This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If this is passed, would this only apply to people in France? Like Signal and WhatsApp, etc, could they make a different version of the app / backend that's unencrypted just for them? Is that even possible? I can't imagine Signal adding a backdoor for everyone in the world.
Or would they just outright pull their software / apps from being used in France? But then what's stopping someone in France from sideloading the app and using a VPN?
not at all arguing this is okay, not even a little
but
If you are the French government, and you know what the French populace has a history of doing to the French government, it would be understandable to want to keep your eye on them, no?
again. It ain't cool. But I'm honestly surprised they didn't hop on the "intrusive surveillance" bandwagon sooner, like, as soon as mass surveillance became feasible, and have the privacy laws they do.
😂 a crosspost from privacy cross posted from Europa
So I'm going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.
The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.
What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.
The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn't allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.
It sounds like you haven't observed the conversation.
And it's not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.
Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.
You're asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You're asking for a mathematical impossibility.
And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.
This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about
To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:
They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it's use outside of a prosecution. It's not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it's probably better than "no encryption for anyone".
