cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/16595505
- Home routing and encryption technologies are making lawful interception harder for Europol
- PET-enabled home routing allows for secure communication, hindering law enforcement’s ability to intercept and monitor communications
- Europol suggests solutions such as disabling PET technologies and implementing cross-border interception standards to address the issue.
“lawful interception” is a fallacy.
If it’s written in the law, it’s lawful. You can of course (and should!) debate about the morality of the diverse forms of lawful interception, but a blanket statement like ‘“lawful interception” is a fallacy’, is a fallacy in of itself.
What is more terrifying is when a elected leader argues against mass surveillance and then is shunned by the intelligence agency and their allies
Laws do not, did not ever, guarantee interception. It always allowed the police to try to intercept. The police hid bugs, tapped wires. Never in history the police said "for lawful interception to happen, all phones must come with preinstalled wiretap. The implication that “communications systems are too secure, there has to be a backdoor for lawful interception” is a fallacy.
The fallacy is imagining that “lawfulness” is an attribute that can be reliably detected on an implementation level.
De facto, if not in absolute.
There’s a dirty secret of telecom I found out working for a telco some years back: CALEA compliance is used more by unknown third parties more than actual law enforcement. When we’d get a subpoena for a CALEA wiretap, as often as not we’d just patch our logger into a pre-existing wiretap as configure a switch to enable one on a particular trunk, cable, and pair.