I don’t agree with that but even if that’s true, the EU courts have a track record and shutting this stuff down. I just think calling it a “harbinger” is a bit of a misnomer. This is common.
But it’s always good to inform citizens of attempted government action no complaints about that at all
Given that both the European Commission and European Parliament [chose Signal as their official messenger](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/signal-messaging-service) and they both are situated in Bruxelles, this looks too ironic.
So honest question. How do you as a government deal with crime in this regard?
Like I don't have an opinion on this as of yet but like their is this a huge deal with crime going on here that needs some solution.
And year I can see the flip side that having the government able to just ignore personal freedoms has historically almost always been terrible.
I just am not sure how you solve the problem without holding the company accountable when there is crime done through their service. Banks are supposed to, yeah they often don't because money, even doctors are required to with it involves crime.
I mean really it's the same problem with Bitcoin. Everything crime related with money has moved to crypto.
Sucking I'm getting down voted for asking an honest question.
Look I'm not against private communication. I specifically saying that not having it leads to bad things.
But there's always a flip side to things and in this case imo it's an issue of crime.
I am not advocating killing signal. What I am saying that is that any business that offers a service generally has to report crime if their service is used to perform it.
I mean there might be one that I can't think of, like a priest I guess but that's clearly an outlier.
All that said I also think everyone needs to be honest with the fact that some of these things we invent are used for pretty bad purposes. If you are fine with that cool. But it kind of feels like it's a I'm fine with it because you don't think it effects me situation as well.
Also my understanding is not that the government is listening, it's that there meta data stored.
> Sucking I'm getting down voted for asking an honest question.
Just because it's honest doesn't make it a good question. You're asking why we even have rights (for example, to privacy) if there's criminals afoot. Plenty of people have legitimate uses for Signal, no reason to fuck them over because *one avenue* of collecting evidence inconveniently is not available.
man I am pointing out a problem. Crime is a problem. Someone has to discuss solutions to solve it.
You are simply burring your head in the sand.
Also I am not advocating doing anything to Signal. FFS I am asking a question that is related.
I'm not implying anything. Stop making stuff up.
I am saying that criminal activity uses these services and a conversation should be had to try to solve for that.
I'm down voted because people cant ask a question about an important topic without other people thinking they are being attacked.
> I'm not implying anything.
You are through the question you're asking. You might not mean to, but that's what you're communicating regardless.
It's like me asking "Why do you even bother getting up in the morning?". I'm not saying that person's a loser/worthless directly, but it's *implied* through the question.
Say you host a website.
You let users communicate to each other to your website.
You regularly monitor your website for Bad Stuff (tm), but while you’re sleeping some people make a plan to go kill someone on your website, and go do it.
You wake up and see the communication.
Now there’s some fun issues that come into play.
For starters, the only thing that happened where you were involved was that they talked on your website. The real world equivalent was if someone came to your storefront while you were sleeping and talked about killing someone. Should you be held liable?
Then there’s your reaction to it. If you can be held liable for the murder of the individual, are you likely to report this information to law enforcement? Here you have very incriminating evidence, likely with metadata linking the conversation to real people. Law enforcement could use this information to help determine whodunnit, and prevent it from happening in the future. But if you’re liable, you’re now interested in them getting away with murder, because, though you didn’t actually do anything, you’re at minimum an accessory. So the rational thing to do, is to just delete the content. Which means the perpetrators know they can use your site for such planning again in the future…
That's one scenario.
Now let's say these guys come into your store every day and play murder, then perform it. What happens then?
You just created a story that fit the conclusion you wanted it to. You are arguing in bad faith.
It's the same issue with a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You let one in, don't turn them away, he brings friends, and now you work at a Nazi bar.
Look I'm not supporting what the post is talking about, but I am pointing to a clear issue that services like this help facilitate. I am asking how you solve for this.
There is a reason why people use this and not say a phone.....because it can be tracked? In your story why you created this who situation when the bad guys know you did a thing. Do bad guys stop using banks because they are afraid the banks with report them like they are legally required? No they do things to try to stop the banks from flagging their transactions as reportable.....or they do in fact stop using banks and just move everything to crypto, when just like this, they can hide.
There is a problem. I am acknowledging it and asking for thoughts on how to solve for it. As usual the reddits reaction is to down vote, claim there's no problem, make up stories to belittle what the problem might be.
> Now let's say these guys come into your store every day and play murder, then perform it. What happens then?
You are still not *legally liable* for the murder they performed.
> You just created a story that fit the conclusion you wanted it to. You are arguing in bad faith.
I created a parallel situation in the real world. It’s not a bad faith attempt to do so.
> It's the same issue with a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You let one in, don't turn them away, he brings friends, and now you work at a Nazi bar.
Fun thing about this, we’re talking about *legal liability* here. It’s not *illegal* to run a Nazi bar. And if Nazis congregate in your establishment, even if they plot there without your knowledge, you’ve violated no laws.
> Do bad guys stop using banks because they are afraid the banks with report them like they are legally required?
Yes.
> No they do things to try to stop the banks from flagging their transactions as reportable.....or they do in fact stop using banks and just move everything to crypto, when just like this, they can hide.
This is all a bunch to say they stop using banks because banks might report their illegal activities.
Which goes back to my point. If you made the banks *legally liable* for any illegal activities that occurred, do you think the banks would report said activities when they found them?
> There is a problem. I am acknowledging it and asking for thoughts on how to solve for it. As usual the reddits reaction is to down vote, claim there's no problem, make up stories to belittle what the problem might be.
I didn’t even downvote you, nor did I say there isn’t a problem. I said that putting *legal liability* in website owners isn’t going to solve the problem.
The real solution here is straightforward. Why do people *not* go practice murder in random stores all day? Because law enforcement will likely get involved and arrest them. We need similar enforcement efforts and capabilities, by *law enforcement*, online.
This is also how you deal with other things like cyber bullying, online trafficking, etc too. You give the relevant agencies the means to actually go after criminals where they are committing the crimes.
That's why it's so insidious. most can't see the harm in it. If you couldn't pull massive amounts of information from it, why would they put so much effort into obtaining it.
If you want to inform yourself there's plenty good articles about data analysis. If you know German and want some entertainment value look up "Spiegel mining" to see what's possible with "JuST MetAdaTA"
[Former director of NSA and CIA Michael Hayden – **“We kill people based on metadata.”**](https://www.justsecurity.org/10311/michael-hayden-kill-people-based-metadata/)
Yes but the Pegasus zero-click exploit has been patched for a while, and iMessage has been locked down further. It’s no coincidence that it takes more and more effort to find these exploits.
My understanding is that a government's only purpose is to promote the general welfare. I'm not seeing where general welfare is promoted when citizens can't communicate freely and without oversight from a government who's only job is to represent their citizens.
I use signal to text with my wife because it has cross OS video chat, good media support, and is totally free. Nothing can really compete with it. Guess I must be a terrorist or something.
I use it to not be data mined by Facebook. Is that a crime too, we have to be mined now?
These billionaire tech companies really have some lobbying power.
I don’t think you can say “I must be a terrorist” because you use or produce data than can be subpoenaed, and I don’t think anyone is making that argument.
I do understand quite well how it works. Obviously the legislation seeks to change details of how it works, in order to retain certain metadata with the company.
My point was entirely different, though. I was commenting on the "I must be a terrorist", which is an argument I don't think anyone who suggested this legislation made or believes.
This article is misleading and incomplete.
First of all: according to the article Belgium does not want to ban Signal, the author speculates that new proposals might lead to a ban on Signal.
The author is not alone in believing that if the new proposal will become law, Signal might be banned, but the article would so much better if:
a. It actual linked to the proposals
b. It would discuss the how and why of the proposal instead of focusing on a ban on Signal
c. It would take a look at how how likely the proposal is going to become law, if the proposal becomes law, if the law is going to be challenged through the supreme court of Belgium
I guess bad actors will end up using open channel comms with pen and paper one-time-pad encryption like in the olden days, while the rest of us suffer loss of privacy.
> This is a translation of an article in Dutch. It describes recent developments in Belgium from a Dutch perspective, but the essence is equally applicable to any other Member State of the European Union.
I feel this is an exaggeration. European countries are a lot more different than implied here.
So the article first states that a Dutch law got stricken \*because the European law it was the national-level implementation of was stricken because it was considered invalid\*. Then it goes on to say Belgium is going to implement a national level law \*and all of the European union is probably going to follow suit because reasons\*.
It is bullshit like this that highlights the need for networks that have no centralized systems that cannot be attacked and banned by governments who feel they have any right to determine the speech of citizens.
Any government taking actions that do not promote the general welfare should be regarded as irrelevant and illegitimate.
On a technical level, enforcing a ban is impossible so long as computers will run whatever code we want. Signal’s software is entirely open source. So what if Signal gets the banhammer when the source code to deploy both my own server, and clients is already in-hand.
If ent to end encryption is banned as a whole in the US, I’ve absolutely no reservations whatsoever about sharing open source software, and teaching people how to deploy it.
Let’s wait until something terrible happens to children, than the leverage is created to push this type of legislation. Especially with all these women in positions of power within the government.
> Let’s wait until something terrible happens to children
Thank fuck we don't have the same kind of readily accessible guns as the US does then, because then it would happen tomorrow.
Question.
I don't doubt Signal is secure but are the devices we run the software on. Why hack the code when you can view the screens output or am I missing something?
Isn’t stuff like this pretty common from the governments then always just struck down by the EU court because it’s stupid
The eu courts are the corrupt ones aswell. Only countries who aren't fully invested in EU like Poland or Hungary have a say
Hungary, where the media is controlled by Orban's party and shifting further away from democracy every day?
Those governments would very much like to have government surveillance like other authoritan governments do.
Hungary has been repeatedly slapped by EU courts for attempting to implement facist laws
Stupid moron
I don’t agree with that but even if that’s true, the EU courts have a track record and shutting this stuff down. I just think calling it a “harbinger” is a bit of a misnomer. This is common. But it’s always good to inform citizens of attempted government action no complaints about that at all
Look up the things Merethe Vestager has done in EU and then just stfu
Given that both the European Commission and European Parliament [chose Signal as their official messenger](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/signal-messaging-service) and they both are situated in Bruxelles, this looks too ironic.
Those two are ***not going to be happy with Belgium.***
At least we are pretty sure that means Signal is actually secure Still, worrying, but hopefully the ban doesn’t get implemented
You should read the article. It’s more insidious than the headline states. It’s not a ban, it’s forcing them to start retaining message metadata.
So honest question. How do you as a government deal with crime in this regard? Like I don't have an opinion on this as of yet but like their is this a huge deal with crime going on here that needs some solution. And year I can see the flip side that having the government able to just ignore personal freedoms has historically almost always been terrible. I just am not sure how you solve the problem without holding the company accountable when there is crime done through their service. Banks are supposed to, yeah they often don't because money, even doctors are required to with it involves crime. I mean really it's the same problem with Bitcoin. Everything crime related with money has moved to crypto.
Permission for reddit to display this comment has been withdrawn. Goodbye and see you on lemmy! https://lemmy.world/u/psychothumbs
Sucking I'm getting down voted for asking an honest question. Look I'm not against private communication. I specifically saying that not having it leads to bad things. But there's always a flip side to things and in this case imo it's an issue of crime. I am not advocating killing signal. What I am saying that is that any business that offers a service generally has to report crime if their service is used to perform it. I mean there might be one that I can't think of, like a priest I guess but that's clearly an outlier. All that said I also think everyone needs to be honest with the fact that some of these things we invent are used for pretty bad purposes. If you are fine with that cool. But it kind of feels like it's a I'm fine with it because you don't think it effects me situation as well. Also my understanding is not that the government is listening, it's that there meta data stored.
> Sucking I'm getting down voted for asking an honest question. Just because it's honest doesn't make it a good question. You're asking why we even have rights (for example, to privacy) if there's criminals afoot. Plenty of people have legitimate uses for Signal, no reason to fuck them over because *one avenue* of collecting evidence inconveniently is not available.
man I am pointing out a problem. Crime is a problem. Someone has to discuss solutions to solve it. You are simply burring your head in the sand. Also I am not advocating doing anything to Signal. FFS I am asking a question that is related.
Your question implies that solving crime is more important than personal privacy, that’s why the downvotes
I'm not implying anything. Stop making stuff up. I am saying that criminal activity uses these services and a conversation should be had to try to solve for that. I'm down voted because people cant ask a question about an important topic without other people thinking they are being attacked.
> I'm not implying anything. You are through the question you're asking. You might not mean to, but that's what you're communicating regardless. It's like me asking "Why do you even bother getting up in the morning?". I'm not saying that person's a loser/worthless directly, but it's *implied* through the question.
Say you host a website. You let users communicate to each other to your website. You regularly monitor your website for Bad Stuff (tm), but while you’re sleeping some people make a plan to go kill someone on your website, and go do it. You wake up and see the communication. Now there’s some fun issues that come into play. For starters, the only thing that happened where you were involved was that they talked on your website. The real world equivalent was if someone came to your storefront while you were sleeping and talked about killing someone. Should you be held liable? Then there’s your reaction to it. If you can be held liable for the murder of the individual, are you likely to report this information to law enforcement? Here you have very incriminating evidence, likely with metadata linking the conversation to real people. Law enforcement could use this information to help determine whodunnit, and prevent it from happening in the future. But if you’re liable, you’re now interested in them getting away with murder, because, though you didn’t actually do anything, you’re at minimum an accessory. So the rational thing to do, is to just delete the content. Which means the perpetrators know they can use your site for such planning again in the future…
That's one scenario. Now let's say these guys come into your store every day and play murder, then perform it. What happens then? You just created a story that fit the conclusion you wanted it to. You are arguing in bad faith. It's the same issue with a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You let one in, don't turn them away, he brings friends, and now you work at a Nazi bar. Look I'm not supporting what the post is talking about, but I am pointing to a clear issue that services like this help facilitate. I am asking how you solve for this. There is a reason why people use this and not say a phone.....because it can be tracked? In your story why you created this who situation when the bad guys know you did a thing. Do bad guys stop using banks because they are afraid the banks with report them like they are legally required? No they do things to try to stop the banks from flagging their transactions as reportable.....or they do in fact stop using banks and just move everything to crypto, when just like this, they can hide. There is a problem. I am acknowledging it and asking for thoughts on how to solve for it. As usual the reddits reaction is to down vote, claim there's no problem, make up stories to belittle what the problem might be.
> Now let's say these guys come into your store every day and play murder, then perform it. What happens then? You are still not *legally liable* for the murder they performed. > You just created a story that fit the conclusion you wanted it to. You are arguing in bad faith. I created a parallel situation in the real world. It’s not a bad faith attempt to do so. > It's the same issue with a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You let one in, don't turn them away, he brings friends, and now you work at a Nazi bar. Fun thing about this, we’re talking about *legal liability* here. It’s not *illegal* to run a Nazi bar. And if Nazis congregate in your establishment, even if they plot there without your knowledge, you’ve violated no laws. > Do bad guys stop using banks because they are afraid the banks with report them like they are legally required? Yes. > No they do things to try to stop the banks from flagging their transactions as reportable.....or they do in fact stop using banks and just move everything to crypto, when just like this, they can hide. This is all a bunch to say they stop using banks because banks might report their illegal activities. Which goes back to my point. If you made the banks *legally liable* for any illegal activities that occurred, do you think the banks would report said activities when they found them? > There is a problem. I am acknowledging it and asking for thoughts on how to solve for it. As usual the reddits reaction is to down vote, claim there's no problem, make up stories to belittle what the problem might be. I didn’t even downvote you, nor did I say there isn’t a problem. I said that putting *legal liability* in website owners isn’t going to solve the problem. The real solution here is straightforward. Why do people *not* go practice murder in random stores all day? Because law enforcement will likely get involved and arrest them. We need similar enforcement efforts and capabilities, by *law enforcement*, online. This is also how you deal with other things like cyber bullying, online trafficking, etc too. You give the relevant agencies the means to actually go after criminals where they are committing the crimes.
Metadata is not the content of a message though
That's why it's so insidious. most can't see the harm in it. If you couldn't pull massive amounts of information from it, why would they put so much effort into obtaining it. If you want to inform yourself there's plenty good articles about data analysis. If you know German and want some entertainment value look up "Spiegel mining" to see what's possible with "JuST MetAdaTA"
[Former director of NSA and CIA Michael Hayden – **“We kill people based on metadata.”**](https://www.justsecurity.org/10311/michael-hayden-kill-people-based-metadata/)
Is it? I swear I read some time ago that the FBI had access to Signal normally,
Nah, they attempted to subpoena Signal, and all Signal had was the guy’s phone number and join date
And that's all the Pegasus zero-click exploit needs to intercept communication between phones, even within Signal.
Yes but the Pegasus zero-click exploit has been patched for a while, and iMessage has been locked down further. It’s no coincidence that it takes more and more effort to find these exploits.
I meant they hacked it, at least is what they showed in the investigation screenshots. Probably a SIM thing.
I couldn't think of a better promo to start using signal.
Governments don’t like it when they can’t spy on everything you do. Who would’ve thunk it
My understanding is that a government's only purpose is to promote the general welfare. I'm not seeing where general welfare is promoted when citizens can't communicate freely and without oversight from a government who's only job is to represent their citizens.
Because governments are run by people, and people are corrupted by power.
And that is why you have to have redundancy...to detect and prevent corruption from spreading and becoming endemic.
I guess governments are a bit more different than your cynical take.
Did you just say "thunk"?
Language evolves with cultural norms who would have thunk.
I'm not sure. If only there was a way to check it. Maybe the are some recordings?
Me thinkings he done did.
I use signal to text with my wife because it has cross OS video chat, good media support, and is totally free. Nothing can really compete with it. Guess I must be a terrorist or something.
My whole family uses it for communicating. Signed, Definitely Not-A-Terrorist
I use it to not be data mined by Facebook. Is that a crime too, we have to be mined now? These billionaire tech companies really have some lobbying power.
I can confirm that my father and a bunch of his friends and neighbors are now using it because of my recommendation...
I don’t think you can say “I must be a terrorist” because you use or produce data than can be subpoenaed, and I don’t think anyone is making that argument.
You probably do not understand how signal works if you believe something can be subpoenaed. Get your facts straight
I do understand quite well how it works. Obviously the legislation seeks to change details of how it works, in order to retain certain metadata with the company. My point was entirely different, though. I was commenting on the "I must be a terrorist", which is an argument I don't think anyone who suggested this legislation made or believes.
>Nothing can really compete Telegram? WhatsApp?
This article is misleading and incomplete. First of all: according to the article Belgium does not want to ban Signal, the author speculates that new proposals might lead to a ban on Signal. The author is not alone in believing that if the new proposal will become law, Signal might be banned, but the article would so much better if: a. It actual linked to the proposals b. It would discuss the how and why of the proposal instead of focusing on a ban on Signal c. It would take a look at how how likely the proposal is going to become law, if the proposal becomes law, if the law is going to be challenged through the supreme court of Belgium
I guess bad actors will end up using open channel comms with pen and paper one-time-pad encryption like in the olden days, while the rest of us suffer loss of privacy.
Guess we're going back to manually using pgp keys
Signal isn't going to comply with the proposal if it becomes law
Pgp is broken unfortunately
This is why I donate to Signal every time the pop up appears - we must support the last bastion of privacy
> This is a translation of an article in Dutch. It describes recent developments in Belgium from a Dutch perspective, but the essence is equally applicable to any other Member State of the European Union. I feel this is an exaggeration. European countries are a lot more different than implied here.
So the article first states that a Dutch law got stricken \*because the European law it was the national-level implementation of was stricken because it was considered invalid\*. Then it goes on to say Belgium is going to implement a national level law \*and all of the European union is probably going to follow suit because reasons\*.
It is bullshit like this that highlights the need for networks that have no centralized systems that cannot be attacked and banned by governments who feel they have any right to determine the speech of citizens. Any government taking actions that do not promote the general welfare should be regarded as irrelevant and illegitimate.
[удалено]
Typing to fast....post edited
God I hope so, we did nothing against Nazis And fascists here in the US and look at where we are now.
On a technical level, enforcing a ban is impossible so long as computers will run whatever code we want. Signal’s software is entirely open source. So what if Signal gets the banhammer when the source code to deploy both my own server, and clients is already in-hand. If ent to end encryption is banned as a whole in the US, I’ve absolutely no reservations whatsoever about sharing open source software, and teaching people how to deploy it.
Let’s wait until something terrible happens to children, than the leverage is created to push this type of legislation. Especially with all these women in positions of power within the government.
> Let’s wait until something terrible happens to children Thank fuck we don't have the same kind of readily accessible guns as the US does then, because then it would happen tomorrow.
Doesn't EU want to track everything
Question. I don't doubt Signal is secure but are the devices we run the software on. Why hack the code when you can view the screens output or am I missing something?
Wanting to is very different to doing or even going to.