4 ms·

Full EU chat control proposal attack on digital privacy and encryption

104 points by walterbell 3y ago

t888 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- FpUser 3y ago
  They just can't stop admiring China
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    This is being downvoted, but the trigger for the NetzDG-style regulations all over the world now was from Germany; and many at the time claimed it was quite close to the Chinese government’s censorship model. A western nation doing it seems to cause many to think that such actions and laws are justified.
- xvector 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - talldayo 3y ago
    I'm starting to think that you're badmouthing the EU to make up for your own industrial deficiency. The productive people I know (American and European alike) are much more civil in conversation.
    - xvector 3y ago
      Mentioning the fact that the EU has an industrial deficiency in tech is not "uncivil" any more than mentioning that the US has a manufacturing deficiency. It is just a fact - I am not sure why you would think it uncivil.
impossiblefork 3y ago
Very strange stuff, considering that ECHR has ruled against this sort of thing. I don't see how it could possibly be legal.
- candiodari 3y ago
  Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. EU states, including the EU itself, have blanket exceptions to the GPDR, for example. For example, they get to pass around private medical data, without telling anyone, supposedly in cases where they deem it to be important for investigations (not just criminal), anything to do with protection of minors, ... And because nobody cooperates well with this "for some reason", you find more than a few examples of them passing around (and using in court) WRONG private medical data. There has never been any conviction for this (DESPITE EU countries getting convicted for basing judgements on wrong medical data in their own EU courts). I imagine something similar is going on here.
  - xvector 3y ago
    Most EU tech regs are designed to rent seek from big tech under the guise of privacy or consumer rights. They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. Take the DMA and Spotify, or the AI Act and Mistral, etc. The blind cheering of EU regs is kinda wild to me. The worst tech regulation I've seen is out of the EU, from trying to destroy PKI and E2EE, or trying to break the transformer model, or a thousand other braindead initiatives.
    - Tainnor 3y ago
      > They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. This is incorrect: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
    - vasco 3y ago
      I'm in europe and I agree to a certain extent. There are also european representatives that genuinely push for privacy, but I consider the GDPR a joke in its implementation by each local countries institutions, which everyone turns a blind eye toward, unless that local institution can use the GDPR as an excuse to not do something, which they take whenever they can. And then the EU turns around and uses the same regulations to go after Meta or Google Analytics. I'm way more worried that public employees in random government entities can look me up willy nilly than Facebook knowing I bought a pencil on Amazon.
mo_42 3y ago
> If the EU governments actually go into trilogue negotiations with this radical position, experience shows that the Parliament risks gradually abandoning its initial position behind closed doors and agreeing to bad and dangerous compromises that fundamentally put our online security at risk. Why would the parliament abandon its position? At least in theory, it's the center of power.
- Scarblac 3y ago
  Intense lobbying, and being mostly invisible to voters whose media only pay attention to national politics.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Not in the EU. The Parliament has gained power over time (from being almost useless in the treaty of Rome) but it's still far from the most powerful body of the UE.
logicchains 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dsign 3y ago
Page 36 here: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-03-28-conseil-csam-compromis-presidence-belge.pdf https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/202... Basically, it imposes an obligation on "information society service" (the term uniformly used to denote anybody doing anything on the Internet as a service to somebody else) and on infrastructure providers. So it's not only your chat service, your telecom operator and your phone, computer OS and router who are mandated to spy on you in order to be able to abide. It also imposes compliance demands on "hosting providers", which means they are mandated to scan your website for keywords that may indicate dissension. Better to not speak of children or sex to be on the safe side. The wording "obligation to detect" means that an encrypted binary blob stored at rest at a hosting provider or transferring over optic fiber is a violation of this law, since the "information society service" can't meet its "obligation to detect" on those. In simpler words, this law does not outlaws cryptography-per-se, but makes it so that "information service providers" are strongly discouraged from letting people have any. Article I point 5 says that "end-to-end" encryption should be preserved, but note that I.5 and I.1 are compatible if the "information society service" implements client-side scanning. Point 4a was suppressed, which means "information society services" and hosting providers must scan customer data in search for illegal activity, in order to comply with I.1. I.1 is compatible with I.3 to the extent a private person is not an "information society service". That is to say, EU citizens have a right to a private life and family life and to freedom of expression and information in the web-server they run in their living room, running their own operating system, and connecting to the Internet through an illegal juncture on a copper cable.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
Good to see eurocrats focusing on the important issues.
bhawks 3y ago
I get so confused - does the state want us to think there are webs of nefarious pedophiles that must be rooted out at any cost or is that a conspiracy theory? A free society cannot exist if people are not free to communicate privately. If they use private communication to break laws and harm society then that is a cost that society needs to bear.
- felsokning 3y ago
  > I get so confused - does the state want us to think there are webs of nefarious pedophiles that must be rooted out at any cost or is that a conspiracy theory? It's a sort of Trojan horse, under the "Think of the children!" appeal to emotion; so, yes, that's what they want you to believe: That Justice is more paramount than privacy and/or security.
greatgib 3y ago
Don't forget that the election of new Members of the European parlement is coming soon. I would suggest to vote wisely to prevent this madness. It might also be good to spread the word for support to the Pirate Party if you have one in your country!
- derelicta 3y ago
  Ahah yes the good old "guys we just gotta vote the fascists out!"
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It's not a perfect solution but not voting them in does help a lot. Saying this from a country where 25% already voted for fascists in the last election :(
    - derelicta 3y ago
      I wish it were that "simple", but I'm afraid fascism is the next logical step from a system that is terribly sick. As long as people do not understand it's a rational developpement from our current stage of capitalism, and as long as people who do realise this do not organize themselves outside of the electoral system, the western world is doomed. Sometimes I wish I could pray to Him and ask Him to give the whole world class consciousness already lol.
      - skrebbel 3y ago
        I found the Marxist! Given that this thread is about government overreach, I’m somewhat confused what your end game is here. Revolution and then what?
        derelicta 3y ago
        > I found the Marxist! Ahah, Marxist I am for sure :) > Revolution and then what? The end of the totalitarian bourgeois dictatorship, and the birth of a workers democracy. Considering most of the western world is industrialised already, we wouldn't have to tolerate first a "managed" capitalistic economic mode of production (like china has to), but directly switch to the socialist mode of production, so, for laymen, workplace democracy. Or if you will, a path to real freedom, at last.
derelicta 3y ago
Here we go again
walterbell 3y ago
HN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/39913946/ https://hnrankings.info/39913946/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ajdude 3y ago
  I wonder how that happened. The post isn't even flagged
wkat4242 3y ago
When the last proposal failed I already said this wouldn't be the end of it. They will keep trying until they succeed.
- derelicta 3y ago
  I'm surprised they haven't raised the spectre of war in ukraine and the israelo-palestinian conflict to push for it already.

104 points by walterbell 3y ago

t888 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FpUser 3y ago
They just can't stop admiring China
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  This is being downvoted, but the trigger for the NetzDG-style regulations all over the world now was from Germany; and many at the time claimed it was quite close to the Chinese government’s censorship model. A western nation doing it seems to cause many to think that such actions and laws are justified.
xvector 3y ago
[flagged]
- talldayo 3y ago
  I'm starting to think that you're badmouthing the EU to make up for your own industrial deficiency. The productive people I know (American and European alike) are much more civil in conversation.
  - xvector 3y ago
    Mentioning the fact that the EU has an industrial deficiency in tech is not "uncivil" any more than mentioning that the US has a manufacturing deficiency. It is just a fact - I am not sure why you would think it uncivil.

impossiblefork 3y ago

Very strange stuff, considering that ECHR has ruled against this sort of thing. I don't see how it could possibly be legal.

candiodari 3y ago
Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. EU states, including the EU itself, have blanket exceptions to the GPDR, for example. For example, they get to pass around private medical data, without telling anyone, supposedly in cases where they deem it to be important for investigations (not just criminal), anything to do with protection of minors, ... And because nobody cooperates well with this "for some reason", you find more than a few examples of them passing around (and using in court) WRONG private medical data. There has never been any conviction for this (DESPITE EU countries getting convicted for basing judgements on wrong medical data in their own EU courts). I imagine something similar is going on here.
- xvector 3y ago
  Most EU tech regs are designed to rent seek from big tech under the guise of privacy or consumer rights. They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. Take the DMA and Spotify, or the AI Act and Mistral, etc. The blind cheering of EU regs is kinda wild to me. The worst tech regulation I've seen is out of the EU, from trying to destroy PKI and E2EE, or trying to break the transformer model, or a thousand other braindead initiatives.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    > They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. This is incorrect: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
  - vasco 3y ago
    I'm in europe and I agree to a certain extent. There are also european representatives that genuinely push for privacy, but I consider the GDPR a joke in its implementation by each local countries institutions, which everyone turns a blind eye toward, unless that local institution can use the GDPR as an excuse to not do something, which they take whenever they can. And then the EU turns around and uses the same regulations to go after Meta or Google Analytics. I'm way more worried that public employees in random government entities can look me up willy nilly than Facebook knowing I bought a pencil on Amazon.

mo_42 3y ago

> If the EU governments actually go into trilogue negotiations with this radical position, experience shows that the Parliament risks gradually abandoning its initial position behind closed doors and agreeing to bad and dangerous compromises that fundamentally put our online security at risk. Why would the parliament abandon its position? At least in theory, it's the center of power.

Scarblac 3y ago
Intense lobbying, and being mostly invisible to voters whose media only pay attention to national politics.
littlestymaar 3y ago
Not in the EU. The Parliament has gained power over time (from being almost useless in the treaty of Rome) but it's still far from the most powerful body of the UE.

logicchains 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dsign 3y ago

Page 36 here: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-03-28-conseil-csam-compromis-presidence-belge.pdf https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/202... Basically, it imposes an obligation on "information society service" (the term uniformly used to denote anybody doing anything on the Internet as a service to somebody else) and on infrastructure providers. So it's not only your chat service, your telecom operator and your phone, computer OS and router who are mandated to spy on you in order to be able to abide. It also imposes compliance demands on "hosting providers", which means they are mandated to scan your website for keywords that may indicate dissension. Better to not speak of children or sex to be on the safe side. The wording "obligation to detect" means that an encrypted binary blob stored at rest at a hosting provider or transferring over optic fiber is a violation of this law, since the "information society service" can't meet its "obligation to detect" on those. In simpler words, this law does not outlaws cryptography-per-se, but makes it so that "information service providers" are strongly discouraged from letting people have any. Article I point 5 says that "end-to-end" encryption should be preserved, but note that I.5 and I.1 are compatible if the "information society service" implements client-side scanning. Point 4a was suppressed, which means "information society services" and hosting providers must scan customer data in search for illegal activity, in order to comply with I.1. I.1 is compatible with I.3 to the extent a private person is not an "information society service". That is to say, EU citizens have a right to a private life and family life and to freedom of expression and information in the web-server they run in their living room, running their own operating system, and connecting to the Internet through an illegal juncture on a copper cable.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

Good to see eurocrats focusing on the important issues.

bhawks 3y ago

I get so confused - does the state want us to think there are webs of nefarious pedophiles that must be rooted out at any cost or is that a conspiracy theory? A free society cannot exist if people are not free to communicate privately. If they use private communication to break laws and harm society then that is a cost that society needs to bear.

felsokning 3y ago
> I get so confused - does the state want us to think there are webs of nefarious pedophiles that must be rooted out at any cost or is that a conspiracy theory? It's a sort of Trojan horse, under the "Think of the children!" appeal to emotion; so, yes, that's what they want you to believe: That Justice is more paramount than privacy and/or security.

greatgib 3y ago

Don't forget that the election of new Members of the European parlement is coming soon. I would suggest to vote wisely to prevent this madness. It might also be good to spread the word for support to the Pirate Party if you have one in your country!

derelicta 3y ago
Ahah yes the good old "guys we just gotta vote the fascists out!"
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It's not a perfect solution but not voting them in does help a lot. Saying this from a country where 25% already voted for fascists in the last election :(
  - derelicta 3y ago
    I wish it were that "simple", but I'm afraid fascism is the next logical step from a system that is terribly sick. As long as people do not understand it's a rational developpement from our current stage of capitalism, and as long as people who do realise this do not organize themselves outside of the electoral system, the western world is doomed. Sometimes I wish I could pray to Him and ask Him to give the whole world class consciousness already lol.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      I found the Marxist! Given that this thread is about government overreach, I’m somewhat confused what your end game is here. Revolution and then what?
      - derelicta 3y ago
        > I found the Marxist! Ahah, Marxist I am for sure :) > Revolution and then what? The end of the totalitarian bourgeois dictatorship, and the birth of a workers democracy. Considering most of the western world is industrialised already, we wouldn't have to tolerate first a "managed" capitalistic economic mode of production (like china has to), but directly switch to the socialist mode of production, so, for laymen, workplace democracy. Or if you will, a path to real freedom, at last.

derelicta 3y ago

Here we go again

walterbell 3y ago

HN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/39913946/ https://hnrankings.info/39913946/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ajdude 3y ago
I wonder how that happened. The post isn't even flagged

wkat4242 3y ago

When the last proposal failed I already said this wouldn't be the end of it. They will keep trying until they succeed.

derelicta 3y ago
I'm surprised they haven't raised the spectre of war in ukraine and the israelo-palestinian conflict to push for it already.