This article incorrectly implies that Telegram is end-to-end encrypted, by putting it in the same line as WhatsApp and Signal.
Telegram doesn't even try to be end-to-end-encrypted by default. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source, Signal is end-to-end-encrypted.
I find it fascinating that a country with citizens that are typically willing to protest in the streets at the drop of a hat don't seem to care. Is it that they aren't technically literate?
These sorts of laws have repeatedly failed to pass in Europe due to people protesting. The government just keeps coming back and trying again it seems.
Some people do not take no for an answer. This is bordering on absurd.
But on the other side what I miss is some explanation if forensic analysis helps here? Presumably the messages stay on a phone and you can recover them. If that is the case then it should be enough to fight the crime, i.e if you get a warrant to access the device then you can access messages, which I believe many would agree is fine.
Lets pretend this happens, I am curious how it would work.
So a person in Canada messages someone in France who's WhatsApp is not encrypted. But the message from Canada is encrypted. Will the person in Canada's message have to be sent unencrypted ? Or will WhatsApp Canada need to allow France to break Canada's encryption ?
Personally I think it would be easier for these apps to ban people in France from using their service.
> "Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state."
> Mass surveillance, of course, isn’t what the delegation is proposing. The fear isn’t that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message.
French investigators won't care about every WhatsApp message. But they definitely will slurp them all up, process them all with AI, and read them whenever they have an interest. And they will deny they are doing this as they do this.
I'm starting to think we need to make encryption a protected class, so that we can label speaking against it as hate speech.
Let's start putting some of these politicians in jail for being stupid.
This article incorrectly implies that Telegram is end-to-end encrypted, by putting it in the same line as WhatsApp and Signal.
Telegram doesn't even try to be end-to-end-encrypted by default. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source, Signal is end-to-end-encrypted.
> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source
And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.
Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."
I find it fascinating that a country with citizens that are typically willing to protest in the streets at the drop of a hat don't seem to care. Is it that they aren't technically literate?
These sorts of laws have repeatedly failed to pass in Europe due to people protesting. The government just keeps coming back and trying again it seems.
What makes you think French citizens don’t care?
Maybe it's time for France to reconsider its relationship with the EU.
The French people typically elect far-right politicians to represent them at the EU level, so...
It's not about left or right, but up and down.
Some people do not take no for an answer. This is bordering on absurd.
But on the other side what I miss is some explanation if forensic analysis helps here? Presumably the messages stay on a phone and you can recover them. If that is the case then it should be enough to fight the crime, i.e if you get a warrant to access the device then you can access messages, which I believe many would agree is fine.
Let’s start with the smartphones of politicians.
Lets pretend this happens, I am curious how it would work.
So a person in Canada messages someone in France who's WhatsApp is not encrypted. But the message from Canada is encrypted. Will the person in Canada's message have to be sent unencrypted ? Or will WhatsApp Canada need to allow France to break Canada's encryption ?
Personally I think it would be easier for these apps to ban people in France from using their service.
They would have used the "ghost user" strategy.
> "Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state."
> Mass surveillance, of course, isn’t what the delegation is proposing. The fear isn’t that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message.
French investigators won't care about every WhatsApp message. But they definitely will slurp them all up, process them all with AI, and read them whenever they have an interest. And they will deny they are doing this as they do this.
To make the link with another very successful article on HN today: who is Franced rule by yet? By cyber-libertarians right?