Swedish government wants a back door in signal for police and ‘Säpo’ (Swedish federation that checks for spies)
Let’s say that this becomes a law and Signal decides to withdraw from Sweden as they clearly state that they won’t implement a back door; would a citizen within the country still be able to use and access Signals services? Assuming that google play services probably would remove the Signal app within Sweden (which I also don’t use)
I just want the government to go f*ck themselves, y’know?
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This is why you should prefer a better protocol like SimpleX
What are you talking about?
Centralized communications are susceptible to government controls, while decentralized systems are more difficult to stop, like Lemmy for example.
And I want a better future. Guess we’re both gonna be disappointed ain’t we
Stop this!
Would anyone accept if the government installed a door into your house that only they have the key to?! Just in case they need to come in and avoid kicking the normal door when I am not home…
Only Swedish backdoor I want is…
Ah the ol’ Kingsmen ending.
As ever, a “technical backdoor” for anyone is for everyone.
This is why you make a protocol rather than an app so there is no owner.
Protocols are much more difficult to create and implement.
The barrier for technical ability and maturity is much higher. Which is why you don’t see them as often, and when you do see them they tend to suck, have massive gaps, or some other significant failing that prevents them from really scaling out.
Building reliable and robust protocols with a hobby project is a nearly impossible task, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of minds over a long period of time to settle on the specifications. And just as long to actually implement it.
Usually this requires some sort of funding and dedicated resources from the get-go. Which many of these projects lack.
“But doing things correctly in life is difficult so why try”.
People still do and build thinga the correct way. See Matrix and Element.
Matrix is a long fuckin shot from “doing things right” it’s not even funny. Have you not seen their funding crisis, the cost to host, and the general inability for it to scale affordably?
It’s almost a poster child for what I just said. Protocols are hard, that’s a great example. Funding is hard, that’s a great example. Software engineering is expensive, that’s a great example. 🤦
Also please don’t straw man me. I’m stating the facts, protocols are hard to make. If you want to make one, you should know this, if you want to hand wave the word, then you should know this.
Being more informed isn’t defeatism, stop trying to be toxic and swing anti intellectualism as a weapon to shut down conversation. If you don’t want people to talk and discuss topics of interest, STFU and go somewhere that isn’t here with that sort of attitude.
Can’t the protocol be blocked at networking level by the ISPs ?
Just send it through SSH?
In theory yes. In practice you cannot expect that every user maintains a server and one with internet facing ssh, specially a message app and the average non technical user.
Article with no trackers
The encrypted messaging app Signal is growing – now even the Swedish Armed Forces are using the app.
But the government wants to force the company to introduce a technical backdoor for the Police and the Swedish Security Service.
“If it becomes a reality, we will leave Sweden,” says Signal’s boss Meredith Whittaker, in an exclusive interview with SVT.
If the government has its way, the bill will be passed in the Riksdag as early as March next year.
The bill states that companies such as Signal and Whatsapp will be forced to store all messages sent using the apps.
Leaving Sweden Signal – which is run by a non-profit foundation – now states to SVT Nyheter that the company will leave Sweden if the bill becomes a reality.
“In practice, this means that we are being asked to break the encryption that is the basis of our entire business. Asking us to store data would undermine our entire architecture and we would never do that. We would rather leave the Swedish market completely,” says Signal’s head of Meredith Whittaker.
She says the bill would require Signal to install so-called backdoors in the software.
"If you create a vulnerability based on Swedish wishes, it would create a path to undermine our entire network. Therefore, we would never introduce these backdoors.
But don’t you as a supplier have a responsibility to support efforts against crime?
"Our responsibility is to offer technology that upholds human rights in an era where those rights are being violated in more and more places. In today’s digital world, there are very few places where we can communicate privately or whistleblow.
The Armed Forces critical Meredith Whittaker mentions the Chinese state actor Salt Typhoon’s 2024 attack on several internet service providers in the United States, where text messages and phone calls were leaked. She believes that a Swedish back door would open the door for the same thing.
"There are no back doors that only the good guys have access to.
The purpose of the bill is to enable the Security Service and the police to request subsequent notification history for persons suspected of crime. Both authorities were positive in the consultation round.
“The opportunities for law enforcement authorities to effectively access electronic communications are absolutely crucial,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer (M) said earlier at a press conference.
But the Armed Forces are negative and recently the Armed Forces urged their personnel to start using Signal to reduce the risk of eavesdropping.
In a letter to the government, the Armed Forces writes that the bill will not be able to be realized “without introducing vulnerabilities and back doors that may be used by third parties”.
The Swedish government can go suck a lemon.
The government is very split on many questions. Privacy being a weird one because it’s the (somewhat) left-leaning Social Democratic that usually come up with these crazy ideas without understanding the implications of privacy.
See Chat Control 2022-2024 https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/chat-control-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-eu-plan-to-scan-all-your-whatsapp-chats
I don’t think this will happen: Their department of defense has adopted Signal for internal communication, and there is no way in hell they would want a backdoor built in. In fact, the article says they have already opposed the suggestion.
I really like that Signal is able to update itself. Even our of the stores, it can still be up-to-date.
Because that worked so well with the US government’s back door into telecom companies. I don’t think they got the Salt Typhoon group out of the system yet.
Then they get it through fdroid?
Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.
And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)
And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.
States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.
it always bugs me how governments who demand backdoors continuously fail to realize that even if they backdoor the encryption of Signal: PGP, or more similarly to Signal, Pidgin+OTR and/or OMEMO all still exist, are well maintained and are designed to work on top of insecure channels. This isn’t gonna be the way to catch actual bad actors, they’ll all just get SimpleX or Pidgin or any other number of things and continue communicating and “going dark”.
…not to mention that Signal’s source code is open, so even if they compromise the Signal client, you can just switch to Molly or build an older version - or if the server is compromised, you can run your own with the backdoor disabled or stripped out. This is a zero-sum-game all the way down.
People host signal proxy for countries where it is banned already. The primary impact of this law is on non technical people and new users thinking to switch to.
The real danger is people downloading random apks that could be compromised.
Or even backdoored by state actors.
Oh that irony would be painful.
Here’s the repo in case anyone is interested in hosting an instance: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy
This is where Signal’s biggest problem shows. It’s centralized. Matrix is the better choice since it will be up to you if you decide to break the law if it’s banned, since there will still be plenty of servers you can reach.
yes. but transition takes time and my mom just installed signal last year. we will get there for sure.
I moved my whole family over to Signal specifically because it was so easy. SimpleX is easier than Matrix, imo, but when Matrix is equally as easy to set up as Signal, then we’ll see where things are.
The only big issue I’ve heard with Matrix is the current implementation doesn’t scale well, due to how servers are required to clone data (or something). I think they’re working on a fix, but it’s still not ready for prime time, I think.
SimpleX is not easy to setup either. There are two flaws I pointed out on GitHub over a year ago which have been ignored:
FLAW #1
Scanning a QR code invite with your camera app does not work. It has to be scanned AFTER you install SimpleX using the camera function of SimpleX.FLAW #2
Clicking on an invite received in Messenger confuses Signal because Messenger appends a question mark and some tracking code rubbish. SimpleX could easily strip the rubbish but it doesn’t. It simply fails.Simple ❌
The first one is pretty standard stuff, and it makes sense why you need to do it from the primary app and not from a third party one (like the camera). You would not want that other app digesting and sending off that invite link to the bowels of Google or whatever, which defeats the purpose of limited invites.
The second one seems pretty easy to workaround. I agree that perhaps their (Facebook?) Messenger implementation should account for the tracking data they tack on, but I’d hardly consider that a deal breaker when you can copy the invite link by hand.
I work in QA, and if I was a PM, I would flatly reject the first “flaw” as introducing weaknesses into the design and assign a low priority to the second due to an easy workaround and only affecting a single app.
Good point re first one.
Second one is a problem for most people. They just click on a link and expect it to work. They would have to figure out themselves what the workaround is because SimpleX says something like “bad invite” or “bad link”.
And even if I told them what to do, they don’t even know it is possible to copy, paste, edit, hit return.
I have about 30 activists using Signal whom I would like to migrate to SimpleX. I didn’t want to handhold each of them. I think you are overestimating general computer literacy out there.
Similarly I would like to migrate over 600 of them from Facebook into our own group in Lemmy however they are older people and a third of them have enough problems signing up to and navigating Facebook.
Adding to my frustration is their English illiteracy. “more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth- grade level.”
You know, now you’ve got me wanting to try my hand at submitting a fix for your second issue.
So to summarize:
- You copy or share a one-time contact link via SimpleX.
- The sender sends it.
- The receiver gets it.
- The receiver clicks on the link, and Meta adds a bunch of extra tracking nonsense onto the link.
- SimpleX throws an exception (“invalid link” or something, right?)
Is that how it goes, in your experience?
Exactly. You want my original github submission URL or is it best to send afresh?
