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Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

Aren't the English already forced to give cops their phone passwords and face jail time if they refuse to?

Giving away Apple's encrypted cloud is just another small step into making 1984 a reality.

In France, they tried to make a law to force signals, WhatsApp, and other encrypted messaging to implement backdoors so that they could catch drug dealers.

Thankfully, it wasn't voted for, but truthfully, the average people didn't give a shit. I wish there was a way to make people learn how important privacy is to freedom and, therefore, to democracy.

I blame the education system that teaches almost nothing relevant. We even had 'citizen lessons', but it was about learning how the political institution works. We never spoke about what is freedom, what it involves, how easy it is to lose it, how hard it is to gain it.

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> Aren't the English already forced to give cops their phone passwords and face jail time if they refuse to?

Similar to France too right?:

> The French Court of Cassation has ruled that people who are suspected or accused of a crime are obliged to reveal the passcode of their mobile phone to the investigative authorities. The Court found that a mobile phone passcode can be considered a “secret decryption agreement of a means of cryptology” (convention de déchiffrement d’un moyen de cryptologie). Refusing to hand over the passcode of a mobile phone is punishable by a fine of up to 270,000 EUR or three years’ imprisonment

https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/french-court-rules-...

This is frightening.

It's horrible here. Every single day it feels like they announce a new method of "cracking down" on crime/child abuse/terrorism that just ends up eroding privacy further.

The irony, as crime has been declining for decades, yet it's the reason for every new authoritarian law under the sun.

Maybe that's why it's been declining.

Another set of good reasons why countries see a decline in crime:

- better economies

- better policing

- better social protections (shocking!)

- more access to education

- programs that reintegrate offenders

These are, of course, much harder for a politician to work on.

> In France, they tried to make a law to force signals, WhatsApp, and other encrypted messaging to implement backdoors so that they could catch drug dealers.

What this Chat Control? It's not dead, France is still in favour of implementing it if it can get a bit more support from other EU states.

France's backdoor mandate is a separate case unrelated to chat control. https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/03/messaging-app-signal-threa...

Don't think so. As a brit I've not heard of it. AI says:

>No, people are not routinely forced to give their phone passwords to English police; police generally cannot compel disclosure without a court-ordered Section 49 RIPA notice, which must be based on reasonable grounds and proportionality.

> The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007,[37] requires persons to decrypt information and/or supply keys to government representatives to decrypt information without a court order. Failure to disclose carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail, or five years in the cases of national security or child indecency. The provision was first used against animal rights activists in November 2007,[38] and at least three people have been prosecuted and convicted for refusing to surrender their encryption keys,[39] one of whom was sentenced to 13 months' imprisonment.[40] Even politicians responsible for the law have voiced concerns that its broad application may be problematic.[41]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...

"Giving away Apple's encrypted cloud is just another small step toward making 1984 a reality."

The big step was "Apple's cloud", i.e., people storing their data on someone else's computer^1 where the someone else is also collecting the data of millions of other people, too

1. Some HN commenters and others define "the cloud" as "someone else's computer"

There are various "threat models", one of them is people losing their life's digital cupboard. For that, Apple provided Time Machine, then provided the equivalent of a digital safety deposit box in somebody else's room, like a bank fault. People can break, lose, or have their phone stolen; then open a new one from the box and have their digital cupboard back.

Well before Apple, the recommendation was to store a backup offsite – almost nobody did. Now many do.

In response to a warrant, a bank opens that box. In response to a warrant, clouds open that box. That part of the threat model isn't new.

Another threat is forgetting the key to your safety deposit box. Most people would be angry if Apple, or their bank, wouldn't let them back in the box. Apple used to be able to help.

Now, unlike the bank, they offer a mode where only you have the key.

It's hard to say this is a step to 1984, given that up to this point, the safety deposit box threat models were similar, just Apple's digital vault was much more likely to be have the user's latest valuables when the user needed them recovered, and when they diverge it is in user privacy favor.

I have often wished all the browsers and OSes had a documented public protocal for all the stuff they sync and that you could go into them and set their endpoint. the majority of people would leave it as the default but some of us would point it to our own servers.

Note to file: Was +5, maybe more

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