Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes

In fact, they are negative because they say that this can't be done without opening up the service to vulnerabilities that could be used by others.

> I ett brev till regeringen skriver Försvarsmakten att lagförslaget inte kommer kunna förverkligas ”utan att införa sårbarheter och bakdörrar som kan komma att nyttjas av tredje part”.

> In a letter to the government, the Swedish Armed Forces writes that the legislative proposal will not be able to be implemented "without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that may be utilized by third parties."

Makes sense, the entire point of Signal is no backdoors. If you add one, you might as well make the app illegal.

The NRL originally developed onion routing and Tor. It was then open sourced, stewarded by the EFF for a few years, before becoming its own non-profit. The NRL still do a ton of work on Tor and its ecosystem, primarily through academic research and occasionally code, though the Tor Project is obviously now the biggest player in the space. The original motivation was to enable communicating with covert assets (intelligence services and the like) overseas, which requires lots of non-military cover traffic to be useful, hence the opening up. Its popularity as an anti-censorship tool has motivated a lot of the continued support from various US agencies, including the NRL. Really though, the NRL is a largely civilian institution, and while the people who work there do work for the military, they aren't typically enlisted, have limited security clearance if any, etc. It's sort of like the Navy's version of Microsoft Research, or Bell Labs.

Militaries need intelligence services to be their eyes and ears. That said, most people who are not in their country's armed forces, government, or intelligence service vastly overestimate how much another country's intelligence services actually care about them. Most people aren't that interesting and don't have any intelligence value for another country's government.

US Navy research labs developed onion routing and the core of Tor

arguably, one of the reasons it was released to the public was to get large amounts of traffic using onion routing. because if it's just 50 data steams that are entirely ONI or NSA then it's easy to hit them with timing attacks.

but 2+ million streams from all over makes it a lot easier to hide.

And SELinux was given to us by the NSA.

They're not using/advocating to use Signal for their military control/communication:

> This week, Brigadier General Mattias Hanson, the Swedish Armed Forces' CIO (Chief Information Officer), decided that calls and text messages that do not concern classified information should, as far as possible, be made using the Signal app. The decision aims to make it more difficult to intercept calls and messages sent via the telephone network.

https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/aktuellt/2025/02/forsvarsma...

Seems people were using SMS for those messages they are now advocating to use Signal for.

Also, seems they've done a review (obviously) but unclear if they had access to something internal from Signal to do the review, feels like they had to:

> The Signal application has been deemed by the Swedish Armed Forces to have sufficient security to make it difficult to intercept calls and messages.

Any decent military will be using multiple forms of communication systems.

I was a communications specialist for the Swedish Armed forces 10+ years ago, including a tour in Afghanistan and a tour in Kosovo.

We used radio links for internet that I can tell you, were more adversarial than friendly.

The Swedish military is highly capable when it comes to network communications. A small nation will have to think differently.

You could potentially use an instant messaging system in control by someone else, if you are willing and capable of sharing encryption keys with whomever you are going to communicate with beforehand.

Is Signal hosted in just 1 country?

Yeah, the Social Democrats, whose member she is

They also have a social engineering attack using the Linked Devices features, which was on the front page of HN recently.

It will be waring factions within government (which is never unitary in any country) --- here these laws/proposals/etc. probably come from domestic spying agencies and police forces in most countries. I suspect that signals intelligence agencies and offensive forces have probably mostly moved to "encryption is good" stance given the number of foreign attacks upon domestic assets (gov, biz, etc.).

However, we shouldn't underestimate the desire for foreign intelligence agencies to bait one's own domestic agencies into "spying for them". So i imagine there's some pressure from, eg., the US sigint agencies to have the EU compromise EU citizens in ways that even those very agencies may today not wish to compromise their own.

At a complete guess, I wouldnt be supried if, eg., the NSA (, CIA, et al.) were goading EUROPOL which was demanding domestic anti-encryption laws.

As an empirical matter, encryption makes agencies like EUROPOL's jobs extremely difficult -- i imagine also because they probably struggle to get coop from domestic police forces, so cannot easily do "the physical police work necessary" to get device access.

In the end, I imagine we'll have china to thank for the end to this nonesense -- since any backdoor will immediately be a means of mass corp/gov espionage.

I think it's part ignorance, part exceptionalism. Backdoors sound simple, and if you're thinking about physical backdoors people are generally pretty good at protecting them. That this is largely because they have a lot of characteristics not shared by digital backdoors is easily lost on most people. These folks also tend to believe that THEY will be perfect stewards of backdoors, and anybody who loses control of them is just less competent.

as a general rule countries that succeed with a policy of neutrality do so by having their military strong enough that they're mot worth fucking with.

What's funny is that it's other EU laws from totally different parts of government which are, at the same time, pushing to allow for side loading of apps and alternate app stores on iOS and Android.

https://www.google.com/search?q=apple%20eu%20alternative%20a...

The end result of which, if done at large scale, means that an EU government couldn't ban signal, short of forcing all its domestic ISPs to be downstream of a China type great firewall, or simply null route all the IP space where signal's servers are located.

You don't need to get Signal from an app store (unless you're on iOS I guess)

There are only a few instances where institutional powers pass judgements that they cannot enforce. Generally doing so makes that institution look weak because it puts them in a position to have their rulings openly flouted. That's at the core of what jurisdiction means.

Sweden can fine Signal all they want but if they can't enforce the collection, they weaken their power and foster disrespect.

Not familiar with Swedish law, but in most of the world the courts have a concept of jurisdiction. Otherwise a small country could just fine Apple $1T and solve its budget woes, and probably build a giant waterslide.

I would be surprised if Swedish law allowed for prosecuting a foreign company with not one bit of operations in the country.

> I keep seeing this idea that because a company is headquartered in some place, means they don't have to follow the laws of the countries where they operate.

My friend's medium size regional ISP is headquartered in the US and as a hosting company certainly has customers who violate any number of censorship, blasphemy, etc laws in Iran, Russia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, just to name a few.

Signal doesn't "operate" in Sweden any more or any less than any other internet based service which has zero servers, offices, bank accounts or other physical presence in the country.

> they operate?

How are they operating? It might as well be viewed as citizens of Sweden interacting with a foreign service out of their own volition.

In general, laws are backed up by the threat of violence. To the extent that Sweden's police can't confiscate Signal's assets in the US, they do not have to comply with anything. The only leverage Sweden's government may have is ISP level censorship, which is likely to cause unintended disruptions. Signal is in turn free to attempt to circumvent the censorship.

Having to build local alternatives probably had a positive impact on China's software industry. We're at a point today that major Chinese software/tech companies are routinely talked about on nightly news.

Would you want to be reliant on American companies right now?

Let them. If you bend you reduce the options for people who do not want that.

i did not read the book but i did read the news when google gave up on serving censored search results in china

Well, only some claim to "remain committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data" while turning off E2EE cloud storage for an entire country.

No, some of them don't even bother pretending they care about your privacy.

> Most of this is being done to address the increasing terrorism threat we now face on a daily basis. Freedoms really only work in societies where people broadly share the same values and cooperate, but European societies are fragmenting and increasingly becoming less safe and less tolerant. If we want to do something about this then restricting freedoms is probably going to be required to some extent.

Or you could undo the changes that have caused that decline in social cohesion. People don't share the same values because our governments have been non-stop importing people with radically different values. Values which see it as a positive to end the lives of those who don't agree.

> Another theory I have is that this could just be a symptom of an older and more female voter base.

That voter base does vote more for the established parties and their policies that have gotten us into this compared to the population at large, yes.

Glaring example supporting the first hypothesis is that Denmark reinstated blasphemy laws in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#Denmark

Step 1: allow a million people from low trust societies to immigrate to a nation of 10 million in a short span of time.

Step 2: Sweden becomes the gun crime capital of Europe.

Step 3: Change your society to a low trust society, dismantling all the wonderful things social services and liberal institutions.

> European bureaucrats generally have little understanding of the technology they get paid to regulate

I'd agree with you if you just put "bureaucrats" instead of European bureaucrats, what country isn't currently led by a bunch of bureaucrats who don't seem to understand even the basics of the technology they legislate about?

I've yet to seen a country to lead the way, no wonder the rest of the countries don't seem to know what to do and just throwing stuff at the wall.

The politicians voting on it might not fully understand but the people pushing the regulation absolutely do. They want a popultion that hears and sees only what they want to.

Bullshit. Crime gangs had myriad of ways to hire youth before. There could be other ways to make sure there’s no huge pool of youth waiting to be hired. But that may be politically too hard.

> Matrix experimented with the concept of running a server on-device

https://arewep2pyet.com/