Oddbean

Surprising court ruling! European Union politicians have been trying to pass “Chat Control” which would ban end-to-end encrypted communications. A new big court ruling on Telegram is a game changer for this. Let’s first get a very brief context for this court ruling. So PRIOR to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia was previously abiding by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). This EU court was hearing a case of Russia’s government against Telegram, with the Russian government demanding a backdoor and the decryption of data. [1] Now AFTER Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia no longer honors this EU court. As a form of disrespect after the fact, the EU court has just ruled on Feb 15 AGAINST Russia, stating that the Russian government can’t force Telegram to decrypt user data. [2] To quote The Register, “While the ECHR decision is unlikely to have any effect within Russia, it matters to countries in Europe that are contemplating similar decryption laws – such as Chat Control and the UK government’s Online Safety Act.” [1] Anti-Russian sentiment backfires Western politicians are now choking on their own blind hatred of Russia, to prevent them from controlling even EU citizens’ chats. Some of our readers will criticize my words to call me “Russian propaganda”. But again, we repeat our previously cited points that the Ukraine situation was provoked in 2014 when the United States organized a violent Nazi coup to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected leader because he was pro-Russian. [10-12] We ironically only know about this coup from leaked audio phone calls of Obama’s head of Ukraine policy Victoria Nuland. [9] So it’s a good thing politicians hate encrypted communications, because if they used them, we wouldn’t even be aware of the rampant corruption. The Obama administration later admitted and apologized for the profanity in the phone call, when Victoria Nuland said “F*** the EU” referring to let’s move ahead with the coup without them. [9b] But they completely missed the point by not apologizing for the violent or illegal meddling in another country’s politics. Ditch Telegram anyway None of these other publicans point out that you shouldn’t be using Telegram anyway precisely because this verdict could have easily gone the other way. We recommend avoiding trusting a centralized provider that can oversee all metadata or potentially be banned. In conclusion, by having unenforceable laws, politicians create a precedent that their words should be ignored. And then by being so crazed to spite Russia, they wreck their own corrupt plans. So I’m going to tell you, like Victoria Nuland told me. Fuck the EU. Sources: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/court-rules-against-eu-chat-control/