Hello dear community. I believe, like me, you are concerned for your digital private life.
I inform you that Europe is on the way of passing a law that allows AI doing mass surveillance on every european country. We all know what it means and that type of activity is as much undemocratic as it serves no cause. I think that if it pass, using Murena, iOS or Android would mean more or less the same.
Pls get inform and feel free to sign this pétition
Useful overview of who’s for and against. And they’ve made it easy to write to your MEPs to express your concerns. I’ve sent emails to the Dutch MEPs who have not (yet) expressed their opposition and received one answer so far.
I have called some ministries listed at Der Kampf gegen die Chatkontrolle braucht dich jetzt! – Chatkontrolle STOPPEN! and stated that I wanted to share my opinion. The operators were polite, and I tried to quickly explain why chat control should not be implemented. (The operator of the Ministry of Justice mentioned that it is - at least in their case - better to send an email because a large number of messages about a certain topic will be summarized and communicated to the minister.)
EDIT: I also called my representative. Interestingly, the operator mentioned that several people have also called so far.
Two of the three German government coalition parties have surprisingly stated that they would not be supporting indiscriminate surveillance of chat communication (Google Translate version of article on Netzpolitik.org).
And the petition linked above has reached over 250 000 signatures now.
It’s looking good, but let’s keep the pressure up so this won’t go through!
At least for now. There may be future attempts to introduce other backdoors (like general decryption keys for state actors, only used if there is considerable suspicion etc. ), but the current attempt by the Danish EU presidency seems to have been stopped.
EDIT: Or better, it is probable that the current attempt has been stopped. Still, something unexpected could still happen.
I raised this issue at a foundational meeting of Corbyn’s new Your Party, and made two direct comparisons:
CIA wiretapping of homes in black communities in New York (60s and 70s)
Stasi obtaining and storing used underwear from every citizen, to allow sniffer dogs to track them if needed.
My point was that if governments (via big tech) are able to monitor digital communication, then any grassroots political movement or rebellion is dead before it begins.
The panel was comprised of one politician, three town councillors, a member of the baker’s union, and two activists. One of the activists engaged with my question and acknowledged the need for privacy. The politicians on the bench were silent.
Fact is, most politicians love the idea of surveillance. Little by little, they’ll achieve it.
EDIT: If you send several mass emails in a short amount of time, the receiving email server (e.g. of your parliament) may not accept e.g. the second email: Thunderbird showed me a message from the Bundestag server that I may be blacklisted if I attempted to send a mass email again. I had to wait some time to be able to send the last email. (I hope that it really arrived.)
Thanks to public pressure, the Danish Presidency has been forced to revise its text, explicitly stating that any detection obligations are voluntary. While much better, the text continues to both (a) effectively outlaw anonymous communication through mandatory age verification; and (b) include planned voluntary mass scannings. The Council is expected to formally adopt its position on Chat Control the 18th or 19th of November. Trilogue with the European Parliament will commence soon after.
It seems that @GaelDuval has implicitly answered your question on Mastodon:
My 2 cents:
/e/OS is not meant to protect you from law enforcement, but to provide you with a decent level of privacy regarding big tech (and as a side effect regarding state actors because less data spilled → less data to be (ab)used).
If you want to ensure that your right to privacy is respected in case of clash with law enforcement, use GrapheneOS (on a Pixel, obviously).
It seems that GrapheneOS and /e/OS have clashed in the past, each side claiming that the other side is wrong (GrapheneOS: /e/OS is a security joke and should not be used under any circumstances; /e/OS: GrapheneOS does not get our goal and tries to smear us). I cannot say who is wrong or right; I cannot help to think of the sewer fight in “Life of Brian” where the anti-roman groups fight with each other instead of focusing on their common enemy…
BTW, I use /e/OS on a OnePlus 6 with unlocked bootloader (cannot be locked), and rooted with Magisk. Should law enforcement extract data from it, I must say that I had it coming.
The focus should always be this one: it’s not about fear that governments can spy on people primarily. That’s where the debate slips quickly in unwanted territory.
It’s about preventing attack surfaces, i.e. backdoors, which can (and will) also be exploited by malicious actors.
Everybody is supposed to give in to a proper justice procedure.
A parallel would be the privacy debate in the crypto sector. The focus should always be in respecting privacy through confidentiality and not opaque secrecy.
Zero knowledge proofs help respecting privacy, confidentiality and allow to provide strictly necessary personal data in a granular and controlled way to authorities.
Using Murena under a mandatory chat control would still make a big difference to using Android/iOS. Since Murena would still help you to protect your privacy from big tech. Which is the main point of Murena imho. It‘s not Murena Main goal to make a device secure from government espionage is it?
(I read the whole thread and know Chat Control Plans have halted, but the point above seems important to me)
”MANDATORY CHAT CONTROL – MASKED AS “RISK MITIGATION”
Officially, explicit scanning obligations have been dropped. But a loophole in Article 4 of the new draft obliges providers of e-mail, chat and messenger services like WhatsApp to take “all appropriate risk mitigation measures.” This means they can still be forced to scan all private messages – including on end-to-end encrypted services. “The loophole renders the much-praised removal of detection orders worthless and negates their supposed voluntary nature,” says Breyer. “Even client-side scanning (CSS) on our smartphones could soon become mandatory – the end of secure encryption.””
Anyway, if a volountary scan is possible, do you really think email providers would ask every customer before performing the scan ?
It would be easier for him to scan all customers just in case.
), but the current attempt by the Danish EU presidency seems to have been stopped.
What is Murena’s position about Graphene OS announce?