Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the terrorists-win dept.

Germany is planning a new law giving authorities the right to look at private messages and fingerprint children as young as 6, the interior minister said on Wednesday after the last government gathering before a national election in September.

Ministers from central government and federal states said encrypted messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Signal, allow militants and criminals to evade traditional surveillance.

"We can't allow there to be areas that are practically outside the law," interior minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in the eastern town of Dresden.

It's not even certain that messages will be obvious to be... anything like they don't want to. A quick look how this can be done is the movie "The Saint" from 1997 where the contractor gets jobs that way. The hard quote is "where authorities install software on phones to relay messages before they are encrypted". Suppose the phone contains nothing of value. Not even the destination for the message because another unit transmits this via a analog transmission junk voice modulated with the actual real bits.

This panopticon idea is incredibly stupid technology-wise and a dangerous setup of society. The last time themes like this were current, neighbors told people in Armani uniforms that so-and-so did bad things so they could snatch their belongings or houses for themselves. And the whole society went down the drain. Oh wait, actually it was repeated after the mustache times with the sickle times. Both failed. This also shows why bootloader locking computer phones is detrimental to real security for real users. Because without it, enforced and silent installation will be hard.

And as for the motivation behind these moves. For some mysterious reason Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech, Slovakia, and Hungary seem to have been spared the latest string of violent attacks. How can that be? Nobel prize awaits! ;)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @10:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @10:07PM (#526233)

    A blog from a grad student whose thesis is that liberals want a welfare state and that can't work with immigrants. Yup, solid gold /s

    Explain how a welfare state can work with mass immigration when even the most tepid predictions [technologyreview.com] are for a shrinking employment rate. Given that there's no reduction in GDP [mit.edu] due to an ageing and shrinking population; Where will the additional taxation revenue come from to support the welfare requirements for a massive increase in population?

    Seems to me that the migrant crime rate would be even less if they screened individuals for employment suitability before letting them into the country. Given that we're talking economic migrants rather than refugees, they could create a set of conditions for entry and call it an "immigration policy" or something. What a pie-in-the-sky, fantastical idea huh? Not as if one of the core responsibilities granted to government under liberal ideals is to protect it's citizenry or anything?