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This "it's only right that we, the humble and fair politicians, are exempt from this forceful control we're exerting over everyone" aspect of ChatControl is beyond ridiculous.

I'm not usually of a "revolutionist" kind in the slightest, but, when you combine this small example to a lot of things currently happening across Europe and the US - it does increasingly seem like people in power are less and less wary of heavy and serious responsibility their positions hold to the people, and are more and more brazen when it comes to trying to isolate themselves from scrutiny over their self-profiting endeavours.

Historically, there were somewhat regular "correction" events happening somewhere sufficiently close, that made sure that responsibility is stuck in politician's minds for longer into the future, but it's been a long time since.

Edit: My comment is partially fueled by everything that's currently happening in Serbia (grand-scale systemic corruption), but I do think you can see similar movement in much more orderly countries in Europe as well, and all this is unconnected to ChatControl, but I see it as a small ripple from the same source.

I also dare say that current state of affairs in US has emboldened such people everywhere.

Nepal is probably not felt as close enough to have an effect.

Here at the computer science department in Aarhus, some of our professors and our head of department are doing their best to try to talk some sense into our politicians. See this post (apologies for linking to linkedin): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cs-au-dk_dkpol-eupol-krypteri...

Diego has been part of putting together this open letter from 500+ cryptography and cybersecurity researchers: https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025

A few details to note: The quote is from August 2024 (last year), and the question (from an MP) to the minister is from September 2024 and so is the response, which can be read here:

https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/reu/spm/1426/svar/207...

For those less familiar with Danish: the minister's answer is basically the same spiel about needing to protect children; and how people will still be protected by the legal system (you know, which is little consultation after you've been beaten up, swindled across borders or worse). So this quote is from a year before Denmark had the presidency in the EU and pushed Chat Control forward. (Though clearly they haven't changed their views on this.)

Ran across this interesting NYT article from 1908. After President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, Teddy Roosevelt demanded action against anarchist publications being sent through the postal service. And yet he clarifies this does not apply to normal mail - "sealed documents" - explaining the government is "expressly forbidden to ascertain, what the purport of such messages may be":

The greater portion of his opinion is devoted to the question of whether, in the absence of any legislation by Congress, the Postmaster General has the right to exclude such publications. On this point his conclusion is: "The Postmaster General will be justified in excluding from the mails any issue of any periodical, otherwise entitled to the privilege of second-class mail matter, which shall contain any article constituting seditious libel, and counseling such crimes as murder, arson, riot, and treason." The Attorney General makes a clear distinction with reference to the authority of postal officials over sealed and unsealed mail matter. In conveying letters and newspapers to persons to whom they are directed, he says the United States "undertakes the business of a messenger." He adds: "In so far as it conveys sealed documents, its agents not only are not bound to know, but are expressly forbidden to ascertain, what the purport of such messages may be; therefore, neither the Government nor its officers can be held either legally or morally responsible for the nature of the letters to which they thus, in intentional ignorance, afford transportation."

https://www.nytimes.com/1908/04/10/archives/roosevelt-demand...

Oops, seems the quote is an old one, and not news. That invalidates my original post somewhat, and I'm sorry that I didn't do proper due diligence.

Here is the original post:

That doesn't sound like the rhetoric of someone who is winning. It sounds more like something someone pushed into a corner, and seeing their project crumbling would say.

But bringing up that it is about civil liberties is an important point, not the way he would like though.

You would think that trying to keep the discourse about criminals and pedophiles would be smarter for his side? I do not follow Danish politics, but I do start to wonder if he is just not very good at doing politics?

From the European Convention on Human Rights [1]:

> Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life edit

> Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...

Something I think is often missing in this evergreen debate: governments have banned encryption before, in amateur radio. See e.g. https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/72/encrypted-traffic...

(Obviously, the difference is in number of users -- not many hams, and lots of internet users, and "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is a difference in kind")

One Swedish-Kurdish man in Iran who is working for the Iranian government is using Telegram/Signal and Monero to intentionally cause carnage in the streets of Sweden and has been attempting to expand to Denmark.

But instead of going directly after this man our tech inept governments are trying to do the mathematically impossible.

I think i get what he's trying to achieve: To get the bad guys (faster) by disallowing things the bad guys can use to get away with stuff.

The slippery balance is also that the good guys of yesterday are the bad guys of today and vice versa.

But both never stopped development of better, weirder, stranger and scarier stuff that can both be used for bad or for good, whichever you choose. I highly doubt encryption will stop because they outlawed it. There will be even better development of encryption that will be even harder to detect if encryption was actually used.

I look forward to soon reading about Peter Hummelgaard's leaked private emails in the newspapers. Let's hope (for him) that he was right about not needing any privacy or encryption. And let's hope his friends/family agree.

Denmark, is a great country, however even I notice problems here as there are in other countries. Corruption and poor decisions. For example a local government office has a brand new facade finish ( amongst other work) that has taken about 4 years to do, its an entire building. Tall buildings are banned in Denmark so its actually surprisingly imposing. Trouble is, they did not use the tax funds to improve the local school for children. I am not joking, its a literal portacabin. Yes there are normal schools in buildings, but the main primary school for this village, ( and bear in mind this is denmark where most things are still carefully constructed and beautiful), is 2 literal portacabins / part of a small modern house, in dire need of upgrading.

Im not saying the new government building is saurons tower, but there was no need to divert funds to improve it, it was just one of the buildings in a non descript village. I wouldnt normally care, but I know someone who goes to the primary school, and apparently it was a big upset that the funds for it went to this government building instead.

Before anyone thinks I am being mean to DK, a very similar thing happened in the UK, the local library that used to be in a large building got moved to essentially a backwater dark room in a terrible part of town, and the main building converted to bigger nicer officer for the local government.

Its a problem I am seeing all over europe.

Just sat badly with me.

EDIT > WTF everyone always so touchy. Everyone just relax ok this is a public forum.

I am a little puzzled why Denmark cares so much about this. Most of the 'yes' countries were, as far as I can see, more or less taking a "yeah, okay, whatever" approach (hence a fair bit of wavering once Germany became a 'no'), but Denmark seems desperate to push it.

Actually, having encryption defeating mechanisms makes a lot of sense when its limited to public servants, like the Denmark's Justice Minister. Those people are trusted with a lot of public resources, in fact all the public servants should have a monitoring device like a black box on them all the time and when something goes wrong that blackbox should be decrypt-able so we can look at the logs and see what went wrong.

Corruption and incompetence, solved.

When Governments ban encryption, its like banning the citizens from sending unreadable gibberish messages over the network.

Encryption algorithm, source code and ciphertext are also free speech. Here is RSA printed on a T-shirt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(fron...

I'm definitely not one who thinks about these things deeply (as others surely do more), though the act of having a private conversation seems sacrosanct, why should distance or medium be a factor.

The minister was abused by his father during his childhood, and that has manifested itself in a low empathic response and a desire to force others to submit. I'm not being fastidious here, his behavior goes from head scratching to explainable when this fact is known, and not just in this case.

The Dutch constitution has an article giving everyone the right to private mail correspondence.

It was meant for physicial mail of course. I wonder if a judge would even see the difference.

A message is a message, regardless whether its deliver by electricity or a horse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party.

I wonder how they are going to try to argue that a E2E encrypted message is not ‘sealed’.

Related discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242458

That's famously why all our mail gets read by the government, and all our phone calls are listened to, and all our homes' walls are transparent, right? Because privacy isn't a civil liberty?

The mechanism of rights makes a lot of sense in a constitution, to establish that these core principles of the legal code of Latveria and may never be trampled upon by subsequent laws, and then refer back to that as a judgement when evolving the law.

However, in recent years it's taken a life on its own and people all over the political spectrum are inventing new rights or denying established rights. At face value it seems like a punchy statement that this is a human right or that isn't a civil liberty, but there's usually nothing to back that up. It's nothing more than a vapid slogan used this way.

What the Justice Minister means is that electronic privacy should not be a civil liberty. Perhaps he doesn't realize that making encrypted messaging illegal is the same as making it illegal to share sequences of decimal digits of transcendental numbers like e and π, which include every every possible sequence of digits encrypting a message?

Time to learn Navajo and other obscure languages. Then watch the fear propaganda as these dicks make foreign languages nobody speaks illegal.

A false civil liberty they reserved for themselves.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

"Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Assuming a trustworthy government with an independent legal system, all communication should be accessible upon judicial decision. This is analogous to acceptance of search warrants and seizure of evidence including paper based documents and messages.

Then again governments often aren't trustworthy. Germany isn't even able to issue European Arrest Warrants as prosecution here is politically dependent¹. And accordingly I also kind of prefer to have my electronic communication cryptographically protected. But I'm not so naive as to believe that this is a solution. This is just treating a symptom which eventually gets worse if not addressed directly.

1: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/landmark-ruling-european...

And don't even get me started on envelopes, the terrorist's friends.

Portraying encryption as a threat is a distortion of the very concept of “freedom.” It’s not about hiding, but about preserving a private space in the digital world just as it is in the physical world.

Maybe all the ministers private communications should be posted publicly then if he’s so keen on having mystery parties inspected them without the senders/receivers consent

It seems all politicians have to through this. Encryption is either-or. Either it has no backdoors or it does not work for anyone including our financial systems

For him it would be. Everything he does should be monitored.

Indeed it is not merely about the right people have to do something. It is about the right of the government to harm its citizens, all of them, all the time.

I typically consider Nordic countries to be pretty enlightened, so this is surprising to me. Just goes to show how politicians everywhere are wrong about encryption.

If he truly believes that, he should have no problem disclosing all of his private and personal messages and emails to us, for everyone to see on the internet.

The truth is that this is just another corrupt politician.

Encryption isn't about hiding crimes; it's about protecting everyday people from surveillance, abuse, and censorship

Encrypted messaging is a basic human right. Those who seek to end it should be put on the same lists as other human rights abusers.

Is it legal to invent a secret language with your friend and talk to each other in that language?

The end game for these policies is, sadly, eminently viable. You’d have to treat your citizenship as if they were corporate employees: all phones under mobile-device-management, all laptops locked down and monitored by kernel level “agents”, and all network traffic running through traffic analysis. Say goodbye to any kind of home made computing devices or operating systems that don’t meet audit approval.

You could nudge this sort of thing into play by starting with e-commerce. No online shopping unless you’re using a Trusted OS. Ratchet up to cat videos and TV shows. Ratchet again to Trusted News. You’re most of the way there!

The “you can’t outlaw math!” crowd are kind of right but that argument assumes free and unencumbered end user devices, which, as crazy as it sounds, might not be a given in the particularly awful dystopian futures available to us right now.

Bloomberg recently published around 18,000 plain text Epstein mails from his Yahoo account which led to the firing of British US ambassador and long time powerful figure in the background Lord Mandelson.

This could have been achieved at least 15 years earlier, so encryption does not seem to be the main obstacle to investigations. In some cases.

Similarly, all investigations into Epstein related JP Morgan transactions have been obstructed, for example by the firing of a Virgin Islands GA who investigated too much.

Looking forward to some EU politician tweets on these issues.

It's interesting to think about support for laws that disallow actions as driven by the action itself or "something else." The something else is often the alleged failure or difficulty of enforcing other laws.

For example: if all encrypted messaging traffic was about innocuous trivialities, support for banning encryption would be absurd. The support for banning encryption isn't because people think encryption is bad, it's because governments propose that encryption makes it too difficult or expensive to enforce other laws like prohibition of CSAM, money laundering, etc.

Other examples: KYCAML, drug paraphernalia, Terry stops / stop and frisk, etc.

I’d only back this if it also meant every civil servant’s communications, written or spoken and sent through any device, were archived from five years before taking office until five years after leaving. Not necessarily public, but fully accessible for prosecution. Any attempt to dodge this should carry jail time.

A bit of context for Americans: the Europe is under a hybrid multi-vector attack from the Evil Axis (China, Russia, Iran, Hungary, etc.).

People are too occupied with ideas of their own comfort and liberty. For everyone who thinks this is such a basic black and white question...

We are on the doorstep of WWIII. China, working through Russia, Iran, Hungary, and others, has built a network of influence proxies.

They use liberty and security as tools to conduct hybrid attacks. Their goal is to undermine the unity of the West, one by one.

Look at the recent extremely well-coordinated multi-vector hybrid attack on Poland.

Some attack vectors:

1. Military vector: They sent military drones to monitor reactions—political, military, etc. It's a milary act but not strong enough to have a military response. Drones had Polish sim cards, and used Telegram protocol to mask their traffic to a simple chat.

2. Political Vector. Vote of no confidence. Once Ursula and the EU decided to respond asymmetrically, they deployed one of their assets, Hungarian Orbán. They tried to remove Ursula, who was advocating for a firm response.

3. Informational Vector. They also started distributing false flag conspiracy theories claiming it was Ukraine, not Russia, who sent the drone. It's a tactic of small bites and proxy attacks internally, spreading propaganda and false narratives.

This is just one of such attacks. Imagine yourself a government worker, trying to fight that. Where left and right your colleagues got bribed , threatent, etc. and you can't even find proofs against them. Your enemy on contrary, knows everything about everyone in their country.

outlawing encryption for the population is bad. people have a right for privacy but i would be for making public all communication of politicians.

The technical proposal behind this legislation is to enforce on-device AI analysis of all chat communication so your device can notify authorities.

This mass surveillance proposal is so dystopian and broken, I’m genuinely ashamed to be an EU citizen.

Is this discussed in Danish news?

This Minister of "Justice" doesn't know the meaning of the word and should be fired immediately. Don't ever let anyone tell you that THEY are entitled to participate in YOUR private discussions. A good old fashioned "fuck you" does the trick, here.

If the government requires the ability to arbitrarily spy on anyone at will to exist (which they have, the encryption thing is mostly retrospective and unwillingness to use/reveal the bigger guns in large public cases), we are probably at a point when the nation state as we know it needs to be renegotiated entirely.

That being said I don't agree that his is necessary.

WTF is wrong with Danes/Denmark? o_O

Serious question: why is Denmark so engaged on that topic?

Depending on the country and constitution, it very much is. And if not, it should be.

The construct of government with its many imperfections isn't able to parse and interpret any and all communication.

If he really believes that he should send all his correspondence to Putin and Trump and probably much worse for him: his constituents.

The Danish showing their claws. The grass isn’t greener.

Well then why does he need an exception from the rule.

Danish politicians are famous here for their lack of knowledge and interest in IT-related subjects. Many danes have the uninformed "what are you hiding" perspective when it comes to privacy matters. Our government-built IT systems are also generally poor with many cost overruns. It's no surprise a Social Democrat politician would say something as ignorant as this.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242458

That corrupt man doesn't disclose his entire life nor has cameras in his home exposing how he acts at every second. He doesn't show how shady he is because he wants no privacy for others but transparency for himself.

The funniest thing is how this authoritarian excuse of a human being wants to make his 1984 world a thing worldwide, because he doesn't even care about the pretense of EU agreements. Not only is there no sovereignty but we should all follow his whims.

Det er virkelig et skam. Pinlig.

Privacy for me and not for thee.

Is DHH aware of what his country is doing? The dude can communicate. If only he were on this.

For a democratic leader to do this, there must be some nontrivial subset of their voter base who support it. In all this ruckus over Europe trying to ban encrypted communication I keep wondering - who the hell are the voters pushing for this?

is he aware that not having encrypted messaging will severely endanger the financial interests of Denmark companies?

I mean sure it's indirect.

But making them susceptible to industry espionage, planting false evidence (encryption also protects against spoofing) or blackmailing executives for dump reasons (idk. sexting in a adulterating manner) is something countries like Russia would do and would endanger financial interests of such companies.

And are Denmarks companies aware about that?

I mean there are so much more important reasons for encrypted messaging (e.g. investigative journalism) but "local companies and with that jobs" being endangered tends to move politicians.

This sort of politician is the reason people turn to the far right.

They see the clowns in power from the right and the left and either decide to completely removes themselves from the political scene or decide that blowing up the whole system is better. And who can blame them?

To me the fact that Chat Control is even entertained is basically a huge betrayal of all the people who want to live in a democracy.

Before digital artifacts, nations had to identify the individual, and get access to their writings to determine culpability.

With digital artifacts, nations have enjoyed the ability to go to third parties to for the last 40-50 years to get access to individual's writings as a shortcut.

This is just a return to the mean. It is not novel or controversial to say "identify the individual, and get access to their writings" in whatever legal way that nation prescribes. Good luck, since their devices may be locked, but going after the individual is real law enforcement

What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?