>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.
One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitively that criminals are still beyond their gavel. In reality, the only individuals who will get spied on are regular people who don't open their terminal just to send a text; exactly the people who should not be spied on in the first place.
When the government realizes this invasive legislature is ineffective, they will probably crack down even harder. After all, what we are willing to accept from rulers has by the looks of it already increased dramatically. I wonder if it at some point it becomes illegal simply to posses encryption software on your personal devices, perhaps even possession of prime numbers that could theoretically be used in modern encryption. How far will the government go to take this illegal math from you?
> Software like PGP is easy to use
Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.
Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.
We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.
One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.
How do you define cryptography? Let's say my files are written in a format that only my software can read. Is it then illegal to distribute said files?
I define it as anything that even slightly inconveniences the so called "authorities".
I've seen local judges give interviews to television networks about high profile cases where they were nearly foaming at the mouth with rage over end-to-end encryption. Cryptography is whatever causes that.
A 75 year old EU judge will let you know.
That is so bleak, but doesn't seem unlikely
Both apple and android are teeing their infra up to support deleting apps they don’t like. Windows is moving towards e2e attestation, and Mac is basically already there. Once that’s all done, you just need to enforce hardware manufacturers boot only into ‘trusted’ operating systems. No more Linux. No more unsigned execution. No more encryption.
This is what I think too. There's a huge push around the world for 3 things right now; verified IDs, trusted or attested signatures for software distribution, and monitoring efforts like the one in the article.
The thing people don't seem to realize about the recent Android announcement that they're going to require digital signing for distribution is that it's not about moderating apps. The objective is to make sure developers are forced to disclose their identity when publishing apps because that allows rich companies and individuals to wield the justice system like a weapon. They won't ban something like ReVanced because all they need to do is make sure the system allows others to take legal action against the developers.
The other thing that people don't realize, like some of the sibling comments here, is that using older hardware and tools can only go so far. Normal people aren't going to do that and people that go out of their way to do it are going to be making themselves a target.
There's already a chilling effect in place. All of my teenage relatives were given a mini lecture to absolutely not post about the Charlie Kirk incident on social media and to avoid talking about it in private chat. I still haven't seen an explanation for how the messages in this incident [1] ended up in the hands of authorities.
But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress".
The only way to "protect the children" is through education, not by forcing them to have a digital paper trail for their whole life.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669
Won’t happen.
There is way too much existing deployed systems depending on alternative open source systems, and a mn incentive to use them to keep using old hardware.
And way too strong a strategic incentive not to depend on US tech alone.
What’s to stop attested open source systems, apart from pesky licence violations that I doubt would stop anyone powerful?
Attestation is simply incompatible with open source.
https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
Plausible, but then people will use old computers and/or fab their own and/or import from adversarial governments and accept the risk of hardware backdoors.
These people aren't rulers, they're public servants that have mistaken themselves for rulers.
If all of your messages can be read in plaintext, your going to have to transfer you keys some other way and it will be very detectable that you are sending encrypted messages which will be next on the chopping block.