Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Easy solution; design a system with backdoors, implement it in some banking or other system the people at the top use, compromise said backdoor and release all the private info of those arguing for the backdoors.

    Things will very quickly turn around.

    (That, or narrow exceptions will be carved out for those in power.)

    by Hobadee
  • I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin.

    There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.

    And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.

    by nekusar
  • Rare AI slop use case
    by mohamedkoubaa
  • I think people use emoji for this
    by qiine
  • Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.

    The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.

    by ETH_start
  • The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
    by notpushkin
  • Google "security despite encryption" etc. It is some good rhetorical manipulation a'la EU over again.
    by jruohonen
  • We see it in the EU here but the groups pushing for that are everywhere, including the US, UK, Australia, etc

    So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years

    by dgellow
  • Stuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.
    by tonis2
  • There is a reason why the popularity of far right is all time high everywhere in the EU.
    by miohtama
  • If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls

    Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.

    It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.

    It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

    by rdm_blackhole
  • Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me? I’m afraid that I, as a good person and father, am going to be punished for not letting them read my private messages. I’m afraid for my future in the EU.
    by teekert
  • The problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members).

    There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.

    It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.

    There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".

    by microtonal
  • They are not going to do anything to you, but they will throw anyone into a jail who develops end to end encryption.
    by miohtama
  • No one really cares about your individual comms. The goal of legislation like this is to ensure that E2E chat apps are no longer distributed on the app stores, so even if a tiny amount of nerds like us might use them among ourselves, they are no longer relevant socially.
    by TFNA
  • > Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me?

    Depends on where you live. If for example you live in the UK, they will jail you until you pony up the PIN to your phone and any other passwords they want from you. Don't know how it is other countries.

    by ExoticPearTree
  • According to the EU this will protect us from ”hostile states, and powerful criminal groups and terrorists”

    Because said criminals will politely follow the law and use the broken, backdoor-ed encryption? Instead of the widely available opensourced true encryption? Of course not.

    The true goal is mass surveillance - not protection from <insert-bad-thing-everybody-has-to-agree-is-bad>

    by catoc
  • This is from April 2025.

    Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.

    by AnssiH
  • Is the actual text of the workplan somewhere? The linked article refers to the text

    more effective tools for law enforcement

    in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text?

    (Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)

    by microtonal
  • It's linked in the second paragraph of article.

      More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies

  Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:

  …
  · A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
  · A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.
    This is pushing for encryption backdoors in eurocrat speech: lawful access to data, roadmap, impact assesment, updating rules.
    by petre
  • Meanwhile the latest gen ai agents are able to crack everything not nailed down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301

    Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm

    by Kim_Bruning
  • With all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less.

    This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.

    by jbstack
  • There are people in the background that are benefiting from all this and it seems to me that its not limited to just one country. Someone knows that weakening all of these systems globally has a lot to gain.
    by trinsic2
  • And, of course, no thought is given to the implications this could have in conjunction with the next Orban. Europe is aligning against Russia as a threat, while at the same time shooting itself in the foot by disabling basic rights like privacy with absolutely no memory of how much more basic lack of privacy (enabled by Facebook) was leveraged with relatively simple tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...) to help Brexit happen (effectively breaking Europe apart).

    This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

    by random3
  • Europe has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.
    by ronsor
  • The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

    If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.

    If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.

    So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

    by bradley13
  • > The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

    As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.

    The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.

    Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.

    That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.

    by stymaar
  • I'm a little hazy on how this gets enforced. I thought the EU made rules, but then those rules had to be ratified and implemented by the national governments of the member nations (and historically, some of them have been very lax about implementing and enforcing those rules).

    Will we end up with a hodgepodge of national rules from each EU country that is effectively unenforceable? Or is there a different mechanism that allows the EU to enforce a blanket rule over all the EU nations?

    by marcus_holmes
  • It's unfortunate that some of us have been warning and shouting this for years, before it got to this place, and before they amassed all this power, and now that it's almost too late people are catching on.
    by rjzzleep
  • > In reality, they want to be dictators.

    Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.

    by MrBuddyCasino