There are places in the world today where only sneakernet communication has any semblance of privacy, so we need non-specialist tools that can provide privacy and secrecy regardless of local conditions. (I’d love to see more communication tools that don’t assume an always-on connection, or low latency, or other first world conditions.)
It is fairly well universally claimed by technology experts and legal experts that Chat Control is not effective for its stated purpose. It does not make it easier to find and stop abuse of children, nor does it have any meaningful reduction to the spread of CSAM. This makes the law unnecessary, thus illegal. However it hinges on that interpretation. Law enforcement officials and lobbyists for firms selling technology solutions claims the opposite, and politicians that want to show a strong hand against child exploitation will use/abuse those alternative views in order to push it.
Removing the "done for a good reason" exception will likely be a massive undertaking. Rather than constitutional protections, I think the more likely successful path would be a stronger IT security, cybersecurity regulations and data protection, so that governments and companies carry a larger risk by accessing private data. A scanner that carry a high rate of false positives should be a liability nightmare, not an opportunity for firms to sell a false promise to politicians. Cybersecurity regulations should also dictate that new legislation must not increase risk to citizens. One would assume that to be obvious, but history has sadly shown the opposite with government producing malware and the hording of software vulnerabilities. If there must be exception to privacy, "for good reason", it must not be done at the cost of public safety.
Technological means are forever vulnerable to social means. Governments can compel what technology prohibits. Technology won't stop politicians from passing legislation to ban privacy.
This reflex to argue against bad ideas using bad faith attempts to totally distort reality (in this case, calling excessive state surveillance “terrorism”) has got to stop. Do you really believe that by so transparently trying to gaslight people, your case gets stronger?
Stop making up bullshit terms and argue these laws on their own merits, or lack thereof. There’s plenty wrong with Chat Control without this kind of nonsense. It’s a terrible proposal. It’s not terrorism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203452
All: if you can't respond in a non-violent way, please don't post until you can.
By non-violent I mean not celebrating violence nor excusing it, but also more than that: I mean metabolizing the violence you feel in yourself, until you no longer need to express it aggressively.
I never felt irritated nor angry about Charlie’s public execution. Perplexed, definitely not surprised. But this statement from Dan had irritated me.
Words aren’t violence. Speech won’t shoot you in the neck in front of your wife and stream it live.
We have perfectly functioning terms for other concepts, we don’t need to Equality everything. When we do that nothing will mean anything, and we’ll soon find ourselves imprisoning or executing those we disagree with. Oops, too fucking late!
It's actually a pretty useful tool. I wish it was called "compassionate communication" or something like that though.
Oh wow seems like the guy who invented it hates the term too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Alter...
Dan is a moderator on a forum and his goal is to maintain a level of civil discourse rather than an aggressive style of communication. It's a very specific definition of "violence" for a specific context and perhaps there's room for clearer terminology.
Wow, that explains so much insanity from this otherwise excellent forum. "Respond in a non-violent way" is insane!
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
No amount of coercive control will nail you to a cross, or shoot you in the neck in front of your wife and a park full of students, because it disagrees with what you say.
Intimidation by making or implying threats of violence isn’t violence.
The reader assuming aggression in blunt words isn’t violence. Not using someone’s preferred pronouns is not violence.
Violence is violence.
People who want to conflate violence with non-violence want to impose their will on others. It’s a personality trait that lends itself to tyranny. You can’t legislate undesirable behaviour out of existence, but you can lock up those you disagree with, and you will enjoy it. You will say things like “ah well, we got what he deserved”.
Punishing people for things like coercive control does nothing to prevent the harm occurring in the first place, and threats of legal consequences rarely do much, if anything, to deter the unwanted activity.
We’re going to have to be more skilful in our thinking if we want people to Be Good and Live Right. I’m sure I’ve read and listen to people who had something more intelligent to say about how we are to live, but we keep fucking nailing them to crosses or shooting them in the fucking neck.
So your solution to this proposal of “terrorism” is to actually commit “terrorism”.
To have tyrannical government we only have to have governments who want to propose such legislation.
Any reasonable sort of government would be highlighting the absurdity of such ideas and speak out against them.
Violence for A ends is Terrorism
Intimidation for A ends is terrorism
∴ Intimidation for A ends is violence. <--- does not follow
Does it serve a similar purpose? Sure. Is it a threat of violence? Sure, but words have meaning.
Violence is a category of harm.
Definitions matter.
If speech is violence then execution is a suitable punishment.
If we want constitutional to have any force, we have to push for a world where words mean something.
It absolutely is violence. If a partner in a relationship was constantly going through your phone, they'd end up in prison in most countries recognising domestic violence.
that's disproportional
I also suspect that there is more to the regulation you're referring to, like something along the lines of 'that disturbs the state, its foreign relations or inter-state organisations'. Is it in StGB? If so, where?
in Germany, calling a politician certain derogatory names or mocking them in a way that is considered a "public insult" (and reasonably likely to impair their ability to do their job) can lead to criminal liability under §188 StGB. The scope includes online social media posts. The trend of enforcement appears to be increasing.
Section 188 of the German Criminal Code "insulting public officials" - This section makes it a crime to insult ("Beleidigung"), defame ("Verleumdung" or slander ("Üble Nachrede" a person in public life (politicians at all levels) if the insult is "likely to significantly impair the ability of the person concerned to perform their public duties"
Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) – social media platform liability; It obliges large social-media platforms operating in Germany to remove "clearly illegal" content quickly (within 24 h) and illegal content within 7 days, report transparency, store removed content for 10 weeks. This law creates an environment in which platform-moderation is under pressure. Content that may lead to criminal liability (such as insults under §188) may be more likely to be flagged/removed by platforms.
General "insult" (§185 StGB), "slander" (§186 StGB) and "defamation" (§187 StGB) apply to any person, not just public officials. Conditions and penalties are higher under §188 when public officials are involved. Also, laws on dissemination of personal data (doxing) (§126a StGB) were enacted in 2021. While not specific to insulting politicians, they add further online-speech liabilities
Denmark has the EU Presidency and is currently pushing ChatControl hard (objecting HEAVILY to the moniker/nickname). They try to sell it as “for the children” and “to fight terrorism” here already…
Who is driving it?
Who wants this so much that they have gone to the massive expense and effort?
Whoever it is - they know thet defeat is only temporary, and if they keep bringing it back from the dead, eventually it will succeed.
That "NGO" also happens to sell a tool called Safer(.io) that allows website owners to check hashes against known CSAM material, which I'm sure is unrelated.
They also happened to have shadily employed some former high-ranking Europol officials, which is again just a pure coincidence.
Balkan Insight did wonderful investigative reporting on them a couple of years back: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
In the meantime, the number of children killed in Palestine and West Bank has surpassed 20 thousand in 2 years, and famine hit more than half a million children in Sudan. It's not like they were short of ways to show they really care about kids, but alas they don't at all. It's just an excuse to restrict personal liberties.
Maybe learn to use a search engine, I heard it's a dying skill.
Your media literacy skills are truly non-existent.
By now it's just too late to take it back and start over without including chat control.
FAANG, various 3 letter agencies.
> Who is driving it?
FAANG lobbists. Stupid politicians who think they can only use it on adversaries.
The people pushing this come from the usual power centers in European politics, the (current) centrists. They feel motivated to protect their positions against encroachments from what they consider extremist positions (be it e.g. economic left or right, or a or b on some other scale.)
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/mp-och-v-rostade-fel-om-k...
https://emanuelkarlsten.se/vansterpartiet-om-varfor-de-stott...
Or they opposed it before the EU elections and then switched immediately afterwards.
Back in 2020 or so the commission first proposed the reform that contains the chat control provisions, then there was like a year or two of well published fighting in the European Parliament (EP) before they reached a position on the entire reform (notably excluding chat control).
Meanwhile the council of minister (effectively the upper house of the EP) didn't get around to forming an opinion before the parliament, so they are doing that now, which means it the same fight over chat control all over again but with different people.
After the council of ministers agrees on a position on the entire reform proposal from the commission we'll get even more rounds of bickering over what the final text should be: the trialogue. Those tend to be very closed, but with how much attention chat control is getting expect lots of leaks and constant news about who's being an ass during that step too.
Note that it is explicitly expected that each of the thee bodies will come up with different positions on many aspects of a regulation proposal, so there is nothing strange with the commission or the council suggesting some the parliament has opposed.
The people pushing it are ~bribed~ lobbied hard by groups who want this so they don't care about wasting their time or resources since they are getting paid for it.
> Is there not some career disincentive/consequence where if you try to push Encryption back doors, you get demolished in your re-election
In a somewhat ironic turn of events we don't know who was pushing it this time as they where protected by anonymity - one rule for them I guess and another for everyone else.
Also most average people don't know anything about encryption or backdoors, not even the meaning of those words. In their minds they have nothing to be concerned or mad about.
Politicians, and more importantly influential people, also rely on the same tech as we do and they have infinitely more to lose if their communications leak.
“The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules” https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...
They already openly reveal their true intentions by this excemption.
Why are chats different?
Art. 15
Freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and of every other form of
communication is inviolable.
Limitations may only be imposed by judicial decision stating the reasons and
in accordance with the guarantees provided by the law.
[1] https://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istituzione/costi...
This is an excerpt of Swedish Regeringsformen[1]:
> Everyone is also protected against body searches, house searches and similar intrusions, as well as against the examination of letters or other confidential mail and against the secret interception or recording of telephone conversations or other confidential messages.
Digital communication is more direct speech, including maybe whispering, than it is writing a letter.
Why is that a problem? Then you just don't do it at all. Society can survive two people being able to have a private conversation.
Ummmmm....yeah? You don't? It's enough the metadata is collected already.
Every time they pull a stunt like this, this becomes a little bit more clear. If the EU wants to avoid the spread of euroskeptic populist parties, they should be working to patch the system and be building legitimacy and credibility, rather than be seen working to undermine it.
Then there's the commission, which is even less accountable to the voters.
Now, I think there is a problem here; in many countries the public can barely bring themselves to care about the European Parliament elections, nevermind who their government nominates as commissioner. But ultimately it is as much in the public’s hands as a ministerial appointment.
Of course that would be a very, very risk approach...
Watch them carefully. They will 100% try again. The enemy is the general public.
A heavily regulated market becomes an oligopoly of a few players with revolving door access to government and often interlocking directorates, patent cross licensing, and other ways of further colluding to keep out competition.
This is why, for example, the big lavishly funded AI ventures are all about “safety” regulation. It would stop anyone from competing. So far that effort has also failed but expect them to keep trying.
We only have to lose once. Erosion is a process.
Every country should fight for constitutional protections for its citizens' rights to (internet) privacy. But that'll never have support from politicians, and laypeople don't have the ability to appreciate this highly technical and nuanced topic.
It's only when opposition is mounted to each individual attempt that we can rally public support. Sadly, we can only muster this energy in the face of losing freedom. And it only has to falter once.
Write a law that end-users have an unlimited right to execute their own programs on their own devices, on par with the producers of said devices, just any code they want. A device doesn't support that? No selling in the EU for you ...
Such a right would make chat control impossible and unworkable as well, for the same reason that open source encryption can't be hacked. It will be impossible to prevent secure messengers to be installed.
> Client-side scanning, the technical approach favored by Chat Control advocates, attempts to circumvent this limitation by analyzing messages on users’ devices before encryption or after decryption. While this might sound like a clever workaround, it fundamentally breaks the security model of encryption.
It's not a misunderstanding, it's deliberate circumvention. It doesn't do anyone any good to pretend that they just don't understand.
This thing is 280px tall! I clicked it for shits and giggles and upon returning it showed a popup XD
https://files.catbox.moe/sv7hb7.png
> Only 2 Steps (thx)
> Click "Download"
> Add Privacy Guard for Chrome™
Don't worry why I'm not using ad block
Normalizing mass surveillance would set a precedent for authoritarian regimes worldwide to demand similar access, further eroding privacy and human rights on a global scale.
I also oppose it on technical grounds, since it would be some kind of local or hybrid ai that does the scanning. A high number of false positives harming innocents would certainly be the result.
Thus, no we don't.
So just blanket "no private communication for anyone"? I mean, why shouldn't people be able to communicate privately? There is no such thing as a "single owner of backdoors", so why try play that game when it never ends with just a single owner?
For instance, law enforcement agencies can receive legal authority to wiretap your phone if they can present reasonable suspicion of criminal activity that must be investigated.
If you want that, you have to also be OK with other parties being able to do so too, as there currently doesn't exists any solutions to that specific problem of just letting one party accessing something without the risk of leaks.
why you are assuming this is true?
first of all it's not true, law enforcement are already doing their work today without chat control.
In case we have massive chat control, do you really expect criminals to send plain text messages via whatsapp/telegram/ecc? They will use custom-made solutions(btw they are already using them ...) to circumvent the chat control.
Even if they will be forced to use whatsapp, they can easily add an extra layer of encryption that will totally circumvent the chat control ... and the only thing we will have are governants able to know every single aspect of our life ...
In fact the minder's minder could be the minder's charge and you get 100% employment.
(/s)
