10 ms·

EU Police Chiefs want an end to end-to-end encryption

92 points by Unfrozen0688 2y ago

Kim_Bruning 2y ago
I read this as "European Police Chiefs want everyone to leave their digital keys under the doormat". I always have the idea that police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize that their way of thinking about security is still somewhere last century. I mean, I don't even mean it to be insulting or anything. People can't be good at everything. It seems that police I've met so far (n<10) are pretty awesome people, but they don't seem to be particularly security conscious qua electronic security. Else the police chiefs would (for one) realize that they need that end-to-end encryption themselves. It's a fairly basic building block, you'd think. OTOH, maybe my impression is wrong, and there are exceptionally skilled police people who I've just never met? But why would they be advising their chiefs so badly then?
- zarzavat 2y ago
  They are trying to maximize their power to their own advantage, just like everyone else. (Un)fortunately it’s way too late to ban e2e encryption for anyone who really wants it (i.e. nerds and criminals), but they might end up banning it for the general public out of spite.
  - loa_in_ 2y ago
    Yes, they're trying to make their jobs easier, even if it undermines everything else. In fact that is such a big part of their lives that they'll be done and retired without ever experiencing the fallout, so they do not care.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- pyuser583 2y ago
  The problem isn’t outdated thinking. Outdated thinking is fine. Conventional police tactics, and surveillance, work just great with encryption. The problem is a very futuristic vision of what surveillance should look like.
- JPLeRouzic 2y ago
  > police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize It is smarter and simpler than that: Once the use of encryption keys is banned, everyone using one will label himself "I am a terrorist" and will be at least annoyed endlessly by the judicial system. https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discussion-during-the-8-december-trial-from-myth-to-reality/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...
- outime 2y ago
  It's not a bug, it's a feature. In other words, I don't think they're being ignorant at all. They've been pushing this angle from different places in the EU and this is one more. They won't stop until it's a reality.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 2y ago
  I've met some very nice literal communists, who wanted to abolish money. I think that's about the same level of wrong as cops trying to abolish encryption — I can see what they're saying and why, but the world can't be as they want it to be.
  - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
    To be fair; if we abolish money, quite a number of crimes become impractical to say the least. I could almost imagine the collective police chiefs writing the same document except for :%s/e2e/money/g . It would be roughly as practical in 2024, so that's a neat argument!
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Once the encryption is banned, the next step will be for online safety czars to censor speech they disagree with, even in private communications. No thanks.
- JPLeRouzic 2y ago
  In France, there are many laws against free speech (lois mémorielles, anti haine en ligne, anti Le Pen, anti fake news (including criticizing the government), etc...). https://www.laquadrature.net/en/censorship/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/censorship/ Refusing to disclose encryption keys could lead you to be prosecuted for “terrorist criminal association”. https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discussion-during-the-8-december-trial-from-myth-to-reality/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...
zx8080 2y ago
The aim is probably not social security, but political power through total censorship.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  The aim might actually be innocent, but it leads to abuse of power. The imbalance of power is common and inevitable, the abuse of power needs some prerequisites. One of those is knowing so much that you know you can get away with the abuse.
anonzzzies 2y ago
Almost everyone in any kind of power wants this except for themselves of course. It has nothing to do with 'the children' or 'crime'; they are not that naive. But some politicians who believe the crime & children narrative while not being in the same court as the censoring crowd might be naive enough to vote for it. It's a world wide illness and it should be prevented.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I feel your vibe as I also distrust authority, but no, it's not "nothing" to do with kids and crime — calls for an end to crypto are foolish and misguided, crypto tech is too simple to inhibit and blocking access to it creates opportunities for criminals to do crimes, any competent criminal group can roll their own crypto from open source projects… but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too, just like there are plenty of non-competent legally operating corporations. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, organised criminals for one, that way they know what they can get away with. I know where I want to end up, but not how to get there from here: The Culture (Iain M Banks) is a surveillance anarchy where everyone is able to watch anyone at any time, and yet nobody really cares what you do.
  - hsvs6 2y ago
    No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Almost everyone carries at least one microphone and two cameras on their person at all times, along with a WiFi system that researchers have demonstrated can be used as a wall-penetrating radar capable of pose estimation, heart-rate sensing, and breath sensing. Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system. Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures. A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police. At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program. We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.
protocolture 2y ago
Thats funny, I want an end to EU police chiefs.
- snowpid 2y ago
  Ok, why?
  - P_I_Staker 2y ago
    This.
  - lelijke 2y ago
    to start of the officer that proposed this is from belgium, same country where a dude that gets caugth with csam gets no punishment to make matters worse i know of at least 2 whistleblowers that try to make this known to the public one of them was the officer that a victim testified to... the officer that took that testimony is not alowed by order of court to not mention the victim if he does so he will get imediatly put behind bars... if you do the research you'll quickly see what is going on and if that is not a good reason for it to end i rather end myself than having to witness all this for much longer
xchip 2y ago
Everybody in the town knows who the drug lords are and where they live, the police apparently not, that is why they need to monitor us.
BSDobelix 2y ago
>Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. We have to fight that, bring crime back to the streets i say!! So we can stay at home and feel safe.
- torginus 2y ago
  Imagine all those evil people saying mean things to each other over the internet!
CRConrad 2y ago
From TFA: > Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle, said: > Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. To keep our society and people safe, we need this digital environment to be secured. Well yeah, as per the traditional definition of "to be secured", that's exactly what stuff like end-to-end encryption is for. Seems like the problem is just that the European Police Chiefs apparently have a different definition of "to be secured". So tell me, dear European Police Chiefs, whom do you think I should want my communications to be secured from? Aha, not you, you say? Well, sorry, I beg to differ.
gmerc 2y ago
They probably want everyone to have glass walls in their house too. Doesn’t mean they should get it either. London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly.
- kmlx 2y ago
  > London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly. any link for the crime claim? i checked multiple websites, and while hard to measure, London as a whole is not even in the top 10 european cities when it comes to crime.
  - hactually 2y ago
    they may be adjusting for cameras per capita which it does lead on
LunaSea 2y ago
Can't wait for this law to be struck down as not being compatible with GDPR. If you can't correctly encrypt messages on disk and in transit you can't guarantee that you secured user's personal data.
lelijke 2y ago
[flagged]

92 points by Unfrozen0688 2y ago

I read this as "European Police Chiefs want everyone to leave their digital keys under the doormat". I always have the idea that police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize that their way of thinking about security is still somewhere last century. I mean, I don't even mean it to be insulting or anything. People can't be good at everything. It seems that police I've met so far (n<10) are pretty awesome people, but they don't seem to be particularly security conscious qua electronic security. Else the police chiefs would (for one) realize that they need that end-to-end encryption themselves. It's a fairly basic building block, you'd think. OTOH, maybe my impression is wrong, and there are exceptionally skilled police people who I've just never met? But why would they be advising their chiefs so badly then?

zarzavat 2y ago
They are trying to maximize their power to their own advantage, just like everyone else. (Un)fortunately it’s way too late to ban e2e encryption for anyone who really wants it (i.e. nerds and criminals), but they might end up banning it for the general public out of spite.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  Yes, they're trying to make their jobs easier, even if it undermines everything else. In fact that is such a big part of their lives that they'll be done and retired without ever experiencing the fallout, so they do not care.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pyuser583 2y ago
The problem isn’t outdated thinking. Outdated thinking is fine. Conventional police tactics, and surveillance, work just great with encryption. The problem is a very futuristic vision of what surveillance should look like.
JPLeRouzic 2y ago
> police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize It is smarter and simpler than that: Once the use of encryption keys is banned, everyone using one will label himself "I am a terrorist" and will be at least annoyed endlessly by the judicial system. https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discussion-during-the-8-december-trial-from-myth-to-reality/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...
outime 2y ago
It's not a bug, it's a feature. In other words, I don't think they're being ignorant at all. They've been pushing this angle from different places in the EU and this is one more. They won't stop until it's a reality.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 2y ago
I've met some very nice literal communists, who wanted to abolish money. I think that's about the same level of wrong as cops trying to abolish encryption — I can see what they're saying and why, but the world can't be as they want it to be.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  To be fair; if we abolish money, quite a number of crimes become impractical to say the least. I could almost imagine the collective police chiefs writing the same document except for :%s/e2e/money/g . It would be roughly as practical in 2024, so that's a neat argument!

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Once the encryption is banned, the next step will be for online safety czars to censor speech they disagree with, even in private communications. No thanks.

JPLeRouzic 2y ago
In France, there are many laws against free speech (lois mémorielles, anti haine en ligne, anti Le Pen, anti fake news (including criticizing the government), etc...). https://www.laquadrature.net/en/censorship/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/censorship/ Refusing to disclose encryption keys could lead you to be prosecuted for “terrorist criminal association”. https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discussion-during-the-8-december-trial-from-myth-to-reality/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...

zx8080 2y ago

The aim is probably not social security, but political power through total censorship.

loa_in_ 2y ago
The aim might actually be innocent, but it leads to abuse of power. The imbalance of power is common and inevitable, the abuse of power needs some prerequisites. One of those is knowing so much that you know you can get away with the abuse.

anonzzzies 2y ago

Almost everyone in any kind of power wants this except for themselves of course. It has nothing to do with 'the children' or 'crime'; they are not that naive. But some politicians who believe the crime & children narrative while not being in the same court as the censoring crowd might be naive enough to vote for it. It's a world wide illness and it should be prevented.

ben_w 2y ago
I feel your vibe as I also distrust authority, but no, it's not "nothing" to do with kids and crime — calls for an end to crypto are foolish and misguided, crypto tech is too simple to inhibit and blocking access to it creates opportunities for criminals to do crimes, any competent criminal group can roll their own crypto from open source projects… but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too, just like there are plenty of non-competent legally operating corporations. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, organised criminals for one, that way they know what they can get away with. I know where I want to end up, but not how to get there from here: The Culture (Iain M Banks) is a surveillance anarchy where everyone is able to watch anyone at any time, and yet nobody really cares what you do.
- hsvs6 2y ago
  No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Almost everyone carries at least one microphone and two cameras on their person at all times, along with a WiFi system that researchers have demonstrated can be used as a wall-penetrating radar capable of pose estimation, heart-rate sensing, and breath sensing. Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system. Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures. A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police. At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program. We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.

protocolture 2y ago

Thats funny, I want an end to EU police chiefs.

snowpid 2y ago
Ok, why?
- P_I_Staker 2y ago
  This.
- lelijke 2y ago
  to start of the officer that proposed this is from belgium, same country where a dude that gets caugth with csam gets no punishment to make matters worse i know of at least 2 whistleblowers that try to make this known to the public one of them was the officer that a victim testified to... the officer that took that testimony is not alowed by order of court to not mention the victim if he does so he will get imediatly put behind bars... if you do the research you'll quickly see what is going on and if that is not a good reason for it to end i rather end myself than having to witness all this for much longer

xchip 2y ago

Everybody in the town knows who the drug lords are and where they live, the police apparently not, that is why they need to monitor us.

BSDobelix 2y ago

>Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. We have to fight that, bring crime back to the streets i say!! So we can stay at home and feel safe.

torginus 2y ago
Imagine all those evil people saying mean things to each other over the internet!

CRConrad 2y ago

From TFA: > Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle, said: > Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. To keep our society and people safe, we need this digital environment to be secured. Well yeah, as per the traditional definition of "to be secured", that's exactly what stuff like end-to-end encryption is for. Seems like the problem is just that the European Police Chiefs apparently have a different definition of "to be secured". So tell me, dear European Police Chiefs, whom do you think I should want my communications to be secured from? Aha, not you, you say? Well, sorry, I beg to differ.

gmerc 2y ago

They probably want everyone to have glass walls in their house too. Doesn’t mean they should get it either. London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly.

kmlx 2y ago
> London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly. any link for the crime claim? i checked multiple websites, and while hard to measure, London as a whole is not even in the top 10 european cities when it comes to crime.
- hactually 2y ago
  they may be adjusting for cameras per capita which it does lead on

LunaSea 2y ago

Can't wait for this law to be struck down as not being compatible with GDPR. If you can't correctly encrypt messages on disk and in transit you can't guarantee that you secured user's personal data.

lelijke 2y ago

[flagged]