18 ms·

EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

575 points by rc00 4y ago

obiwahn 4y ago
Maybe she is just saying that Google and Apple soft Keyboard are scanned and it does not matter if you use signal or telnet...
seydor 4y ago
The purpose of most eurocrats is to write long reports to other eurocrats justifying their time and expenses. It's normal to see people claim authority on things they have very little idea of. The recently-caught MEP who took bribes was apparently in charge of science and tech, AI & blockchain , and the things she would say in public were astounding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCxsN3qlkU?t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCxsN3qlkU?t=5m30s
- cowpig 4y ago
  Making cynical blanket statements about large groups of people doesn't do anything to address any kind of issue, and instead normalizes negative behaviors both within that group. Within the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors. Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors? Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.
  - seydor 4y ago
    i m not within that group -- very few people are within that group and the vast majority are unelected and unaccountable to us. I m not the only one complaining about the brussels bubble. dont try to shift the blame on us my experince with eurocracy is from projects i ve participated in
    - lwhi 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - seydor 4y ago
        the EU is a political organization so , yes? having an opinion is allowed , but like i said there is no way to express it somehow. In fact i usually learn about EU regulations affecting my business from hacker news
        hilios 4y ago
        The EU does public consultations, usually years in advance. If those regulations are affecting your business it might be worthwhile to check their site every once in a while.
        mihaic 4y ago
        Do you know by first-hand experience if these public consultations actually make any difference? I once attended one from the local gov, and everything was already predetermined and the debate was just a dance.
        hilios 4y ago
        The proposed laws usually change before they are adopted. I can not ascertain how much of an impact the public consultation has. It is online though so the barrier of entry is pretty low. And even if it's completely useless it is still a good way to stay informed if the changes might impact someones business.
      - actually_a_dog 4y ago
        I don’t see any facts coming from you, either.
        candiodari 4y ago
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    > How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors? By increasing transparency and accountability.
    - zaphar 4y ago
      I have observed multiple instances where someone had proposed that and been shorted down by the crowd e saying, we don't believe it trust you because you (work in govt, represent a company, are in $political party). Clearly that doesn't work.
      - nebulousthree 4y ago
        That's because it's not the propositions that need to be transparent. Politicians are great at explaining their grandiose propositions. It's the actions taken and the results that need to be transparent.
  - fnmron 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - livelielife 4y ago
    your response contains some very valid points around the dynamics of groups with bad reputations. You point out real negative consequences. But you misidentify the group being criticized. it's not euro bureaucrats. it's literal morons who take ownership and responsibility over things they don't understand well enough to even surround themselves with advisors who know what they're talking about. I've seen this attitude from many very wealthy people, a willingness, a bravado even, to be ignorant about what they do for a living, e.g. I met a dude who told me had a software business, but he didn't even know what programing language his own property was written in. what really sets me off is their unwillingness to find out. (oh, and that this are the kind of people at the top of our society)
  - Kretinsky 4y ago
    You'd be surprised by the large number of EU civil servants with fake/complacency PhDs. There is a cottage industry of PhD candidates writing theses for EU servants, for $$, to make ends meet.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I think the problem is that humans are going to be human. We hold our bureaucrats to a high standard, so if the group contains a few bad eggs it spoils the reputation of the whole group.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
akomtu 4y ago
I bet Ylva didn't even write it. She's just a talking head for those who don't want visibility.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I wish I could believe that the individual is just a useful idiot. Part of that rhetoric mostly works in US too, where I kinda place the blame on the old guard for not understanding technology, where it is not exactly given that they do not. edit: From where they sit ( position where they have to champion this effort ), it is just not part of the equation that is relevant to them so any means to get public on your side even with comments about sniffing is justified. HN will ridicule it, but a lot of people will swallow it wholesale.
WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
That's indeed quite worrying, this plus the American Cloud Act means online privacy is at risk.. I wonder why Mullvad doesn't complain about the American Cloud Act, or did they already? Mullvad employees could be extradited to the US if they do not comply (opening up your servers for example), since it's a bilateral agreement with the EU It's a pretty dark era ahead of us: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources
bitwize 4y ago
They have to pass it to find out what's in it! Never go full American politics.
Anonboxis 4y ago
Here is the Regulation in question: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022:209:FIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... Its full name is the: Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse
- mecsred 4y ago
  Neither of those links are functional
  - tacker2000 4y ago
    Both work for me
Waterluvian 4y ago
This is more common than the opposite. I’m reminded of that recent embarrassing display of US government where the TikTok CEO was peppered with the kinds of questions that betray the fact that the congresscritter doesn’t comprehend the topic. If they wanted real answers they’d say, “I yield my time to this SME I brought in.” But they’re just there to look tough on whatever.
- ouid 4y ago
  You don't need to be a subject matter expert to understand how encryption works. E2E can be explained to an 8 year old. The problem is that the skills selected for in politicians is the same as the skills selected for in non-venomous snakes, ie, their resemblance to venomous snakes, without the metabolic overhead of actually producing venom.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I don't understand your metaphor. > E2E can be explained to an 8 year old. Can. Also, the main problem here isn't explaining the tech itself (although the quotations in the link indicate this is also a problem), but rather explaining why it's (a) actually good, and (b) impossible to prevent even if it wasn't good. But even if it was the tech itself, most people don't have maths skills and fundamentally don't (care to?) think logically. When I was a kid, I couldn't understand why the adults kept joking about why it was so hard to stop the VCR from flashing 12:00 when I found it trivial. (I think we're getting to the point where you could run an image detection process on the display itself, totally circumventing any encryption. This will have a lot of consequences that are totally obvious and yet it may be done regardless).
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Pretty much that. Your average politician on this side of the pond is not much better than the ones on the other side And to be even more honest, technical people have a very hard time getting their point across non-technical people and engaging in politics
  - 4y ago
12j1l2io3 4y ago
[flagged]
- 12j1l2io3 4y ago
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
  - throwaway426079 4y ago
    Is there any legitimate purpose or utility to the user in that green bubble? I'm an Android user with no knowledge of iMessage.
    - ulimn 4y ago
      If I write a message to someone, them being blue or green means I will either pay for the message (sms) or it's free (iMessage).
      - prophesi 4y ago
        And to piggyback off this, to have an iPhone is often a status symbol for teens or some societies. So whether you know anything about iMessage or not, a teen with an Android phone may be heckled when their iPhone recipient sees a green bubble.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - MBCook 4y ago
      Yes. It distinguishes iMessage from SMS/MMS. With iMessage you get read receipts (if turned on), high quality multi-media (instead of just MMS), end-to-end encryption, the ability to edit or unsend messages for a short time, multi-device messaging, no per-message fee, and probably more. The green bubble is a signal that isn’t available in that conversation. It’s a little like the old padlock in the address bar but far more abstract.
goobma 4y ago
[flagged]
- rcoveson 4y ago
  It is sufficient to demonstrate that the a proposal is worse than the status quo. A problem doesn't demand an immediate resolution just because somebody proposed a bad solution.
- jjulius 4y ago
  Having a solution is not a prerequisite for providing criticism. It is okay to see a flaw but not yet have an answer.
  - goobma 4y ago
    No but it makes it an empty criticism. It's like the activists who say "abolish the police!" but either have no insight into or are deliberately ignoring why the police exist, and have no ideas regarding who would perform the equivalent function instead.
    - CP3f6kMA 4y ago
      We are very aware of why police exist.
    - delecti 4y ago
      I think you must not have interacted with many people who advocate for police abolition. Even just googling "abolish the police" returns a page full of results of various proposals, with detailed breakdowns. It's quite simple: just how we don't call the police for house fires or heart attacks, there are a large variety of other societal problems which would be better served by more specialized (and less heavily armed) services. Also, police exist to protect capital, not us. It evolved from slave catching forces, and does relatively little to prevent or solve most crime.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Here's a real problem. Let's call it X. Someone proposes a solution: "Let's do Y!". It is perfectly valid criticism to say that Y doesn't actually fix X. I don't care if that counts as "empty criticism" by your definition. If someone proposes a solution, it's perfectly valid criticism to point out that the "solution" doesn't actually solve.
s1k3s 4y ago
I'd be happy if they understood what's written in their GDPR bill passed 7 years ago.
- pestaa 4y ago
  How do they not understand it?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  How is the gdpr relevant to this?
legitster 4y ago
For all the faults that lobbying brings with it, there is something to be said for actually bringing in outside experts into the legislative process. You can seek intellectual purity all you want, but at the end of the day you are going to have to have some trust that farmers know where seeds go and tech companies know how encryption works. Similar bills have died several times in the US, if only because there were actual experts available (aka, lobbyists) who could tell them why this idea was dumb and impossible. It's hard not to see this following in the line of "right to be forgotten" or "tracking consent" where legitimate concerns about the language of the rules were completely dismissed as industry noise.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  Lawmakers obviously need the assistance of outside expertise. The problem with lobbying is that most of the assistance comes from the people with most of the money. Lawmakers could (and in some jurisdictions do) seek out assistance rather than relying on moneyed interests to offer it.
mongol 4y ago
The podcast episode in Svenska Dagbladet (which is otherwise a very good podcast) was infuriating because the opponent and the host did not catch on to her ridiculous statements about encryption. She really needs to meet a journalist that can cross-examine her statements about this. She got away too easy there.
- tephra 4y ago
  Knowing the opponent he indeed caught on but with 30 minutes (and most of that spent with Ylva) there's only so much you can do.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- meling 4y ago
  I only read the blog summarizing the interviews, but I’m horrified that she can talk this much bs with such apparent confidence. I don’t know who she is and how she got to have this role, which she does not appear qualified to hold.
  - mongol 4y ago
    She is a Swedish politician from the Social Democratic party. One of the senior ones that served as minister in the cabinet for a number of years. Unfortunately, that does not mean she is competent
    - Jolter 4y ago
      She is competent in many areas but obviously not in tech.
max51 4y ago
This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but at the same time they don't want other people to read it. The fact that even the politicians signing on it can't understand it should raise a lot of red flags. We should treat them the same way that an anti-virus treats "safe" code with payloads that are obfuscated using techniques also used by viruses (a big reason why you get false positives on cracks and keygens btw). We should assume that they are trying to hide something they don't want us to see when they make their bills extremely hard to read even for lawyers.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes. That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.
  - max51 4y ago
    I have no problem with the vocabulary itself and most of the Legalese. I try to use more of it in my documentation because, as you mentioned, it has less room to interpretation and loopholes compared to more commonly used phrasing. My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly. Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes. When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.
Freeaqingme 4y ago
Someone commented something along the lines of 'but then how are we supposed to tackle organized crime'. As I typed the comment below the comment got flagged and I could no longer reply. Still, I think the bit below may contribute to the discussion. TL;DR; I think that as a society we should more often ask ourselves if something is actually worth fighting if it means sacrificing a lot of our human rights. That may not be a problem on HN, but it is one imho on a political level in many Western countries. There is not always a solution to a problem. Let's say you wanted to bring the number of car crashes to zero. Eventually there's nothing 'reasonable' left to be done, and the only remaining option would be to ban cars altogether. Instead, we accept a certain number of crashes because it's deemed more important to be able to drive a car than it is to bring the number of car crash fatalities to zero*. For example, in a country like Germany there are 0.8 homicides per 100K inhabitants. You could put _everybody_ under surveillance, just to have an easier job of finding the perpetrators. In the process there would be many false positives, wrongful imprisonments, etc. In order to preserve the rule of law, maybe it's sometimes best to accept that you cannot create the perfect society. At least not a society in which people who are innocent (the very vast majority) can also still enjoy their freedoms. Besides, I feel like the police has become somewhat lazy in many Western countries for the past 20 years. Before the rise of the internet, it was simply accepted that you couldn't know what two spouses had said to each other and you had to rely on good-old detective work. However, since things like Facebook Messenger, the cops expect to be able to get a warrant for all this data. That era appears to be slowly ending with E2EE, and all of a sudden they're struggling because those detective skills have slowly deteriorated. * To be clear, I think that in many countries there's still quite a lot of room for improvement to reduce the number of car crash fatalities. Not in the least in the USA.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  This shouldn't even be a foreign concept to the HN audience. Not long ago these was a post about "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Those interested in the legal system out there should also be familiar with the idea of how some criminals will get away in the attempt to prevent any innocent person from going to prison. Sometimes it costs more to fight a problem than you get back from solving it.
- 4y ago
walkhour 4y ago
Reminds me of the senator that asked Zuckerberg how do they make money [0], and Zuckerberg simply said they run ads. What a way to use your questioning time, with something that was a google search away. [0] https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ
- decremental 4y ago
  Often the point of seemingly obvious questions like that is to have the person on record making that statement and potentially what they might omit.
  - walkhour 4y ago
    Maybe, but Zuckerberg smirks, also the guy behind him, and also the blond lady next to him. It seems more likely to me that the Senator was out of his depth.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  That's a lie by omission, surely. They sell data too. Ads and analytics, game data, user association data, user attention data. But "ads" is pretty euphemistic -- to the point of dishonesty -- when the ads are targeted political campaign messages, for example. Cambridge Analytica was at least enabled by Facebook. I'd say that their operations could be summed up more reasonably by "Facebook track people".
jll29 4y ago
Don't believe vendors' lies about "end-to-end" encryption. If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin. Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself. You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your behalf. Obviously, this excludes mobile devices. Do not trust a tree of certificates if you cannot trust the root certificate because it belongs to an organization that is in a jurisdiction where people may be interested in what you have written and said in your encrypted message. Don't trust old-school typewriters and the postal system either. Letters are routinely opened and typewriters can be matched. For example, the Stasi (secret police of the former GDR - German "Democratic" Republic) had an archive of type samples of all sold models of typewriters for re-identification of political pamphlets. You can trust a few things: You can trust your Linux box with your self-compiled kernel (no 3rd party drivers), at least as long as it is not on a network. To build a safe environment, you could start there, taking a defensive approach. Remember, last time the paranoid turned out to be naive when Snowden revealed the real status quo in 2013 (ten years ago, when I couldn't buy a 1 TB USB stick).
- voxic11 4y ago
  > You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?
  - beisner 4y ago
    There are quantum-resistant encryption schemes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    You’ll probably be dead by then anyway.
    - 4y ago
willtemperley 4y ago
Funny - the European Commission told its staff to "Switch to Signal messaging app" in Feb 2020: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to-signal-messaging-app/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc... I wonder what changed.
- feanaro 4y ago
  Nothing changed. They'll continue using Signal for themselves, they just don't want you using it too. Or rather, they want you to use it just as long it has a manhole only they can access.
- candiodari 4y ago
  Secure comms for government, not for you. Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other). https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-in-school https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-... "Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence." Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%. And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand? Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.
ginsider_oaks 4y ago
just give me the NSA putting backdoors in my chips rather than this two-faced nonsense.
viktorcode 4y ago
She maybe don't understand technology, but I get the feeling that breaking or weakening p2p is not what she talking about. The scanning means scanning performed on the end devices, not of the communications. The idea is to force communication messengers providers to perform scan on end user's device. That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.
- evancox100 4y ago
  Right, I don’t have a lot of love for EU bureaucrats (thanks cookie law!), but this criticism misses the mark in many places. You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different. Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct. Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that. The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.
dahwolf 4y ago
Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail. In the digital domain, we're fine with all of these illegal searches, either we don't even know they happen or we do know yet let it pass, as it feels "invisible" and not intrusive. Plus, you're a standup citizen so all is good. And that's how one day you end up as a bankrupted outcast for having insulted the king.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything. Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?). But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want more constitutional protections (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse. Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0]. Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic. More brain drain? Is it the intended goal? [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
  - leoedin 4y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but there's plenty of Americans living all over Europe. Here in London there's loads.
  - desas 4y ago
orangepurple 4y ago
It's almost like there is a shadow government [1,2,3] which uses these people as puppets for the citizenry. Of course the puppets are clueless. They just need to approve everything the shadow government has on its agenda. In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence. [1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-news/card/BFhE0BwSxGmXoRdPyaUL https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-ne... [2] https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shadow-government/ https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21/the-taliban-has-successfully-built-a-parallel-state-in-many-parts-of-afghanistan-report-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21...
randyrand 4y ago
> Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption. This is trivially possible. 1. send an end to end encrypted message to the recipient 2. also send an end to end encrypted copy of the message to the government. I’m not agreeing with it. But you can clearly send end to end encrypted messages to multiple parties without fundamentally breaking the encryption…
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Are you saying that sending and scanning are the same? I think we need to define "scan" (or "sniff" or whatever other metaphors are used here) as more than just receiving a copy that's still encrypted. What definition is there, which is distinct from "decrypt"? You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think by the point you encrypt the plaintext twice the idea of end-to-end is broken.
  - ranguna 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I do not agree with this EU proposal. Why do you say that e2ee is broken if the plain text is encrypted more than once? Isn't that what happens in group chats? And if not, they could just make all chats group chats. You, your recipient and the government.
    - reyqn 4y ago
      Maybe this would actually make people tick on how outrageous this is.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      That would make it very obvious. I like that idea.
denton-scratch 4y ago
I simply can't believe she's as ignorant as she comes across; even if she doesn't know that you can't "scan" an encrypted file, she's a damned EU Commissioner; she has a large staff of educated people to advise her. I think she simply doesn't care about the reality, she wants to bang a "protect the children" drum for political reasons. It's odd; she seems to be a pedagogy graduate, who was once (1988) elected to the Swedish parliament as a communist, then worked as a teacher, and was later (1994?) appointed a social-democrat minister. So since her first parliamentary term, she has not been an elected representative, but an appointed functionary. So I guess her "political reasons" amount to pleasing her boss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson Former commies who repent don't lose their contempt for ordinary people. They continue to think they are "the vanguard". I reckon she just thinks ordinary people are too dim to notice that her sayings are nonsense.
- Jolter 4y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean by her not being an elected representative. She was a Swedish member of parliament for a long time, not just one term. The tradition in Sweden is that ministers are taken from among the ranks of the ruling party’s MPs, even though exceptions sometimes are made.
Tade0 4y ago
Steganography is going to gain some renewed popularity should this pass.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kabes 4y ago
> “Next summer, all the scanning taking place right now of child sex will be banned within the EU. That is, if we don’t have special legislation that allows it.” Ah, the good old child sex card. We keep on losing our privacy in its name, but never do I see a number of how many children are actually being saved by the surveillance apparatus.
cultureswitch 4y ago
Aside from the obvious impossibility of privacy-compatible searches, I'd like to focus on the authoritarian excuse du jour, child sexual abuse. How prevalent is it really? How often are children actually abused, in comparison to images of the abuse being circulated? Is there really an increase in child abuse over the last couple of decades? It seems to me that this angle is especially unpopular to talk about among privacy advocates because most people will wrongly think that it is defending child abuse. Thanks to the magic of internet forums, I don't have to care too much. In my evaluation, actual child abuse is happening at record low rates in the western world due several factors. The first is the secularization of society, reducing the influence and number of (always male) priests over large amounts of children. Second, practical access to separation and divorce is much easier to women with children than it used to be. Wives can better protect their children from an abusive father than they could a couple of decades ago. Third, a side effect of the campaign to eliminate gender roles and discriminations against women in education and the workplace is that men teaching young children have basically gone extinct. Fourth, the hysteria about the problem has led all men to distance themselves from children in general, in order to avoid even the slightest suspicion. So considering all that, what's really happening? We can expect rates of pedophilia haven't changed much. It's there genetically, and will be for the foreseeable future. The conclusion should be obvious: pedophiles have shifted from a society where getting away with abuse was a realistic prospect to one where it is not. So they do the next best thing and use pornography instead. Of course, the material is still being made and the abuse still happens. But we've gone from a situation where e.g. there was one child being abused by each pedophile to one where that ratio is maybe one child to ten or a hundred pedophiles (or vastly more depending on how much the material was shared). Am I wrong?
- unconed 4y ago
  Your sheer, naked bias that only men abuse children and partners while women always protect them... while simultaneously questioning established narratives. Phew. That takes a special kind of stupid.
v0id24 4y ago
I think they understand. I remember how in Russia they justified the blocking of sites and the transfer of encryption keys for messengers. I have deja vu. At first they were justified solely by the fight against pedophiles and terrorists. Then gradually the fight against pirates, then with misleading information, the fight for fair elections, and so on and so forth. Then they canceled the receipt of permits through the courts. Opposition blockades appeared without justification...
Superpencil 4y ago
She just means that the chat client should perform scanning on-device. This is why she compares it to link preview fetching. Time to re-write that bill.

575 points by rc00 4y ago

Maybe she is just saying that Google and Apple soft Keyboard are scanned and it does not matter if you use signal or telnet...

seydor 4y ago

The purpose of most eurocrats is to write long reports to other eurocrats justifying their time and expenses. It's normal to see people claim authority on things they have very little idea of. The recently-caught MEP who took bribes was apparently in charge of science and tech, AI & blockchain , and the things she would say in public were astounding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCxsN3qlkU?t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCxsN3qlkU?t=5m30s

cowpig 4y ago
Making cynical blanket statements about large groups of people doesn't do anything to address any kind of issue, and instead normalizes negative behaviors both within that group. Within the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors. Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors? Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.
- seydor 4y ago
  i m not within that group -- very few people are within that group and the vast majority are unelected and unaccountable to us. I m not the only one complaining about the brussels bubble. dont try to shift the blame on us my experince with eurocracy is from projects i ve participated in
  - lwhi 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - seydor 4y ago
      the EU is a political organization so , yes? having an opinion is allowed , but like i said there is no way to express it somehow. In fact i usually learn about EU regulations affecting my business from hacker news
      - hilios 4y ago
        The EU does public consultations, usually years in advance. If those regulations are affecting your business it might be worthwhile to check their site every once in a while.
        mihaic 4y ago
        Do you know by first-hand experience if these public consultations actually make any difference? I once attended one from the local gov, and everything was already predetermined and the debate was just a dance.
        hilios 4y ago
        The proposed laws usually change before they are adopted. I can not ascertain how much of an impact the public consultation has. It is online though so the barrier of entry is pretty low. And even if it's completely useless it is still a good way to stay informed if the changes might impact someones business.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      I don’t see any facts coming from you, either.
      - candiodari 4y ago
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  > How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors? By increasing transparency and accountability.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    I have observed multiple instances where someone had proposed that and been shorted down by the crowd e saying, we don't believe it trust you because you (work in govt, represent a company, are in $political party). Clearly that doesn't work.
    - nebulousthree 4y ago
      That's because it's not the propositions that need to be transparent. Politicians are great at explaining their grandiose propositions. It's the actions taken and the results that need to be transparent.
- fnmron 4y ago
  [flagged]
- livelielife 4y ago
  your response contains some very valid points around the dynamics of groups with bad reputations. You point out real negative consequences. But you misidentify the group being criticized. it's not euro bureaucrats. it's literal morons who take ownership and responsibility over things they don't understand well enough to even surround themselves with advisors who know what they're talking about. I've seen this attitude from many very wealthy people, a willingness, a bravado even, to be ignorant about what they do for a living, e.g. I met a dude who told me had a software business, but he didn't even know what programing language his own property was written in. what really sets me off is their unwillingness to find out. (oh, and that this are the kind of people at the top of our society)
- Kretinsky 4y ago
  You'd be surprised by the large number of EU civil servants with fake/complacency PhDs. There is a cottage industry of PhD candidates writing theses for EU servants, for $$, to make ends meet.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think the problem is that humans are going to be human. We hold our bureaucrats to a high standard, so if the group contains a few bad eggs it spoils the reputation of the whole group.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

akomtu 4y ago

I bet Ylva didn't even write it. She's just a talking head for those who don't want visibility.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I wish I could believe that the individual is just a useful idiot. Part of that rhetoric mostly works in US too, where I kinda place the blame on the old guard for not understanding technology, where it is not exactly given that they do not. edit: From where they sit ( position where they have to champion this effort ), it is just not part of the equation that is relevant to them so any means to get public on your side even with comments about sniffing is justified. HN will ridicule it, but a lot of people will swallow it wholesale.

WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago

That's indeed quite worrying, this plus the American Cloud Act means online privacy is at risk.. I wonder why Mullvad doesn't complain about the American Cloud Act, or did they already? Mullvad employees could be extradited to the US if they do not comply (opening up your servers for example), since it's a bilateral agreement with the EU It's a pretty dark era ahead of us: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources

bitwize 4y ago

They have to pass it to find out what's in it! Never go full American politics.

Anonboxis 4y ago

Here is the Regulation in question: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022:209:FIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... Its full name is the: Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse

mecsred 4y ago
Neither of those links are functional
- tacker2000 4y ago
  Both work for me

Waterluvian 4y ago

This is more common than the opposite. I’m reminded of that recent embarrassing display of US government where the TikTok CEO was peppered with the kinds of questions that betray the fact that the congresscritter doesn’t comprehend the topic. If they wanted real answers they’d say, “I yield my time to this SME I brought in.” But they’re just there to look tough on whatever.

ouid 4y ago
You don't need to be a subject matter expert to understand how encryption works. E2E can be explained to an 8 year old. The problem is that the skills selected for in politicians is the same as the skills selected for in non-venomous snakes, ie, their resemblance to venomous snakes, without the metabolic overhead of actually producing venom.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I don't understand your metaphor. > E2E can be explained to an 8 year old. Can. Also, the main problem here isn't explaining the tech itself (although the quotations in the link indicate this is also a problem), but rather explaining why it's (a) actually good, and (b) impossible to prevent even if it wasn't good. But even if it was the tech itself, most people don't have maths skills and fundamentally don't (care to?) think logically. When I was a kid, I couldn't understand why the adults kept joking about why it was so hard to stop the VCR from flashing 12:00 when I found it trivial. (I think we're getting to the point where you could run an image detection process on the display itself, totally circumventing any encryption. This will have a lot of consequences that are totally obvious and yet it may be done regardless).
raverbashing 4y ago
Pretty much that. Your average politician on this side of the pond is not much better than the ones on the other side And to be even more honest, technical people have a very hard time getting their point across non-technical people and engaging in politics
- 4y ago

12j1l2io3 4y ago

[flagged]

12j1l2io3 4y ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
- throwaway426079 4y ago
  Is there any legitimate purpose or utility to the user in that green bubble? I'm an Android user with no knowledge of iMessage.
  - ulimn 4y ago
    If I write a message to someone, them being blue or green means I will either pay for the message (sms) or it's free (iMessage).
    - prophesi 4y ago
      And to piggyback off this, to have an iPhone is often a status symbol for teens or some societies. So whether you know anything about iMessage or not, a teen with an Android phone may be heckled when their iPhone recipient sees a green bubble.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Yes. It distinguishes iMessage from SMS/MMS. With iMessage you get read receipts (if turned on), high quality multi-media (instead of just MMS), end-to-end encryption, the ability to edit or unsend messages for a short time, multi-device messaging, no per-message fee, and probably more. The green bubble is a signal that isn’t available in that conversation. It’s a little like the old padlock in the address bar but far more abstract.

goobma 4y ago

[flagged]

rcoveson 4y ago
It is sufficient to demonstrate that the a proposal is worse than the status quo. A problem doesn't demand an immediate resolution just because somebody proposed a bad solution.
jjulius 4y ago
Having a solution is not a prerequisite for providing criticism. It is okay to see a flaw but not yet have an answer.
- goobma 4y ago
  No but it makes it an empty criticism. It's like the activists who say "abolish the police!" but either have no insight into or are deliberately ignoring why the police exist, and have no ideas regarding who would perform the equivalent function instead.
  - CP3f6kMA 4y ago
    We are very aware of why police exist.
  - delecti 4y ago
    I think you must not have interacted with many people who advocate for police abolition. Even just googling "abolish the police" returns a page full of results of various proposals, with detailed breakdowns. It's quite simple: just how we don't call the police for house fires or heart attacks, there are a large variety of other societal problems which would be better served by more specialized (and less heavily armed) services. Also, police exist to protect capital, not us. It evolved from slave catching forces, and does relatively little to prevent or solve most crime.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Here's a real problem. Let's call it X. Someone proposes a solution: "Let's do Y!". It is perfectly valid criticism to say that Y doesn't actually fix X. I don't care if that counts as "empty criticism" by your definition. If someone proposes a solution, it's perfectly valid criticism to point out that the "solution" doesn't actually solve.

s1k3s 4y ago

I'd be happy if they understood what's written in their GDPR bill passed 7 years ago.

pestaa 4y ago
How do they not understand it?
InCityDreams 4y ago
How is the gdpr relevant to this?

legitster 4y ago

For all the faults that lobbying brings with it, there is something to be said for actually bringing in outside experts into the legislative process. You can seek intellectual purity all you want, but at the end of the day you are going to have to have some trust that farmers know where seeds go and tech companies know how encryption works. Similar bills have died several times in the US, if only because there were actual experts available (aka, lobbyists) who could tell them why this idea was dumb and impossible. It's hard not to see this following in the line of "right to be forgotten" or "tracking consent" where legitimate concerns about the language of the rules were completely dismissed as industry noise.

masfuerte 4y ago
Lawmakers obviously need the assistance of outside expertise. The problem with lobbying is that most of the assistance comes from the people with most of the money. Lawmakers could (and in some jurisdictions do) seek out assistance rather than relying on moneyed interests to offer it.

mongol 4y ago

The podcast episode in Svenska Dagbladet (which is otherwise a very good podcast) was infuriating because the opponent and the host did not catch on to her ridiculous statements about encryption. She really needs to meet a journalist that can cross-examine her statements about this. She got away too easy there.

tephra 4y ago
Knowing the opponent he indeed caught on but with 30 minutes (and most of that spent with Ylva) there's only so much you can do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
meling 4y ago
I only read the blog summarizing the interviews, but I’m horrified that she can talk this much bs with such apparent confidence. I don’t know who she is and how she got to have this role, which she does not appear qualified to hold.
- mongol 4y ago
  She is a Swedish politician from the Social Democratic party. One of the senior ones that served as minister in the cabinet for a number of years. Unfortunately, that does not mean she is competent
  - Jolter 4y ago
    She is competent in many areas but obviously not in tech.

max51 4y ago

This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but at the same time they don't want other people to read it. The fact that even the politicians signing on it can't understand it should raise a lot of red flags. We should treat them the same way that an anti-virus treats "safe" code with payloads that are obfuscated using techniques also used by viruses (a big reason why you get false positives on cracks and keygens btw). We should assume that they are trying to hide something they don't want us to see when they make their bills extremely hard to read even for lawyers.

Dalewyn 4y ago
Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes. That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.
- max51 4y ago
  I have no problem with the vocabulary itself and most of the Legalese. I try to use more of it in my documentation because, as you mentioned, it has less room to interpretation and loopholes compared to more commonly used phrasing. My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly. Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes. When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.

Freeaqingme 4y ago

Someone commented something along the lines of 'but then how are we supposed to tackle organized crime'. As I typed the comment below the comment got flagged and I could no longer reply. Still, I think the bit below may contribute to the discussion. TL;DR; I think that as a society we should more often ask ourselves if something is actually worth fighting if it means sacrificing a lot of our human rights. That may not be a problem on HN, but it is one imho on a political level in many Western countries. There is not always a solution to a problem. Let's say you wanted to bring the number of car crashes to zero. Eventually there's nothing 'reasonable' left to be done, and the only remaining option would be to ban cars altogether. Instead, we accept a certain number of crashes because it's deemed more important to be able to drive a car than it is to bring the number of car crash fatalities to zero*. For example, in a country like Germany there are 0.8 homicides per 100K inhabitants. You could put _everybody_ under surveillance, just to have an easier job of finding the perpetrators. In the process there would be many false positives, wrongful imprisonments, etc. In order to preserve the rule of law, maybe it's sometimes best to accept that you cannot create the perfect society. At least not a society in which people who are innocent (the very vast majority) can also still enjoy their freedoms. Besides, I feel like the police has become somewhat lazy in many Western countries for the past 20 years. Before the rise of the internet, it was simply accepted that you couldn't know what two spouses had said to each other and you had to rely on good-old detective work. However, since things like Facebook Messenger, the cops expect to be able to get a warrant for all this data. That era appears to be slowly ending with E2EE, and all of a sudden they're struggling because those detective skills have slowly deteriorated. * To be clear, I think that in many countries there's still quite a lot of room for improvement to reduce the number of car crash fatalities. Not in the least in the USA.

xboxnolifes 4y ago
This shouldn't even be a foreign concept to the HN audience. Not long ago these was a post about "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Those interested in the legal system out there should also be familiar with the idea of how some criminals will get away in the attempt to prevent any innocent person from going to prison. Sometimes it costs more to fight a problem than you get back from solving it.
4y ago

walkhour 4y ago

Reminds me of the senator that asked Zuckerberg how do they make money [0], and Zuckerberg simply said they run ads. What a way to use your questioning time, with something that was a google search away. [0] https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ

decremental 4y ago
Often the point of seemingly obvious questions like that is to have the person on record making that statement and potentially what they might omit.
- walkhour 4y ago
  Maybe, but Zuckerberg smirks, also the guy behind him, and also the blond lady next to him. It seems more likely to me that the Senator was out of his depth.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
That's a lie by omission, surely. They sell data too. Ads and analytics, game data, user association data, user attention data. But "ads" is pretty euphemistic -- to the point of dishonesty -- when the ads are targeted political campaign messages, for example. Cambridge Analytica was at least enabled by Facebook. I'd say that their operations could be summed up more reasonably by "Facebook track people".

jll29 4y ago

Don't believe vendors' lies about "end-to-end" encryption. If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin. Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself. You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your behalf. Obviously, this excludes mobile devices. Do not trust a tree of certificates if you cannot trust the root certificate because it belongs to an organization that is in a jurisdiction where people may be interested in what you have written and said in your encrypted message. Don't trust old-school typewriters and the postal system either. Letters are routinely opened and typewriters can be matched. For example, the Stasi (secret police of the former GDR - German "Democratic" Republic) had an archive of type samples of all sold models of typewriters for re-identification of political pamphlets. You can trust a few things: You can trust your Linux box with your self-compiled kernel (no 3rd party drivers), at least as long as it is not on a network. To build a safe environment, you could start there, taking a defensive approach. Remember, last time the paranoid turned out to be naive when Snowden revealed the real status quo in 2013 (ten years ago, when I couldn't buy a 1 TB USB stick).

voxic11 4y ago
> You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?
- beisner 4y ago
  There are quantum-resistant encryption schemes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
- nicoburns 4y ago
  You’ll probably be dead by then anyway.
  - 4y ago

willtemperley 4y ago

Funny - the European Commission told its staff to "Switch to Signal messaging app" in Feb 2020: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to-signal-messaging-app/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc... I wonder what changed.

feanaro 4y ago
Nothing changed. They'll continue using Signal for themselves, they just don't want you using it too. Or rather, they want you to use it just as long it has a manhole only they can access.
candiodari 4y ago
Secure comms for government, not for you. Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other). https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-in-school https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-... "Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence." Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%. And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand? Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.

ginsider_oaks 4y ago

just give me the NSA putting backdoors in my chips rather than this two-faced nonsense.

viktorcode 4y ago

She maybe don't understand technology, but I get the feeling that breaking or weakening p2p is not what she talking about. The scanning means scanning performed on the end devices, not of the communications. The idea is to force communication messengers providers to perform scan on end user's device. That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.

evancox100 4y ago
Right, I don’t have a lot of love for EU bureaucrats (thanks cookie law!), but this criticism misses the mark in many places. You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different. Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct. Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?
LinuxBender 4y ago
That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that. The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.

dahwolf 4y ago

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail. In the digital domain, we're fine with all of these illegal searches, either we don't even know they happen or we do know yet let it pass, as it feels "invisible" and not intrusive. Plus, you're a standup citizen so all is good. And that's how one day you end up as a bankrupted outcast for having insulted the king.

908B64B197 4y ago
Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything. Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?). But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want more constitutional protections (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse. Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0]. Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic. More brain drain? Is it the intended goal? [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
- leoedin 4y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but there's plenty of Americans living all over Europe. Here in London there's loads.
- desas 4y ago

orangepurple 4y ago

It's almost like there is a shadow government [1,2,3] which uses these people as puppets for the citizenry. Of course the puppets are clueless. They just need to approve everything the shadow government has on its agenda. In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence. [1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-news/card/BFhE0BwSxGmXoRdPyaUL https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-ne... [2] https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shadow-government/ https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21/the-taliban-has-successfully-built-a-parallel-state-in-many-parts-of-afghanistan-report-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21...

randyrand 4y ago

> Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption. This is trivially possible. 1. send an end to end encrypted message to the recipient 2. also send an end to end encrypted copy of the message to the government. I’m not agreeing with it. But you can clearly send end to end encrypted messages to multiple parties without fundamentally breaking the encryption…

hunter2_ 4y ago
Are you saying that sending and scanning are the same? I think we need to define "scan" (or "sniff" or whatever other metaphors are used here) as more than just receiving a copy that's still encrypted. What definition is there, which is distinct from "decrypt"? You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.
Aeolun 4y ago
I think by the point you encrypt the plaintext twice the idea of end-to-end is broken.
- ranguna 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I do not agree with this EU proposal. Why do you say that e2ee is broken if the plain text is encrypted more than once? Isn't that what happens in group chats? And if not, they could just make all chats group chats. You, your recipient and the government.
  - reyqn 4y ago
    Maybe this would actually make people tick on how outrageous this is.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    That would make it very obvious. I like that idea.

denton-scratch 4y ago

I simply can't believe she's as ignorant as she comes across; even if she doesn't know that you can't "scan" an encrypted file, she's a damned EU Commissioner; she has a large staff of educated people to advise her. I think she simply doesn't care about the reality, she wants to bang a "protect the children" drum for political reasons. It's odd; she seems to be a pedagogy graduate, who was once (1988) elected to the Swedish parliament as a communist, then worked as a teacher, and was later (1994?) appointed a social-democrat minister. So since her first parliamentary term, she has not been an elected representative, but an appointed functionary. So I guess her "political reasons" amount to pleasing her boss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson Former commies who repent don't lose their contempt for ordinary people. They continue to think they are "the vanguard". I reckon she just thinks ordinary people are too dim to notice that her sayings are nonsense.

Jolter 4y ago
I’m not sure what you mean by her not being an elected representative. She was a Swedish member of parliament for a long time, not just one term. The tradition in Sweden is that ministers are taken from among the ranks of the ruling party’s MPs, even though exceptions sometimes are made.

Tade0 4y ago

Steganography is going to gain some renewed popularity should this pass.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kabes 4y ago

> “Next summer, all the scanning taking place right now of child sex will be banned within the EU. That is, if we don’t have special legislation that allows it.” Ah, the good old child sex card. We keep on losing our privacy in its name, but never do I see a number of how many children are actually being saved by the surveillance apparatus.

cultureswitch 4y ago

Aside from the obvious impossibility of privacy-compatible searches, I'd like to focus on the authoritarian excuse du jour, child sexual abuse. How prevalent is it really? How often are children actually abused, in comparison to images of the abuse being circulated? Is there really an increase in child abuse over the last couple of decades? It seems to me that this angle is especially unpopular to talk about among privacy advocates because most people will wrongly think that it is defending child abuse. Thanks to the magic of internet forums, I don't have to care too much. In my evaluation, actual child abuse is happening at record low rates in the western world due several factors. The first is the secularization of society, reducing the influence and number of (always male) priests over large amounts of children. Second, practical access to separation and divorce is much easier to women with children than it used to be. Wives can better protect their children from an abusive father than they could a couple of decades ago. Third, a side effect of the campaign to eliminate gender roles and discriminations against women in education and the workplace is that men teaching young children have basically gone extinct. Fourth, the hysteria about the problem has led all men to distance themselves from children in general, in order to avoid even the slightest suspicion. So considering all that, what's really happening? We can expect rates of pedophilia haven't changed much. It's there genetically, and will be for the foreseeable future. The conclusion should be obvious: pedophiles have shifted from a society where getting away with abuse was a realistic prospect to one where it is not. So they do the next best thing and use pornography instead. Of course, the material is still being made and the abuse still happens. But we've gone from a situation where e.g. there was one child being abused by each pedophile to one where that ratio is maybe one child to ten or a hundred pedophiles (or vastly more depending on how much the material was shared). Am I wrong?

unconed 4y ago
Your sheer, naked bias that only men abuse children and partners while women always protect them... while simultaneously questioning established narratives. Phew. That takes a special kind of stupid.

v0id24 4y ago

I think they understand. I remember how in Russia they justified the blocking of sites and the transfer of encryption keys for messengers. I have deja vu. At first they were justified solely by the fight against pedophiles and terrorists. Then gradually the fight against pirates, then with misleading information, the fight for fair elections, and so on and so forth. Then they canceled the receipt of permits through the courts. Opposition blockades appeared without justification...

Superpencil 4y ago

She just means that the chat client should perform scanning on-device. This is why she compares it to link preview fetching. Time to re-write that bill.