The Democratic World’s Privacy Saboteurs: Still Out There…
Denmark has re-tabled the repeatedly failed Chat Control law, mandating service providers enable scanning of encrypted messages for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
We’ve written numerous articles over the past few years about the spate of anti-privacy regulatory and law enforcement proposals making the rounds of otherwise liberal democratic governments around the world, including Sweden, the UK, France, the US, and others. My fellow CyAN member and fellow board member Kim Chandler McDonald has just published a blog post on Canada’s C-2 bill, which would “give government officials the authority to issue secret ministerial orders to electronic service providers – orders that could compel access to encrypted data or communications, all while offering little in the way of public transparency or civil oversight.“
At times, it feels like well-meaning activists and legislators are pursuing a coordinated tactic of trying to beat privacy and digital rights advocates into submission through the sheer volume of proposals, including rehashed attempts at introducing discredited and widely opposed legislation like Chat Control. Almost without exception, these are the result of a lack of information, and misplaced idealism. Nobody supports the misdeeds that encryption-breaking laws are designed to minimise, investigate, and prosecute.
The arguments why these laws, and those who support them, are wrong have been made time and time again – undermining end to end encryption weakens the security of, and trust in, digital communications. This will negatively impact freedom of expression, undermine democracy, and make online commerce less safe, while masking lazy investigative work by law enforcement and intelligence officers. It will offer nothing in the way of protection against terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers, child abusers, or other offenders, while penalising law abiding citizens and companies.
Worse, illegal sexual abuse content, terrorist and extremist messaging, and other awful phenomena are a canard to pre-emptively silence opposition to such laws. Nobody in their right mind supports child pornography, right? So why are you opposing this? Never mind that backdoors can be used to pursue political dissent should our demonstrably fragile democracy ever go down that dark path as some countries currently actively are doing. Breaking encryption opens the door to blanket surveillance as much as enabling cybercrime.
Bluntly: you want these powers because you do not trust individuals. I counter that we don’t trust you with these powers, nor should we. Figure out a way of doing your jobs that doesn’t punish me and my fellow honest citizens by taking away tools that are vital for our safety.
On a positive note, Nvidia has just unambiguously announced in a blog post that its policy includes “No Backdoors. No Kill Switches. No Spyware.” Heise has more context on the company’s promise, a response to accusations by China’s Cyberspace Administration as a result of US lawmakers’ demands to build tracking-capabilities into AI chips.
We hope that Nvidia’s statement, especially the part about refusing backdoors and surveillance, will contribute materially to the opposition against intrusive, impractical, and undemocratic surveillance laws making the rounds of the world’s legislatures, and will encourage other major corporations to realise the impracticality and undesirability of such laws and mechanisms.