This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that.

But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved.

In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss.

Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all.

On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals.

Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.

This is true of course but the counter argument is that running your own infrastructure is probably not a problem for international criminal gangs but your group chat with the boys is not gunna go through some AI garbage filter and in the end we are still going to get our cars stolen but now the police is knocking because I called Merz a fascist bastard and once the actual fascist win an election they are going to knock on everybody’s door who called Weidel a pick me girl in Turkish.

In summary, without stupid jokes about German politics, the actual stated goal is unachievable but the real world consequences in a Europe that is sprinting to the far right are incredibly dangerous.

They ship entire CARS.

Not some kind of fancy sci-fi grain-of-sand sized microchips that are completely impossible to track. Not even drugs! Cars! Those huge metal objects that weigh over a metric ton each! Those cars!

If the police can't stop criminals from shipping CARS out of an ISLAND COUNTRY, the issue isn't that they don't have a way to breach privacy of every citizen. The issue is that they should be all fired and never allowed to do any government work ever again.

The replies to this thread cannot be serious, on a web forum populated—I thought—primarily by technologists. Surely you all remember the variations on, "If you make encryption illegal then only criminals will have encryption"?

The next step will surely be to make use of communication programs that law enforcement cannot read illegal, right? The police find some person who has committed a crime, caught in the ways that criminals are usually caught, such as with forensics, or simply with the guns and drugs in the boot of their car. Then they can see what forms of communication this person was using, and who was using it with them. At that point, it doesn't matter what those other people were doing: The use of banned encryption technology is the crime. You can roll them up for that, or use evidence of this crime to justify further intrusion into their meatspace lives. And so it goes, on up the chain of a criminal organization. Theoretically, at least.

I don't like this, I don't support this, but as has been said elsewhere in this thread: Let's not pretend this is some insurmountable problem for a government who has already shown an appetite for surveillance.

What is absent from your comment (and also from many arguing against you) is the discussion of trade-offs.

Yes, criminal gangs are bad.

And, for me, and probably many others here too, enabling governments to look at private encrypted messages of everyone is way worse.

Let’s find other ways to prevent these gangs from stealing cars.

Criminals get access to all sorts of illegal things, from drugs to weapons through stolen cars.

Are you telling me that you genuinely believe that they won't be able to download an open source, actually end-to-end encrypted app?

The stupid ones already use Telegram, which is not E2EE. There is no need to change anything for them. Those who are smart enough to choose a secure messenging app today will still be able to do it, even if that app is made illegal.

If that is what they wanted, why hide it behind language about child safety? These bills happen in the US too, nearly identical to the ones in Europe. I don't think this is about stopping crime at all. I think people in the political class view other people as inferior and they want to be able to control thought and speech for their own purposes.

>To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.

no

I don’t follow what prevents criminals of such scale from using another encrypted channel or application after this ban?

What about this law will prevent criminals from using encrypted chat applications?

I understand your point, but I fail to see how this law will change that.

I am perfectly OK with the current level of crime and the current level of freedom. In fact, I'd be OK with slightly more crime in exchange for more freedom. Truth is the police often don't even act on the crimes that are provable using good old-fashioned detective work. So they have no leg to stand on.

In fact, freedom to break the law, revolt and even kill people is necessary for a functioning democracy. The fourth box of freedom is the final check and balance. If enough people (over half the population) determine that the government is corrupt, they need to be able to overthrow it.

And that required and armed population and the ability to organize. Yes, this also helps criminals. Yes, sometimes innocent people will die because the wrong people also have access to guns. That's all the more reason to be able to fight back, both against bad people and against the government.

History repeats itself (with minor variations). People don't value their freedoms, let them be eroded by those who are attracted to power for power's sake, they get abused, and finally either they get fed up and start a revolution or the state functions so poorly it gets invaded.

We're at the stage where freedoms are getting eroded more and more noticeably. I would very much prefer to break the cycle before it comes to rifles and drones.

Ok let's scan every phone in the world instead of just scanning the containers the leave our ports. Sensible.

People who break the law for money have existed forever and forever will. You don't need encrypted messages to smuggle drugs across borders.

It just forces the police to do good-old-fashioned policing. For example, nab one of the few street level guys and force them to give up the higher-level guys. Maybe make them wear a wire.

The real problem is that we've given up on going after the low-level guys, whether they're stealing cars or selling drugs or pickpocketing the tourists. If we catch them at all, we just release them.

So, they are able to get illegal goods through customs and police is not able to catch it because no wiretaps?

The following is supposed to happen in undetectable manner: - stolen car drives from A to B (on roads that can be policed), - at location B let’s assume it’s chopped (finite locations/people that can chop cars) - a container is loaded with heavy, metal car parts, undetected by metal detectors (weight scan, x-ray, visual inspection) - container paperwork is signed by someone (literal government ID is presented here) - customs officers are approving the outbound container that weighs over a metric tonne

You don’t think there is immense amount of incompetency or corruption here?

And what happened to police posing as a buyer, undercover cops, physical surveillance?

We recently shipped our furniture to US, and customs x-rayed it and charged us.

These are literally non-issues.

I don't understand how you can ship a car without proper papers out of the country so easily. Maybe focus on that first?

I don't think this will stop these people. I'm fairly sure I could write some web app, or in an extreme case, provide my team of car thieves with dedicated hardware that just illegally encrypts messages.

I think these laws are simply to catch everyday people chatting about illegal stuff on a phone without any preparation.

> there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces

Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.

> But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold.

If that is really such a big problem, then why don't the politicians say so instead of saying that this law is for protection children?

How hard is to pay a dev and make a custom chat just for them?

You can get it up and running in one week on a cheap server.

To point out the glaring holes in your comment:

- Criminals will still use encryption even if its against the law, given they are criminals

- Denmark is one of the safest countries on earth and every year crime has been declining for decades. Even your property theft example is a declining occurrence in Denmark: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178977/number-of-report...

Given property theft is down and encryption has been available for the entire time period of that chart -- do you have any actual steelman for why Denmark would need this, absent a thirst for power/control, especially now?

if anything should come out of this is that car manufacturers need to come up with a way so it's not this dead simple to steal cars. And it is not that hard. They already have all the tech ready with good security systems. but you know what? those are expensive. and that is something they dont want. so they go with the cheap alternative, which has been cracked 1000+ times already.

So instead of breaking the privacy of everyone, this should only impact the manufacturers.

Just my 0.02

> They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime.

The vast majority of crime is very dumb. Like the three guys who broke into my garage and tried to take my bicycle. The police however is not interested in that: not interested in CCTV recordings, not interested the license plate of the van they were driving.

If the police isn't doing even the simplest things, there's no way in hell they would bother decrypting their whatsapp messages. That's reserved for people targeted by the government, not to fight street crime.

This isn't a dilemma unique to encrypted comms or privacy. You have to weigh the net benefits to society as a whole. How much has the lack of secure communication and encryption at rest cost society? How much have the criminals you mentioned benefited from the lack of encryption? How much more difficult would it be for criminals to locate targets and victims with encryption protecting the latter?

> For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold.

This does not happen almost anywhere else - car theft. This is UK issue with local law enforcement / insurance companies.

Phones - just fix your streets, elect politicians that are tough on crime. Simple.

Technology has never been the limiting factor in stopping any crime. I've literally shown a cop the exact GPS coordinates of stolen items and they shrug.

If police forces wanted to do a better job here, they would.

Don't presume stopping this sort of crime is the purpose, that theory doesn't hold water.

That's all bullshit because we already live in a panopticon. Everyone's physical movements are tracked, facial recognition works even on partials, there are HD cameras everywhere, continuous uploads of videos to TikTok and Instagram mean fugitives can no longer hide in the public world. Phones, Alexas/Homepods, vehicles etc can be remotely converted in to bugs with a court order (and a bunch of other devices probably are without.)

Whether its car thieves or drug dealers, these exist in the West today by explicit choice, not because it is impossible to stop.

track cars then and shipping containers and whatnot, not people's conversations.

we all pay the price, yes, but we also all enjoy the prosperity it brings us.

at best these are arguments for finally making cars harder to steal. (and for people to own fewer of them and just rent them when they need it. and the renter company can then store them in a big fucking lot with security if they want to.)

...

as other commenters pointed it out, the technology is out there.

sure, it might not convince enough voters, we'll see. but it's sure as shit that these networks are not going back to pen and paper.

Wow, no mentions of banana.

I'm bit more sympathetic to this type of argument than most of HN. Looking at what happens in The Wire, you need a judge to allow the wiretap, right? It's not just a willy-nilly cops-can-see-anything system, right? Though it has happened from time to time that since stuff is digital, people have taken a peek when they weren't supposed to. For instance, there was a case over the summer where someone was looking up people in the Danish CPR database, unauthorized.

But I also think this won't be the same as wiretapping. That was based on an old telephone system that was very much tied to the technology of that time. In particular, it wasn't encrypted, being just a straight up analog circuit. The bad guys couldn't do much other than use code words, or security by obscurity.

With digital, anyone can encrypt, and the cost of decryption is super high. I'm not sure what Snowden said about it, but I think it's fair to say that very few messages could be decrypted.

So what will happen? We will all send our decrypted chat messages to the man, and the bad guys will just write their own chat app, which will be encrypted. Nothing illegal will ever happen on the public channels, which from time to time will have some idiot looking at his ex-girlfriend's messages, while the drug lords just write encrypted messages that probably aren't even recognized as chat text.

> watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages

The drama of that show was principally derived from the fact that the gangsters never so much as spoke near a telephone. The idea that you're going to force a backdoor into whatsapp and the gangsters are going to throw their hands into the air and turn themselves into the police is frankly idiotic. Criminals already use special apps and hardware to communicate more securely. They will continue regardless of what the law says they can do, because they are criminals. The idea that the rest of us should give up secure communication in order that gangsters can still find ways to communicate securely reaches the level of insulting. The cat is firmly and safely out of the bag on wiretapping gangsters.

Private communication is not that hard, nothing prevents a drug lord spin their own "signal" app, and since they are already criminal, another crime is not a big deaal, so making it illegal to use secure app is dumb. Also i love banana

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