The EU wants to establish universal client-side scanning for text messages and photos on citizen’s phones. With user words: All cryptography would be useless and hence, nobody would have any privacy in the digital realm anymore.
Love the episode! And the music is awesome!
I’m starting to think that a big problem with people who make laws is the lack of accountability. I mean, take that issue with the teacher from the last podcast, and imagine that after reversing this law and declaring it should never have appeared in the first place, the people who signed this thing into a law would be held accountable and charged: the money spent for this long lawsuit, the damages to the teacher, etc, etc…
This is hardly feasible, of course, but I can’t see how else this “people make laws without bothering to figure out the thing they’re regulating” can be fixed.
Well said, but the question always remains how can you make a complex system (society) where some cannot hide behind the complexity.
Again a point where some kind of cost-benefit calculation needs to be done.
As usual, intersting food for thought.
And on the down side: I hope human socities are not going to hell with handbasket!
Of course they are! But they have been for at least 3000 years, according to literature, and I doubt we (our even our children) will witness them reach the destination point. 
From hearing about this, it “everybody hates it” scenario from the ‘tech’ people. Like other EU ruling/proposals, it feel like it is not the MEP idea, but some lobbyists. Also still not really thinking about HOW the implementation should work (technology and legally).
Who is the one that will benefit from this (in the way it proposed)? The NGO; and the governments that now have more spying power?
What prevent ‘self rule’ that say “we suspect dissidents are child abusers, so we must spy on them” - power given, almost never returned.
I actually read some good articles about this and will do some of my own research. Hopefully, there should be a future episode in this…
I’m finally getting caught up again, so I figured I should reply to Fab’s question about where Canada is at on this topic.
So far, this topic is not on the public radar here. I say that because it is a bit interesting (difficult) to follow the goings on in government these days. The government of Canada passed some laws (C-11 and C-18) that brought some internet areas under their control. As such, news is now banned on platforms such as Meta and Google in Canada.
The official reasoning was that it was financially hurting our media companies to allow search engines and social media to post links to their stories. Yes, I know, it doesn’t make sense that having a link to a media company’s site to read their story would hurt them. And just as a person of average intelligence would think, the media companies noticed a reduction in revenue now, likely closely linked to the fact that not being able to see and click their story in those locations leads to a decrease in them showing ads on their websites. But that’s OK, because the government just announced a further $129 million, on top of the regular annual media spending, to help them out.
To be clear, the government spending on media actually only goes to specific approved MSM, such as the government owned CBC, or government dependent Global. The small and independent media companies, the ones that often do not have big money and their own dedicated TV channels, and are the ones most hurt by not having their stories shared in search engines and social media, they won’t be getting a penny.
It’s actually a sad state of affairs. We have actual elected government officials, who work in our house of parliament for the opposition parties, who are having their content removed from social media platforms. You can often see them pleading that we subscribe to them on alternative platforms or old school email newsletters, because our government is silencing their ability to report on what is happening in the government.
And now, even though the government swore up and down that their laws would only effect larger media companies, we see them actively creating a podcast registry and working with existing podcast sites. This means that in the not too distant future, new podcast subscribers may not be able to find this podcast, because Canadians will only be able to find government approved podcasts that contain Canadian approved content. Fab is not Canadian content, so to the bottom of the list…
So, in short, while I do suspect our government will be making a move on encryption in the future, their current plan is to blind us and take away our ability to share and talk about what they are doing. This will make passing laws like the one proposed in the EU much easier. After all, if the people do not know about the changes, you get less push back…