Matthew Green

EU-Überwachungspläne: Unionsfraktion jetzt gegen Chatkontrolle, Innenministerium will sich nicht äußern Überraschend kündigte am Dienstagnachmittag der Fraktionsvorsitzende der CDU/CSU an, dass es eine anlasslose Kontrolle von Chats mit der Union nicht geben würde. Das Innenministerium sagt, die Abstimm...

The leader of the CDU caucus has stated that the CDU is now against the proposal, which is a good sign. There will be a vote tomorrow on the positioning of the German government.

netzpolitik.org/2025/eu-uebe...

I hear that the EU ChatControl situation is going better today. I cannot believe how close the EU has gotten to passing this crazy regulation.

Who is “we”?

One where every commenter on the liberal blogs is not a hard-right Bush-era Republican.

Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime Court records show that the narrative Flock and a Texas Sheriff's Office has told the public isn't the whole story, and that police were conducting a 'death investigation' into the abortion.

NEW: In May, a Texas police department said they used the powerful Flock surveillance network against a woman who had an abortion "for her safety"

Newly obtained court records show it was a 'death investigation,' and they considered charging her with a crime

www.404media.co/police-said-...

Substack is a bad place.

If AI became quietly superintelligent in 2018 and began reorganizing our world to its purposes, would that look very different than what’s happening today?

Anything is possible to pull off if you’re willing to force someone to redesign their app, and you’re not concerned about security. Just force people to upload the texts to a server before they even get encrypted.

It's too long a story to explain how I know this, but I once found out that the FBI made challenge coins about how they tried to force Apple to break iPhone encryption. Challenge coins celebrating shitty behavior is deeply a part of FBI culture.

The Xiaofeng Wang search warrant has been unsealed, thanks to @riana.bsky.social. infosec.exchange/@hovav/11531...

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

Buy me a drink, sing me a song, take me as I am because I can’t stay long?

The Trump Administration Is Coming for Nonprofits. They're Getting Ready As the Trump administration threatens them, liberal nonprofits have been quietly preparing to do everything from surrendering 501(c)(3) status to relocating outside the US.

As the Trump administration threatens them, liberal nonprofits have been quietly preparing to do everything from surrendering 501(c)(3) status to relocating outside the US.

Doesn’t sound much like what the states require for age verification, but I guess that’s good?

Bluesky rolls out age verification for users in Ohio | TechCrunch Users in Ohio will have to verify their age to use Bluesky's social network as of Monday.

techcrunch.com/2025/09/29/b...

These laws are never ever put to bed. One day you’ll be distracted and they’ll get one through.

They’ve been going after Meta too.

So BlueSky is blocked in Mississippi and requires age verification for “adult content” in SD, WY, OH and the UK. How accurate is their classification of adult content?

“AI expert” to a computer scientist: you’re working on optimizing model architectures and improving backprop.

“AI expert” for real: you’re gluing transformers together with Python and hoping you get better results.

My student pointed me to this paragraph in the Guardian’s “CoverDrop” white paper. Gagh we need more good software engineers to build libraries!

All of them.

Would be a technical nightmare because now you’d have two versions of Apple encryption, where the security changes depending on where in the world you are (ie your IP address.) This is so dangerous that it’s tantamount to a global backdoor, including against US citizens.

A final note: it’s not totally clear what the UK is asking for here, but one theory is: they want access to foreign users who have ADP encryption on, but are on UK soil (for example, foreign diplomats.)

This would be a technical nightmare, but it fits the facts.

What’s worrying here is that the UK government seems absolutely determined to access user private data, no matter the bad press and the consequences. And they’re now willing to do it overtly. Between this and recent moves against encryption in the EU, we’re going to a bad place.

It’s also possible that the UK is asking for a backdoor in Apple’s iMessage text messaging system. That isn’t technically “iCloud” but it’s adjacent enough that I could see it getting presented that way. This would not be the first time the UK gov expressed interest in that.

So “we want a backdoor to access iCloud encryption” could mean access to those password vaults and secure health data. This means Apple would have to disable those features in the UK as well, or deploy new insecure encryption code that could affect users globally.

As to question (1), the article isn’t super clear. But it’s worth pointing out that Apple doesn’t just provide end-to-end encryption for backups through their ADP feature. They also provide end-to-end encrypted backup for health data, web history and passwords, even without ADP.

Second, how is Apple supposed to make a single encryption system that’s secure for US users but not for UK users? This would require that they partition their software globally and have many versions, which seems like a disaster. Are you sure you’re running the “secure” OS?

So here we are again. This time the UK is narrowly targeting their request at UK users only. But this is baffling for two reasons.

First, Apple no longer offers the ADP encrypted backup feature to new UK users, and existing users are being migrated. So what is the UK asking for?

When this fact became public, it drew a huge backlash. Apple announced that it was entirely removing the encrypted backup feature for all UK users. Trump administration figures rebuked the UK government.