Hacker News Reader

Comment by hypeatei | Hacker News Reader

I'm not European, but it's probably a mix of intelligence services advocating for it and government regulation as a solution to everything. If you believe that every problem can be solved by a regulator, then the logical endgame is the regulator needing a window into every aspect of your life so they can make sure you're not violating regulations.

The Patriot Act isn't on equal footing as these Chat Control-esque laws we're seeing. The US government spies on people, sure, but they're not mandating encryption backdoors or trying to outlaw VPNs.

View on HN

Snowden revealed PRISM meant the US government just had straight access to servers of major providers, so they didn’t need any of this. I would be shocked if the NSA hadn’t stepped up its data collection efforts in the last decade in secret.

> Snowden revealed PRISM meant the US government just had straight access

People read this and think that US government had unhindered access to all data in major providers.

According to Edward Snowden, PRISM allowed the government to compel internet companies to turn over any data that matched specific court-approved search terms. such as email addresses, all under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

At least some parts of it were likely unconstitutional as it could target U.S. persons, but it was not free for all as "straight access" indicates. It was straight access after FISA court approval.

NSA runs much more invasive MUSCULAR program in the UK without FISA or other type warrant.

They were tapping fiber links between datacenters

And, they were directly installing compromised hardware in datacenters [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

> but they're not mandating encryption backdoors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG#Weakness:_a_poten...

Yes, that was an insidious move from the NSA but nowhere near a mandate. No one uses it because of that weakness and they're allowed to do that.

My understanding is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_140-2 required Dual-EC DRBG to be implemented in any crypto system used by government, including such protocols as SSL/TLS, these algorithms are typically also adopted by industry, and NSA went further by paying RSA and perhaps others to make it the default in their security products.

This came after previous attempts such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

you sure? https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/ (2016)

Fair, the US government is not a saint in this respect. I will say that a three letter agency getting upset and requesting a backdoor does seem different than a legislative (executive?) commission proposing laws to backdoor communications.

From a recent EFF post[0], it appears they've backed off the scanning and encryption demands so that's good, I guess. Hopefully that sticks and they don't propose something similar in the future.

0: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

In the US, the laws permitting mass surveillance are, at least in part, secret: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

Surveillance isn’t bad per se. It’s when everything is so hush hush (which surveillance is by definition) and you lose sight of who has access to what, we humans start to get silly ideas. We’re imperfect and corruptible. Only in this case, it’s so hard to catch any illegal corrupt activities taking place.

So in my opinion, it’s a band-aid to more deep seated problems that more often than not creates new problems. I don’t know enough about how EU intends to do. I guess even eventual mandatory declassification (like a reasonable 5 yrs delay) would deter bad actors/politicians that aren’t well meaning from misusing it.

Why do you think surveillance isn't bad per se?

It's certainly not compatible with privacy.

Yes I believe what was revealed about 10-15 years ago about the "mass surveillance" conducted by the US and what is happening in Europe are totally different things.

The US conducts mass surveillance at a planetary scale, as an "Empire". It was implemented secretly by its 3 letter agencies with the help of various actors.

Europe is doing it in the open with laws and regulations and only targets the people in its territories. One simple reason they would have to do this way is they simply have no equivalent in capabilities to the NSA, CIA, etc. or big tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com