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EU Encryption

A German Minister Wants To Ban End-to-End Chat Encryption (thenextweb.com) 159

Posted by EditorDavid from the pushing-for-plain-text dept.
An anonymous reader quotes the Next Web: According to Spiegel Online, the country's Federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, wants encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram to provide chat logs in plain text to the authorities. Since these services come with end-to-end encryption, the companies will have to break the encryption and provide a backdoor to give access to the texts.
Wired adds that "This is obviously incompatible with end-to-end encryption, used by services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram and, if passed, such a law would effectively ban secure encryption for instant messaging." Some commenters on Bruce Schneier's site suggest this is just political grandstanding.

An analysis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy think tank, argues that this would be a major change from Germany's stance on encryption over the last two decades: Instead of focusing on regulating encryption itself, Germany has worked to enable its security agencies to conduct hacking. It has even passed a legal framework tailored to government hacking operations...

The legal debate eventually led to a landmark supreme court ruling emphasizing the government's responsibility for the integrity of information technology systems. The conversation is far from over, with some supreme court cases still pending in regard to recent legislation on the lawful hacking framework.
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A German Minister Wants To Ban End-to-End Chat Encryption More

A German Minister Wants To Ban End-to-End Chat Encryption

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  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I don't know what Chairman Mao would do from his grave, but officials of NSA will be partying hard at its US headquarter to celebrate.

  • not even grandstanding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @09:48AM (#58690752) Homepage Journal

    The current German government famously has no clue about anything. Most of its ministers have a grand total of zero experience or education in the areas they are responsible for, and frankly speaking the country is still running despite the government, not because of it. All the result of 14 years of Merkel politics, were loyalty is the only factor that counts and expertise is considered a hindrance.

    So this, like a lot of things, isn't even grandstanding, it's just an idiot shooting his mouth off knowing that his voters (mostly elderly people, I'm not making this up, if people above 70 weren't allowed to vote, his party would be a tiny one occupying just a few seats at the edge of parliament) - well, that these voters don't know better, don't care much, but like it when he seems strong and on top of things.

    • Not surprising from the people who brought you the Gestapo and the Stasi - the latter being the former employer of the current Chancellor.

      Don't get fooled by the beer and the quaint portrayals of jolly toymakers. They are *always* looking for the next Kaiser, Hitler, etc, and they started both world wars, and innumerable small ones before that. 80 years ago most of the world was ready to force them back to a pre-industrial state, which the USA stopped because it would have required that 25-3

      • Not surprising from the people who brought you the Gestapo and the Stasi

        You can say what you want about the current German government, but the Gestapo and the Stasi were examples of well thought out, efficient, and above all the most effective policing agencies on the planet. The fact that their overload was literally Hitler was obviously not a good thing, but the current government has nothing to do with the governments that brought you the Gestapo and Stasi, because frankly the current government lacks the competence to do so.

        Don't get fooled by the beer and the quaint portrayals of jolly toymakers. They are *always* looking for the next Kaiser, Hitler, etc

        That is literally the dumbest thing I've ever read

        • That is literally the dumbest thing I've ever read, to the point where actually saying that in public is likely to get you in trouble with the German government
          No, it does not get him into trouble, why would it?

          Paragraph 5 of the german constitution protects free speech ...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        Not surprising from the people who brought you the Gestapo and the Stasi - the latter being the former employer of the current Chancellor.

        At least if we do something, we do it properly. But you would know, of course. Pretty much every spy, weapons scientist and general who was unknown enough to be kept out of the Nuremberg trials was hired by the US government after the war. Or put back into positions by the US command in occupied Germany as part of a program to counter the evil communists.

        Not to mention half of the war was financed by US banks and supplied by the US military industry. Right until the declaration of war.

        back to a pre-industrial state, which the USA stopped because it would have required that 25-30 million germans would have to starve to death, or otherwise "go away",

        Actually, no. The USA

      • Not surprising from the people who brought you the Gestapo and the Stasi - the latter being the former employer of the current Chancellor.
        You are an idiot.
        Gestapo was during Hitlers reign, which caused the dividing of Germany. Stasi was the secret police in the east german part: a direct result of losing the war and being so stupid to get half of Germany conquered by the russians.

        Merkel has absolutely nothing to do with the Stasi, at least we don't have any indication for it.

        Hint: the war ended 1945 ... for

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's not particular to the current government. High ranking posts have always been assigned solely based on rank in the current governing parties. We always end up with the same idiots who stumble from one ministry to the next with fuck all knowledge about either. They know how to become ministers. That's it.

      For example our current defense minister was formerly minister for family and social affairs. On a completely unrelated note, our military is run down and a joke to just about anyone.

      And if one of the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        You are right it's not new.

        When I was in my early 20s, we had a joke about the Bundeswehr (the german military, for you yanks): "Don't make jokes about the Bundeswehr. In case of war, they have to distract the enemy until the real soldiers arrive."

        Yes, it was always idiots in suits. But it has become particularily pronounced with Merkel. Before her, party politics decided who went where. With her, loyalty to her and nothing else decides.

    • The current German government famously has no clue about anything. Most of its ministers have a grand total of zero experience or education in the areas they are responsible for, and frankly speaking the country is still running despite the government, not because of it.

      It sounds like they're channeling Trump and his 'model' of how to run a government.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        It sounds like they're channeling Trump and his 'model' of how to run a government.

        Hold our beer. First because it's better and second because we invented that a loooong time before Trump went into politics. 20 years minimum. I didn't care much about politics before that. But ever since then, we've had monkeys running the country.

        It's actually a good thing Germany isn't a real democracy and the people really running the show pretty much don't give a shit who's the government. Otherwise the country would be even more fucked than it already is.

    • Seehofer is clueless even compared to the rest. He already was an idiot while being in a Kohl cabinet in the nineties and hasn't learned anything since then.

      That's the largest problem with Bavaria - first they elect village idiots and then, after realising that it was a stupid idea, they send them to the federal government. And they have been doing that for decades.

    • Completely agree. But in case you missed it, in the recent EU elections Merkel's party (CDU) was the biggest loser, followed close by the SPD.
      Merkel and a few others called german "youtubers" aka "youtube artists": influencers. That caused a shitstorm on German youtube channels ... obviously only for a day or two. But it is still a hot topic in the

      He is called Rezo, 2.5M views after a day or two, now over 14M views, and: and close to 200,000 comments!.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        I agree that this situation fits like "die Faust aufs Auge" (not sure how to translate that turn of phrase).
        If you can't beat them in open discourse, where there's a risk of revealing your own incompetence, and you don't have any dirt on them to be used as an ad hominem, because what they said is protected speech, hack their computers where you'll certainly find some dirt. It's the secret police method of getting rid of disagreeable people and it still works well as we can in Russia.

        However these attempt

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nnull ( 1148259 )
      What the hell happened to Germany's privacy group? They had a large following including connections with wikileaks. Hell, half the wikileaks releases were of the German government privacy violations to the point that many minsters were afraid of them. Now I can't even buy a SIM card in the damn country due to new "Anti-terrorism" rules and I have to fly in neighboring Netherlands to get one. Not to mention the internet in Germany is like being on DSL in 1998 in 2019. What the hell happened to your internet
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Catholic Bavarian, enough said (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seehofer is a right-wing conservative nut job. He would fit perfectly into the GOP. He and his predecessors have been working for years to undermine the German constitution. Nothing new...

  • Posting as AC because I have done contract work supporting law enforcement.

    A lot of folks here probably have no idea how bad most of the data returned by these providers to law enforcement is. I've seen returns from legal requests that were structured in such a way that you could tell that the person who structured the report was almost laughing at them and muttering about how they'll never be able to make that data machine-readable for things like analytics.

    Believe it or not, but a lot of cops and federal

  • I actually have no problem with banning encryption services as long as they have public APIs. Nobody needs encryption services; computers are cheap enough that you can encrypt it yourself, even on the lamest phone. The services should just deliver messages, and the user-oriented client (which almost certainly wouldn't come from the service itself, due to the inherent conflict-of-interests that always creates) can add the encryption. Service provider has no say, and no ability to intercept.

    • You're probably right, but the lesson of 20-odd years of PGP has been that self-encryption of existing unencrypted messaging systems means very low adoption of encryption.

      Plus there's the larger problem of key exchange. It's not hard, but asking people to manually manage it generally means it doesn't happen.

      The unencrypted messaging systems either build in over-complicated PKI or make their user interfaces incredibly clumsy to use third party encryption.

      I mean, would Zix even exist if self-encryption was e

    • Service provider has no say, and no ability to intercept.

      Yes they can, and will. They will drop all unauthorized protocols, or send them straight to tla.gov. The ISP is an impenetrable wall for all but the most determined with very expensive equipment.

      • Service provider has no say, and no ability to intercept.

        Yes they can, and will. They will drop all unauthorized protocols, or send them straight to tla.gov. The ISP is an impenetrable wall for all but the most determined with very expensive equipment.

        Here's the vacation picture you asked for - followed by 64K of binary.

        • Yes, that buys some time...

          The best communications are still in the "Sunday Classifieds". It's like a one time pad. But latency is kind of a thing. I mean, obviously you don't have to wait until Sunday, but the lag is noticeable when compared to the modern telegraph.

  • It's so easy to build your own secure chat service (Score:5, Interesting)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @10:12AM (#58690884)
    The criminals will simply move to home made solutions. Even a junior developer can build a PKI-based encrypted chat. Cryptography is public knowledge after all.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dusanyu ( 675778 )
      why bother making a chat solution? get a couple https://protonmail.com/ [protonmail.com] accounts and plan your criminal stuff via email.

    • You don't think they know that? The service provider's deep packet inspection will deal with it and reroute the traffic to the proper authorities.

    • Yep. Say it with me, everyone:

      When encryption becomes a crime, only criminals will have encryption

      Politicians in general are clueless about technological matters like encryption. Therefore they just don't understand: 'backdoored' encryption means it's not encrypted anymore. At that point you may as well just make all encryption illegal, and force everyone and everything to be done in the clear. At least then the criminals dumb enough to use encryption would stand out.
      ..But wait, even that won't work! There are countless ways to hide the real content of a conversation that

  • He should have retired years ago. He has no idea how the 'series of tubes' work.

    PS. He's a Christian Socialist of all things. :-)

  • Fine (Score:2)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    But from now on I want to be privy to all of this minster's telephone calls and bedroom conversations.
  • First of all, he should ban math.

  • "wound my heart with a monotonous languor"

    Its the 75th anniversary in a couple of days

  • Not a fascist (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @11:02AM (#58691124)

    This guy is not a fascist. He is something worse: He is an opportunist that does not care how much damage he does as long as he gets a short-term personal pay-off.

    • Don't confuse fascism and opportunism with straight up stupidism.... errr stupidity. The vast majority of people proposing such solutions believe in the sacred rule of law including checks and balances.

      It's one of the reasons they are stupid enough to believe that a back door would only be used for good and not for evil.

  • Call it the Standard Terminal Access Security Institute.

    Or STASI for short.

    The agency will start out with great brand awareness. There's even a film [amazon.com]...

  • Translated Headline: "A German Minister Wants To Put The Cat Back In The Bag"

    Yeah, let's just time-travel back to 1920 or so and pretend that no one knows about encryption.

    It'll be easy, all we have to do is pass a law. Laws always work, so what's all the fuss about?

    We can call it the "German State Privacy Option", or "GESTAPO". That's friendly sounding, right?

  • No worries,
    he is not very popular and such a law will pass.
    Perhaps the "summer hole", is starting soon. The time without much news and action and he likes to talk to hear his voice.

  • He demonstrated the depth of his commitment to openness by sharing a live feed of his entire digital footprint on the internet.

    This in part aimed to dispel criticism that lack of encryption gives security services and other technologically advanced beings an informational advantage over the ordinary individual who inadvertently share their entire lives online.

  • I want to ban all idiots and morons from using the internet, like this minister.

    I'm not going to get what I want either.

  • Cue the epic death match between the Privacy Europeans and the Regierung Über Alles Anti-Crypto Europeans.

  • It's absolutely ridiculous... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's absolutely ridiculous that people actually believe that there is such a thing as a "secure, end-to-end encrypted" messaging mechanism in these surveillance devices. Of course, so-called "tech news" sites like Slashdot do nothing to clear up this horrible misconception... quite the opposite. But it's still absurd. Don't believe for a second that this is actually the case, you damn fools.

  • Because I don't think any government has the ability to stop me from encrypting my communications.

  • Is that I can never tell whether they are talking about just picking up the messages for that one app or for all of them before they are encrypted. For instance, in Signal my phone spell checks me so I know the phone has access all the way through to the text input area of Signal. What stops Facebook Messenger, Samsung, Google, etc... from accessing that?

  • If anyone other than the intended recipients can read your encrypted messages, you should assume *anyone* can. And then what's the point of encryption?

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