There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances.
I really appreciate Signal's public responses to warrants ("sure, here's all the information we have, by design we don't have anything important"). https://signal.org/bigbrother/
The method that works is to make it technically or practically impossible.
The only way is to avoid the jurisdiction altogether then, because any app can be remotely updated to disable encryption…
Any other backdoor mechanism can similarly be breached or misused. There is no such thing as a backdoor that can only be used for what it is "supposed" to be used for.
- Don't allow remotely installing things on a device, only doing so with physical presence on the device.
- Have "binary transparency" mechanisms to make sure that you're seeing the same binary everyone else is, and you're not getting served a special backdoored version nobody else sees. (This doesn't prevent global backdoors, of course, but those are more likely to get caught.)
- Relatedly, have multiple independent app stores in different jurisdictions, and make sure they are serving identical binaries. That ensures no one jurisdiction can surreptitiously demand and enforce a backdoor.
- Have signatures from the original app author that can be verified, and ensure that intermediaries (e.g. "app stores") can add signatures but can't add anything to the package that's not covered by the original signature. That reduces the number of parties you have to trust.
- In an ideal world, only install Open Source software that's reviewed and subject to multiple independent reproducible builds.
Also, democratically authorized state actors have a valid role to play in liberal democracies.
That's appropriate for a SCIF, not for someone's day-to-day life.
> Also, democratically authorized state actors have a valid role to play in liberal democracies.
They still don't get to have backdoors into everyone's device.
Also, many many events throughout history should demonstrate that "democratically authorized" is in fact laughably bad at curtailing abuses of power, and not a substitute for a sacrosanct right to privacy that's systematically enforced through both legal and technical means.
Make devices secure. When people tell you to make them insecure, refuse.
If you look at history, not sure why technical measures would offer much protection against violence based approaches against privacy, though.
When you said "If you can install stuff on the device, how could you protect against it?", that sounded like it was talking about how a device that can have new software installed onto it can have a backdoor for later use installed onto it, and that led into a discussion about how to protect against that.
Were you instead saying "on a device you have control over, how can you protect yourself against that?". Or something else?
> If you look at history, not sure why technical measures would offer much protection against violence based approaches against privacy, though.
They can at a minimal level (e.g. steganography, duress passwords), but yes, ultimately there is little you can do against someone threatening you personally with harm.
And, yes, there can be a debate if such warrants are desirable etc., but I think it's quite different from broad-based backdoors for potential mass surveillance etc. and liberal democracies can decide to have such tools available.
I think part of what I was suggesting still applies there: if you can't install things remotely, and you have oversight to ensure that any backdoor applied to you has to have been sent to everyone (which provides a measure of security), then what's left is physical control of the device. For instance, keeping the device in your possession, locking it down against peripherals...
That can't prevent you from being physically coerced, but it provides a lot of security in every other case. And if things have devolved to the point of you being physically coerced then you have much worse problems.
Recently in the country I live some people from interpol accidentally withdrew a red notice, after initial prosecution, the prosecutor realized several mistakes were made and documents lost, so as a country with the rule of law, the prosecution withdrew the charges as there was insufficient evidence, compare and constrast with a corrupt country like Canada where the attorney general was fired for wanting to prosecute a company that had bribed Momar Ghaddaffi with 2 million dollars. Worse yet, they spread their culture of corruption through out the world instead of keeping it at home.
I agree that there shouldn’t be a backdoor by default. But, for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated.
Sure. And on the flipside, given the many ways such a capability is a security risk and an abusable backdoor itself, it's something to develop additional technical safeguards against, such as Binary Transparency to verify that everyone's getting the same binaries.
Backdoors are unacceptable 100% of the time, and should never be legal.
A backdoor is a lazy power grab that is either supported in ignorance by technically illiterate useful idiots or supported in full knowledge of the intended partisan abuses of basic civil liberties.
Hacking a criminal's phone with compromised software, and/or intercepting their voice & data, is not a backdoor. Backdoors mandate a violation of informed consent, and as such, should be criminalized without exception.
There's no place for backdoors in civilized societies.
Edit: My first read had me interpret backdoor as any undetected means of gaining access to a device/system. I have updated by definition to mean using a flaw in the system left intentionally to gain access. This somewhat negates the need for my previous comment, but I'll leave this for illustrative purposes.
Wiretaping a suspect's phone on the other hand is a fine (and often necessary) police operation, as long as it must be approved by an independent magistrate.
Because the language is far clearer in the US, you would and do hear "warrantless" being used in both the legal and general sense when it comes to these topics, but translating "Anlasslos" as "warrantless" would imply far too much confidence than is given.
"Unfounded" also reflects the weak perspective on hard boundaries of law and limitations on the state that simply do not exist in Germany and effectively all of Europe in the way that they do in the USA as de facto immovable law of the Constitution. "Anlasslos" implies a mental framework and conception that defers your rights (free speech in this case) to the subjective judgement of various people like politicians, judges, technocrats, bureaucrats, regulators, police officers, etc., i.e., someone does not like your speech so they will monitor your communication with our grandma for the abusive and narcissistic, manipulative concept of "hate speech", aka. "speech I hate".
In which case, the best you can do is use an obscure method that the attacker is unprepared for. If they've hijacked the AES CPU operation to store the key and include it in the output for a later syscall like when writing the output file, but you unexpectedly use some funky experimental cipher, you'd be lucky until they push an update. The device has a mandatory backdoor after all, so govt can also decide what new code it needs to run now, perhaps under the guise of detecting more situations of terroristic content or whatnot. There's no winning that game except through obscurity, and I presume everyone has heard about how reliable security through obscurity is
But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you phone's location can be hundres of miles away.
Use it to your advantage.... They do.
Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive cellular data connection that was intentionally uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way wifi is.
Right now, the only legitimate reason cell networks have to identify specific devices to users is for billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in various ways, either by making it a public good, or by integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data connections.
* Ideally the user id should be used only once and derived from some pre-shared secret.
First, in a case closer to the current world, I'm just suggesting that disabling the cell modem should power it off so it can't do any kind of location or tracking.
Second, in a more ideal world, the concept of "data connection" would be entirely separate from any identity attached to a phone or text message, and you could handle the latter via whatever connection you have, whether a cell data connection or wifi or something else.
I heard "rule of law" being used to justify roughly the opposite (Russian laws, including mass surveillance and censorship), and neither that was clear; apparently it worked simply as an universal justification.
The usual definition is that there are written laws that apply to everyone equally, as opposed to a rule by decree and some kind of tyranny, and the laws do not change too often, are not made for particular occasions (so they do not turn into decrees effectively). So I'd think "suspicionless" -- that is, universal -- sounds closer to it, rather than selective/arbitrary surveillance on a suspicion. Unless such suspicion is at least decided by a court, without rubber-stamping.
I'd assume because this means someone has to be officially suspected of a crime, rather than being targeted just because someone didn't like them?
Don't thank Germany too early. The only reason they changed their tune is because a massive number of people reached out to the government representatives in the last few days/weeks.
Without that, it would have gone through.
Case and point, you can look at the timeline of each country's position on https://fightchatcontrol.eu and you will see that Germany went from opposing to undecided to opposing again.
This is the sad state of affairs today. Privacy and rule of law have nothing to do with it.
I personally reached out to many German MEPs and the only ones who bothered to respond and were against CC were from the AFD. Make of that what you will.
Well, thank Germany for that then.
The rule of law establishes, first of all, that the Law does not distinguish any kind of person from another. This is why in order to have a true Rule of Law, the three powers (Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary) must be truly separated.
Decrees are exactly one way to subvert it: the executive acts as the legislative.
Also, in tyrannies (vid. Venezuela, Iran, etc.), the Judiciary is a slave to the executive.
The rule of law states, first of all, that people in Government are subject to the same laws as any other citizen.
It is obviously an unreachable optimum (like true "democracy" is), but that is the basic principle. Not that "Laws" govern the place.
Chat Control (and see especially the Danish Minister who said "common citizens should not expect to be able to use cryptography" or words to that effect) is suspicious under the rule of law because it differentiates ipso iure between "ordinary citizens" and "the executive".
Edit: whether you agree with him or not, reading "The road to serfdom" should enlighten you a lot about this topic.
As for the separation of powers, it is a related concept, but still a distinct one; not sure if bringing it up helps here.
Added "The Road to Serfdom" into my book queue, thanks for the suggestion.
ChatControl cannot exists without criminalizing cryptography (crypto with backdoors is not crypto).
When the act of uttering sufficiently complicated mathematics is a crime, we entering the territory of absurdity.
Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be arbitrary.
I am against criminalizing cryptography and largely agree about it being infeasible given the extent of proliferation and ease of replicating it/am playing devil's advocate:
Laws banning math related to manufacturing nuclear weapons can and has been enforced. It's important to take legal threats like ChatControl seriously and not just dismiss it as absurd/unenforceable overreach, even if that's likely true.
The key note with what the previous poster said was 'arbitrary', meaning the laws will end up a nonsensical mess because the maths have huge amount of industrial, commercial, and personal uses and suddenly one range of use is banned leads to situation where law enforcement tends to go after particular groups for who they are, not what they've done.
Tech companies can certainly be forced to build surveillance into their chat applications and operating systems. This doesn't have to be about backdooring crypto.
> Enforcement can only be arbitrary.
Sure, but it would be forced upon the vast majority of the population. Tech-savvy people will find ways to circumvent it, so will criminals, but that doesn't make mass surveillance of all others any less scary.
You seem to be saying that letting them go free is the best answer we have. This may be correct - it is something we as society need to debate in great depth. However it still isn't a good answer.
I think there's some confusion and people talking past each other there.
With a warrant, LE can extract messages from devices, request and receive data dumps from service providers, and attempt to crack encrypted data. In many places they can also insert backdoors (server or client side) with a warrant. We see some people pointing this out as being sufficient.
This is different from every device and citizen (except politicians) preemtively having their devices backdoored with access granted after a warrant (which you seem to be arguing for). Most of us agree that this is unacceptable and is already unconstitutional in several EU countries.
"Why don't you want a government camera implanted in your eyeballs? Do you want to let criminals go free?"
This isn't a problem of process like requiring warrants and just cause. Even if said process is designed to be perfect and is executed flawlessly, it is still hinged on a fundamental breakage of the security model a given chat software is built on. If a trusted government has a magic password that can read anybody's encrypted text messages, then it must be assumed more nefarious actors can figure out that password and use it themselves.
It creates a single point of failure that would compromise literally everyone.
What absurd news to be hearing in 2025, that "western liberal democracy" states are discussing whether to have the power to listen in on everyone's conversations - something Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia could have only dreamed of.
That is not a state governed by rule of law, but instead, a peoples being ruled by the power of surveillance.
Where should I send my money?
we got any of those? please tell me so i can move there
Maybe anything in Western Europe...
But more than that, even if you had all the information available, it will still be drowned in order of magnitudes higher amounts of counterfeit information, propaganda, lies.
How can I get read-access to your home directory? Do you have an open sftp or want to set one up?
Please post your IP and port here so we can take part.
To get the paradigm shift you're after, and a collective consciousness, you'd have to have buy-in from every member of such a society, and to raise children in the same principles. Perhaps it could be a civilization on an island, or the founding principle of a generational starship or something.
The notion of encrypted private communication didn't exist a couple of decades ago and people are talking about it as necessary for rule of law.
There's a missing logical link in there somewhere.
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You've changed the contents of your comment.
I don't adhere to the American Civil Religion, so I don't need to consider opinions of the founders of the project.
Sure, we didn’t have encrypted communication a couple decades ago, but we did have an expectation of privacy: letters, phone calls, even in-person conversations.
Encryption is just the modern way of preserving that same right in a digital context.
Nor was pervasive monitoring of our every action, nor were our actions and daily lives conducted on a digital system that makes data storage trivial.
They dont just “feel” oppressed, they are.
Many people use VPNs and use overseas services. The primary purpose of the "Great Firewall" appears to be erecting a technological barrier to entry, protecting the culture of average people who don't require that sort of access for business.