European Police Chiefs call for action against end-to-end encryption roll-out
europol.europa.euThis is unlikely to be of any consequence. ECHR has already ruled that weakening or backdooring e2ee isn’t allowed. So bar a law that bans rolling out e2ee at all, this won’t achieve anything.
Next they'll want cameras in all our houses. Much of their argument would apply to privacy anywhere?
I think this comparison deserves more consideration. I don't want to treat it as a strawman and ignore it, and I don't want to just automatically knock it down as ridiculous. I think it deserves thinking about as possibly the closest analogue we have to what the idea of un-inhibited access to on-the-wire end-to-end intent would be: it's morally equivalent to having a police camera in your home, all the time.
You don't know if it's being watched or not, you don't know if its event triggered or always-on, or how anything you say and do is contextualised. You only know it may be used against you at any time.
What it crystallises for me is the implicit "if you are pure you have nothing to fear" quality in these things. The idea that the loss of privacy is inhibiting and that this kind of law is antithetical to a fundamental expectation of privacy as a right. Many places have no written constitutional norms in this space, and so the right to privacy is assumed, not codified. (and, it would be equally simplistic to assume codified rights necessarily enshrine them or strengthen them)
No analogy between online and offline worlds is particularly exact, but I prefer analogies about window shades, maybe including whether you can make window shades out of materials that block more and more of the electromagnetic spectrum (if you learn that your old window shades were transparent to infrared, for example).
Or Terahertz rays maybe?
The thing with real-world effects is that the channel to control this would be their ability to constrain IR shielding materials in the supply chain. But if they were ubiquitous, then I guess it's a good analogue: you would be guilty of the crime of attempting to hide your IR signature, not of any specific act done under the banner of being IR invisible.
Your phone has 2 cameras, your laptop haa one. /s