Europe

Thanks for the nostalgia.

2010 - back then I was an insecure teenager, finding refuge and empowerment in technology, anxious that I will die alone. One year before finishing high school and two before meeting my future wife. I texted her also using Pidgin for ICQ and Google Talk (without the OTR, of course).

Now I'm a self-confident software developer, instead anxious that I will die in a fascist dictatorship, and absolutely sick of the modern shitnology, preferring to care for plants on the balcony after work, because they are something real and not annoying.

Tech is just not fun anymore. But maybe it's for the better, that made me go outside more.

But back on topic:

prohibiting encryption is like saying people should not be able to have private conversations without a microphone in the room which the government can always tune in to, if they see the need. Obviously completely ridiculous.

I guess just in case I'll keep my illegal encryption software somewhere hidden and encrypted. Will be fun when we will start sending crypto data hidden steganographically in a wall of text that reads like bad LLM output. Have fun scanning all the traffic looking for cues that are not there. Anything can be encoded in almost anything else. There is absolutely no way that a government, no matter how powerful, could enforce any such restriction in a bullet proof way against anyone who puts in the tiniest bit of effort.

Concerning making math illegal... Reminds me of DeCSS. Been there, done that. When people were wearing shirts with the illegal prime number. Fun times.

No, it was god. You must be misremembering in your old age :P

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Wise words, even tarnished by their descendants.

It's happening all over Europe and the US, but especially Europe. Police were used to being able to eavesdrop on any sort of communication. This becomes ever less possible, while at the same time, you have more and more crimes that are committed solely by communicating and can't be prosecuted or even detected without massive internet surveillance. I think the US commitment to "free speech", freedom of information, has a somewhat protective effect.

Of course, these online-only crimes are 99%+ copyright, but even copyright has gained in favor among netizens. Then you have "deep fakes". Bunch of other stuff like holocaust denial. Going after such stuff is quite popular among lemmings, too. And how else are you going to enforce all that?

I don't know about Denmark, but e.g. in Sweden tax declarations are considered public information. In many areas in the Netherlands, you are able to view the complete ground floor of houses from the street. The idea of privacy differs between cultures.

Nonetheless, I'm convinced every minister of justice would state the same, even in the most privacy fokussed countries.

We do and it's part of our constitution (same situation as Germany about not being updated). Not that any of the recent governments have cared about this minor detail.

We only recently got rid of another law, which required logging of calls and texts by telecommunications.

This only ended because the EU courts ruled it was against the right to privacy, and it still took them 8 years to drag their feet following the ruling to abolish the law.

Various government from both sides of the political spectrum have slowly introduced, or paved the way for, more mass surveillance, but the current government has been extremely vocal about surveillance.

Edit: penal code says "sealed" messages are off limits. Not that they care 🙄

We (Germany) do, but it has never been updated to include electronic communication.

Our constitutional rights ensure that the police must have a good reason to investigate our correspondence. I suppose the issue with well-encrypted messaging for the state is that even with a good reason, the police can't read the correspondence.

Not that I support this nonsense, just saying.

would lobby against postal privacy

No, they wouldn't because then the stupid masses might wake up and realize how their rights are stripped away. Instead they always pretend that existing constitutional and other laws would not actually protect communication.

You bet they will. Right now its impractical, because a lot of people of it, but after laws like chat control pass it'll be easier to make encryption illegal altogether because a lot fewer people will go through the hurdles. Only criminals and deviants will use encryption. And you're no deviant, are you citizen?

If it was actually about catching criminals they would also care about this kind of thing, but they don't, they wanto to control the masses of generally law-abiding citizens who might maybe install Signal messenger while it's still legal.