the ass I'd rather store all of that in the cloud. (Which ironically whatsapp pretty much just does anyway if it backs up to google drive, it just makes it the most inconvenient it could be)

Is it that hard? Every time I moved to a new phone, whatsapp's backups are in my google drive and restored without any problem whatsoever

It’s not hard, but if you do one step out of order, your backup becomes unusable and all your history goes bye-bye.

If you don't back up to google drive, the process is much much more hairy. The transfer looks smooth but I have seen it fail in multiple instances.

These days I learn not to get attached to my message history

Trump admin did the same thing with Signal. I'm pretty sure they did it because US gov't emails and IMs are for sure archived.

The US gov started using Signal before Trump and they were backing up Signal chat logs (which it seems the UK wasn't doing with WhatsApp?). It was just controversial which vendor the prior US gov had chosen to handle the backups (an Israeli tech firm) and how it was used by the executive branch. But they were ultimately following transparency/archiving rules.

Politicians around the world do it on purpose because they know they can more easily get away with leaving no trace.

It's not an accident they don't use government email/IM and use WhatsApp/Signal instead.

But then they turn around and want to convince us it's bad when we use it. Because they're the ones handling “acceptable” secrets, somehow.

“For my friends? Anything. For my enemies? The law.” - Óscar Benavides

(Though to be fair, if we’re comparing South American military dictators, he was actually almost reasonable)

I never saw any reporting after those Signal chat stories came out. At the time it was reported that they had a period of time to make sure conversation were archived properly. It would be interesting to know if that actually happened.

Technically speaking WhatsApp is roughly second place on secure messaging behind Signal.

So while there are massive issues wrt. compliance and giving a US company control over all of this from a purely security choice they could have done way worse and still f*up compliance.

I don't really mind someone foreign having access to what is being said, as much as I mind public servants not being able to be held accountable because all of the discussions are encrypted.

If you’re thinking about foreigners in this context being some random person on WhatsApp in the US, that’s one thing.

You really might want to consider however that ‘foreign’ in this case could be anybody from a Russian FSB agent in Moscow, to a pro Project 2025 CIA agent.

It’s not a good idea for a minister in a gov’t to have their ideas spammed to people accidentally or (by hostile action) intentionally that are not within that same gov’t.

Regardless of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, if anything else it’s an operational risk due to misaligned incentives that the voters are really dumb to not make a bigger deal about.

In the US, it's Signal. In the UK, it was WhatsApp.

When researchers dumped 100% of Signal's users in the USA, because its contact discovery API has no rate limiting, they found a huge portion of Signal's US userbase has Washington D.C. area codes.

"Signal; Washington D.C. numbers are more than twice as likely to be registered with Signal than for any other area in the US" https://encrypto.de/papers/HWSDS21.pdf

Meanwhile, in Scotland since the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon ran her government with an entirely parallel communication network on WhatsApp, explicitly to prevent her government's discussions and decisions from being discoverable by FoI requests.

There was daily deletion of messages. It was drummed into people by Sturgeon's head civil servant, Ken "Plausible Deniability" Thompson: https://archive.is/jK6Bd

> Thomson was head of the Covid co-ordination directorate of the Scottish government and wrote: “Just to remind you (seriously), this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the “clear chat” button is…”. He later added: “Plausible deniability are my middle names. Now clear it again!”

Sturgeon, just like Boris Johnson, retained zero WhatsApp messages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-67949454

Scotland only banned use of WhatsApp in government 4 months ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8pe585z1o

The beltway people working as public servants are (supposed to be) using the TeleMessage fork of Signal. Specifically designed to archive messages for the public record. That is the reason for the increased representation of federal workers.

The compliance (audibility, recovery, etc) is the big problem, IMO, not the security.

In practice this is not that much different to what went before except that things happen more quickly.

Before people would go down the pub and have a discussion or in the corridor.

Things were never all discussed through official channels.

Now actually is probably more transparent as some of the WhatsApp messages are leaked and people can't deny them.

I'm certain that people will take an emotional reaction to what you've written, but I just want to be the first to say that I think you're right.

"Whatsapp" is the new "talking to the person in the corridor" or "having a quick chat down the pub", it's not the new email, and having them leak is ironically the most accountability we've seen.

I'll use an example of someone I support generally now: Tony Blair was accused of having backroom discussions regarding the invasion of Iraq and secret meetings away from even his cabinet[0]. Since we only have hearsay of what went on, it's very difficult to hold him accountable for this.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-12306377

From what I read, huge decisions were taken over whatsapp, particularly with regard to Covid policy. This wasn't "go for a pint, have a chat" type work.

If it was up to me, using whatsapp for ANY govt business should be an instant sackable offence. I don't conduct my company business on whatsapp. I conduct it on mainly slack and email. Its not hard.

You don’t think most huge decisions are discussed over back channels in addition to or before moving to official channels?

Actually the entire theme of Yes Minister, one of the best parodies of how the government is run is that not a single important decision or discussion is had in a public forum. Many episodes involve burying particularly incriminating official records.

Not only that when learning business one comment made was

Decisions are not made in meetings they are made in discussions before the meetings. Going into a meeting and thinking that your comments will change things is being naive.

From that the thing to be learnt is that you have to have off the record meetings first to convince the powers that be.

Now at least some of these meetings are recorded via WhatsApp and leaks before they never were.

Also see how IBM and Oracle get business - they take the senior C level managers out to lunch or golf and persuade them. They don't bother talking to the people who could evaluate if it was a good deal technically.

The short term problem is, that the government are responsible for sacking themselves in the short term - and those clowns just refused to, which is not the case for the current government who are replacements for the clowns who the electorate firmly sacked at their first opportunity.

So re your comment: 'For the UK govt its business as usual', not really.

You do not have to like the government of the day, but don't fall into the trap of believing that they are all the same.

I submitted this some time ago [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127521

Our governments have hoodwinked the population into believing that society needs to be surveilled by the government to prevent crime, and not the other way around. We're forgetting who signed off on this whole thing.

The central problem here is this:

In the Physicists from 1961 (German: Die Physiker, F. Dürrenmatt) the central theme is that scientists cannot "uninvent" something. Encryption is here to stay. Mathematically proven. Period.

The criminals will just flock to the "real encryption" and not the honeypots/backdoored messengers as they are being caught. In the end word of mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is unsafe."

Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.

Defending the innocent law abiding adult Joe, just wanting to send their honey pics in private is a distractor in this argument. I will not sacrifice my western standards just because 0.1% people are inherently evil.

>The criminals will just flock to the "real encryption" and not the honeypots/ backdoored messengers as they are being caught. In the end word of mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is unsafe."

Actually the opposite seems to be true. Criminal gangs are particularly susceptible to honeypots precisely because they don't trust the mainstream services.

2 prominent example was that huge sting operation a couple of years back where a supposedly "secure" service was being run by the FBI. And then you have the infamous pager plot, which is admittedly very different but it perfectly illustrates how shaky alternative communications can be.

>Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.

From the hysteria this has generated you would think it was the most crippling threat western democracy has faced since communism.

Oh really?

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617630/German-court-f...

Actually the reality was the honeypots were illegal to use as evidence in court. So these criminals are now smarter and more dangerous as we taught them OPSEC.

>when something goes wrong that blackbox should be decrypt-able so we can look at the logs and see what went wrong.

We always check the logs and when something goes wrong we vote for the box to explode

Public servants have a job, outside of their job, they are just regular citizens with the same rights and duties as everyone else.

So, monitoring them of the job, sure, but they have the right for a private life. Or not, depending on the law...

It is a bit more complicated for high ranking official, where immunities and classified information come into play, and they don't really have 9-to-5 jobs. But for lower ranking public servants, like police officers, magistrates, mayors, etc... that would apply.

I am a little puzzled why Denmark cares so much about this. Most of the 'yes' countries were, as far as I can see, more or less taking a "yeah, okay, whatever" approach (hence a fair bit of wavering once Germany became a 'no'), but Denmark seems desperate to push it.

Denmark seems to have a bit of a gang violence and organised crime problem, may be related

Not really. Its very minor compared to most other European countries.

From what I've read it is at least a major theme in their national discourse, of course that doesn't mean that the statistics support that it is actually a major problem. But probably at least a lot of people (voters) feel that it's a major problem, so that makes it something for politicians to want to take into account /use for their benefit.

When Governments ban encryption, its like banning the citizens from sending unreadable gibberish messages over the network.

Encryption algorithm, source code and ciphertext are also free speech. Here is RSA printed on a T-shirt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(fron...

If the government requires the ability to arbitrarily spy on anyone at will to exist (which they have, the encryption thing is mostly retrospective and unwillingness to use/reveal the bigger guns in large public cases), we are probably at a point when the nation state as we know it needs to be renegotiated entirely.

That being said I don't agree that his is necessary.

I'm definitely not one who thinks about these things deeply (as others surely do more), though the act of having a private conversation seems sacrosanct, why should distance or medium be a factor.

The minister was abused by his father during his childhood, and that has manifested itself in a low empathic response and a desire to force others to submit. I'm not being fastidious here, his behavior goes from head scratching to explainable when this fact is known, and not just in this case.

Related discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242458

It's interesting to think about support for laws that disallow actions as driven by the action itself or "something else." The something else is often the alleged failure or difficulty of enforcing other laws.

For example: if all encrypted messaging traffic was about innocuous trivialities, support for banning encryption would be absurd. The support for banning encryption isn't because people think encryption is bad, it's because governments propose that encryption makes it too difficult or expensive to enforce other laws like prohibition of CSAM, money laundering, etc.

Other examples: KYCAML, drug paraphernalia, Terry stops / stop and frisk, etc.

Encrypted messaging is a basic human right. Those who seek to end it should be put on the same lists as other human rights abusers.

Those politicians can barely write laws that are not a frontal attack on fundamental rights.

well said.

Not that i do not agree, but how did the humans actually do that a couple of thousands of years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography#Antiqu...

I think that the cleaner argument is that the ability to have private conversations is a fundamental human right, and in the current technological environment, that means strong encryption.

Egyptian inscriptions used alternate hieroglyphics to hide meaning. Substitution ciphers were known to the Romans. Those involve mathing, although only a bit of addition. The Vigenère cipher is only hundreds, rather than thousands of years old - at least, as far as we know; the Greeks or Romans certainly had the requisite math skills to pull that one off. More broadly, confidential communications existed. Mesopotamian clay tablets (ca. 2000 BCE) had envelopes with seals. You'd imagine breaking a seal would be punishable. The hippocratic oath (3rd century BCE) mentions keeping medical secrets.

But that's not to say a human right should not spring into existence as new technology becomes available. For instance, the freedom to receive information (especially radio stations, such as Voice of America) got some attention post WW II.

They simply had their conversations in private, there was no surveillance state with the ability to monitor all conversations in real time, and no medium with which to facilitate this.

Encryption preserves our right to have private conversations in the digital era, where such surveillance is ubiquitous.

> They simply had their conversations in private,

This still works, by the way.

It should be but the UN declaration on human rights (Article 12) is a bit fuzzy on the topic:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) states the following in Article 17:

> 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > > 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

The UN declaration on human rights dates back to just after WW II and the ICCPR does not really change anything. Encryption was not widely available and the breaking of things like Enigma was still a state secret. Phone taps were pretty common and the phone system still had human operators that could listen in trivially.

This doesn't mention encryption at all. And that's the problem. It's not covered as a human right under these declarations that lots of countries signed. And of course lots of the signers are taking lots of liberties with these rights. Lawful protection is a very vague label.

Of course, the modern practice of modern business communication happening via things like email, shared files, etc. and the very real risk of foreign nations spying on such communications require a very robust approach to encryption that is generally incompatible with installing back doors and giving arbitrary government agencies wide access to those. Of course such back doors are widely assumed to actually exist anyway but the scope of that is a bit murky. Does the NSA have access to your Google Drive? Maybe, probably. What if you are a business? What if that is hosted in the EU. Probably still yes. It's a valid reason for some EU companies to not want to use Google Drive and a few other US provided tools and infrastructure.

If the back doors leak, you compromise the security communications of all companies and people that use the affected platforms. If that goes unnoticed for a few years, your enemies gain a huge advantage.

When it's Germany vs. the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean intelligence agencies (to give a few practical examples), I'd prefer to not have German government agencies to be the weakest link in my communications. That's the risk that needs balancing.

Even if you trust them to have the right intentions (which is a big if), trusting them to be competent and worthy of that trust is another matter. I'd assume the worst actually. It only takes 1 person to be compromised here for this to go wrong. And with the level of Russian, Chinese, etc. intelligence activity, the only safe assumption is that there are going to be compromised people that will have wide access to information about back doors if not the actual back doors. In fact, for back doors to be useful for policing, a lot of people would need access. Without that level of access, the back doors are pointless. And with that they become a gigantic national security problem.

The Dutch constitution has an article giving everyone the right to private mail correspondence.

It was meant for physicial mail of course. I wonder if a judge would even see the difference.

A message is a message, regardless whether its deliver by electricity or a horse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party.

I wonder how they are going to try to argue that a E2E encrypted message is not ‘sealed’.

> I wonder if a judge would even see the difference.

A judge can't actually apply the constitution, as article 120 of the constitution forbids that, and The Netherlands doesn't have a constitutional court. In any case, most articles contain the phrase "except in cases determined by law". This means that the constitution is mostly a set of guidelines for politicians that practice civic hygiene, and not a tool to oppose bad laws. It's especially useless to delay and oppose fascists, as they'll just pass laws and/or state of emergencies without basis or changing the constitution.

Judges can apply the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically the right to privacy, but of course lawful exceptions can be made there as well as long as they are proportional and subsidiary. There's a good case to be made that Chat Control is neither.

That's famously why all our mail gets read by the government, and all our phone calls are listened to, and all our homes' walls are transparent, right? Because privacy isn't a civil liberty?

Bloomberg recently published around 18,000 plain text Epstein mails from his Yahoo account which led to the firing of British US ambassador and long time powerful figure in the background Lord Mandelson.

This could have been achieved at least 15 years earlier, so encryption does not seem to be the main obstacle to investigations. In some cases.

Similarly, all investigations into Epstein related JP Morgan transactions have been obstructed, for example by the firing of a Virgin Islands GA who investigated too much.

Looking forward to some EU politician tweets on these issues.

Epstein isn't a great example. It's someone leading an extravagant life we and connected to a rediculous number of people. That's a lot of people to try and get to use signal or exchange PGP keys with. Especially celebrities that wouldnt know what that is.

I’d only back this if it also meant every civil servant’s communications, written or spoken and sent through any device, were archived from five years before taking office until five years after leaving. Not necessarily public, but fully accessible for prosecution. Any attempt to dodge this should carry jail time.

The end game for these policies is, sadly, eminently viable. You’d have to treat your citizenship as if they were corporate employees: all phones under mobile-device-management, all laptops locked down and monitored by kernel level “agents”, and all network traffic running through traffic analysis. Say goodbye to any kind of home made computing devices or operating systems that don’t meet audit approval.

You could nudge this sort of thing into play by starting with e-commerce. No online shopping unless you’re using a Trusted OS. Ratchet up to cat videos and TV shows. Ratchet again to Trusted News. You’re most of the way there!

The “you can’t outlaw math!” crowd are kind of right but that argument assumes free and unencumbered end user devices, which, as crazy as it sounds, might not be a given in the particularly awful dystopian futures available to us right now.

> The “you can’t outlaw math!” crowd are kind of right but that argument assumes free and unencumbered end user devices, which, as crazy as it sounds, might not be a given in the particularly awful dystopian futures available to us right now.

That future is already here for the substantial number of people who have only iOS devices. Even in the EU where Apple is forced to allow alternate app stores and direct installation of apps, the apps must be signed with a key that Apple can revoke. Google seems to be planning something similar for "certified" Android, and some important apps refuse to run on any other kind of Android.

I'm disappointed so many smart people in the tech world participated in this corporate power grab.

Well said. And I am disappointed in myself as much as anyone. My only consolation is that I at least took a frontline part in making Linux, GNU, FreeBSD, and FOSS in general what it is these days, on the back-end.

— sent from my iPhone

I suppose someone who understands the problem choosing an iPhone in spite of it is very slightly culpable, but it doesn't sound like you helped build any of these systems that deprive end users of their final say over computers they own.

The mechanism of rights makes a lot of sense in a constitution, to establish that these core principles of the legal code of Latveria and may never be trampled upon by subsequent laws, and then refer back to that as a judgement when evolving the law.

However, in recent years it's taken a life on its own and people all over the political spectrum are inventing new rights or denying established rights. At face value it seems like a punchy statement that this is a human right or that isn't a civil liberty, but there's usually nothing to back that up. It's nothing more than a vapid slogan used this way.

That corrupt man doesn't disclose his entire life nor has cameras in his home exposing how he acts at every second. He doesn't show how shady he is because he wants no privacy for others but transparency for himself.

The funniest thing is how this authoritarian excuse of a human being wants to make his 1984 world a thing worldwide, because he doesn't even care about the pretense of EU agreements. Not only is there no sovereignty but we should all follow his whims.

Time to learn Navajo and other obscure languages. Then watch the fear propaganda as these dicks make foreign languages nobody speaks illegal.

A false civil liberty they reserved for themselves.

What the Justice Minister means is that electronic privacy should not be a civil liberty. Perhaps he doesn't realize that making encrypted messaging illegal is the same as making it illegal to share sequences of decimal digits of transcendental numbers like e and π, which include every every possible sequence of digits encrypting a message?

> What the Justice Minister means is that electronic privacy should not be a civil liberty. Perhaps he doesn't realize

In time, you will find that what a politician means is dependent at least of: political party he is in, amount of lobby/bribes he/she was subjected to, time of day, weather, his souse's mood.

Don't make the priest follow the teaching of Jesus, it won't work.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

"Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

For a democratic leader to do this, there must be some nontrivial subset of their voter base who support it. In all this ruckus over Europe trying to ban encrypted communication I keep wondering - who the hell are the voters pushing for this?

So long as you proclaim "to protect our children" (or whatever) loudly, >50% of voters will support anything that they don't really understand.

Assuming a trustworthy government with an independent legal system, all communication should be accessible upon judicial decision. This is analogous to acceptance of search warrants and seizure of evidence including paper based documents and messages.

Then again governments often aren't trustworthy. Germany isn't even able to issue European Arrest Warrants as prosecution here is politically dependent¹. And accordingly I also kind of prefer to have my electronic communication cryptographically protected. But I'm not so naive as to believe that this is a solution. This is just treating a symptom which eventually gets worse if not addressed directly.

1: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/landmark-ruling-european...

And don't even get me started on envelopes, the terrorist's friends.

Along with all of those irresponsible people who say things where they cannot be heard by a government microphone, or think things without saying them, implicity promoting false civil liberty.

Portraying encryption as a threat is a distortion of the very concept of “freedom.” It’s not about hiding, but about preserving a private space in the digital world just as it is in the physical world.

If he truly believes that, he should have no problem disclosing all of his private and personal messages and emails to us, for everyone to see on the internet.

The truth is that this is just another corrupt politician.

The thing is, politicians will be exempt from the rules proposed by this chat control legislation.

"*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules."

source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Maybe all the ministers private communications should be posted publicly then if he’s so keen on having mystery parties inspected them without the senders/receivers consent

I typically consider Nordic countries to be pretty enlightened, so this is surprising to me. Just goes to show how politicians everywhere are wrong about encryption.

Presumably “enlightened” mens having the same opinions as you?

For him it would be. Everything he does should be monitored.

It seems all politicians have to through this. Encryption is either-or. Either it has no backdoors or it does not work for anyone including our financial systems

There may be some middle ground: only allow encryption that's expensive but possible to decode without the key. That would at least make dragnets impractical. Political activists and those holding corporate secrets would still be at risk though...

Indeed it is not merely about the right people have to do something. It is about the right of the government to harm its citizens, all of them, all the time.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242458

The Danish showing their claws. The grass isn’t greener.

Those are not "claws". Claws are tools, and tools can be useful for an organism.

Those are signs of rot and fungal infection.

I stand corrected.

As a fellow EU citizen that came from a “third world country” I can’t help but to be surprised about 3 things:

- How slowly but surely the EU and its members are becoming exactly like the governments of said third world countries. (I’ve lived through them, trust me, I know)

- How unaware most citizens are about EU’s power hungriness. The same EU that hasn’t yet apologised for their attempt to clean up the US mess in the Middle East by taking on the displaced people from that region without proper integration plans.

- The fellow Europeans have little clue about the shit-show and corruption in Brussels. It’s rotten.

Well then why does he need an exception from the rule.

By his logic, if I spoke to another in a language incomprehensible to him, I would be forced to divulge my conversation.

The technical proposal behind this legislation is to enforce on-device AI analysis of all chat communication so your device can notify authorities.

This mass surveillance proposal is so dystopian and broken, I’m genuinely ashamed to be an EU citizen.

This sort of politician is the reason people turn to the far right.

They see the clowns in power from the right and the left and either decide to completely removes themselves from the political scene or decide that blowing up the whole system is better. And who can blame them?

To me the fact that Chat Control is even entertained is basically a huge betrayal of all the people who want to live in a democracy.

He is a minister of a center-right wing government.

Exactly my point. This sort of non-sense used to be part of the ideas expressed by people on the fringes of the political class not from center-right/center left parties.

The far right is about to try to take away all of America's guns, freedom of the press, speech, and the right to assemble. They have already essentially removed birthright citizenship for brown US Citizens that are the minor children of immigrants.

The far right is always infringing on liberty in a hope to bring the world backwards or stop some way society is changing - that is what the right is - traditional.

Is it legal to invent a secret language with your friend and talk to each other in that language?

Is this discussed in Danish news?

Det er virkelig et skam. Pinlig.

*en skam

Han skriver dansk

Kamalåså!

A bit of context for Americans: the Europe is under a hybrid multi-vector attack from the Evil Axis (China, Russia, Iran, Hungary, etc.).

People are too occupied with ideas of their own comfort and liberty. For everyone who thinks this is such a basic black and white question...

We are on the doorstep of WWIII. China, working through Russia, Iran, Hungary, and others, has built a network of influence proxies.

They use liberty and security as tools to conduct hybrid attacks. Their goal is to undermine the unity of the West, one by one.

Look at the recent extremely well-coordinated multi-vector hybrid attack on Poland.

Some attack vectors:

1. Military vector: They sent military drones to monitor reactions—political, military, etc. It's a milary act but not strong enough to have a military response. Drones had Polish sim cards, and used Telegram protocol to mask their traffic to a simple chat.

2. Political Vector. Vote of no confidence. Once Ursula and the EU decided to respond asymmetrically, they deployed one of their assets, Hungarian Orbán. They tried to remove Ursula, who was advocating for a firm response.

3. Informational Vector. They also started distributing false flag conspiracy theories claiming it was Ukraine, not Russia, who sent the drone. It's a tactic of small bites and proxy attacks internally, spreading propaganda and false narratives.

This is just one of such attacks. Imagine yourself a government worker, trying to fight that. Where left and right your colleagues got bribed , threatent, etc. and you can't even find proofs against them. Your enemy on contrary, knows everything about everyone in their country.

The only thing in Europe that got sabotaged was Nord Stream, and the current investigation focuses on Ukrainians who, according to the WSJ, were directed by Zaluzhnyi.

We might want to monitor Zaluzhnyi's messages.

Sorry, the Russia invasion is utterly wrong, but this kind of fear mongering is dangerous.

oh yeah, 19 drones attacking Poland just to test things is just a joke, sure :)

Read how Nord Stream was built first. It was shit show of a bribery, similar to how I outline before. And that bribery broke EU anti monopoly rule which dictate that no supplier should go above certain %.

So yeah, whoever did this, you should say thank you

> Their goal is to undermine the unity of the West, one by one

> Imagine yourself a government worker, trying to fight that. Where left and right your colleagues got bribed , threatent, etc. and you can't even find proofs against them. Your enemy on contrary, knows everything about everyone in their country.

That's somehow an argument to outlaw secure communication so even your enemy can spy on your messages?

> Political Vector. Vote of no confidence. Once Ursula and the EU decided to respond asymmetrically, they deployed one of their assets, Hungarian Orbán. They tried to remove Ursula, who was advocating for a firm response.

Ursula faced a vote of no confidence (with 2 more in October) because she's unfit to lead EU.

Far right and far left in EU Parliament to file separate von der Leyen no-confidence motions at midnight (https://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-far-left-eu-parlia...)

I don't disagree, but what's the relevance of this information for the topic at hand? The chat control proposal is for government-mandated scanning of devices and processing the information in a EU-wide data center close to Interpol.

Obviously, foreign spies and threat actors can continue to use encrypted communication. In the worst case for them, they can stop using the Internet and use burst-mode radio transmissions.

So what's your point?

exactly, how do you fight if everyone except you know everything about even your citizen e.g. tiktok, and you know nothing ?

I'm not advocating, I'm just asking a question. what is a tactic if we are really on a brink of a world war? It's subject of debate, but what if the goverment truly believe this way?

Serious question: why is Denmark so engaged on that topic?

outlawing encryption for the population is bad. people have a right for privacy but i would be for making public all communication of politicians.

This Minister of "Justice" doesn't know the meaning of the word and should be fired immediately. Don't ever let anyone tell you that THEY are entitled to participate in YOUR private discussions. A good old fashioned "fuck you" does the trick, here.

Before digital artifacts, nations had to identify the individual, and get access to their writings to determine culpability.

With digital artifacts, nations have enjoyed the ability to go to third parties to for the last 40-50 years to get access to individual's writings as a shortcut.

This is just a return to the mean. It is not novel or controversial to say "identify the individual, and get access to their writings" in whatever legal way that nation prescribes. Good luck, since their devices may be locked, but going after the individual is real law enforcement

Depending on the country and constitution, it very much is. And if not, it should be.

The construct of government with its many imperfections isn't able to parse and interpret any and all communication.

If he really believes that he should send all his correspondence to Putin and Trump and probably much worse for him: his constituents.

Danish politicians are famous here for their lack of knowledge and interest in IT-related subjects. Many danes have the uninformed "what are you hiding" perspective when it comes to privacy matters. Our government-built IT systems are also generally poor with many cost overruns. It's no surprise a Social Democrat politician would say something as ignorant as this.

is he aware that not having encrypted messaging will severely endanger the financial interests of Denmark companies?

I mean sure it's indirect.

But making them susceptible to industry espionage, planting false evidence (encryption also protects against spoofing) or blackmailing executives for dump reasons (idk. sexting in a adulterating manner) is something countries like Russia would do and would endanger financial interests of such companies.

And are Denmarks companies aware about that?

I mean there are so much more important reasons for encrypted messaging (e.g. investigative journalism) but "local companies and with that jobs" being endangered tends to move politicians.

Is DHH aware of what his country is doing? The dude can communicate. If only he were on this.

Afraid not, too busy cheerleading racists like Christopher Yaxley-Lennon.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

I didn't see that name in that post so I don't see what you're talking about (and it seems highly inflammatory, toxic, misinformed, and off topic). But I suspect the concern for DHH is not so much race as culture.

This is the "culture" demo DHH is referring to https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tommy-robins...

"Tommy Robinson" is the nom de guerre that the fascist Yaxley-Lennon uses since it sounds more working class.

WTF is wrong with Danes/Denmark? o_O

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"

Privacy for me and not for thee.

What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?

I suggest you look into how much of chemistry, physics and biology has already been "outlawed", and how the legislatures went about it ?

Yeah, nitrogen chemistry, high-concentration hydrogen peroxyde is already fairly restricted, as well as poisons.

Including in the US. The "right to bear arms" doens't cover high-energy explosives.

Interestingly, the laws around high explosives in the US aren’t as restricted as you think.

You can make lots of things legally. The laws are around storage and transport. Where the short version is you 24hours and you mostly can’t transport.

Ackshually, when the NFA was passed to 'tax' explosives ('destructive devices'), it was considered unconstitutional infringement on the right to keep/bear arms to ban explosives, machine guns, etc so they 'taxed' them instead. You can still buy/manufacture them with a tax stamp.

Also when congress de-funded (outlawed) the process for felons to restore their firearm rights, they forgot to do it with explosives. So even a felon can have high-energy explosives legally.

High explosives are even less regulated than firearms in the US. You can buy them by the ton and explosives are very inexpensive. This does not circumvent compliance with regulations for safe transport and storage, which is the practical limitation.

>the practical limitation

That... Wouldn't be tolerated if this was a 2nd amendment right. Imagine the same limitations applied to firearms.

Black powder, which is used (and at the time necessary) in the kind of firearms used when the 2A was conceived, has such limitations in any non-trivial (more than personal use) quantity.

I can store a ton of firearms in my garage but they can’t destroy the neighborhood by accident. High-explosives can.

People that buy high-explosives at scale just have some land outside of town where they can store them en masse. Problem solved. There are huge magazines of high-explosive just outside many major cities all over the US. Very infrequently, one of them goes “boom”, which kind of justifies forcing them to be on the outskirts.

You can own it, you just have to store it where it won’t wreck your neighbors if you are an idiot. Rural land is cheap.

If I possess, e.g., a certain quantity of U235, the government can act on the material, e.g., confiscate it because it is a physical entity. Meanwhile, I can arrive at the knowledge required for encryption, and even an encrypted message, a priori.

In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.

That knowledge is not illegal, nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

> nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

Just don’t write it down encrypted.

> That knowledge is not illegal, nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

In Germany, it is often illegal to disseminate such material (e.g. for building bombs) by § 130a StGB:

> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130a.html

DeepL translation:

"§ 130a Instructions for criminal offenses

(1) Anyone who disseminates or makes publicly available content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instruction for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1) and is intended to promote or arouse the willingness of others to commit such an act shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.

(2) The same penalty shall apply to anyone who

1. disseminates or makes available to the public content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instructions for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1), or

2. gives instructions in public or at a meeting for an unlawful act referred to in Section 126 (1)

in order to encourage or incite others to commit such an act.

(3) § 86 (4) shall apply mutatis mutandis."

---

For reference: § 126 StGB is:

> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__126.html

DeepL translation:

"§ 126 Disturbance of public order by threatening to commit criminal offenses

(1) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,

1. commits one of the cases of breach of the peace specified in § 125a sentence 2 nos. 1 to 4,

2. commits a criminal offense against sexual self-determination in the cases specified in § 177 paragraphs 4 to 8 or § 178,

3. murder (§ 211), manslaughter (§ 212) or genocide (§ 6 of the International Criminal Code) or a crime against humanity (§ 7 of the International Criminal Code) or a war crime (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 of the International Criminal Code),

4. grievous bodily harm (§ 224) or serious bodily harm (§ 226),

5. a criminal offense against personal freedom in the cases of Section 232 (3) sentence 2, Section 232a (3), (4) or (5), Section 232b (3) or (4), Section 233a (3) or (4), in each case insofar as these are crimes, Sections 234 to 234b, § 239a or § 239b,

6. robbery or extortion (§§ 249 to 251 or § 255),

7. a crime dangerous to the public in the cases of Sections 306 to 306c or 307 (1) to (3), Section 308 (1) to (3), Section 309 (1) to (4), Sections 313, 314 or 315 (3), § 315b (3), § 316a (1) or (3), § 316c (1) or (3) or § 318 (3) or (4), or

8. a dangerous offense in the cases of § 309 (6), § 311 (1), § 316b (1), § 317 (1) or § 318 (1)

shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.

(2) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb public peace, knowingly falsely claims that one of the unlawful acts referred to in paragraph 1 is about to be committed shall also be punished.

Tell that to Chinese trying to get through the Great Firewall.

Better yet, tell that to the Chinese who can't be bothered to try to get through the Great Firewall.

You are familiar with “intent” right? It’s not right, that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.

Now that you see how the government lies in the area you actually understand, try to extrapolate a little and think about what else the government might be lying about ;)

They'll just ban encrypted apps?

Define 'encrypted app' in a way that is not just completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent.

They'll just ban apps like Signal.

Which is comical because the Swedish military has standardized signal for all non-classified communication.

uh oh

As far as definitions go, that's circular.

It's almost as if being able to ban things in a completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent way was exactly the point...

And if they do that, do you think it will affect what criminals do?

Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.

It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."

How do you filter encrypted channels from the noise? For example, say the criminals now communicate by having a browser extension write e2ee encrypted todo items on a shared todo list app.

And then they will just post SPAM messages at a defunct Usenet group as a some of internal code to share illegal stuff as nothing.

I don't have enough context, why are they trying to ban encryption in the first place?

This doesn't seem hard to do. Messaging apps exist in app stores, transmit data through one of a few ISPs often past national boundaries to a couple of data centers. It's not hard for a national government to see the communication and stop it or punish those attempting it. It could be done by technical means, putting pressure of the stores, or anywhere along the chain. Countries block all social media by fiat. It seems easy enough.

It is easy to ban what are currently the most popular apps for encrypted messaging. But the math is more or less trivial, to the point that this will simply kick off a cat-and-mouse game the government cannot win. And that is before steganography comes into play.

At the absolute worst, OTPs are trivially uncrackable and relatively foolproof, assuming you can exchange keys out of band. Furthermore, it is trivial to generate keys that decode captured ciphertext into decoy cleartext, should the government try to coerce the keys from you.

I'm not saying OTP is practical for regular people in everyday chats (though it certainly can be for text, in my opinion). However, it is apparent to me that if RSA+AES becomes unviable, for example, then it will have nearly no impact on any criminal operation that cares about security.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

All Australians now live with the Assistance and Access Act 2018, where yes in fact if you use the illegal math, receive a TCN and do not comply… straight to jail.

Australia is dystopic in more ways than one[1], so this unfortunately does not surprise me.

I probably do not have to point out the issue with the soundbite, but I am doing it anyway: The “laws” of mathematics are valid across all of existence. Last time I checked, that includes Australia. As a matter of fact, I have personally stored encrypted communications with an Australian vendor after the law went into effect (not that I knew about that law in particular). And I can confirm that the communications were indeed still encrypted.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w (Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election?)

I agree with you in substance. But do these cute little word games—where we redefine commonly understood strings of words with idiosyncratic meanings to obscure what’s actually being disputed—work on anyone? It’s like saying that gun control is “literally trying to outlaw chemical reactions and kinetic energy.” Why not just clearly articulate what right you think society should protect?

You mean like '1st amendment' and 'freedom of speech'?

This is Denmark?

Denmark's constitution recognizes the right to freedom of speech. Moreover, the right to freedom of speech is a fundamental right that exists regardless of your government's ability to recognize it.

Thus, 'freedom of speech' is a perfectly legitimate and reasonable answer to 'what right you think society should protect', regardless of what country we are speaking about.

Define encryption.

To help you along, you basically have two alternatives:

1. Be intentionally vague, so the definition encapsulates just about anything and can then be applied and enforced at will. This is obviously what they are going for, by the way, and *that* is the word game being played here.

2. Some set of sets of mathematical functions, contingent on some properties pertaining to computational complexity. This is what cryptography is and, as such, is the correct way to go about it. Non-exhaustively, one property we are looking for is that some data can only be considered 'encrypted' if the computational complexity of decoding it without a secret/key is strictly higher than with said secret/key.

As I also said in another comment, I can derive an encrypted message a priori. That makes it fundamentally different from any analogies tied to physics or chemistry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com