"While indiscriminate backdoors might be cheaper for the State than alternative investigative measures, they were expensive for society at large on account of the security risks they produced," EISI told the ECHR.
It's great when someone with some sway actually gets it.
EU institutions are pretty great, but sooner or later they're going to lose the fight against the technofascist nightmare that's constantly getting pushed on us
Luckily this is not an EU institution, this is an international treaty above the EU. For example, Azerbaijan is a signatory.
Point is, you can't easily get it through EU legislation to overturn this, as it would need to cross the ECHR, which it won't do.
Can’t wait to see the brexiteers’ faces when they realise Britain is still a signatory.
Oh they're still trying to get out of the ECHR so they can deport people to Rwanda.
Ah duh, I guess I mixed up the ECJ and ECHR and the "EU court" in the headline didn't help
I feel like Europe is the only place actually making an effort to protect personal privacy these days.
That's because Europe has actual experience with having their privacy invaded and it wasn't just to show you relevant ads. During the war my grandparents burned letters and books after reading them. And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal... but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.
The UN formally declared privacy as a human right a few years after the war ended. Specifically in response to what happened during the war.
A lot of the data used by police to commit horrific crimes was collected before the war, for example they'd go into a cemetery home and find a list of people who attended a funeral six years ago, then arrest everyone who was there. You can't wait for a government to start doing things like that - you have to stop the data from being collected in the first place.
Imagine how much worse it could be today, with so much more data collected and automated tools to analyse the data. Imagine if you lived in Russian occupied Ukraine right now - what data can Russia find about you? Do you have a brother serving in Ukraine's army? Maybe your brother would defect if you were taken hostage...
Well, it defers a lot from country to country.
For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data. They have personal identification numbers that contain lots of personal information that many institutions (e.g. banks) have access to unless you ask for privacy protection. All of this also makes interaction with institutions very streamlined and easy, but it comes at the cost of less privacy.
In Norway and Sweden, for example, anyone can access personal income data about anyone living in the country. Full transparency, more or less.
On the other hand, a country like Germany does not issue personal identification numbers because the population is highly skeptical of data collection and registration, a remnant from the wars. Germany is much more bureaucratic and its government less efficient, but Germans prefer the arm's length approach to government data collection and almost no data is publicly accessible.
In Germany you have to show some kind of ID - which gets registered in a system - to buy a SIM card, something I never had to do in other countries I lived in, in Europe.
There is no other point in having such a requirement for stores to record people's ID when they buy SIM cards than to associate phone numbers with people for surveillance.
The UK too doesn't have ID cards or ID numbers for people and yet has the biggest densitity of surveillance cameras in Europe, automated license plate reading cameras in major roads and highways and, as shown by the Snowden revelations, has an even more broad civil society surveillance system in place than the US and, by the way, when that came out the political response was simply to retroactivelly make legal any part of it which weren't.
ID numbers are just one big "look over here" distraction from what's really going on.
I didn't say that Germany doesn't collect data for basic protection of its citizens and for terrorism prevention (or, some may see that as surveillance). It does. It's just not shared in a big central system that other institutions and private companies can pull from like it is in the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.
E.g. if you move from one place to another in Germany, the government institutions in the two locales don't talk to each other about that. So, for tax and social benefits purposes, you have to tell each one that you moved. The federal government is also not involved.
Edit: spelling
Somehow the rest of Europe doesn't need to get people's IDs when SIM cards are sold "for basic protection of its citizens and for terrorism prevention". Further, the idea that "terrorists" won't just buy their SIMs in a different country and bring them over and using them in Germany is laughable (the only reason I did so for the couple of months I lived in Germany is because I was a heavy data user).
Also from what I've seen in Britain, having government entities unable to properly share data AND having a disproportionately high level of civil society surveillance are not at all incompatible.
I would've tended see the same association between no-IDs and no-crossing of data with low-surveillance that you seem to be making here if I hadn't seen first hand how that is not at all linked (or maybe it's actually inverselly correlated) during the time I lived in Britain.
You're not right about the rest of Europe not needing ID for a SIM. In Denmark, you need ID. In Sweden, you need ID. In Norway, you need ID. I'm sure you need in many other countries as well.
In the US, you also need an ID to open an account.
Such a big win. What a fantastic week.
Finally, good news. I can't believe we need to go to court just to be allowed to have encrypted conversations. It's MY conversation and MY data.
This is incredibly funny for people who followed this. Everybody and their grandma told the European Commission that there was no way that breaking end-to-end encryption was compatible with the law. Yet they constantly pushed for it anyway and now look at this mess.
I am almost certain that the European Commission will claim that there are still ways to break end-to-end encryption, only to defeated in court yet again. Like they tried with data preservation for law enforcement purposes. They just can't stop themselves.
The commissioner responsible for the chat control was thoroughly corrupt by a company which created the scanning system. She was also either unbelievably dense or very, VERY dedicated to her role of a pearl-clutching, think-of-the-children granny. To the point of arguing with IT specialists on TV.
It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Ah my never ending love for EU . Is there a way to donate to the EU ?
I'm a EU Citizen, you can send me the Money 🥸
Never idolise. Courts simply apply the laws, and good laws were likely written by inspired people and approved in a good political climate. These two conditions are not static.
In this case, the title is misleading. It's not the ECJ, it's the ECHR. The ECHR isn't part of the EU even if the EU and the EU members recognize it.
The ECHR rules according to the ECHR and not the EU regulations. The court can overturn EU regulation when violating the Human Rights.
I know i guess i wanna support so they have motivation to go forward. But yes you are absolutely right.
We are always on the brink of ruining everything nice that we have been slowly building.
You can read here about the plans of the European Commission to enable service operators to mass scan all the users' private messages in search of illegal materials.
The Commission is the same super-government body that signed privacy-oriented things like the General Data Protection Regulation.
Yeah i kinda did hear about it and was suprised. But figures can't have anything nice nowadays anyway
Maybe buy stuff there? A lot of vpns and other privacy companies and orgs are European.
Will do in the future i am currently using proton
Trust me, the UE have enough money. Please donate to your local homeless shelter instead :3
Move to EU and pay taxes there. Or buy European products, they pay taxes and some of it go to the EU.
Moving to EU is better option if you can afford it. You'll also get healthcare and other stuff.
They fund their political campaigns via taxes and put limits on spending and campaign seasons, just buy european-made instead if you're a fan.
Don't. They already get way to much taxes and while these are the shining examples of what the EU should be and are beacon of hope...there are other utterly ridiculous laws and stupid regulations we have to deal with. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be European and so on, but it's not the bright haven some people make it to be...
Can you name any ridiculous laws or regulations that negatively affect you? I have a hard time recalling any EU law or regulation that directly affects me without a good reason.
Also, can you name a nation without laws that negatively affect you or could be considered stupid?
Pity we don't have any of those human rights in America. Maybe we should join the EU.
But you have Freedom™!
It's Freedom® these days. It took a little while for the application to be processed.
Maybe one day, the land of personal freedom and Liberty can have a small amount of the personal freedom and Liberty often declared by the “globalist big government” EU.
EU: "This violates human rights"
US: "Human rights? What are those? Are they in the constitution?"
Yeah, I wish the US could get some of those mysterious rights
US: “Human rights? What are those? Are they in the constitution?”
There actually are strong privacy rights written into the constitution. Unfortunately they don't fit well with modern data collection creating loopholes big enough to drive a truck through.
And nothing is being done to close those loopholes. In fact the opposite... end to end encryption, for example, would close most of the loopholes. Legislators are using "think of the children!" arguments to try to stop companies from upgrading services to use E2EE.
The ECHR is not an EU court, it's a Council of Europe court, different organisation.
Edit: To make things more confusing, the EU is in negotiations about joining the Council of Europe.
I tok great pleasure in making my Brexiter dad look a tit by asking what he disliked about the EU. "Well I'm sick of their human rights court telling us what to do! So I'm voting we leave the EU!"
Me: "But we'd still be covered by the ECHR. Are you thinking of the ECJ?"
I don't speak to him anymore cos he's a cunt*.
*Not politics - he's just a cunt who doesn't approve of my 'lifestyle choices' (childless, gay and mentally ill).
EU, I belive in you!
Good to get this sort of ruling on the books.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
