I'm french, i have not heard any people, work, street, even television or internet speak about that.
The sad truth is that it wouldn't even solve the issue, criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications. there are open source software that can't be tampered with, software that doesn't use a single server where backdoor can be put, or they could even simply encrypt their text message. i could do that from my mac terminal and Bruno Retailleau isn't going to put a backdoor in my mac terminal...
What about using the probability that a specific race or religion will commit crimes then target those people with aggressive tactics.
As for the public they could make those people feel unwelcomed through constant harassment in the hopes they leave the country.
Thus reducing the crime rate by any means.
----
I checked the murder rate and it's been on a downward trajectory for the last 30 years
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...
I haven't check other stats but what if your views on crime are being manipulated by people who have agenda that normally wouldn't be possible if the true reason was revealed?
Crime? Immigrants are doing it. Retirement age? Immigrants are spending the money.
These things are not backed up by data, but just like the US, or Nazi Germany, nobody cares, simply easier to choose an easy "solution" and blame immigrants.
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5763585?sommaire=576363...
That is a known fact. Criminality rate drops but french people are feeling more and more insecure.
There is a media oligarchy in France (by billionaires) that pushes anything but left ideas (the left want an exit tax and a wealth tax, the last one is the Zucman tax). The idea that immigrants are criminals is easy to spread as the prison population is clearly different than the mean population of France (for various reasons). They are pushing it so hard that the population is feeling insecure even if the criminality rate drops.
Source about media oligarchy by billionaires: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/M%...
People survive murders because medicine has gotten better. There are more attempts. It’s just that people survive them.
Also, you can’t report crimes against occupants (I know by experience). So yes, crime reports fall.
There used to be a increase of crime but it was because of what the law counts as a crime. And no, non-lethal crime didn't increase so it is not about medicine that is getting better.
France is under occupation by invaders like when France was under occupation by Nazi Germany. Can’t talk. Can’t complain. Can’t address the occupiers.
And we can’t talk about occupation. Like you’re doing now: Downvoting me to hide my speech, so that there is no problem. No crime is a problem if you can move the people who were hurt far enough from your social circle.
Parisians have developed this unique trait of being about to dodge the identity of the people while talking about it: “Man this block is so dangerous, but it’s impressive how one block away, it’s safe. Maybe it’s because it was renovated. The other day, that women arrived at 10 pm, it was dark, the police arrived too late. But I don’t understand, the municipality installed flower pots all along the street, should be safer now!”
See, never mentioning the cause because it’s socially too dangerous.
If this keeps up, we're going to ban you. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Actually, you're right about murders, but you're wrong overall i'd say. Organized crime is on the rise since 2004? Maybe a bit before.
Politicians "reformed" the police, removed our "proximity police" which were basically social workers with physical and weapon training, who also were a great point of contact for future informants as it built a lot of trust in some cities (mostly western and northern France: it didn't work as well in the south and in Paris, but it worked truly great were i lived and their removal killed a lot of initiatives. My bet is that the failure in Marseille and Paris killed the initiative which worked great in small to medium cities).
And then circa 2008 they added another police reform that basically pushed police towards targeting petty criminals. Petty criminals turned to organized crime "en masse", and nowaday you have basically 3 crime families who run most of the crime in France. They reached Paris around 2011-2014, divided it cleanly around 2017 (i've heard multiple people talking about a missile launcher sighted in the 93 around 2015-2016 when i lived there, in at least 2 different location) and now politicians act surprised.
> French want less criminals and immigrants in the street. Whatever it takes.
Maybe it's because I spent most of my time in big cities hanging out with relatively well-educated, often left-leaning, relatively young people, but I'm not getting that vibe at all.
Yes, you do have pathological cases of badly integrated immigrant communities - for example the quartiers Nord de Marseille, and yes, I've known more working class people who have to endure abuse from anti-social immigrant drug dealers to express some pretty far right views, but I'm not sure that reflects the majority of the French population. I don't watch the news much, but when I do I don't see anything about issues with integration, mostly stuff about Ukraine and Trump.
They just said that they hadn't observed the same thing in their entourage.
> Some had to crawl, bleeding on the floor, reciting to Coran.
Are you referring to a recent event in France? Can't find any with the query "réciter coran otage". That quote makes France look like a war zone.
> Some pupils grow under oppression, having to donate their lunch meal every day.
> Some had to give their mobile phone.
Are you making a link with "occupants" from the first sentence? Because bullying and assault didn't wait for immigration to exist, and criminality in general is caused by so much factors that makes the analysis harder than just looking at correlations.
> some people are thrown in the Seine.
Search for "jeté dans la Seine" (thrown in the Seine):
- [20 years ago] Brahim Bouraam: murder of a Moroccan in Paris by a far-right militant [0]
- [5 days ago] A jogger thrown into the Seine by a drunken German, another bystander injured [1]
I don't think you referred to those actions.
> But as long as you give occupants priority and respect in your life, and you respect them
Nobody said something remotely related to that in the thread.
> don’t say anything about the occupied zone
...
I hope that you can still find some enjoyment in the dystopian alternate reality you're experiencing.
PS: I lived in a hot district. I haven't been assaulted but I know someone who has been. It hasn't been perpetrated by an immigrant, and nothing happened after. He hasn't been caught, police closed the case, and life went on. It makes me think the problem here is not related to immigrants. But that's anecdata anyway. A study apparently found no correlation between immigration and criminality [2].
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Brahim_Bouraam
[1]: https://www.20minutes.fr/faits_divers/faits-divers-paris/414...
[2]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/04/23/no-study...
Is that truly not the case in France? I'd be curious as to the results of a study comparing this effect across both countries.
False statistics.
Let’s call it a strange anomaly that when we get racketeered, it’s arabs, when my car’s bumper was broken, it was by an arab, when I got punched in the metro, it was an arab, when my relative was raped at 7, it was an arab, and we literally have anti-muslim bollards around every school in my country to prevent arabs from using trucks to maul 70 people like they did in Nice, and other anti-muslim metal detector in every Christmas market “because we’re safe”, which cost us millions on top of freedoms we lose,
…but according to YOUR statistics, immigration makes us SAFER.
Between a reality that I can witness and has material reality, and your statistics, I choose that you are blatantly falsifying truth in order to commit a crime against humanity. Because we’re real people dying in my country and this is by design from you, as demonstrated by the orders to kill mécréants by Algerian influencers.
Or maybe you don’t have problems because you’re Muslims.
Yes. Many people feel unsafe, are affected by crime, or feel they are. Yes, people are afraid. Whether they are, statistically actually more unsafe, or not (most often aren't) matters little. If people have a problem with criminal behaviour or abuse, they have a problem with criminal behaviour or abuse. Regardless of where that comes from. Being beaten up by three Moroccans hurts just as much as being beaten up by three Frenchies whose great grandparents were also born in Marseille.
It honestly doesn't help. First and foremost because many people will now dismiss the problems you may adress, simply because they are drowned in what appears racism, or at least ignorance.
You've heard of the Italian Mafia? A criminal organization where ethnicity was literally a criteria for admission? Or, while not criminal, Jewish diamond merchants? Having a specific ethnic group specialize in a certain type of commercial activity isn't new.
When that activity is trafficking drugs from Morocco, against the wishes of the local state, it's not surprising that the organization is largely composed of people who happen to share a common language, culture and ethnicity with Morroco.
And if you're wondering why Morocco, well that's where all the hashish is grown.
You've possibly been to "Chinatown" in a large city (say NYC). Now remplace east Asian immigration with North Africa immigration, replace the stereotypical restaurants and dry cleaners with drug dealing, and you have north Marseille.
This unfortunate fact actually drives a lot of the racism. If you ignore it because it sounds racist well... The problem will remain, refusing to accept that there currently is an ethnic group that dominates illegal drug trafficking in a certain place, due to ties with the source of the drug doesn't make it any less true.
Similarly, of you're smuggling cocaine into the US, speaking Spanish is a really good trait to have. Because the country that produces most of the cocaine speaks that language.
If there's a clear, proven answer to that, one that works obviously better than other methods to solve or prevent it, then by all means: name this parameter.
In all other cases, it helps nothing. If anything, its counterproductive.
Let me give an example: a significant portion of Dutch heavy criminals, in the niche of harddrug trafficking were raised in poverty (relatively, its still the netherlands), in tough neighborhoods, by parents/families that often fall partly outside of the established social constructs.
If you look carefully, non of these parameters are "of certain ethnicity", but the enthnic group underlies many of these parameters. A populist politician, or racist, would say "they are all Marroccan". Which, except for the absolutists "all" is true, even. But it doesn't help one bit in preventing this crime, catching the criminals or preventing new kids to become the next generation.
What helps is finding the traits that do lead to them turning criminal; many of these traits may stem from their ethnic background. Mind you: these traits are by no means excuses, merely traits that allow a clearer and more effective treatment of the societal illness that these criminals are.
(Source: my ex treated a.o. criminals at a TBS. Where phyches "dissect" these people in order to treat them so that some might some day return to society)
If that were true, France would have a vastly different immigration policy. It would even have an explicit, drastic, and targeted emigration policy.
Well, half /s anyways. Working class don't want them because "they're taking our jobs". Middle class don't want them because "blah blah security". Upper class want them because that's cheap labour. And as it happens, the upper class is the class in power.
Most french don't care. But this still creates tensions, even between immigrants, say for like housing. As we say in french, it's a "bourbier".
In the end, it's the same situation as in any other country where immigration has taken over the frontline of the political debate.
And the sad reality, the maintainers for most useful OSS projects are essentially paid employees of a company. Which can be easily enticed/forced by governments.
And then there's the hardware manufacturers. Even the most hardened software running atop compromised hardware becomes worthless.
That's relevant knowledge. It's not the relevant knowledge. Another piece of relevant knowledge is facts about complex things like political science, cryptography, etc. Since politicians actually need to decide and implement things, as a side gig to being popular, lack of the proper knowledge to do so is a shortcoming.
> I would like to know what the public opinion on these issues is
Not big sample sizes, but I regularly ask and interview people from all sides of life, and to a simple question like "Do you think the police should spy on you if that catches criminals?" the answer is always a resounding "no". Especially young people. They just way "No way. We're not criminals". They "arguments" may be choppy, muddy waters, but I don't think peoples feelings about being spied on is much of a mystery.
Unlike French media, Swedish media does not have a well-developed tradition of confronting those in power and/or demanding accountability.
I often get frustrated by how easily interviewees dodge direct questions by answering something completely different, and get a "thank you" from the journalist in return, instead of a follow-up question.
We have a looong and storied tradition of not liking the government, starting with our first revolution in 1789, continuing in 1830 and 1848, and further reinforced by the Nazi occupation during WW2. When I went to England, I heard the joke "where are all the French people? Oh right, probably on strike again".
I feel like some people would probably go out and protest if the government went so far as to suggest that maybe regular tooth brushing might be a good idea, just out of principle.
No revolutions, unless explicitly permitted by the government.
Actually makes me a bit worried given the recent geopolitical development in the world.
If you tell your voters: "I will force those tech people to develop encryption that can be accessed by the good guys but not by the bad guys", the average voter will say "yeah, that sounds reasonable".
I am frustrated that the politicians don't understand that they are making it worse for everybody, but that's probably a consequence of their voters not understanding it either. That's always the problem with complicated issues (e.g. climate change or covid). Voters typically vote without having a basic understanding of the topic.
They would argue about the damages drugs do.
I think they know what they are doing. Digital privacy has no lobby outside of EEF. We donate more than $10k to them annually.
If one of them finds a way to patent drugs that are currently illegal or otherwise profit from it, legalization will happen.
Honestly, in many places, legalization has already happened, look at the coffee shops in the Netherlands and the dispensaries in North America.
The police industrial complex might be attached to their cash cow, but everyone else in the capitalist system wants to get rich too, and I suspect in the long run that'll win out.
Also, much as how after a few thousand years of civilization people eventually wised up to human sacrifice wasn't actually a good idea and was not in any way required to make the sun come up, maybe at some point in the future we'll realize that harsh criminal penalties don't actually solve the drug problem.
France has some of the strictest laws against cannabis use in Europe, and also some of the highest rates of consumption, or at least it did last time I checked.
Some of it, certainly, but I doubt it's all. Violence committed by druggies trying to scrape up enough for their next hit would still happen.
Also, addicts stealing from their moms would still happen, which is regrettable even if it is not violence.
If drugs were not prohibited, they would not cost so much as to cause "scraping up enough".
How come I can buy 50 liters of isopropanol (99.(9) whatever, dehydrated, better than medical eth) for like 20 euro, but no luck for ethanol. Even while ethanol is that much cheaper to produce?
> Violence committed by druggies trying to scrape up enough for their next hit would still happen.
It's almost none, because those things don't cost enough to ruin a person's life. Even for most of the serious addicts.
The "war on drugs" probably brings violence associated with drugs, but drugs in general bring harm (when someone becomes an addict or dies because of an overdose, it does harm to the relatives). Nobody would care about drugs if it didn't.
The Wikipedia article notes that the redefining of pi was specifically not an aim of the bill, pi not being mentioned in it.
What's this have to do with right wing? Can't we have a civil discussion about tech impact in society without making it all about how only one political affiliation is always evil wile the other is always righteous?
Abuse on freedom of speech, spying and censorship is bad no matter which political side does it, and they all do it, so leave your political grumbles at home, this aint the place, hence flagged.
And then of course actual (or especially far) left adopted authoritarian policies whenever they had any power regardless of any of their past rhetoric (conservatives are at least occasionally honest about what they want to do)
Do you see any conservatives firebombing people's private property right now, or is it only the "tolerant left" doing it?
How much online free speech was censored under the leadership of the left in the years prior, all under the guise of "protecting free speech" and "creating safe spaces"?
One can abuse the "think of the children" emotional arguments to justify a lot of fascist totalitarian behavior and policies, all in the name of "good". Remember: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
So any destruction of private property due to political or ideological reasons is inherently "fascist"?
Anyway not that this justifies anything but wouldn't insurance pay for the destroyed Teslas? If so the terrorists are doing those people a service in an indirect since they would be able to buy a car they wouldn't have to be ashamed of driving anymore, so win-win (as long as nobody is harmed, there is no valuable stuff in the car etc.)
And just to be clear, even if you are responding in a tongue in cheek way. One person is joking about damaging physical property, and you're joking about about sending that person to prison for 20 years for their sarcastic remark. Do you really think a Tesla is more valuable than a human life? Do you really think a low effort joke is more valuable than a human life?
I mean it's horrible if you car is destroyed by dumb and violent people (just burning lithium batteries makes it much worse, which IMHO is the greater crime but that's somewhat tangential) but if it doesn't affect you financial it's not a big deal and you are much less of a victim than the fire fighters who have to put out that fire.
Damage to property seems secondary and barely significant compared to uncontrolled burning of dangerous materials. Thinking otherwise is quite something...
Fascism is a right-wing political ideology, not a set of personal/non-governmental behaviors and actions.
So while this is a series of words that grammatically forms of a structurally valid sentence, it doesn't actually have any meaning.
However, it is my experience that people using the phrase “tolerant left” aren’t frequently interested in discussions grounded in reality.
It's my fault I got involved in the silly discussion in the first place since nobody starting a discussion with blaming "the right wing", is fully allright in the head. We closed down the asylums, and so they moved online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_bla...
Unless you're claiming that it's literally impossible to construct a cipher with multiple decryption keys, I don't see how you're implying that asking for a backdoor "proves they don't understand the very basics of how encryption works".
Their stance differs from yours due to their values being different from yours, not due to inferior literacy.
These folks very well understand that bad people can steal keys. Stolen keys have been a thing since antiquity. It's not rocket science they don't understand. Every single key in history has had a risk of theft and this is no exception.
The truth is a lot of them understand this just like you. But unlike you, they are willing to accept this risk. You aren't. That's fine. You have a value disagreement -- you don't think the risk is worth it, and they think it is. Which is why you make arguments about the merits of the issue, instead of attacking the other side on their basic literacy. Just because you disagree on values that doesn't mean the other side is stupid or illiterate about the basics.
This isn't about politeness either, it's actively counterproductive to your own cause: insulting people and showing that you lack a basic understanding of their position is a sure-fire way to make sure they dig their heels in and continue to oppose you regardless of the merits of the situation. i.e. it's a grest strategy for losing in the end.
On another level, pushing a compromised update to every phone in Europe (to gain access equivalent to having a copy of the backdoor) would be noticed by the publisher, and the binary difference would quickly be found by security researchers.
They're not concerned about their own security. They believe that they will have access to tools that will make them safe, but that "those people" will be deterred, and it is acceptable to give up some basic safety for many to catch "the bad people."
And, historically, they weren't necessarily wrong. The problem is more that all of the tradeoffs and probabilities from history have been thrown at the window, because it is now trivially easy to phish the majority of a population and getting a master key gives you access to hundreds of millions of individuals that you can reach from around the globe rather than a couple dozen that you can get to in person from a particular apartment complex.
Understanding encryption is not the problem. Understanding scale is the problem.
Technical nit:
I (mis?)remember reading in a cryptography book (by Schneier?) that the NSA has at least one algorithm where the decryption key is different than the encryption key, but my search-fu finds no references to it online. The application would be for devices in 'hostile territory' where there was a risk of capture of the unit and so you didn't want the other side to be able to alter data/firmware since the cipher that is available is decrypt only.
However, see perhaps:
* https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/abstracts/traitors.html
* https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/39397/one-encrypt...
Also, see n-of-m algorithms:
There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption".
While I oppose building backdoors, I don't really agree with this claim. There's nothing incoherent about developing a threat model.
If you increase the number of backdoor keys needed to decrypt by enough, and have these keys be stored only on hardware that is meant to make it infeasible to extract the key from it, and if these machines are distributed among a sufficiently large and varied group, maybe that could work as reasonable oversight to prevent the backdoor from being used outside of select cases?
Edit: to be clear, I don’t want this. Just trying to map out what positions could reasonably be held / what options there are.
To me (and I think that's the position of cryptography-aware people), requesting a backdoor is a risk so high that it makes absolutely no sense.
Of course, they understand that if an adversary gets access to the backdoor, then it's game over. And of course, they believe that it's possible to prevent the adversary from accessing the backdoor. But that's my whole point: their believing this means that they don't understand the problem.
Even if you don't have the encryption keys you can read messages by breaking into a phone and taking screenshots, for example.
What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional athletes of lying and obfuscation.
no more naughty business!
Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.
But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of anything technical.
Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
they are, most tech worker didn't know how cryptography works under the hood and yet you expect politician to know it??? nah its just intelligence agency make a request to parlement of some shit
OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada).
OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.
How long ago was that?
"We should have a backdoor for law enforcement", okay but what if that abused by some regime that doesn't like Jews, Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, communists, authors, journalists... you? Obviously THOSE people shouldn't have access to a backdoor. Okay, but if you do it EU wide then Hungary will have access to it. Okay, only Western European nations should have access. What if AFD wins in Germany or Groupe Rassemblement National in France? Okay, in THAT case the backdoor access should be revoked. Who decides that?
It's very clear that politicians want backdoors in encryption, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. Those circumstances are almost completely tied to their own parliamentary seats. If questioned long enough, most of them will see it issue, they probably won't admit it though.
So no, not dumb, just incredibly short sighted on almost irreversible decisions that can and will hurt the wrong people.
There may be exceptions, of course, but over and over again, when one checks the background of politicians in high positions, one finds out, that they simply inherited a lot, and never worked in the field they are making decisions about, nor actually in any other field. They "just became politicians". And even then they misuse funds, cars for private trips, first class tickets on means of transportation, let themselves be bought by lobbies, have prospect of some corporate board later, have even more side income than they are being already paid for their badly done job as a politician, and so on and on. Many one could outright call despicable.
The problem is, that we let them do it. Going into politics is such a clusterf' that no normal person even wants to do it any longer. It only attracts those kinds of person we see there. Others are sidelined or never join politics in the first place. Then we also don't vote/kick/protest them out of office the moment we hear about their crimes.
Hanlon’s razor isn’t always true, sometimes it really is malice. Considering EU ministers want to exempt themselves from Chat Control, that suggests to me they do understand enough of the basics.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...
That link was the first random link that popped up, that, from memory, was illustrating the theme at hand.
No, I wasn't willing to do a deep dive into the putrid sewer of child abuse to satisfy the need for a "better" link.
It's upsetting enough to know that these things exist, and I have absolutely no need to make it my area of expertise and focus, for my own well-being.
If you want to, knock yourself off.
I'd like to comfort you that this is not true for the majority of Americans. We are having a hard time wrapping our heads around what our new government is doing.
But yes... individuals don't make foreign policy, and we are subject to the whims of our polity. That's exactly what I'm asking the parent poster to take into account.
There is always good news and bad news in the world. Our judicial branch is (so far) working to reverse illegal moves by the executive branch. People are protesting across the US and across the world. Our allies are currently putting pressure on us that is reversible.
The bad news is that our country is losing trust every day. We voted this person into office twice. We are deporting people for voiced opposition to the regime. There are now travel warnings to the US from multiple countries. Ironically, it’s now harder to leave the US. MAGA is trying to spread into other countries given the foothold it has gained here.
There isn’t a lot of comfort to give when the guy who holds the nations nuclear codes is questionably coherent and actively hostile.
Source?
One bad news (for everybody) is that I believe a lot of citizen of those "allied" countries don't see the US as allies anymore. The US are now seen as this unstable "partner" that threatens becoming an enemy (e.g. by invading those ex-allies militarily) and may well become an enemy.
And the feeling is getting worse everyday.
That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.
That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.
In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)
I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.
On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblée. This is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think Darmanain was an exception)
We have to remember that, while the minister changes with the government and thus is by definition a politician (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by government changes. Those are the ones making the calls. And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and DGSE).
No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician -- makes the call.
And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be an expert on all the things that come up in a single ministry, let alone the parliament.
This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership in democracies.
When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against speech or whatever.
Which is to say they understand the situation perfectly and are acting with a firm intellectual grasp of what is going on.
The issue isn't that they don't understand encryption, it is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to resist the state. Which is cool and all, authoritarianism is always with us to some extent. But at its core they see this from the viewpoint that the state is fundamentally in control and sometimes it grants people the privilege of privacy because it doesn't think what they are saying is important and therefore they can be humoured. They'll pretend technical ignorance if it gets the liberals off their backs, but the only people they are fooling are the credulous.
But by doing that, they make it easier for adversaries to spy on their own citizen, which is a national security issue.
That's why it sounds like ignorance to me: I understand that they really want a backdoor just for themselves "because they are the good guys" and "for national security", but they don't understand that if they have a backdoor, then their adversaries will eventually have it, too.
The people in government have a hierarchy of threats. Social challenges from within their own nation always higher than those from foreign countries. Most politicians are perfectly happy to sacrifice national security to be able to see what their citizens are saying, they just won't articulate it in plain language because it sounds bad.
We can tell this because they're signing off on narratives around being "the good guys". Anyone pushing that sort of narrative spin isn't a good guy. That isn't how law enforcement works in practice and anyone in high political power knows it if they have even a shred of intellectual honesty; they've seen how the sausage is made and are well aware that the real world is all various shades of what happens when a family breaks down and siblings start fighting with each other.
They welcome Europeans thinking their government is out to get them
> Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive
People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in Russia were conditioned by decades of violent dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
> your politicians
Putin?
> need to be kept in check.
Keeping in check != assuming the worst. Assuming the worst from everybody is how no one would get anything done. e2ee, like any tech not bad or good inherently helps both goodies and baddies. Not turning blind eye on this is important first step. Even if your gov doesn't get a backdoor now they will keep at it until they find a way because voters who are not extremist libertarian techbros want them to. Your way out is to help them find a good enough way witg a compromise.
I'm sorry if I'm blunt or rude but you have zero idea what you're talking about, and judging by this answer you're unlikely to even attempt to find out. It saddens me that people who have actual chance to avoid neo-feudalism learn nothing from the experience of my own country (Russia), because hey that's Eastasia and we've always been at war with Eastasia so it can be discarded, "we" are not like that, surely "we" are not "them" and can do better, it can never happen here. Well, good luck! You'll need it.
And you I guess have no objection to my main point. e2ee helps crime as much as good guys, maybe more because it helps scale crime. And non stupid government would see that. If what a democratic government is doing to fix this looks like censorship, then it does not mean the government is bad. There is other context. A good democratic government can be instructed by competent experts make better tradeoffs. You cannot expect politicians to be competent experts.
It saddens me that every now and then even well intentioned(?) fellow russians act like every government is like that. You're not the only one. The legacy and history of how people came to power is completely different. Yes it's hard to believe but there are governments who are different.
If you want to see how actual surveillance would look, check out russia. Chinese firewall tech, TSPU boxes at every ISP, making VPN illegal etc. Unlike EU there is historical context and evidence in which it is clear that the government is not doing this to fight crime.
And remember authoritative governments don't care about trust and they get things done while west is squabbling.
To say gov does it to spy is not constructive. What can you do? If they are against you you lose, they hold all the power. This reminds me of attitude of most people in Russia. But to say government does it because it doesn't know is constructive. Because it (and the public) can be educated. There are democratic processes for this.
Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?
Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?
We could be seeing the effect of France's top notch level of mathematical attainment in how their politicians are behaving.
Education lifts all boats.
Politicians: a backdoor that can be used by the police for investigating crimes, but not by criminals themselves.
HN users: no backdoor at all, especially not a backdoor that can be used by the police.
Politicians: technology that strengthens the power of the state, against crime, but also militarily, for spying on enemies both foreign and domestic.
Citizens: defensive architecture that prevents the state from preventing free speech.
This is especially relevant in the era of AI, where the cost of mass surveillance is virtually zero, and is incredibly powerful at sentiment analysis and summarization. Free speech is threatened when any statement can and will be used against you.
1. Europe should not rely entirely on the US for its defense (stated by Trump numerous times).
2. Europe should stop its mad self-destruction and descent into totalitarianism (stated by Vance on several occasions).
Were they incorrect? Were they unreasonable? Sometimes you need a friend to tell you a harsh truth. Hearing that truth does not make that friend into an enemy; quite the contrary.
2. That's funny coming from a person who is building a totalitarian system. He was supporting parties that would make a similar development in Europe possible.
Basically he told me that over there people just go on websites to order drugs, pay with crypto from a centralized crypto exchange and then have it delivered in they physical mailbox. And this is not the Silk road thing this is local business, shipped by the national postal service from an address in France from France.
I also read an article once saying drug stores on the internet and social media are very common over there.
My conclusion was that, selling most drugs had become de facto decriminalized in France.
Strangely France is also by far the country where I have been systematically harassed by the police and customs (at the frontier and within the country). They are very aggressive and it is to the point that I now avoid that country as much as possible.
I bet the vast majority of Europeans across all swaths of the political and socioeconomic strata would tell you that (1) Europe DOES NOT rely entirely on the US for its defense and (2) that Europe is NOT on a mad self destructive descent into totalitarianism.
In fact, as an American, id say (2) sounds vastly more applicable to the the USA under the current Republican administration.
Further, they'd also tell you to stop taking your talking points from those two bozos. It destroys your credibility by using them as any kind of reliable source of factual information.
And you'd loose that bet. Your opinions might be shared in your leftist bubble but definitely not across the whole population.
If your source is Vance, I would suggest you question it.
Most of the world is currently looking and worrying at the US becoming an oligarchy. Who is talking about "Europe descending into totalitarianism"? The sentence does not even make much sense, as Europe is not a country. I'm not even sure if Vance is aware of it.
When you genuinely think that everybody else is wrong and you are right, maybe it's time to take a step back.
they usually talk to experts in those areas. Who those experts are can vary quite a lot though.
1. I don't believe that anything changed in recent months/years other than the US repeating the statement that maybe EU should take care of its own defense. Not exactly a new sign of "becoming hostile" IMO.
2. If this would even be true then they have always been hostile to Europe and only just recently started becoming honest and open about it (but again, I dont see any sign of actual change). Five eyes, NSA, etc is not exactly new and have super obviously been used and are still being used by the US to do economic and political espionage on Europe for at least decades. The leaked news of NSA spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone is like 10+ years ago by now?
My opinion is that every EU company that uses Onedrive, Teams, Outlook, Google etc (99 percent of them is my guess) are basically paying to give away their trade secrets to their US competitors. "but the terms of the contract say..." yeah right...
Is government agencies to. In the UK the NHS uses AWS, courts use Teams.... IT security is just ignored - its only recently that it occurred to the govt to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites.
European militaries are heavily dependent on the US too and have a lot of equipment that is reliant on US supplies or can only be used in line with agreements with the US.
It feels like you missed the hostile actions. There are many, but let's just mention the fact that the US repeatedly threatened to invade militarily.
Chats being encrypted between multiple participants is a normal use case of cryptography. Giving limited government access can be part of a cryptoscheme and doesn't mean that encryption has to be disabled.
Risking a potential flame war here but I think it’s important to cool down hysterical rhetoric whenever it’s pushed.
The US has not become hostile to Europe, and it’s quite silly to say this in contrast to, say, a certain country next door that is currently invading a European country.
The US is in the midst of a many decades “pivot to Asia.” This is not hostility, but growing indifference.
Among others, the US is threatening to invade and annex ex-allies using militarily force. This is the definition of "hostility", and again this is only one example.
Speech matters. "Software cancer bill" sure sounds less appealing than "catch terrorists bill".
Nobody has to understand the details about why encryption backdoor is impossible to implement without breaking the encryption. It is too hard of a topic. I only understand it vaguely. Does it matter? You don't need phd in silicon design to know that chips are important.
The title says "France rejects backdoor mandate" but TFA makes it clear that France is not a hive-mind:
- The rejection was by the French National Assembly (think parliament/congres) - Ths happened despite pressure from the internal ministry (the government)
I find it interesting that it is often a similar story at the EU level where the European Parliament puts a stop to the worst impulses of the European Commission.
That’s more than a bit of an overstatement. One faction in the US government has started being less loyal to Europe. Most Americans consider Europe to still be our closest allies and friends.
Furthermore the US businesses are not stupid and have shown they will stand up to government pressure around data sovereignty. Anything less will drive both US and global customers back to on-prem infrastructure.
https://www.reuters.com/article/legal/microsoft-sues-us-gove...
The feeling isn't mutual.
> Furthermore the US businesses are not stupid and have shown they will stand up to government pressure around data sovereignty.
Only until it threatens their livelihood and family. Don't be naive. The majority of both Democrat and Republican members of the Senate and Congress, and many judges and other people in high positions in the government are afraid of the repercussions of crossing Trump. The US is screwed.
Maybe, yes. Do you know how many Europeans now consider that the US are not allies anymore? And how many take the threats of invading them seriously? Allies don't threaten to invade.
> Furthermore the US businesses are not stupid
The oligarchs of BigTech have clearly bent the knee. It would be irrational to trust them.
No?
You can have encryption with “secure” backdoors. (In the sense that only an entity with the backdoor key could use it.)
For example, let’s say you were going to symmetrically encrypt some data with a certain private key.
You can add the key to the data, asymmetrically encrypted with the public backdoor key.
(You can improve on this with a salt to retain public anonymity.)
As a theoretical matter, cryptography can do this. As a practical matter…that’s a separate question of human structures and behaviors. But you don’t need cryptography to understand that.
Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works.
Especially these days in Europe, it seems completely insane: it is already a problem that most companies use US services, given that the US have become hostile to Europe. The sane way to go is to try to get better privacy for European companies/people, not worse. Adding backdoors just makes it easier for adversaries to access private data.