“While indiscriminate backdoors might be cheaper for the State than alternative investigative measures, they were expensive for society at large on account of the security risks they produced,” EISI told the ECHR.
It’s great when someone with some sway actually gets it.
EU institutions are pretty great, but sooner or later they’re going to lose the fight against the technofascist nightmare that’s constantly getting pushed on us
Luckily this is not an EU institution, this is an international treaty above the EU. For example, Azerbaijan is a signatory.
Point is, you can’t easily get it through EU legislation to overturn this, as it would need to cross the ECHR, which it won’t do.
Can’t wait to see the brexiteers’ faces when they realise Britain is still a signatory.
For example, Azerbaijan is a signatory.
And doesn’t really care, because there’s no punishment for, say, being a member of something with “human rights” in the name and Azerbaijan simultaneously.
They even occasionally pay fines for torturing someone to death or things like that. Those fines are not that big.
Maybe one day, the land of personal freedom and Liberty can have a small amount of the personal freedom and Liberty often declared by the “globalist big government” EU.
EU: “This violates human rights”
US: “Human rights? What are those? Are they in the constitution?”
Yeah, I wish the US could get some of those mysterious rights
US: “Human rights? What are those? Are they in the constitution?”
There actually are strong privacy rights written into the constitution. Unfortunately they don’t fit well with modern data collection creating loopholes big enough to drive a truck through.
And nothing is being done to close those loopholes. In fact the opposite… end to end encryption, for example, would close most of the loopholes. Legislators are using “think of the children!” arguments to try to stop companies from upgrading services to use E2EE.
This is incredibly funny for people who followed this. Everybody and their grandma told the European Commission that there was no way that breaking end-to-end encryption was compatible with the law. Yet they constantly pushed for it anyway and now look at this mess.
I am almost certain that the European Commission will claim that there are still ways to break end-to-end encryption, only to defeated in court yet again. Like they tried with data preservation for law enforcement purposes. They just can’t stop themselves.
It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
The commissioner responsible for the chat control was thoroughly corrupt by a company which created the scanning system. She was also either unbelievably dense or very, VERY dedicated to her role of a pearl-clutching, think-of-the-children granny. To the point of arguing with IT specialists on TV.
To the point of arguing with IT specialists on TV.
Could you please link it or just name that person? I want to see that and be offended.
Ylva Johansson. She’s Swedish and late last year went on tour around Swedish media about chat control. The media, however, were prepared so hilarity ensued.
https://nordictimes.com/debate/many-misleading-claims-about-chat-control-2-0/
The ECHR is not an EU court, it’s a Council of Europe court, different organisation.
Edit: To make things more confusing, the EU is in negotiations about joining the Council of Europe.
I tok great pleasure in making my Brexiter dad look a tit by asking what he disliked about the EU. “Well I’m sick of their human rights court telling us what to do! So I’m voting we leave the EU!”
Me: “But we’d still be covered by the ECHR. Are you thinking of the ECJ?”
I don’t speak to him anymore cos he’s a cunt*.
*Not politics - he’s just a cunt who doesn’t approve of my ‘lifestyle choices’ (childless, gay and mentally ill).
I feel like Europe is the only place actually making an effort to protect personal privacy these days.
That’s because Europe has actual experience with having their privacy invaded and it wasn’t just to show you relevant ads. During the war my grandparents burned letters and books after reading them. And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal… but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.
The UN formally declared privacy as a human right a few years after the war ended. Specifically in response to what happened during the war.
A lot of the data used by police to commit horrific crimes was collected before the war, for example they’d go into a cemetery home and find a list of people who attended a funeral six years ago, then arrest everyone who was there. You can’t wait for a government to start doing things like that - you have to stop the data from being collected in the first place.
Imagine how much worse it could be today, with so much more data collected and automated tools to analyse the data. Imagine if you lived in Russian occupied Ukraine right now - what data can Russia find about you? Do you have a brother serving in Ukraine’s army? Maybe your brother would defect if you were taken hostage…
Well, it defers a lot from country to country.
For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data. They have personal identification numbers that contain lots of personal information that many institutions (e.g. banks) have access to unless you ask for privacy protection. All of this also makes interaction with institutions very streamlined and easy, but it comes at the cost of less privacy.
In Norway and Sweden, for example, anyone can access personal income data about anyone living in the country. Full transparency, more or less.
On the other hand, a country like Germany does not issue personal identification numbers because the population is highly skeptical of data collection and registration, a remnant from the wars. Germany is much more bureaucratic and its government less efficient, but Germans prefer the arm’s length approach to government data collection and almost no data is publicly accessible.
In Germany you have to show some kind of ID - which gets registered in a system - to buy a SIM card, something I never had to do in other countries I lived in, in Europe.
There is no other point in having such a requirement for stores to record people’s ID when they buy SIM cards than to associate phone numbers with people for surveillance.
The UK too doesn’t have ID cards or ID numbers for people and yet has the biggest densitity of surveillance cameras in Europe, automated license plate reading cameras in major roads and highways and, as shown by the Snowden revelations, has an even more broad civil society surveillance system in place than the US and, by the way, when that came out the political response was simply to retroactivelly make legal any part of it which weren’t.
ID numbers are just one big “look over here” distraction from what’s really going on.
For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data.
And that’s very stupid.
But psychologically this may be a good thing - people learn to not be ashamed of saying “yeah, you can get all this information about me, but it’s simply not your concern, so fsck off” from the very beginning.
And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal… but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu
