Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.

In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.

From my memory this case can actually be used to support spyware, I remember all the media complaining "how is it possible that the police or the secret service can't instantly locate a phone very precisely" , same when that airplane crashed and the people were calling for help but the authorities could not get the coordinates and searched for hours , the media was demanding that the police or other services have the technical ability to locate any person in distress.

> What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time.

Probably a coincidence that it all happens just before the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. It could be they sent the new agenda a bit earlier to allow governments to prepare themselves.

Every Western government is receiving the same briefings from its intelligence and counterintelligence agencies: these powers are needed in case the third world war starts.

Why is that strange? Technology's proliferation decentralizes political power nexuses, making it a near-existential threat to tyrants^Wgovernments everywhere.

I mean, because the world is connected via a large global network with instant communication.

It's kind of like asking "Why did the world kind of destabilize politically during the 1910s". Massive technological change swept the world and fast travel changed the dynamics of the world.

Our world has changed from one of bulky analog data (paperwork, pictures, remote places) to one where any information can be digitized and sent anywhere in the past 2 decades. This data can be stored pretty much forever. This is as much of a change as what occurred in WWI and WWII. The political dynamics of the world are completely different in the data regime. He who controls the data controls the world.

This is a very difficult trend to counter, just because you decide not to control said data, doesn't mean that others aren't capturing that same data and using it against you, in which they'll take power.

There is a distinct possibility that rights and ever growing capabilities of technology are fundamentally incompatible. This is going to present a growing problem for human societies.

I believe the main reason is the current "situation" with the US. European agencies and law enforcement have relied heavily on NSA signal intelligence via low-level intelligence exchange and it has become more and more clear that this is a dangerous dependence. In a sense, the turn towards codifying and legalizing surveillance had already started with the Snowden revelations because at that time many people realized that the usual practices were basically illegal and wanted more legal certainty. At the same time, companies like Apple have increased device security a lot over the past decade.

That's my take on it. I'd love to hear other explanations. It's indeed curious why so many EU countries are pushing for increased surveillance so heavily.

> . In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy.

You found out why.

You can make it technologically impossible, but they can also come and arrest you just for using such technology. So its not really a technical problem, its a social/political one.

I don't think there's a way with a phone that people would actually be willing to use. At some point it has to be decrypted to be displayed to the user and there's always the chance there's a flaw somewhere in the stack from hardware to OS to app etc that will have a gap to exfiltrate the data.

Avoiding centralised services is generally a good start. You could also do something like encrypt any messages through PGP even if the service you're using is already "e2e encrypted" like iMessage or signal

The problem is they'll legislate for the providers to insert back doors, negating cryptographic hardness.

s/CIA/NSA/g (probably)