
American Tech Giants Face Fight in Europe Over Encrypted Data - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/technology/american-tech-giants-face-fight-in-europe-over-encrypted-data.html?src=busln&_r=0
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jbapple
The article says, "The recent attacks have pushed many Europeans to favor
greater powers for law enforcement over privacy," but the only direct evidence
for this claim is quotes from high-level government employees.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, there are a number of issues
about which surveying congress would give you very different results from
surveying the actual residents.

Furthermore, no evidence is presented that the recent terror attacks changed
the minds of the politicians quoted in this article; before the recent terror
attacks, there were already high-level government employees who thought there
should be encryption backdoors, I presume. Are those politicians just getting
more press now?

~~~
mtgx
There may be an increase in numbers for those that would now be okay with more
surveillance, but probably not very significant. I bet there are a lot more
politicians who are now ok with it, though, and they will try to sell it to
the population as the "solution" to stopping terrorism - even though, once
again, they _knew_ who the guy was, and they could've used a regular warrant
to wiretap him.

What pisses me off the most is that after all of these events, it seems nobody
from the intelligence community ever resigns or gets fired. Because, of course
they must've done their job "flawlessly", and you can't blame them. It's
everyone else's fault _but theirs_.

I hope they won't push for too much besides more public surveillance, though.
Because I think the EU could become more of a "safe haven" for US tech
companies that want to flee a US government wanting to backdoor encryption or
demand that they don't use end-to-end encryption for their services. That
could really pay off for the EU economically, in the long term.

~~~
rdudek
What pisses me off more is that law enforcement are debating encryption issues
while the terrorists are using low-tech devices and attacks to cause the
damage.

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studentrob
> Britain .. where expanded powers for the country’s intelligence services are
> likely to come into force by the end of the year. The legislation is the
> brainchild of the ruling Conservative Party, which has a sufficient
> parliamentary majority to enact the regulatory changes.

I wonder how they plan to stop terrorists from using encryption that is
available through free and open source software. Censor the entire internet?
Scan every memory chip coming into the country and delete any unreadable data?
This plan becomes impractical very quickly.

~~~
junto
Using RIPA 2000 they can still put you in prison for up to 2 years for
refusing to give up your encryption key.

You make an interesting point though. If the terrorists know it is dangerous
for them to use the internet using accounts linked to them, then they will
just find a way around it. Hack the neighbours WiFi, use public WiFi in
Starbucks, go into the public library etc. Good forbid that might just talk
face to face or use burner phones (which they are).

The desire for a complete surveillance society is based on a ridiculous
political supposition that Big Brother makes our world safer. No more
terrorists and paedophiles. It is easier than trying to make the big changes
necessary in order to really tackle these problems.

I have no idea how we tackle paedophiles, but with Islamic fundamental
terrorism, it would be a monometallic step if we, in the West, could do our
meddling and remove or troops from "their lands", which has been a bone of
contention since Bin Laden's first attempt on New York.

We aren't the world police force and we also need to stop dealing with
countries like Saudi Arabia who prop up our defence industries and military
industrial complex.

~~~
pascalmemories
> Using RIPA 2000 they can still put you in prison for up to 2 years for
> refusing to give up your encryption key.

2 years for non terrorism related cases. 5 years for anything "national
security" related.

e.g. model plane enthusiast with mental health issues?
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/)
worth reading the whole thing as it does a lot of analysis and gives lots of
detail.

~~~
junto
Oh God. That's worse than I thought!

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Gys
So in a bad scenario every country gets its own backdoor. Hundreds of
backdoors, each accessible by hunderds of employees. And all those people can
access every single aspects of my life at any time.

O yes, I feel very safe now...

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makeitsuckless
For fuck sake, how can you have such a blatantly anti-European headline and
pad the article with anti-European propaganda phrasings like "Europe’s
attempts to get access to encrypted data" when the same fucking article itself
states that major sovereign nations that are both on the European continent
_and_ founding members of the EU support encryption as a fundamental right?

The straw man evil "Europe" portrayed in this article quite obviously doesn't
exist.

