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France Says Fight Against Messaging Encryption Needs Worldwide Initiative (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Messaging encryption, widely used by Islamist extremists to plan attacks, needs to be fought at international level, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday, and he wants Germany to help him promote a global initiative. He meets his German counterpart, Thomas de Maiziere, on Aug. 23 in Paris and they will discuss a European initiative with a view to launching an international action plan, Cazeneuve said. French intelligence services are struggling to intercept messages from Islamist extremists who increasingly switch from mainstream social media to encrypted messaging services, with Islamic State being a big user of such apps, including Telegram. "Many messages relating to the execution of terror attacks are sent using encryption; it is a central issue in the fight against terrorism," Cazeneuve told reporters after a government meeting on security. "France will make proposals. I have sent a number of them to my Germany colleague," he said.
We need to control the message by reframing the dialogue. Instead of saying that politicians want to invade our privacy (which is too obtuse for most people to understand), we need to make the argument more emotional, specific, and personal:
"Senator Dumbshit wants to make us turn over our babies' bath pictures to pedophiles, by eliminating the encryption we use to protect our families."
There are many kinds of encryption. During WWII British radio was using previously agreed phrases to activate French resistance. Can you arrest someone for sending message: "Uncle Henry is sick today" ? Where do you draw a line? What if I encode message into RAW camera image such that it does not affects how an eye see the image but otherwise has fully encoded text in the lower bits of the image pixels (text itself still encoded by cipher)? Those in many cases might be indistinguishable from normal camera noise and it will be very hard to prove that the image has a hidden message inside it and that it is breaking the law. Cameras typically have 14 bit deep RAW images and human eye only distinguishes 8 bit. So for each pixel of the image I can encode (naively) 6 bits of message and still have an image that the eye will not see the difference. Obviously the example is naive. In real life less bits with smarter algorithm would have to be used to make impossible to prove that the image has hidden message beyond noise.
Christians have killed doctor and bombed clinics where abortions were performed, that's terrorism, guess we have to ban all christianity too.... hmmmm... we may be on to something here, banning all religion...