And now it starts. Programs specifically designed to be encrypted getting attacked.
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"Now"? Apps like Signals are constantly under fire. Whitaker already told the whole EU it would just leave if they introduced the "chat control" legislation.
Meanwhile, the Swedish Armed Forces recently decided to use Signal for secure communication: https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/aktuellt/2025/02/forsvarsmakten-anvander-appen-signal-for-oppen-kommunikation-med-mobiltelefoner/
Half of the original article:
The Armed Forces, on the other hand, are negative and write in a letter to the government that the proposal cannot be realized "without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that can be exploited by third parties", reports SVT.
So that's covered.
There needs to be a messaging app which provides a backdoor for every government that requests it. Every time some dumbass legislator asks for a super-giga-secure-backdoor they promise not to misuse, they should be directed to that app.
Imagine the complexity of the encryption algo with 100 different custom made backdoors!
You just encrypt it with every key. It's wasteful, but not all that complicated.
At that point, you just don't encrypt things at all.
goatse.cx used to work wonderfully for that.
Hello there, fellow Internet old-timer!
The "if" to that "then" being that if they pass a law that would make Signal illegal in Sweden, then Signal will leave Sweden.
Illegal unless they install the backdoors. They could choose to do that instead of leaving Sweden, but they are choosing to leave Sweden.
If they did that, Signal would no longer exist at all. Nobody anywhere in the world would want to continue using it.
Itβs worth noting that mullvad is based in Sweden
No wonder they pussied out and removed port forwarding
The Swedish politicians tried adding backdoors to encrypted apps for at least 20 years :P I don't really understand why they still (ever) think it is a good idea
The problem is that politicians don't understand cyber security, whta their asking is basically the equivalent of closing the front door of a house and leaving the backdoor open. It was already proven to be a bad idea, eternalblue is a good example.
I'm a bit surprised that the armed forces are openly opposing this, but good for them!
That is because they just decided to switch to use it for internal communications. This means that they would have to roll back that decision.
It would have been good of the article to mention that important tidbit...
Technically only for non-classified internal communication. Classified stuff is restricted to be discussed only using military approved locked down hardware. But still, issuing a strong recommendation for Signal above all other options when communicating using regular devices is a good thing. Lots of "regular" conversations can still leak more than you expect through metadata, timing, etc, so they trust Signal to protect that
I mean beyond everything else, any group actually interested in the safety and security of citizens (so, not politicians or cops anywhere apparently), should be pushing everything to be encrypted everywhere. In the modern digital world anything not properly encrypted is at risk for ate tracks by bad actors.
I don't get how its supposed to work...they want to require messengers to include backdoors in their software? So when a program is FOSS, then you can literally just use it knowing there is no backdoor..also, what blocks you from using a server in different country? Wtf that even means...
Then politicians would simply require for "any technical measures to ensure the backdoor to be available" or something like that, meaning it would be Signals' job to ensure the backdoor works. They don't give a shit how something is done (IT is just too complex for most of them), only that it gets done somehow. For that very reason federal digital services are such a shitshow so often, they just don't understand what they even ask for so professionals always have to work around politicians' demands constantly breaking even the most basic security principles.
This law cannot go through! This is a threat to democracy in our country.
Privacy matter. You must be able to talk to your friends without needing to worry about if the government is listening to you. This will not help to catch the bad guys as they will just change to some other protocol. But it opens up the possiblity for third party doing something that they should not even be able to do. Stop this now.
I'm not familiar with EU law, but wouldn't this set a precidence across the whole EU?
There is no such thing as a precedent in EU law. Any court can in general disagree with any other court. Appeals still exist, but they are only valid for that one case.
Judges don't make laws here.
Not unless turned into EU law, or a lawsuit over it reaches EU court. Individual countries can't change the rules of the union on their own.
There's already EU court precedence against mandatory backdoors