German Minister Wants Secure Messengers To Decrypt Chats

guest · May 24, 2019

German Minister Wants Secure Messengers To Decrypt Chats
May 24, 2019
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ter-wants-secure-messengers-to-decrypt-chats/

Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer purportedly wants to force messaging providers such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Threema to provide plain text chats to law enforcement agencies on a court order as reported by Der Spiegel and from a number of other German news outlets.

This means that the leader of the Christian Social Union (CDU) basically wants to ban messaging end-to-end encryption since for keeping cleartext logs of encrypted chats the apps would either have to be injected with some sort of backdoor or the encryption removed altogether.

"Messenger services such as WhatsApp or Telegram should be obliged to record the communications of their customers and to send them to authorities - in a readable form, ie unencrypted," as Der Spiegel reports [automated translation].
Also, "providers who do not fulfill this obligation should be banned by order of the Federal Network Agency for Germany" with the new rules to be enacted by the end of the year.
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mirimir · May 24, 2019

Governments sure are feeling insecure about citizens having privacy. "Think of the children!" and "Think of the terrorists!", they say. Everyone wants access like China has. And it's horrible, and sad. I'm glad that I had so many decades of ~freedom. And I'll not stop fighting this cancer until I fall over dead. Which, I suppose, could be any day now But just kiddin', dog willing.

sdmod · May 24, 2019

+1 Well said

mirimir said: ↑

Governments sure are feeling insecure about citizens having privacy. "Think of the children!" and "Think of the terrorists!", they say. Everyone wants access like China has. And it's horrible, and sad. I'm glad that I had so many decades of ~freedom. And I'll not stop fighting this cancer until I fall over dead. Which, I suppose, could be any day now But just kiddin', dog willing.
Click to expand...

guest · May 28, 2019

Facebook Is Already Working Towards Germany's End-to-End Encryption Backdoor Vision
May 28, 2019
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevl...rmanys-end-to-end-encryption-backdoor-vision/

While it was little noticed at the time, Facebook’s presentation on its work towards moving AI-powered content moderation from its data centers directly onto users’ phones presents a perfect blueprint for Seehofer's vision.

Touting the importance of edge content moderation, Facebook specifically cited the need to be able to scan the unencrypted contents of users’ messages in an end-to-end encrypted environment to prevent them from being able to share content that deviated from Facebook’s acceptable speech guidelines.

By raising the specter of on-device content scanning for disallowed speech inside of end-to-end encrypted conversations and in particular sparking the idea of being able to silently harvest those decrypted conversations on the client side, Facebook is inadvertently telegraphing to anti-encryption governments that there are ways to bypass encryption while also bypassing the encryption debate.
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In the end, it is almost a certainty that the days of being able to securely converse through end-to-end encryption are coming to a close as companies move their censorship and data harvesting and analysis to the edge.
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guest · Jun 15, 2019

Mozilla pens open letter to German policymakers over planned encryption law
Government proposals would undermine ‘20 years of successful crypto policy’
June 14, 2019
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/...rman-policymakers-over-planned-encryption-law

In an open letter published this week, Mozilla warned that government talk of providing authorities with backdoor access to secure messaging apps should be barred from Germany and the wider European landscape.
“The BMI (Federal Ministry of the Interior) proposal counteracts 20 years of successful crypto policy in Germany,” a translated version of the letter reads.

The proposal, the letter explains, goes against the German government’s Digital Agenda 2014-2017 which explicitly states “there will be no ban or limitation on [encryption] products”.
Industry pushback
Threema, an E2E instant messenger platform that’s popular among German-speaking users, was among the digital rights organizations putting their name to the open letter [...]
“The planned commitment of the messenger operators would lead to the operators having to install a vulnerability in their software.

The German government is expected to discuss any changes to the law before its parliament rests this June.
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