Is the EU becoming nationalist/fascist/undemocratic?

[auroraglacialis]

Thanks for explaining basic cryptography, HNM, but that was not really my point. Of course there are ways which can provide some security in specific communications between 2 people that are security aware and capable. Which by the way is why all this data retention and internet censorship is bloody useless when it comes to the issues the lawmakers pretend to be the reason for installing them (child pr0n, terrorism, criminal activities, hackers,...) because these people are the ones that are most likely to soon figure out a way to get around these restrictions. But the issue is that most traffic is unsecure and that this , if used properly , can tell someone very valuable personal information about almost all people.

[Human No More]

That's the point of awareness - even if they don't change it, people should know what their trackable/identifiable footprint is. There's a lot more I could do, certainly, as with alost every person on Earth, yet I'm still more secure than the average, but I'm aware of the impact of each activity.

There is always an arms race between censorship and bypassing it, and it will always have the same result - not least because the most knowledgeable and skilled people always realise that not only is freedom more important, but that authoritarians will always be playing catch up.

[Fkeu'itan]

It's the chemtrails man.

[auroraglacialis]

Well, I follow the talks at the congress (CCC | Veranstaltungen des CCC) and other activities of the CCC, I think we here are quite aware of the possibilities. Still the gap between general application and the front of the arms race is widening. Some people even claim the we lost the war (video) and to be honest, it is not looking good. There is a war on general computing that has started escalating. And meanwhile people are just not aware of this - they dump all their private data (and mine) on failbook and elsewhere by themselves - no data retention and spying laws needed. This is the masterpiece of surveillance - to convince people that they WANT to give up their privacy and data. Its a really well done large scale social hack

[Human No More]

Communication will split - if you look around, there are even plans to facilitate this, primarily via darknets, but I think it will happen anyway as people who are aware gravitate towards those who are aware and take action, while those who are unaware remain in the same place. It doesn't even take an amazing amount of skill to follow or participate - well beyond the average luser, but not to someone who is even aware of the issues.

[auroraglacialis]

But I think it is a problem if everyone but some who are aware of the issues just lets things go as they do. Sometimes, awareness is high enoug - like in Germany when 100.000 people went on the streets to protest data retention laws and a subsequent lawsuit in the supreme constitutional court resulted in a retraction of that law. But at the same time 2 or 3 other major issues went ahead (electronic RFID passports, centralized medical data collection,...). I really fear that we are loosing here, not winning. 20 years ago, the percentage of privacy-aware people in so many areas was higher than it is now. People protested the census back then - nowadays there are just a few concerned voices. Yes, the "pirate party" has won 7% of votes and thus has entered the parliament in one of germanies states last week, that is a good sign in terms of the reflection of the awareness of voters of the privacy issues which was one of their main political themes, but I feel somehow that Germany is not really the norm here. If there is something I like about the German society, it is that the people are overall more aware of the problematic issues that threaten the world and the ideas of a free society. Maybe because Germany has experienced two totalitarian states and it has experienced the effects of pollution and overburdening industrialization early on. We had the NAZIs, the STASI, completely toxified rivers, forests dying of acid rain and fallout from Chernobyl. Maybe it is no wonder that antifascism and environmentalism are not as weak as elsewhere here...
But still - I observed the trends over the past 20 years and looking bad I see that the trend is not encouraging, that things seem to rather decay than to progress towards something positive. Not all is bad and not all is gloom and doom, there are many good people out there trying to keep civil liberties, freedom and democracy alive and the environment safe. But if I go around the street and ask people if they heard about TOR, they probably would in >>90% of the cases direct me to the nearest city gate (Stadt-tor) and not to a computer program and for GNUs, they probably tell me to go to Africa. If I send someone random a PGP encrypted email, I will not get a reply (heck sor some even opening a HTML email is a challenge). We spread flyers and stickers making fun of pseudosafety measures like CCTV or try to make people aware of horrible internet laws, but I still feel this is not enough and we are still loosing. You in the UK have already lost, I think. If I'd have to travel to the UK, I'd probably have a strange feeling in my stomach. I would not take my laptop with me (as they can force me to give away my password for the encryption), I would feel watched by CCTV wherever I go and try to spot the cameras and I would try to always use a proxy or TOR when available to go on the internet. But what do people complain about who live there? That THEIR neighborhood has not yet enough CCTV cameras. W T F...

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

But I think it is a problem if everyone but some who are aware of the issues just lets things go as they do.

Generally speaking, this is the way it has always been. Complete awareness of an issue usually only comes with civil war, afaik.

[auroraglacialis]

Well - I think it is absolutely no coincidence then, that the language of the CCC congress titles are increasingly sounding like a military congress. There is a war going on about the internet and computing in general. And if we loose, computing and internet turns into a massive machine to control people like the TV did but worse. Maybe people will wake up one day to a civil internet war - or they will wake up only after it is over and the war has reached the real world.
I dont even want to think about what a totalitarian government can do with all the data that each of us has sitting in the internet and on devices. Social Network, Friends, location data, sexual orientation, political orientation, religious issues. If the NAZIs would gain power today, it would make everything a lot easier for them to round up people they do not like - just visit their f-ing facebook pages - or the ones of their friends and there is all the data an opressive government ever wishes to know, including "facbook locate" data and so on. The amount of data, facebook knows about each of us would make the east German STASI totally envious.

[Human No More]

People need to pick their battles. Census protesting is stupid, while if you make every random go 'not AGAIN...' in regards to privacy threats, they will become more ignorant, and it makes real threats harder to get people aware of. RFID passport chips are a classic example - yes, there are security issues around them, but in terms of remote reading (get a shielded case for it), not in terms of general privacy, remember if you go to an airport there are dozens of facial recognition and ANPR camera systems in addition to people observing. That's the point about levels of acceptability and being informed about what data is being collected where and by who, and in either case, I'm less concerned about airports wanting to stop people who are on terrorism watchlists than I am about interception of private communications (although the two together are why data sharing between organisations is always a big concern).

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

But if I go around the street and ask people if they heard about TOR, they probably would in >>90% of the cases direct me to the nearest city gate (Stadt-tor) and not to a computer program and for GNUs, they probably tell me to go to Africa. If I send someone random a PGP encrypted email, I will not get a reply (heck sor some even opening a HTML email is a challenge).

See my previous points. It's never going to be for everyone, but by the knowledge being there, it changes how things are thought of and respected, while, although it's a painful thing to admit, some people are simply too ignorant of privacy issues to be helped.

You in the UK have already lost, I think. If I'd have to travel to the UK, I'd probably have a strange feeling in my stomach. I would not take my laptop with me (as they can force me to give away my password for the encryption)

Probably cause. They can't look randomly because they feel like it, and need an actual case. As it is, and in an exact example of my point, it is trivially easy to implement measures to defeat this if you really do have something that can not be located without a key even within a decrypted volume.

I would feel watched by CCTV wherever I go and try to spot the cameras and I would try to always use a proxy or TOR when available to go on the internet. But what do people complain about who live there? That THEIR neighborhood has not yet enough CCTV cameras. W T F...

I don't understand CCTV-phobia, although I do not support overly widespread use either. It's less useful than it is claimed to be, yes, but it's a deterrent in the same way that police standing around are, police are watching people too, but I think most people would oppose banning them. People just need to think about where it is and how likely it's useful to be (airports, stations, buses, trains, hotspots of crime: sure, they need them. Random streets, no). Again, the issue is how they're used policy-wise, not their existence, and again, that people know what's happening.

As for internet use, you're confusing Britain with France/the US/Australia; the only internet censorship is a massively and systematically flawed system which is trivial to bypass in any case, used to block access to child abuse images instead of actually taking action against those responsible. Tor is actually a bad bet for many people - it's vulnerable to several attacks up to and including people simply running a packet sniffer over an exit node they operate, which has been done both in proof of concept and real use several times. That doesn't give some info that may be useful such as source IP, but the more datasets they have, the easier it is to find consistences (e.g. AOL's search data leak, which allowed a huge number of people to be personally identified). It helps as a layer of security, but relying on it is failing to understand how it works.

[auroraglacialis]

Of course I know about the weaknesses of TOR and almost all other ways to retain some privacy. And yes of course one can hide sensible data inside video files and so on. All kinds of things are possible but most of them will be only for very well informed and capable people - and of course those who are targeted, namely terrorists and criminals.
And that is the whole point - not if it is POSSIBLE for individuals who are interested to protect at least some of their privacy (though somtimes that is impossible or illegal as well as in the example of CCTV, number plate-logging, cellphone position logging, facebook/email accounts of friends and relatives). But the pure fact that people have to do all this sort of things to maintain at least some shreds of privacy is not good.
And it is even proven to be inefficient for the cause they claim to erect many of these. Overall crime rates do not drop by setting up CCTV, Terrorists do not get caught by data retention - but the collateral damage is huge. This issue is way too large to describe here completely, but I think it should be evident that a government or corporation logging the social network, movements (cellphones, cars, CCTV+facial recognition), email contents etc is a danger. That whole post-privacy bull**** goes on my nerves. "Oh, I dont have anything to hid, go ahead and install a friggin video camera in my living room". Everyone has something to hide - maybe not from friends or even an uncorrupted police. But data is eternal and once logged and stored, the risk of it getting into the wrong hands or the right hands turning wrong is just too large.

It is not so much about myself - I can probably go ahead and ramp up my security status with various tools I know of, but I am thinking of the general public. The US is showing very fascist tendencies similar to pre-1933 Germany. Do you think in 1925 in Germany it would have been regarded as reasonable if the Jews and Communists and Gays would have put their friendslists on facebook, if the democratically elected government would have installed CCTV on the streets, logged the cellphone positions of the citizens, ran automated software to read unencrypted emails. Of course they did not have the technology, but what if... - and then what would have happened after 1933. You think the newly instated insanity at the head of the state would not have seized and used that data to create the most efficient way to arrest and kill persons that have the wrong sexual orientation, race, political opinion or that have just been close friends to someone like that? Of course some people can slip by that - and some people did. Some people pretended to be "good Germans" while secretly helping Jews or secretly communicated. But a free society cannot give away their freedom by giving someone that much control over their lives. Then it becomes not free anymore.

The issue also is not to imprison more people, to ramp up police to arrest more people, to install more CCTV cameras to drive criminals into those places that dont have CCTV - this is like putting concrete blocks into a river. You can divert the flow, maybe slow it down in some parts or even stop it for a short while, but the river will always find a way and there will always be the same amount of water washing over the blocks in the end. It is futile. In case of crime and terror, the proper strategy is prevention, not punishment or crackdowns or surveillance. If a society is managed properly, it does not have as much crime - CCTVs, data retention or censorship laws or not.

And speaking of censorship - maybe it is easy (for us) to circumvent internet censorship (with TOR, proxies, alternative DNS, tunnels,...) - but for most it is not. If they call up some website and it says "not found" or "this site is illegal", they will think "oh, geez, I better look elsewhere" and thats it then.

Again, the CCC has been working on this issue for what - over 30 years now? Trying to raise awareness of privacy issues? And there is some success recently in Germany at least, but other countries seem to be much less aware.

But of course awareness of this is based on assuming that there could be something changing in the future - probably too much of a stretch for most people who think that all will just go on as it has been going in the past 20 years.

[auroraglacialis]

Could governments recognise ANYONE instantly via CCTV? Japanese camera can scan 36 million faces per second | Mail Online