[palata]

> I believe they are referring to using GPG to encrypt data before putting it into Slack

In good approximation, nobody does that.

And anyone who is capable of communicating over PGP won't be covered by ChatControl anyway. They can keep using PGP over whatever they want, or just compile Signal from sources.

> If that ever became illegal because encryption then groups of people could simply use scripts or addons to pipe through different types of encoding to make AI fuzzy searches harder.

I don't think that this makes any sense at all. This is some kind of poor encryption. Either you honour the law and you send your messages in plaintext, or you don't and you use proper encryption. There is nothing worth anything in-between.

If encryption is illegal, those who really need it can still use steganography.

[Bender]

This is some kind of poor encryption.

In fact it is exactly zero encryption both technically and legally. By using encoding I would not be breaking the law at all assuming encryption itself is actually outlawed. Encryption is mathematical obfuscation. This is only useful for text to/from the server of course. Local storage is still being scanned which means one still have to use a device that does not have local scanning if the files are sensitive such as financial documents or those files would also have to be encoded. Encoding may not have value to some people but it has value to me. Obviously if I am trying to hide something that is highly sensitive like a master password database then I would probably do something a tad bit stronger, maybe 64 to 256 chains of encoding. This is still sufficient to break fuzzy scanning.

Here's an easy one:

    MDExMTAxMTEwMDExMDAwMDAwMT
    EwMDAwMDExMTAxMDAwMTExMDEx
    MTAwMTEwMDAwMDAxMTAwMDAw
    MTExMDEwMDAwMTAwMDAwMDEwMA
    oxMDAxMDAxMDAwMDAwMTEwMDAw
    MTAxMTAxMTAxMDAxMDAwMDAw
    MTEwMDAwMTAwMTAwMDAwMDExMT
    AwMTEwMTEwMTAwMTAxMTAxMTAw
    CjAxMTAxMTAwMDExMTEwMDEw
    MDEwMDAwMDAxMTEwMTExMDExMD
    ExMTEwMTEwMTEwMTAxMTAwMDEw
    MDExMDAwMDEwMTExMDEwMAo=

Zero encryption but it might take people a while to figure this out. The commands I used are installed by default to most Linux distributions. If I wanted to get really crazy I would add different levels and types of compression in the middle of the chain.

[palata]

> In fact it is exactly zero encryption both technically and legally.

I am not a lawyer (are you?), but technically you're wrong.

"In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode."

A caesar cipher is encryption. I don't see why chaining encodings wouldn't be. Technically and legally.

[Bender]

That's for lawyers and judges to work out. I will not concern myself with it.

Here is a legal definition: [1]

Making text or code unreadable to secure it for transmission or transport. Both the sender, the encryptor, and the receiver, the decryptor, have the means to translate text or code from source language to unreadable, undecipherable gibberish and back. The devices used have a key that is unique to the sender and receiver.

They used the word key. Our court case will have to decide if chained commands are legally equivalent to a "key". It's not even clear to me that is the universal legal definition. Time and grey wigs will tell. If they decide chained commands are a key that could have an interesting precedence on cases involving protecting users data, banking, military secrets, etc...

[1] - https://thelawdictionary.org/encryption/

[palata]

I get your point, we disagree.