Denmark's Justice Minister Calls Encrypted Messaging a False Civil Liberty
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Denmark's Justice Minister has been criticized for calling encrypted messaging a 'false civil liberty', sparking a heated debate about privacy and government surveillance.
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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)
Encryption preserves our right to have private conversations in the digital era, where such surveillance is ubiquitous.
This still works, by the way.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
"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."
Including in the US. The "right to bear arms" doens't cover high-energy explosives.
That... Wouldn't be tolerated if this was a 2nd amendment right. Imagine the same limitations applied to firearms.
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.
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.
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.
In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.
Just don’t write it down encrypted.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.)
consolation
The truth is that this is just another corrupt politician.
"*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules."
source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Those are signs of rot and fungal infection.
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.
Corruption and incompetence, solved.
[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2429354-wissen-sms-jes-door-rutte-vol...
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.
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.
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
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.
These days I learn not to get attached to my message history
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.
(Though to be fair, if we’re comparing South American military dictators, he was actually almost reasonable)
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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We always check the logs and when something goes wrong we vote for the box to explode
no. Regards, Ursula
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127521
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.
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.
(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")
You mean like certain medical issues? You really should tune into a HAM band one of these days.
Ham is useful, there are things about it that make it DIFFERENTLY useful than the internet. (see also number stations)
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.
> 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...
> "Postal and telecommunications secrecy are inviolable."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Constitution_of_t...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So phone taps are illegal in Germany? Police can't record what you're talking on the phone?
This is regulated in the Telekommunikations-Überwachungsverordnung (TKÜV).
Edit: nvm, I didn't see this was about the GDR.
They’re quoting the East German constitution. I think there is a /s missing at the end.
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..
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.
ChatControl is a proposed new law, in compliance with the EU Treaty.
... Unless the EU courts find the law unconstitutionally broad.
Really? That reads as the lowest possible bar. The legislature just needs to pass a law that allows for the snooping and it is then in 100% compliance with that section. Not even to mention "necessary in a democratic society", I can't imagine wording more broad than that.
The German "constitution" is simply not very good.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng
It's really very simple: NO human rights are absolute.
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.
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.
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...
That being said I don't agree that his is necessary.
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