Danish Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgaard: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37443248
"And also at the same time compromise the security of every computing system in the country, lay the foundation for massive abuse of power and murder the concept of privacy. It's all for their own good."
We must break with the totally erroneous perception that ostensibly democratic governments can be trusted.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Wise words, even tarnished by their descendants.
Around 2010, I was using Pidgin to communicate with friends, a universal client to connect to instant messaging platforms. At the time, this would have been MSN, ICQ, AOL messenger, Skype, etc. Even facebook was running its own XMPP server that you could connect to, and communicate with your facebook friends! Pre-enshittification-times were really amazing.
In this pre-Snowden era, end-to-end encryption was pretty much unheard of, TLS was used for “serious stuff” like online banking. Still, Pidgin had a plugin implementing OTR messaging, which is essentially an ancestor of the Signal protocol. It worked by sending the encrypted messages as plain text messages over any supported service. Me and my friend (who, I believe, was using a different non-Pidgin MacOS client?) would talk to each other using OTR-encrypted messages via Facebook Messenger. Key verification was not a solved issue and had to be done manually using a different channel. And when you opened Facebook itself to look at your messages, all you could see was a bunch of base64(?)-encoded gibberish. Fun times.
The only way to outlaw encryption is to outlaw mathematics. If two (or more) persons want to exchange messages securely, they can and will always be able to do so. If I cannot trust my messaging application, I will find a way that I do not have to trust it, and people that have something to hide even more so. Encryption is not a loophole for criminals; it is a bulwark against tyranny. This proposal will solve no problems, but establish a authoritarian surveillance state.
Thanks for the nostalgia.
2010 - back then I was an insecure teenager, finding refuge and empowerment in technology, anxious that I will die alone. One year before finishing high school and two before meeting my future wife. I texted her also using Pidgin for ICQ and Google Talk (without the OTR, of course).
Now I'm a self-confident software developer, instead anxious that I will die in a fascist dictatorship, and absolutely sick of the modern shitnology, preferring to care for plants on the balcony after work, because they are something real and not annoying.
Tech is just not fun anymore. But maybe it's for the better, that made me go outside more.
But back on topic:
prohibiting encryption is like saying people should not be able to have private conversations without a microphone in the room which the government can always tune in to, if they see the need. Obviously completely ridiculous.
I guess just in case I'll keep my illegal encryption software somewhere hidden and encrypted. Will be fun when we will start sending crypto data hidden steganographically in a wall of text that reads like bad LLM output. Have fun scanning all the traffic looking for cues that are not there. Anything can be encoded in almost anything else. There is absolutely no way that a government, no matter how powerful, could enforce any such restriction in a bullet proof way against anyone who puts in the tiniest bit of effort.
Concerning making math illegal... Reminds me of DeCSS. Been there, done that. When people were wearing shirts with the illegal prime number. Fun times.
Yes! And Trillian, man I miss Trillian...
There is AI. Facebook doesn't have to forward encrypted messages. The internet can be locked down to prevent encryptes messages.
The Internet can’t be locked down to block shit.
How? I doubt you're able to propose a solution that can't be broken in 5 minutes, the only solution is to either accept it or block 100% of the internet, if you leave even a single write access allowed it can be used to communicate, and if it can be used to communicate, it can be used to send encrypted messages.
What is actually going on with denmark? What is their problem with privacy? Have they always been like that?
I don't know about Denmark, but e.g. in Sweden tax declarations are considered public information. In many areas in the Netherlands, you are able to view the complete ground floor of houses from the street. The idea of privacy differs between cultures.
Nonetheless, I'm convinced every minister of justice would state the same, even in the most privacy fokussed countries.
Nonetheless, I’m convinced every minister of justice would state the same
You are right. But that only shows how hard they are trying to destroy democracy now as the EU and many countries' constitutions consider privacy and the ability to confidentally communicate privately a basic human right.
References:
EU convention on Human Rights: "The European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to respect for private life, the home and correspondence. This includes protecting the privacy of messages, phone calls, and emails. Governments can only interfere with these rights when it is specifically allowed by law, and done for a good reason – like national security or public safety."
Danish constitution: "§ 72 The dwelling shall be inviolable. House search, seizure, and examination of letters and other papers, or any breach of the secrecy that shall be observed in postal, telegraph, and telephone matters, shall not take place except under a judicial order, unless particular exception is warranted by statute."
All those morons could at least openly talk about the fact that they want to change basic constitutional rights. But they don't as people could realize what they are doing then. So it's always the same bullshit of bending and bending laws until they break (or courts object), then pretend to be totally surprised, turn around and try the exact same shit again.
Not only tax declarations, but a lot of public info on car ownerships, court cases, personal address, and so on. "Doxxing" is not really a thing, in the same sense, here. But there used to be somethings that were completely off limits, like contents of postal mail. That used to be considered very much a private thing. Until recently.
It's the current government which is comprised of old parties (well one new party but founded by a well-known politician) full of people who are basically politicians as a career. They care about power and control. Most everything else comes second.
Luckily we have elections soon-ish, but unfortunately people will probably keep voting for these parties, as they've done in the past. It is what it is.
It's happening all over Europe and the US, but especially Europe. Police were used to being able to eavesdrop on any sort of communication. This becomes ever less possible, while at the same time, you have more and more crimes that are committed solely by communicating and can't be prosecuted or even detected without massive internet surveillance. I think the US commitment to "free speech", freedom of information, has a somewhat protective effect.
Of course, these online-only crimes are 99%+ copyright, but even copyright has gained in favor among netizens. Then you have "deep fakes". Bunch of other stuff like holocaust denial. Going after such stuff is quite popular among lemmings, too. And how else are you going to enforce all that?
From the snippets that I read here and there it looks like Denmark has been like this for a long time and it keeps getting worse. They have a very high density of surveillance cameras, loose privacy laws and recently closed their postal services for delivering letters. It only makes sense then to end encryption so you can make no communication whatsoever without the government knowing about every detail.
After all, that is a privilege reserved for politicians.
Does Denmark not have a secret of correspondence/letters kind of constitutional right?
We do and it's part of our constitution (same situation as Germany about not being updated). Not that any of the recent governments have cared about this minor detail.
We only recently got rid of another law, which required logging of calls and texts by telecommunications.
This only ended because the EU courts ruled it was against the right to privacy, and it still took them 8 years to drag their feet following the ruling to abolish the law.
Various government from both sides of the political spectrum have slowly introduced, or paved the way for, more mass surveillance, but the current government has been extremely vocal about surveillance.
Edit: penal code says "sealed" messages are off limits. Not that they care 🙄
We (Germany) do, but it has never been updated to include electronic communication.
That's actually wrong. Art. 10 (1) GG protects the secret of the letter, secret of postal service and the secret of telecommunication (Brief-, Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis).
Doesn't need to be updated, electronic communication was included in the very first draft in 1948.
Our constitutional rights ensure that the police must have a good reason to investigate our correspondence. I suppose the issue with well-encrypted messaging for the state is that even with a good reason, the police can't read the correspondence.
Not that I support this nonsense, just saying.
If it hadn't already been established long ago, vile creeps like Peter Hummelgaard would lobby against postal privacy, too.
would lobby against postal privacy
No, they wouldn't because then the stupid masses might wake up and realize how their rights are stripped away. Instead they always pretend that existing constitutional and other laws would not actually protect communication.
Danes, if you re-elect this man, you are condoning this outrageous position.
Breaking encryption would be an unmitigated disaster, Peter Hummelgaard either doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about or is completely insane.
Both
There's been a lot of that going around...
You know I'm starting to think the Danes just might suck.
Dane here. I don't think we suck. But that guy does.
Don't be racist against all of them just because a few assholes happen to have that citizenship
Not now but it's a democracy. If they keep supporting him in the next elections their society can be judged.
I'm racist against them because they enslaved my gamgamgamgamgamgamgamgamgamgamgamgamgam's sister
They've gone a bit insane
I feel like this man has some mighty nasty skeletons in his closet if he was openly advocating for "rules for thee but not for me"
August 2024, where the minister says: "We have to break with the totally mistaken notion that it is every man's freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services
Are you going to prevent people from using e2e encryption systems that run atop existing non-encrypted systems?
You bet they will. Right now its impractical, because a lot of people of it, but after laws like chat control pass it'll be easier to make encryption illegal altogether because a lot fewer people will go through the hurdles. Only criminals and deviants will use encryption. And you're no deviant, are you citizen?
They say they want to target the criminals, but even if made illegal, those would be the ones to use encryption manually over unsecure channels anyway. Arriving at the same problem as before, only having shafted the general public.
If it was actually about catching criminals they would also care about this kind of thing, but they don't, they wanto to control the masses of generally law-abiding citizens who might maybe install Signal messenger while it's still legal.
So with all this bullshit coming from some great "democratically elected leaders", can i just sign up with some random ass party and say i need encryption because i am a politician?:>
What do the other political parties in denmark say?
Sounds like they need new leadership.
We really do. If you check the stop chat control website, most of our MEP's are against however the government still really pushing for it.
'We must break' and not 'We must convince'.
We must break with the totally erroneous perception that governments have the right to trample on peoples privacy.
The real misconception is that breaking encryption in the big services including Signal and Telegram would stop criminals from using encryption. Unfortunately any compromised service can be used for unbreakable encrypted communication, including gmail. So the only thing this is good for is listening in on our crap..
andway itway isway osay easypay otay egislatelay awayway.
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It's taken only about 35 years for the "free" countries of Europe to adopt the same mindset that the Eastern Bloc used to have. In large parts of Germany, for example, people can still remember how it was when you could expect your government to listen in on any and every private conversation. It wasn't good.
No, it was god. You must be misremembering in your old age :P
At least everyone was well fed and clothed
how many people have you talked to from soviet states? because food insecurity was a serious problem in the highly stratified authoritarian eastern bloc. yes, capitalism kills, but if you understand capitalism to be a system of controlling the workers by having a small cabal owning everything you start to realize the eastern bloc was capitalist as hell
You could even buy a car if you were prepared to wait 10 years for it.
Afraid not: The USSR had all sorts of food supply issues and even intentionally starved people.
The only thing that never ran out was Vodka and Korn. Folks had to wait in line for anything and everything. What a great time it was.
Goddammit, I thought you were being sarcastic before I saw your replies
It's for the same reason. China is starting to dominate the global economy and European countries have to protect theirs. It's unbelievable that they believe that it is a good idea.