The Director General of the National Crime Agency and European Police Chiefs are calling for industry and governments to take urgent action to ensure public safety across technology platforms.
It's the Police, they are trained to handle bad people, so they see bad people everywhere and treat everyone (depending in Level of racism) as a potential bad person.
It's a fundamental part of the system. When you as a human give power over your life to somebody else or accept that other people have power over you, then that power will inevitably attract the worst of society who will attempt to use that power that you have granted them. The only way out of this is to completely reject the premise of large government. No one person should be beholden to a large central entity. At least here in the United States, I think the state government should be about as big as government gets and completely abolish the federal government because it is just abusive and too far away from the people.
From the outside it honestly looks like half of what the federal government does is prevent certain states from abusing their people.
The problem isn't large governments, you get abuse of power even on a very local level, think small town mayor or police or even in some hobby related clubs with just a few members.
Also, there is plenty of abuse when you don't give any power to someone but they just take it because there is nobody to prevent them from taking it.
"We need construction companies to build homes in a way that allows access to every room at any time for law enforcement"
Sounds a bit strange doesn't it?
What I don’t get is what’s the end game? Because this will likely affect only already law abiding citizens or those with limited technical knowledge as bad agents will simply generate certificates and encrypt however they see fit. It’s not like building an encrypted client is hard…
The police state wants more ways to criminalise normal behaviour, so that more of the public comes under their thumb. The point is to always have some excuse to persecute whoever they were already planning to persecute.
Don't use encryption? Great, we can eavesdrop.
Do use encryption? Great, we can destroy you.
What a complete load of horse shit. Show me crime statistics that clearly show that mass scanning of messages was the only way to detect a felony or reach a verdict of guilty.
I'm not going to lie I thought this was a rare moment of police org stating that. It clearly is. It would be like them saying locked houses impead investigation and that they only want locks for car, houses, whatever to support a master key the police own.
It shows a clear lack of understanding of just how insecure that makes something and just how much trust in state would be needed for it to be even conscionable.
anyone who this is supposedly targeted at will just start encrypting their messages on their own so even if message is intercepted it cant be read without difficulty/reasonable time.
I could do it even here: U2FsdGVkX1+w2vSFD+69kO38y4VaS7pIJlM9vam//gU= (passkey=test)(aes-256-cbc)
conveying information to large amounts of people this way is difficult, pretty much impossible if recipients are tech-illiterate. But if you REALLY have something you want to hide, you dont have to rely on communication services doing it for you. Only people who will suffer from this are the real targets: all of us.
If services start making rules that you cant do this one could probably even obfuscate that message has been encrypted by encrypting it further in some other way that makes it look like written text, even if its nonsense.
only reason they want to do this is mass surveillance. Before long eu could become like china and you have to be constantly afraid something you or someone you have had contact with says something that is considered wrongthink. All it takes is couple of elections where awful people get power.
And all that is just from the viewpoint that governments will abuse this. Criminals will find even more use for unencrypted communications.
The absolute state of bongs and their Orwellian shitscape nanny-state. When are they going to start tagging them with RFID because they can't risk untagged citizens committing crimes?