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Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect (theregister.com)
55 points by pseudolus 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



The citizens rights have slowly but surely been eroding over the last couple of years in Sweden, under the guise of protection from gang violence. With the Uk precedence, this might actually pass given the current political climate.

Sad how a country that used to have pirate bay have come to this.


How is this an erosion of citizens rights?

From my understanding, every country in the world have always been able to tap to phone lines to listen to conversations whenever they wanted (sometimes surrounded by laws). And now every country is trying to do the same with electronic communications that were evading this situation.

Of course it will be abused, it always was the case and always will.

I see this more as a wake up call that only face to face communication in private settings are legally private.

Privacy was never automatic before 2000`s, it required effort. It seems people forgot that.


>From my understanding, every country in the world

> it always was the case and always will

>before 2000`s, it required effort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring


How ?

It seems to be a continuation of historical trends where privacy was never automatic but somehow people always forget it.

Is this fundamentally different?


When I was standing in the field in the Middle Ages, harvesting turnips, and I said to the guy next to me: I don't think I like our prince. There was no permanent record of that.

If I was standing at the loom and I said to the weaver next to me: I don't think we're getting enough of a share of the value of our work, then there was no permanent record of that.

Today, if I ask my colleague on MS Teams what he wants for lunch, IT will probably still be able to process that message automatically 30 years from now.

Without a persistent record, privacy was the default. All messages were ephemeral.

Large-scale automated surveillance power is a contemporary anomaly, and it is currently uncertain whether open and democratic societies will survive this very recent and dangerous threat.


You're comparing oral discussion with written discussions.

We got so distracted by shiny new tools that we forgot what it was underneath.

My grandfather, before the modern computer era, used to say "words fade, writings stays".

Trying to prevent government from breaking encryption won't solve the underlying issue that we are naive.


> You're comparing oral discussion with written discussions.

No, I am comparing communication in general and it just so happens that in the past all communication was oral and now we all work from home and converse through large online platforms.

If, in the future, people move their communication to brain implants (help us God - any God), then brain implant telepathy would be the method of communication most in need of protection, to preserve or reclaim the important and centuries-old default of private, unmonitored communication.

New forms of communication do not change or diminish the legitimate and important need for private communication.


We've been using written discussions for thousands of years [1] but people expect the same reality for oral and written.

You and I are both heading towards the same goal, private discussions.

But, I'm saying that it will never happen if there's an electronic device involved and you want it to happen with it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... , written c. 1750 BC.


Am I wrong to expect a letter I send someone via mail to not be opened and read by the post office first? I’ll be damned if I ever reach your level of indifference.


No, you can expect that it won't be read. But nobody can assure you that it never will.

This is the same with email or IM. I don't go around giving my Gmail password to everyone, but I know that many processes at Gmail read my mails.

I don't consider it indifference to know that every written conversation I make could be read by someone.

Nobody should blindly trust anyone telling you the opposite.


Don't blindly trust it, but that's the whole point of end to end encryption!


That's the whole point of this thread that end to end encryption like Signal faces threat from government. End to end encryption means nothing if you downloaded binary from app store and some entity controls the binary. They could potentially turn off end to end for specific user without the user noticing that.


What's the point of encryption? It's to protect data for some time, not forever.

All encryption can (and will) be broken.

I was there when Md5 became obsolete and was replaced with Sha-1 ( made by the nsa) which is now also obsolete.

I was there when all 8 letters password on windows could be cracked in minutes. And discovered that windows kept a copy of the hash locally, unless your password was +15chars.

Don't blindly trust end to end encryption.


Everyone seems to be cheering for this, but I think it's important to remember that Swedes have a need for private, secure communications just like the rest of us. If they've already gotten their normie friends to switch to Signal, I highly doubt they'll be ecstatic about moving apps again. This is bad for people that depend on Signal, period.


Who is cheering, other than clueless boomer politicians?


This law is probably not legal though. The data storage directive wasn't, this probably isn't either.

Obviously we have parliamentary sovereignty, so if parliament actually wants it done, then it's the law, but they probably would not exercise parliamentary sovereignty in a case like this which would be dubious treaty-wise once there's a legal judgement against in something like the ECHR.

There's a reason this is being considered though, and it's kind of a problem. People probably genuinely believe that unless they can go through stuff that people say, a bunch of the foreigners would cause problems that be dealt with as society is presently organized.


This is how you actually take a stance unlike the cowards at apple





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