84 ms·

Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

960 points by andrew918277 2y ago

ziggy_star 2y ago
You can't even stop it here. Start here.
- fredoliveira 2y ago
  Define "here".
  - ziggy_star 2y ago
    [flagged]
darby_nine 2y ago
I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  Almost nothing is. Local politicians fail upwards to the EU (at least in Germany) or some private job, if they fail at all. Most of the time, you can do what you want, and the voters don’t care.
  - kqr 2y ago
    And, on the flip side of the coin: once you are sufficiently disliked, almost anything can be taken as the trigger point for a scandal.
    - account42 2y ago
      But when was the last time a "scandal" has resulted in actual negative outcomes for a politician?
  - pfortuny 2y ago
    Same in Spain.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "and the voters don’t care." Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something? Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.
    - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
      That's precisely the thing. Whenever EU does something people don't like, they hate EU, not the council members who voted for it.
      - gillesjacobs 2y ago
        Because it is exactly the EU governance that lacks democratic representation, enabling unfavoured politicians to remain in significant power. You can only elect MEPs (via party lists) locally. The majority of legalislation is drafted by the technocratic European Commission and legislation is mostly passed through parlaiment unchanged from there. There are many nationally disgraced politicians seating in the EP, EC or council. Only the ones in the EP were electible. The people have correctly identified that a massive supranational unaccountable government is the problem, enabling corrupt people to keep ruling which undermines the core functioning of representative democracy.
        Double_a_92 2y ago
        By voting for the members of parliament, and the parliament then deciding everything else... Ideally things should work out as the people want it. Otherwise it would mean that democracy just doesn't work...
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        gillesjacobs 2y ago
        Supranational/federalist "representative" particracy does not work. Representative democracy works better with increased locality, where policy and politicians are directly beholden to constituents.
  - blumomo 2y ago
    Those not yet brain washed voters do actually care. But then there are the „Wahlhelfer“ who openly proud themselves in Twitter to invalidate votes for parties they disagree with. This is democracy?
    - FabHK 2y ago
      Sources?
- bun_terminator 2y ago
  It's their job and goal in life to hurt the population
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    They can literally just sit there and it would be better…
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      They have to justify their existence and maximize growth and headcount. In this case I’m not sure if it’s the politicians themselves as much to blame as the EU apparatchiks and lobbyists
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    More control is the objective.
- thomostin 2y ago
  Absolutely. It only works because they claim it's for the protection of children.
  - miroljub 2y ago
    They ride the wave and find always some excuse. It was fighting the terrorists until a few years ago, now it's children again. Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights. Unlikely—this would actually benefit people.
      - miroljub 2y ago
        Chat control would benefit people, if they say it's for climate or lbqtg++ protection? But it won't benefit if they say it's to fight the terror or protect the children? If you really think that spying is OK, if they have "good enough" excuse, no wonder we get all this shit enacted.
        darby_nine 2y ago
        [flagged]
        dTal 2y ago
        Which is a very interesting asymmetry, if we're stipulating that these are merely excuses. It implies that "think of the gays" will lose you more votes than it gains, compared to "think of the children". Terrorists and children are apparently the optimally intersectional bogeymen and helpless wards respectively.
        fsflover 2y ago
- isodev 2y ago
  Well, people wanted even more alt-right representation in parliament, MEP support for the entire package of policy "Chat Control" is part of is now higher than ever. There is a lot more "for the children" policy coming up.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Yeah, although really no-one of the 'regular people' (well, I have even educated programmer friends saying it's good to catch criminals) care/know (they glaze over when I talk about 'another tech blah') about this, they did vote the people in who like this kind of stuff (and probably are somewhere making $ with it).
  - gillesjacobs 2y ago
    This isn't necessarily true: the Identity and Democracy faction is explicitly pro-privacy, digital rights and against Chat Control. - https://id-party.eu/program/ https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site) - https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-european-democracies-april-23-2024 https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview) - https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site) The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.
    - pgraf 2y ago
      FYI, 84% of ID has voted pro chat-control in 2021. https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID
      - gillesjacobs 2y ago
        I stand corrected. Guess all that posturing about privacy was all empty election promises then. Seems like only the Greens, the left and within ID the AFD voted against.
- wickedsickeune 2y ago
  In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament: * a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever. * a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general * a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video * a convicted criminal It's impressive to manage to fail as a politician.
  - patates 2y ago
    Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)
    - bratwurst3000 2y ago
      You forget they have Mazedonia and Bulgaria as neighbors ;)
      - nbzso 2y ago
        Hi, Malakas.
  - skilled 2y ago
    Also -> YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo
    - oliwarner 2y ago
      Yup that's the problem with PR: people actually get what they vote for. And people are idiots.
  - FabHK 2y ago
    While your other examples are damning, I see nothing wrong with an elderly politician without social media profiles.
- gravescale 2y ago
  My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica. Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y". After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data. With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects). And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today. Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers. It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.
  - hoseja 2y ago
    We have to make the more traditional methods popular again.
    - gravescale 2y ago
      The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated. Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".
- mschuster91 2y ago
  The populace is clueless and/or ignorant, and Brussels has a well earned reputation for being a popular toxic waste dump for unpopular politicians. To give some examples from Germany, we dumped Günther Oettinger and Ursula von der Leyen there in the last two elections, and this year our far-right party managed to place a suspected traitor on the top of their list.
  - argentier 2y ago
    Thanks for that Germany. Won't you take her back and make her Minister for Castles or something,
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  One of its champions, Ursula von der Leyen, is pretty popular. One of the main reasons for that is that people don't understand what she is saying.
  - account42 2y ago
    Popular or infamous? Never heard the nickname Zensursula?
- nobutterbetter 2y ago
  [dead]
- cdmoyer 2y ago
  I mean, if you asked many people "is it ok if the government can read some of your chat messages in exchange for catching a bunch of child pornographers," this will be a very popular "yes" vote. People are generally very willing to trade some rights and freedoms for safety. Or don't realize the trade-off they're making.
- krick 2y ago
  We need to define "politicians" first. I can see your point if "politician career" means "being repeatedly elected" (even though other people pointed out what are the problems in this case). But the EU Commission isn't elected. These people are appointed by some fucked up complicated process. They definitely seem to have pretty good careers, but what are these careers — I wish I knew.
I_am_tiberius 2y ago
There must be something toxic in the water in Brussels.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Or Strasbourg https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-year-move-to-strasbourg-a-waste-of-money-but-will-it-ever-be-scrapp https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...
mellosouls 2y ago
Already being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993
- bun_terminator 2y ago
  this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.
  - _VX3r 2y ago
    Threema being paid up front makes it harder to adopt for average uses. Signal is great option and wish more would use it.
    - bun_terminator 2y ago
      It would be if signal would have resisted the temptation to go cryptobro. They didn't, and they lost all credibility as a result.
    - dijit 2y ago
      I wish more people would use something that's not US backed honestly. Centralisation is a curse. I don't inherently trust Signal, and you have to because nothing they do is verifiable; I wrote a really hit-and-miss article about this before: https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/ https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    Interesting. Here it had some niche users, but got completely supplanted by signal, which is the clear #2 with the people I know.
    - bun_terminator 2y ago
      Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result. With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.
nope1000 2y ago
"Fun" Fact: it's currently the European championships in football (soccer) in Europe (probably the biggest event of the year), so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak this through without too many people noticing.
- thomostin 2y ago
  Also, the parliament is still 'new'… perfect time to push something like this through before the dust settles
  - pas 2y ago
    it's not even on the EP's schedule. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=order https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    Interesting, in the US, the best time to see crazy laws passed is every 4 years, between Nov 5 and Jan 7(?), if a new President is elected and a number of Congress people are thrown out of office from a specific Party. That is because the people who need to leave office will usually join with the opposition to get laws passed that they wanted but were afraid to vote for before the election.
- Hbruz0 2y ago
  How does this allow for it to be sneakily applied, as you suggest ?
  - worldsayshi 2y ago
    The public, as a group, can only keep a small number of subjects in focus at a time. This feels like a phenomenon that I take for granted to be true but I haven't heard any name for it or read any studies. It really feels like a symptomatic phenomenon of our time.
    - 2y ago
23B1 2y ago
Statists pave the road to tyranny with their good intentions.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Rather, people make up excuses for the elite to cope. There are no good intentions involved in this.
cryptonym 2y ago
It took a bit of time but we are finally reaching sovietic dream of mass surveillance. We just need extremist to be in power (oh wait!) so it can be enabled for other purposes and we'll get full powered Stasi.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  Well they do keep electing communists in Europe so it makes sense the Soviet dream state is near completion.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    By communists you surely means far-right.
    - account42 2y ago
      Which countries in europe are run by the far right right now. Most governments are still decidetly center-left even if people are finally standing up to them with their votes.
  - cryptonym 2y ago
    This has more to do with totalitarism than communism. ChatControl is getting support from parties labelled as both left and right.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Well the police aren’t going anywhere and they are the ones pushing for this tirelessly. This is everything to them to make their power (and politicians) absolute. They will have dirt on everyone if you can’t have private conversations at all. Even if it’s not illegal they will find something immoral to destroy your life. Allowing police (the government) to become nearly omniscient is a very very bad idea.
cocoflunchy 2y ago
I tried sending an email using the info from https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organization/COREPER/ https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi... !
blowski 2y ago
I too instinctively bristle at this kind of legislation. It's likely to be abused, with many false positive that make it more effective at sweeping up innocent people, while the guilty just find workarounds. But all coming on here and saying "ooohh, this is bad, innit!" is not very interesting, and unlikely to prevent it. Why is the EU doing this? Which political groups are supporting and opposing it? Why now? How are vendors responding? How does it affect non-EU countries?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bratwurst3000 2y ago
  They already found out that it is a lobby organization that pushes it for those who sell the products for surveillance. Please google it I am to lazy to search for it. Sorry Edit: here it is https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/#netzpolitik-pw https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
- throwaway43734 2y ago
  There are organizations which are selling AI tools to filter content. For instance, Thorn, a US organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, is building such tools and heavily lobbying for Chat Control in EU. "Ashton Kutcher is a tireless advocate." https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Also concerning that he seems to have more input on policy than all EU citizens together. This democracy the EU is implementing is becoming a joke.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    "Kelso would've wanted the surveillance state, and he banged Eric's sister so he is someone to look towards for moral guidance" "Oui oui!"
anonzzzies 2y ago
Someone is benefitting and it's not 'the children'.
ajb 2y ago
A lot of despondency about this. But I think part of why this stuff gets through is that techies are campaigning in the wrong way Those advocating for it have a visceral pitch: your kids will be in danger if this doesn't pass. Those against are arguing for abstracts, like freedom and privacy. And sure, people should be in favour of those things - but there's a visceral pitch against, and it's not being used What will happen if this stuff is put in place, and used as claimed? There will be a massive rush of automated "accusations" of child abuse against innocent parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This will result in many families being unnecessarily stressed and disrupted by investigations, and at least some children being removed from innocent families. Why will this happen? after all, won't the scanning be 100% accurate?</s> Obviously not. Tech companies don't want to be responsible for this - the scanning won't be optimised for accuracy, it will be optimised to pass the buck as hard as possible[1], because the tech companies don't want to business of taking the blame when some pedophile isn't caught. Who is the second level of review? Maybe some minimum wage zero-hours subcontractor at Serco or Group 4 Security, or whoever the equivalent of that is in the EU. But that's probably it - once the image has been labelled 'bad' no-one else will want to look at it. So, even if you are sending a picture of your own child to your own mother, you will have at the very least to have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by someone you don't know who has about 5 seconds to look at it and is probably from a completely different culture. Yet none of this has been brought up in the media either by tech companies or by privacy activists. [1] The other option is that the tech companies abdicate completely and just use some black box from the government to scan every picture. Problems with that left as an exercise...
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I think commercials like a local politician looking over a cop’s back saying “I need some dirt on Citizen Z, he fixed my plumbing last week and overcharged me, let’s see what we can find on him”. Then show his plumbing business shut down a week later because of some obscure local law about using imperial wrenches instead of metric.
sprash 2y ago
"Chat Control" is already real. This is just codifying prevalent practice done by a multitude of agencies into law.
- FabHK 2y ago
  Sorry, is there any evidence that E2EE eg in WhatsApp, Signal, etc. is routinely broken? I am not talking about exceptional hacking of phones of individual high-value targets for surveillance by nation-state-level actors, but mass surveillance.
  - sprash 2y ago
    If there was public evidence allowed to be released nobody would be using those algorithms obviously. The point of those algorithms is to make them hard to break for the public and easy to break for the agencies . E.g. None of your mentioned products use quantum hard encryption. It is not far fetched to assume that all the relevant agencies have access to a working quantum computer. But I doubt you need even sophisticated hardware. Most "government approved" encryption algorithms should be considered compromised from the get-go.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      I seriously doubt that agencies have more capabilities than the scientific community of mathematicians. Perhaps there are weak points in implementations, but I don't believe any agency has the capabilities to crack encryption, even some of the older algorithms. There is no evidence that a quantum computer can break classic encryption yet. Even if the agencies tried, they would not have the means to stop the spread of such information. And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this.
      - sprash 2y ago
        Almost 100% of the "scientific community of mathematicians" is funded by the government. They can't be trusted either. If they want to publish something that is considered to be a "threat to national security" the agencies have multiple avenues at their disposal to "convince" them to not publish. > And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this. Codifying covert practices into law has the big advantage to make the whole oppressive surveillance state much more efficient. Gone are the days of "parallel constructions". Also the chilling effects of total surveillance alone might be enough to prevent the opposition to be effective.
no_time 2y ago
>If you’re a EU citizen, please consider contacting your government’s representative today, asking them to vote against Chat Control. Are there any studies on the effectiveness of this? To me it always read like a joke. The only way I can imagine this going is. >Good day Mr. Rep I'm really really worried about x legistlation for reasons y and z. >Sure buddy. hangs up >Votes like his "donors" asked him to anyways.
- ramon156 2y ago
  Exactly this. Once you read up about donors, or keys, or whatever word your country uses, it becomes obvious that it's all pretty straight forward
drdebug 2y ago
The wording in the current draft seems to indicate that it applies to "providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services". So unless this includes ISPs, I wonder if that means a decentralized P2P service is not covered.
- uyzstvqs 2y ago
  Not applicable, nor enforceable. If this were to pass then the next Signal will be P2P. There are already some good protocols like Tox. Ironically the pervs will still be using WhatsApp, and just put their CSAM in a password-protected zip file before sending.
  - cryptonym 2y ago
    You should scan on the device before it goes on the network. P2P networking or not, the app should include a scanner. Even if you use an open-source clone without scanner, your contacts most likely will use an app with builtin scanner. Your communications will be scanned on their end. At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery.
    - efreak 2y ago
      > At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery. We do open and scan some percentage of regular mail at the post office. It's difficult to find exact sources because the USPS only seems to easily admit to doing it for postage reasons, but it's fairly well known that they search for drugs, bombs, etc. Mail is subject to X-ray scanning and being opened under suspicion of a variety of things happening. When they can't open it themselves, they're also allowed to request permission from the recipient (you can refuse, but then they can go to a judge).
      - cryptonym 2y ago
        X-Raying import of goods is one thing. What I'm thinking about is more opening letters to read writings and check pictures, without explicit permission nor judge involved.
anonzzzies 2y ago
There are exemptions in the document and this article also talks about it; it would be good to know what tools we can use (p2p chat etc) that are exempt from this. I guess most people will blindly accept and won't care, but at least people can move if they do care (and possibly convince others).
- saurik 2y ago
  I would think a peer-to-peer system would not be exempt from this legislation, particularly given my understanding that the EU courts do not look favorably on gotcha-style analysis of laws that are limited to definitions of words used being twisted to claim "I'm unregulated". If you are a developer who works on a chat client as part of a decentralized service, I'd expect both you and all of the people running the network to suddenly become service providers subject to this law.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    There was a discussion about Matrix here; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713065 But it seems (as always) not easy to determine.
  - cherryteastain 2y ago
    It's impossible for the EU to apply any meaningful enforcement action to a P2P encrypted chat system made by non EU citizen developers residing in a non EU country. Sure, the EU can declare your app is subject to this law, but then what?
    - Hitton 2y ago
      Just not being available in app stores would effectively stop its usage.
      - account42 2y ago
        That is hardy going to be a factor. Most people are not going to care anyway and those that do will be able to install it without an app store.
etrvic 2y ago
> Besides, there’s no way of really knowing whether Chat Control would actually be (or remain) limited to CSAM. I definitely agree with the article here. Probably after Chat Control will be implemented for CSAM this would act as a gateway towards using this tehnology for other things. I am curious whether chat control will extend to mail or other means of online comunication, if it will be implemented ofc(hopefully not). I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way, I don’t want my conversations to be monitored 24/7.
- dsign 2y ago
  > I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way... Talking to people is great. I write science fiction for a hobby. In my stories, when two people want to have a private conversation to discuss some economic barter that can be construed as tax evasion, they take off all their clothing and go swimming to a beach with noisy waves. But there is always that lingering fear about if anybody surreptitiously got a microphone implanted during their latest root canal treatment... Truth be told, I'm a very unimaginative bloke, because in my current jurisdiction banks are already forced to report on their customers, and in my previous one, the government had a decided phobia of cell-phones and attributed to computer printers in the hands of civilians the same dangers of an independent printing press.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  today's voice recognition tools are pretty good, look at meta's recent results. I wouldn't be that sure that phone discussions will not be monitored in some future. It's likely the other way - phone service providers are few in nr, it could be easy to force the change on them
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I don’t know about Europe but the US has been scanning trunk lines of domestic and international calls for decades looking for keywords and actually have decades of archived conversations that AI will make it all the more feasible to comb through and look for thought crimes.
neugiergiraffe 2y ago
Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ? Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job? Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the first place?
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  There's no democracy, it's just show. Mass surveillance is necessary to keep the power.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  "But the pedos" is a guaranteed way to lure voters. Besides, there is a laaaarge amount of influential, rich and well connected people like Ashton Kutcher/Thorn willing to profit off of it. They're selling out our freedoms for personal gain.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > democratic states Democracy is a spectrum and it comes in many flavors. For example nobody voted for von der Leyen, the French voted against the EU referendum in 2005 but the government still went with it, there hasn't been any referendum in France since
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Which are examples of democratic deficiencies that might be indicative of the EU not being particularly democratic.
- eimrine 2y ago
  It is not about democracy, it is about bullshit jobs in IT sector. Too many useds are fooled with proprietary software.
- cl3misch 2y ago
  > democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance I am not saying this is false, but think about the inverse: are there non-democratic states never drifting into mass surveillance? Maybe it is a symptom of a developed, high-trust society. Which doesn't make mass surveillance a good thing. I'm just contemplating whether it's even possible to turn out different.
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
On one hand we should all agree that chat control is bad, OTOH the populist approach to issues it's IMO much worse than the issue itself. There is no chat control in EU yet and there will not probably be one as envisioned by the gloomiest commentators, regardless on how the voting will go. 1 - online child abuse it's real, yes, it can be used as a pretext to sponsor unpopular laws, but it exists and can't be dismissed only as a false claim or something politicians bring up for their evil plan of global dominance and massive surveillance (last sentence is the rhetorical equivalent of What about the children?) 2 - political groups laser focusing on how the World will end if the EU discuss about some issue that has privacy implications aren't in any way better than those laser focusing on childrens' safety. 3 - the elected representatives are elected by the people of EU through a pure proportional electoral system, they represent the Europeans in almost perfect proportion to the population. The issues they are focused on are the issues that people of EU care about, we might not like the opinions and/or the acts of the majority, but it's how democracy work. 4 - the parliament is not new, the new elected representatives are still forming the new political groups (starting from today) so, no, there's no evil puppet master behind the regular schedule of the parliament 5 - issues like this one have been discussed in Europe for 15 years at least, it's nothing new, but every time there is someone predicting the end of the World as we know it. Why? it's simple: it's their job, they've been elected by a tiny minority, have little or no space compared to the larger political groups, so they need to be very local about it and use the sharpest tool of them all: fear. It's political marketing 101, nothing to see here, please disperse naked gun's style. In this case threema makes, not surprisingly, a chat app. 6 - Moreover, in November 2023 the parliament sided with encryption, by not approving the proposal to break E2E encryption while in March this year (2024) The European Court of Human Rights ruled that weakening encryption can violate fundamentals human rights (link to the sentence: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854%22] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854...}). Democracy also means trusting the system, even when it seems that everything is lost. 7 - the law hasn't passed yet and the voting will probably be delayed again, due to the aforementioned parliament still not actually in place at full steam. 8 - if being European taught me something is that approving a law is one thing, enforcing it is a complete different story. In many countries, like mine, Italy, law enforcement is a farce, especially when it's about regulatory infringements. Last but not least, laws protecting children have already been abused here in Italy (and I'm sure everywhere else) long before internet was a thing or without using any form of chat control just for political gain. A couple of examples (sorry, Italian only) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese https://www.ilpost.it/2023/06/08/caso-bibbiano/ https://www.ilpost.it/2023/06/08/caso-bibbiano/ the second one has been so controversial (and the accusations in such bad faith) that the equivalent Wikipedia page has been removed and locked by the admins https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeli_e_demoni_(inchiesta) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeli_e_demoni_(inchiesta).
Double_a_92 2y ago
You can't stop this kind of shit. Even if we do it will be back in a couple of months with another name.
- latexr 2y ago
  That’s like saying “well, I can’t stop death so might as well keel over right now”. Even if it’s true that you can’t stop it (it isn’t, you’re just giving up), delaying it to the next time is still worth. Do it enough times and it works as if it were stopped.
loftsy 2y ago
It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free speech because being a "troll" becomes a lot more personal. I think this way of living would be closer to our nature as tribal primates. It would improve behaviour and overall quality of life. Our brains are designed to have checks and balances from wider society which you don't get anonymously online. This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified.
- theclansman 2y ago
  What exactly would be the difference with what we have now? We already have physical addresses.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lm28469 2y ago
  > We should eliminate anonymity online. Unless you're careful and quite tech literate this is already the case
- alanwreath 2y ago
  It sounds like a solid idea (bot rejection anyone), but I wonder if governments would use it to quarantine users instead. Would I have to pay a bi-yearly fee to maintain and reissue my online passport? All in all I would be willing to be quarantined if that meant the bots would suddenly die.
- piva00 2y ago
  > This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified. This is where you completely break your premise, this is Stasi levels of informing, asking for the population to spy on each other. It's not healthy to society when you feel that any other person you interact with might be informing on you to the State, you leave a very wide avenue open for misuse when the State changes its rulings on what's considered criminal.
piva00 2y ago
Just sent an email to the Swedish representation in the EU, if some other Swedish resident wants the text to be adapted for your own use, let me know and I will share it.
- razentine 2y ago
  Please send it over, my e-mail is listed under my profile!
anonzzzies 2y ago
Seems there are videos https://video.consilium.europa.eu/event/en/27508 https://video.consilium.europa.eu/event/en/27508 . Sound isn't working for me though.
sentientmachin3 2y ago
Problem is most of the people don't care because they "have nothing to hide". Moreover, do they really think this is going to solve the issue of child pornography?
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  the issue cannot be "solved" it's a false myth that the issues need to be "solved". Have we solved murder yet? And why in the US the murder rate is 10 folds the European one? Are US politicians lobbying for more homicides? It's too easy to frame the issues in a context where I am right and the other part is wrong, because yes. I used to run a service free as in speech and as in free beer to host little snippets of text to pass them around, I started it because I was tired of not being able to easily share some piece of information from my mobile phone to some other device. It's astonishing the amount of spam and illegal material, from simple copyright infringement to porn - probably revenge porn or people sharing media of unaware victims-, that the service was getting used for in a very short amount of time. I guess there are probably botnets scanning the entire internet for vulns or open services to abuse them. I shut it down voluntarily, nobody reported me or said anything to me or forced me to do a thing, I simply did not want to be part of something like that and and had no time/resource to properly fight the spam. This is the sad state of affairs and refusing to even discuss about it, to me means burying your head in the sand.
WhackyIdeas 2y ago
PGP encryption should be taught in school. Ingrained. Data privacy used to be trampled on with the fear of ‘terrorism’, but the Americans blasted the airwaves with the word so much that it diluted the word to the point it instills zero fear. Now the new words of the times to trample on privacy is CSAM. And like utter fools, the public fall for the same crap time and time and time again. The truth is, the world will always be shit and have shit people in it. Those shit people will do shit things. It’s a fight over your soul now. And the AI is going to love love love everything it has on every single person on the planet. I can’t wait for the AI to come for us all - we are collectively just awful (and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something). I am mad.
- ironSkillet 2y ago
  Please give examples of how the authoritarian, repressive, conformity-demanding CCP is less awful and soul destroying than Western democracy, as flawed as it is.
  - dzonga 2y ago
    western democracy is good for people in the west. not other countless nations that have been enslaved, colonized, invaded, subjugated, stripped in the name of democracy and religion. Russia, CCP etc are horrible too - but let us not forget history. The Global South Remembers.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      Western nations aren't solely responsible for insufficient historical education.
    - zirgs 2y ago
      Germany committed the Holocaust in my country. They murdered more than 100k of our citizens. And even more died in the WW2 that they started. But now we are in the same political, military and currency union with them, because countries and their ideologies change.
romankolpak 2y ago
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused. If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious
- KptMarchewa 2y ago
  We just won't catch some criminals, and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
- Sander_Marechal 2y ago
  Same way as they have always done. Identify suspects, get warrants, confiscate computers and other electronic devices, build a case, etc.
- cbeach 2y ago
  There are criminals operating behind the safety of closed doors with locks on. We need to compromise all door locks, in order to keep everyone safe from criminals.
- Rucadi 2y ago
  If a message platform is gov controlled, criminals will use other alternatives that are not monitored, which they probably already do. What you end up is just having the gov having all information about private citizens, which can be used against us. For example, the government of Spain constantly shares private citizen data of people near political adversaries for political reasons, also, I don't want people knowing what I share with my girlfriend, regardless of it they do something or not with it publicly.
- WhackyIdeas 2y ago
  It’s not a stupid question. But to think that it will make people more safe is double think. Right wing dictorship is on the rise across Europe and the World. No-one knows the future, but it’s sure looking bleak. We are all making ourselves less secure to the future. And with AI… ooft. AI will get to a point where it takes over, and decisions like these help it to. We are destroying our future fast.
ForHackernews 2y ago
Following the links from this article to the EU directory[0] I tried to visit the site listed as my country's official representatives only to find a literal blinking "under construction" gif: http://www.irelandrepbrussels.be/ http://www.irelandrepbrussels.be/ Amazing. [0] https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organization/COREPER/MDR_COREPER_123CS https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
DebtDeflation 2y ago
> And EU professionals like lawyers, journalists, and physicians could no longer uphold their duty to confidentiality online. This is the point that needs to be hammered home. Allowing governments access to everyone's confidential information is a massive security disaster waiting to happen because bad actor's will target this backdoor.
nbzso 2y ago
[flagged]
taylorius 2y ago
This is the sort of stuff that made Brexit appealing to me. Remainers make out that we (UK) are xenophobic in some way, because we left the EU. No - we don't hate European people, they're great - we just hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions.
- latexr 2y ago
  You keep saying “we”, as if yours is the prevailing UK opinion. Not only was Brexit a close vote, people who voted to leave have largely been regretting it. https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people-regret-brexit https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people... In the aftermath of Brexit I remember reading time and again of people who voted to leave and by doing so screwed up their own business (e.g. florists whose flowers come from abroad). They expressed nothing but regret. So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”, they voted leave because they didn’t understand the big picture and were tricked by unscrupulous politicians making false claims (probably the most famous being that a lot more money would go into the national heath service).
  - taylorius 2y ago
    I could say the same thing to you. You don't get to define "we" any more than I do. In fact my use of the collective "we" was directed primarily towards the claim of xenophobia - which definitely WAS an accusation thrown at people who supported Brexit. The thrust of my point was to single out the political ruling class in the EU for their refusal to listen to the opinion of their subjects. (I can't call them constituents, as that would imply some sort of representative democracy was taking place). "So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”," Yes they very definitely did. The economic arguments were never the main drivers of Brexit. It was about national sovereignty, and electoral accountability - and this new Orwellian EU law, (enacted "for the children", of course) only serves to reinfoce that view.
    - latexr 2y ago
sensanaty 2y ago
I'd support legislation that made it mandatory for any politician of any capacity to keep all of their communications publicly searchable, and I do mean all. Let's see how quickly proper privacy laws get implemented when these parasites are actually affected by the laws they're setting forth.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
infecto 2y ago
I don't support this legislation but I also do not live in the EU. Honest question, why do we (US, EU, wherever) not have more harsh punishment for child SA? Why not castrate the offender after two strikes or even one? I am sure there are other biological reasons for this to happen but I got the impression a lot of abusers were abused as children.
- intunderflow 2y ago
  Similar reason why there's no death penalty. If you get the wrong person and you lock them up you can release them with compensation, it won't fix it but its better. You can't un-castrate someone the same way you can't revive them after an execution. Courts convict innocent people all the time, hence no irreversible punishments.
  - tichiian 2y ago
    Locking someone up is a one-way punishment, they will not get their years back. Branding someone as a child-molester, even if they are later vindicated, is permanent. We already have irreversible punishments.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - infecto 2y ago
    Ok but after two strikes? If you have gotten into trouble twice, I don’t have much concern. Life is not fair sometimes. Happy to see if there are better ways to treat abusers that improve recidivism but I am not convinced prison time works. There is something deeply wrong with people who not only have the desires but are willing to act on them knowing it will hurt their victims.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      The threat level doesn't make your proposal a necessity and I believe it is founded in the same irrational fears that this policy suggestion plays on.
chaostheory 2y ago
This is more proof that the GDPR was nothing more than protectionist laws.
meiraleal 2y ago
A controversial take but I'm in favor of this kind of legislation. Big tech platforms is currently taken by criminals, anyone pretending it's not is lying. They need to be regulated and it will come in the form of regulating users. What's the alternative? Communication tools that don't have a central server. What's the problem here? This legislation has the potential to unlock a golden age for local-first software
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pieter_mj 2y ago
It's a Five Eyes effort impo. https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/#netzpolitik-pw https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17914935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17914935
darkblackcorner 2y ago
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krick 2y ago
Just want to point out that the blogpost doesn't seem very effective it achieving it's stated goal. I'm curious how many people actually acted on it (i.e., approached their MEP representatives) and if their actions had any effect. You are urged to take action, but neither of the linked posts makes it easy for people to do that. Ok, there is a link to a website where I can find some email address for "Permanent Representation of <country name>", thanks. Is it it? Should I send an email? Like, do I have to prove I'm a citizen of <country name> or is emailing them anonymously from some batman69@gmail.com email account is totally fine? I have no idea. Who is my counter-agent, how should I talk to them? Should I assume they are very well aware of the proposal and have their opinion, or are they most likely ignorant about all that stuff? What do I write? What this is supposed to achieve? Do I just email the url to this blog-post? Well, this should be actually a preferable solution, I imagine, but the blogpost doesn't seem to be written in a way to be convincing to a random MEP (assuming he NEEDS to be convinced). I don't claim I could do better (I'm totally ignorant about all that stuff), but just saying it isn't as actionable as it could probably be.
nurettin 2y ago
Orwellian surveillance is all fun and games until you get to Kafkaesque imprisonment.
Barbara230 2y ago
[dead]

960 points by andrew918277 2y ago

ziggy_star 2y ago

You can't even stop it here. Start here.

fredoliveira 2y ago
Define "here".
- ziggy_star 2y ago
  [flagged]

darby_nine 2y ago

I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.

Semaphor 2y ago
Almost nothing is. Local politicians fail upwards to the EU (at least in Germany) or some private job, if they fail at all. Most of the time, you can do what you want, and the voters don’t care.
- kqr 2y ago
  And, on the flip side of the coin: once you are sufficiently disliked, almost anything can be taken as the trigger point for a scandal.
  - account42 2y ago
    But when was the last time a "scandal" has resulted in actual negative outcomes for a politician?
- pfortuny 2y ago
  Same in Spain.
- lukan 2y ago
  "and the voters don’t care." Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something? Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.
  - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
    That's precisely the thing. Whenever EU does something people don't like, they hate EU, not the council members who voted for it.
    - gillesjacobs 2y ago
      Because it is exactly the EU governance that lacks democratic representation, enabling unfavoured politicians to remain in significant power. You can only elect MEPs (via party lists) locally. The majority of legalislation is drafted by the technocratic European Commission and legislation is mostly passed through parlaiment unchanged from there. There are many nationally disgraced politicians seating in the EP, EC or council. Only the ones in the EP were electible. The people have correctly identified that a massive supranational unaccountable government is the problem, enabling corrupt people to keep ruling which undermines the core functioning of representative democracy.
      - Double_a_92 2y ago
        By voting for the members of parliament, and the parliament then deciding everything else... Ideally things should work out as the people want it. Otherwise it would mean that democracy just doesn't work...
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        gillesjacobs 2y ago
        Supranational/federalist "representative" particracy does not work. Representative democracy works better with increased locality, where policy and politicians are directly beholden to constituents.
- blumomo 2y ago
  Those not yet brain washed voters do actually care. But then there are the „Wahlhelfer“ who openly proud themselves in Twitter to invalidate votes for parties they disagree with. This is democracy?
  - FabHK 2y ago
    Sources?
bun_terminator 2y ago
It's their job and goal in life to hurt the population
- Aeolun 2y ago
  They can literally just sit there and it would be better…
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    They have to justify their existence and maximize growth and headcount. In this case I’m not sure if it’s the politicians themselves as much to blame as the EU apparatchiks and lobbyists
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  More control is the objective.
thomostin 2y ago
Absolutely. It only works because they claim it's for the protection of children.
- miroljub 2y ago
  They ride the wave and find always some excuse. It was fighting the terrorists until a few years ago, now it's children again. Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights. Unlikely—this would actually benefit people.
    - miroljub 2y ago
      Chat control would benefit people, if they say it's for climate or lbqtg++ protection? But it won't benefit if they say it's to fight the terror or protect the children? If you really think that spying is OK, if they have "good enough" excuse, no wonder we get all this shit enacted.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        [flagged]
        dTal 2y ago
        Which is a very interesting asymmetry, if we're stipulating that these are merely excuses. It implies that "think of the gays" will lose you more votes than it gains, compared to "think of the children". Terrorists and children are apparently the optimally intersectional bogeymen and helpless wards respectively.
        fsflover 2y ago
isodev 2y ago
Well, people wanted even more alt-right representation in parliament, MEP support for the entire package of policy "Chat Control" is part of is now higher than ever. There is a lot more "for the children" policy coming up.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Yeah, although really no-one of the 'regular people' (well, I have even educated programmer friends saying it's good to catch criminals) care/know (they glaze over when I talk about 'another tech blah') about this, they did vote the people in who like this kind of stuff (and probably are somewhere making $ with it).
- gillesjacobs 2y ago
  This isn't necessarily true: the Identity and Democracy faction is explicitly pro-privacy, digital rights and against Chat Control. - https://id-party.eu/program/ https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site) - https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-european-democracies-april-23-2024 https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview) - https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site) The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.
  - pgraf 2y ago
    FYI, 84% of ID has voted pro chat-control in 2021. https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID
    - gillesjacobs 2y ago
      I stand corrected. Guess all that posturing about privacy was all empty election promises then. Seems like only the Greens, the left and within ID the AFD voted against.
wickedsickeune 2y ago
In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament: * a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever. * a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general * a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video * a convicted criminal It's impressive to manage to fail as a politician.
- patates 2y ago
  Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)
  - bratwurst3000 2y ago
    You forget they have Mazedonia and Bulgaria as neighbors ;)
    - nbzso 2y ago
      Hi, Malakas.
- skilled 2y ago
  Also -> YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo
  - oliwarner 2y ago
    Yup that's the problem with PR: people actually get what they vote for. And people are idiots.
- FabHK 2y ago
  While your other examples are damning, I see nothing wrong with an elderly politician without social media profiles.
gravescale 2y ago
My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica. Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y". After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data. With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects). And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today. Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers. It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.
- hoseja 2y ago
  We have to make the more traditional methods popular again.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated. Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".
mschuster91 2y ago
The populace is clueless and/or ignorant, and Brussels has a well earned reputation for being a popular toxic waste dump for unpopular politicians. To give some examples from Germany, we dumped Günther Oettinger and Ursula von der Leyen there in the last two elections, and this year our far-right party managed to place a suspected traitor on the top of their list.
- argentier 2y ago
  Thanks for that Germany. Won't you take her back and make her Minister for Castles or something,
raxxorraxor 2y ago
One of its champions, Ursula von der Leyen, is pretty popular. One of the main reasons for that is that people don't understand what she is saying.
- account42 2y ago
  Popular or infamous? Never heard the nickname Zensursula?
nobutterbetter 2y ago
[dead]
cdmoyer 2y ago
I mean, if you asked many people "is it ok if the government can read some of your chat messages in exchange for catching a bunch of child pornographers," this will be a very popular "yes" vote. People are generally very willing to trade some rights and freedoms for safety. Or don't realize the trade-off they're making.
krick 2y ago
We need to define "politicians" first. I can see your point if "politician career" means "being repeatedly elected" (even though other people pointed out what are the problems in this case). But the EU Commission isn't elected. These people are appointed by some fucked up complicated process. They definitely seem to have pretty good careers, but what are these careers — I wish I knew.

I_am_tiberius 2y ago

There must be something toxic in the water in Brussels.

Aeolun 2y ago
Or Strasbourg https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-year-move-to-strasbourg-a-waste-of-money-but-will-it-ever-be-scrapp https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...

mellosouls 2y ago

Already being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993

bun_terminator 2y ago
this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.
- _VX3r 2y ago
  Threema being paid up front makes it harder to adopt for average uses. Signal is great option and wish more would use it.
  - bun_terminator 2y ago
    It would be if signal would have resisted the temptation to go cryptobro. They didn't, and they lost all credibility as a result.
  - dijit 2y ago
    I wish more people would use something that's not US backed honestly. Centralisation is a curse. I don't inherently trust Signal, and you have to because nothing they do is verifiable; I wrote a really hit-and-miss article about this before: https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/ https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/
- Semaphor 2y ago
  Interesting. Here it had some niche users, but got completely supplanted by signal, which is the clear #2 with the people I know.
  - bun_terminator 2y ago
    Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result. With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.

nope1000 2y ago

"Fun" Fact: it's currently the European championships in football (soccer) in Europe (probably the biggest event of the year), so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak this through without too many people noticing.

thomostin 2y ago
Also, the parliament is still 'new'… perfect time to push something like this through before the dust settles
- pas 2y ago
  it's not even on the EP's schedule. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=order https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...
- jmclnx 2y ago
  Interesting, in the US, the best time to see crazy laws passed is every 4 years, between Nov 5 and Jan 7(?), if a new President is elected and a number of Congress people are thrown out of office from a specific Party. That is because the people who need to leave office will usually join with the opposition to get laws passed that they wanted but were afraid to vote for before the election.
Hbruz0 2y ago
How does this allow for it to be sneakily applied, as you suggest ?
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  The public, as a group, can only keep a small number of subjects in focus at a time. This feels like a phenomenon that I take for granted to be true but I haven't heard any name for it or read any studies. It really feels like a symptomatic phenomenon of our time.
  - 2y ago

23B1 2y ago

Statists pave the road to tyranny with their good intentions.

rightbyte 2y ago
Rather, people make up excuses for the elite to cope. There are no good intentions involved in this.

cryptonym 2y ago

It took a bit of time but we are finally reaching sovietic dream of mass surveillance. We just need extremist to be in power (oh wait!) so it can be enabled for other purposes and we'll get full powered Stasi.

nemo44x 2y ago
Well they do keep electing communists in Europe so it makes sense the Soviet dream state is near completion.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  By communists you surely means far-right.
  - account42 2y ago
    Which countries in europe are run by the far right right now. Most governments are still decidetly center-left even if people are finally standing up to them with their votes.
- cryptonym 2y ago
  This has more to do with totalitarism than communism. ChatControl is getting support from parties labelled as both left and right.
EasyMark 2y ago
Well the police aren’t going anywhere and they are the ones pushing for this tirelessly. This is everything to them to make their power (and politicians) absolute. They will have dirt on everyone if you can’t have private conversations at all. Even if it’s not illegal they will find something immoral to destroy your life. Allowing police (the government) to become nearly omniscient is a very very bad idea.

cocoflunchy 2y ago

I tried sending an email using the info from https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organization/COREPER/ https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi... !

blowski 2y ago

I too instinctively bristle at this kind of legislation. It's likely to be abused, with many false positive that make it more effective at sweeping up innocent people, while the guilty just find workarounds. But all coming on here and saying "ooohh, this is bad, innit!" is not very interesting, and unlikely to prevent it. Why is the EU doing this? Which political groups are supporting and opposing it? Why now? How are vendors responding? How does it affect non-EU countries?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bratwurst3000 2y ago
They already found out that it is a lobby organization that pushes it for those who sell the products for surveillance. Please google it I am to lazy to search for it. Sorry Edit: here it is https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/#netzpolitik-pw https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
throwaway43734 2y ago
There are organizations which are selling AI tools to filter content. For instance, Thorn, a US organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, is building such tools and heavily lobbying for Chat Control in EU. "Ashton Kutcher is a tireless advocate." https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Also concerning that he seems to have more input on policy than all EU citizens together. This democracy the EU is implementing is becoming a joke.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  "Kelso would've wanted the surveillance state, and he banged Eric's sister so he is someone to look towards for moral guidance" "Oui oui!"

anonzzzies 2y ago

Someone is benefitting and it's not 'the children'.

ajb 2y ago

A lot of despondency about this. But I think part of why this stuff gets through is that techies are campaigning in the wrong way Those advocating for it have a visceral pitch: your kids will be in danger if this doesn't pass. Those against are arguing for abstracts, like freedom and privacy. And sure, people should be in favour of those things - but there's a visceral pitch against, and it's not being used What will happen if this stuff is put in place, and used as claimed? There will be a massive rush of automated "accusations" of child abuse against innocent parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This will result in many families being unnecessarily stressed and disrupted by investigations, and at least some children being removed from innocent families. Why will this happen? after all, won't the scanning be 100% accurate?</s> Obviously not. Tech companies don't want to be responsible for this - the scanning won't be optimised for accuracy, it will be optimised to pass the buck as hard as possible[1], because the tech companies don't want to business of taking the blame when some pedophile isn't caught. Who is the second level of review? Maybe some minimum wage zero-hours subcontractor at Serco or Group 4 Security, or whoever the equivalent of that is in the EU. But that's probably it - once the image has been labelled 'bad' no-one else will want to look at it. So, even if you are sending a picture of your own child to your own mother, you will have at the very least to have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by someone you don't know who has about 5 seconds to look at it and is probably from a completely different culture. Yet none of this has been brought up in the media either by tech companies or by privacy activists. [1] The other option is that the tech companies abdicate completely and just use some black box from the government to scan every picture. Problems with that left as an exercise...

EasyMark 2y ago
I think commercials like a local politician looking over a cop’s back saying “I need some dirt on Citizen Z, he fixed my plumbing last week and overcharged me, let’s see what we can find on him”. Then show his plumbing business shut down a week later because of some obscure local law about using imperial wrenches instead of metric.

sprash 2y ago

"Chat Control" is already real. This is just codifying prevalent practice done by a multitude of agencies into law.

FabHK 2y ago
Sorry, is there any evidence that E2EE eg in WhatsApp, Signal, etc. is routinely broken? I am not talking about exceptional hacking of phones of individual high-value targets for surveillance by nation-state-level actors, but mass surveillance.
- sprash 2y ago
  If there was public evidence allowed to be released nobody would be using those algorithms obviously. The point of those algorithms is to make them hard to break for the public and easy to break for the agencies . E.g. None of your mentioned products use quantum hard encryption. It is not far fetched to assume that all the relevant agencies have access to a working quantum computer. But I doubt you need even sophisticated hardware. Most "government approved" encryption algorithms should be considered compromised from the get-go.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    I seriously doubt that agencies have more capabilities than the scientific community of mathematicians. Perhaps there are weak points in implementations, but I don't believe any agency has the capabilities to crack encryption, even some of the older algorithms. There is no evidence that a quantum computer can break classic encryption yet. Even if the agencies tried, they would not have the means to stop the spread of such information. And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this.
    - sprash 2y ago
      Almost 100% of the "scientific community of mathematicians" is funded by the government. They can't be trusted either. If they want to publish something that is considered to be a "threat to national security" the agencies have multiple avenues at their disposal to "convince" them to not publish. > And finally, we wouldn't get laws like this. Codifying covert practices into law has the big advantage to make the whole oppressive surveillance state much more efficient. Gone are the days of "parallel constructions". Also the chilling effects of total surveillance alone might be enough to prevent the opposition to be effective.

no_time 2y ago

>If you’re a EU citizen, please consider contacting your government’s representative today, asking them to vote against Chat Control. Are there any studies on the effectiveness of this? To me it always read like a joke. The only way I can imagine this going is. >Good day Mr. Rep I'm really really worried about x legistlation for reasons y and z. >Sure buddy. hangs up >Votes like his "donors" asked him to anyways.

ramon156 2y ago
Exactly this. Once you read up about donors, or keys, or whatever word your country uses, it becomes obvious that it's all pretty straight forward

drdebug 2y ago

The wording in the current draft seems to indicate that it applies to "providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services". So unless this includes ISPs, I wonder if that means a decentralized P2P service is not covered.

uyzstvqs 2y ago
Not applicable, nor enforceable. If this were to pass then the next Signal will be P2P. There are already some good protocols like Tox. Ironically the pervs will still be using WhatsApp, and just put their CSAM in a password-protected zip file before sending.
- cryptonym 2y ago
  You should scan on the device before it goes on the network. P2P networking or not, the app should include a scanner. Even if you use an open-source clone without scanner, your contacts most likely will use an app with builtin scanner. Your communications will be scanned on their end. At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery.
  - efreak 2y ago
    > At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery. We do open and scan some percentage of regular mail at the post office. It's difficult to find exact sources because the USPS only seems to easily admit to doing it for postage reasons, but it's fairly well known that they search for drugs, bombs, etc. Mail is subject to X-ray scanning and being opened under suspicion of a variety of things happening. When they can't open it themselves, they're also allowed to request permission from the recipient (you can refuse, but then they can go to a judge).
    - cryptonym 2y ago
      X-Raying import of goods is one thing. What I'm thinking about is more opening letters to read writings and check pictures, without explicit permission nor judge involved.

anonzzzies 2y ago

There are exemptions in the document and this article also talks about it; it would be good to know what tools we can use (p2p chat etc) that are exempt from this. I guess most people will blindly accept and won't care, but at least people can move if they do care (and possibly convince others).

saurik 2y ago
I would think a peer-to-peer system would not be exempt from this legislation, particularly given my understanding that the EU courts do not look favorably on gotcha-style analysis of laws that are limited to definitions of words used being twisted to claim "I'm unregulated". If you are a developer who works on a chat client as part of a decentralized service, I'd expect both you and all of the people running the network to suddenly become service providers subject to this law.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  There was a discussion about Matrix here; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713065 But it seems (as always) not easy to determine.
- cherryteastain 2y ago
  It's impossible for the EU to apply any meaningful enforcement action to a P2P encrypted chat system made by non EU citizen developers residing in a non EU country. Sure, the EU can declare your app is subject to this law, but then what?
  - Hitton 2y ago
    Just not being available in app stores would effectively stop its usage.
    - account42 2y ago
      That is hardy going to be a factor. Most people are not going to care anyway and those that do will be able to install it without an app store.

etrvic 2y ago

> Besides, there’s no way of really knowing whether Chat Control would actually be (or remain) limited to CSAM. I definitely agree with the article here. Probably after Chat Control will be implemented for CSAM this would act as a gateway towards using this tehnology for other things. I am curious whether chat control will extend to mail or other means of online comunication, if it will be implemented ofc(hopefully not). I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way, I don’t want my conversations to be monitored 24/7.

dsign 2y ago
> I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way... Talking to people is great. I write science fiction for a hobby. In my stories, when two people want to have a private conversation to discuss some economic barter that can be construed as tax evasion, they take off all their clothing and go swimming to a beach with noisy waves. But there is always that lingering fear about if anybody surreptitiously got a microphone implanted during their latest root canal treatment... Truth be told, I'm a very unimaginative bloke, because in my current jurisdiction banks are already forced to report on their customers, and in my previous one, the government had a decided phobia of cell-phones and attributed to computer printers in the hands of civilians the same dangers of an independent printing press.
Moldoteck 2y ago
today's voice recognition tools are pretty good, look at meta's recent results. I wouldn't be that sure that phone discussions will not be monitored in some future. It's likely the other way - phone service providers are few in nr, it could be easy to force the change on them
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I don’t know about Europe but the US has been scanning trunk lines of domestic and international calls for decades looking for keywords and actually have decades of archived conversations that AI will make it all the more feasible to comb through and look for thought crimes.

neugiergiraffe 2y ago

Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ? Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job? Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the first place?

vbezhenar 2y ago
There's no democracy, it's just show. Mass surveillance is necessary to keep the power.
mschuster91 2y ago
"But the pedos" is a guaranteed way to lure voters. Besides, there is a laaaarge amount of influential, rich and well connected people like Ashton Kutcher/Thorn willing to profit off of it. They're selling out our freedoms for personal gain.
lm28469 2y ago
> democratic states Democracy is a spectrum and it comes in many flavors. For example nobody voted for von der Leyen, the French voted against the EU referendum in 2005 but the government still went with it, there hasn't been any referendum in France since
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Which are examples of democratic deficiencies that might be indicative of the EU not being particularly democratic.
eimrine 2y ago
It is not about democracy, it is about bullshit jobs in IT sector. Too many useds are fooled with proprietary software.
cl3misch 2y ago
> democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance I am not saying this is false, but think about the inverse: are there non-democratic states never drifting into mass surveillance? Maybe it is a symptom of a developed, high-trust society. Which doesn't make mass surveillance a good thing. I'm just contemplating whether it's even possible to turn out different.

peoplefromibiza 2y ago

On one hand we should all agree that chat control is bad, OTOH the populist approach to issues it's IMO much worse than the issue itself. There is no chat control in EU yet and there will not probably be one as envisioned by the gloomiest commentators, regardless on how the voting will go. 1 - online child abuse it's real, yes, it can be used as a pretext to sponsor unpopular laws, but it exists and can't be dismissed only as a false claim or something politicians bring up for their evil plan of global dominance and massive surveillance (last sentence is the rhetorical equivalent of What about the children?) 2 - political groups laser focusing on how the World will end if the EU discuss about some issue that has privacy implications aren't in any way better than those laser focusing on childrens' safety. 3 - the elected representatives are elected by the people of EU through a pure proportional electoral system, they represent the Europeans in almost perfect proportion to the population. The issues they are focused on are the issues that people of EU care about, we might not like the opinions and/or the acts of the majority, but it's how democracy work. 4 - the parliament is not new, the new elected representatives are still forming the new political groups (starting from today) so, no, there's no evil puppet master behind the regular schedule of the parliament 5 - issues like this one have been discussed in Europe for 15 years at least, it's nothing new, but every time there is someone predicting the end of the World as we know it. Why? it's simple: it's their job, they've been elected by a tiny minority, have little or no space compared to the larger political groups, so they need to be very local about it and use the sharpest tool of them all: fear. It's political marketing 101, nothing to see here, please disperse naked gun's style. In this case threema makes, not surprisingly, a chat app. 6 - Moreover, in November 2023 the parliament sided with encryption, by not approving the proposal to break E2E encryption while in March this year (2024) The European Court of Human Rights ruled that weakening encryption can violate fundamentals human rights (link to the sentence: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854%22] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854...}). Democracy also means trusting the system, even when it seems that everything is lost. 7 - the law hasn't passed yet and the voting will probably be delayed again, due to the aforementioned parliament still not actually in place at full steam. 8 - if being European taught me something is that approving a law is one thing, enforcing it is a complete different story. In many countries, like mine, Italy, law enforcement is a farce, especially when it's about regulatory infringements. Last but not least, laws protecting children have already been abused here in Italy (and I'm sure everywhere else) long before internet was a thing or without using any form of chat control just for political gain. A couple of examples (sorry, Italian only) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese https://www.ilpost.it/2023/06/08/caso-bibbiano/ https://www.ilpost.it/2023/06/08/caso-bibbiano/ the second one has been so controversial (and the accusations in such bad faith) that the equivalent Wikipedia page has been removed and locked by the admins https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeli_e_demoni_(inchiesta) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeli_e_demoni_(inchiesta).

Double_a_92 2y ago

You can't stop this kind of shit. Even if we do it will be back in a couple of months with another name.

latexr 2y ago
That’s like saying “well, I can’t stop death so might as well keel over right now”. Even if it’s true that you can’t stop it (it isn’t, you’re just giving up), delaying it to the next time is still worth. Do it enough times and it works as if it were stopped.

loftsy 2y ago

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free speech because being a "troll" becomes a lot more personal. I think this way of living would be closer to our nature as tribal primates. It would improve behaviour and overall quality of life. Our brains are designed to have checks and balances from wider society which you don't get anonymously online. This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified.

theclansman 2y ago
What exactly would be the difference with what we have now? We already have physical addresses.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lm28469 2y ago
> We should eliminate anonymity online. Unless you're careful and quite tech literate this is already the case
alanwreath 2y ago
It sounds like a solid idea (bot rejection anyone), but I wonder if governments would use it to quarantine users instead. Would I have to pay a bi-yearly fee to maintain and reissue my online passport? All in all I would be willing to be quarantined if that meant the bots would suddenly die.
piva00 2y ago
> This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified. This is where you completely break your premise, this is Stasi levels of informing, asking for the population to spy on each other. It's not healthy to society when you feel that any other person you interact with might be informing on you to the State, you leave a very wide avenue open for misuse when the State changes its rulings on what's considered criminal.

piva00 2y ago

Just sent an email to the Swedish representation in the EU, if some other Swedish resident wants the text to be adapted for your own use, let me know and I will share it.

razentine 2y ago
Please send it over, my e-mail is listed under my profile!

anonzzzies 2y ago

Seems there are videos https://video.consilium.europa.eu/event/en/27508 https://video.consilium.europa.eu/event/en/27508 . Sound isn't working for me though.

sentientmachin3 2y ago

Problem is most of the people don't care because they "have nothing to hide". Moreover, do they really think this is going to solve the issue of child pornography?

peoplefromibiza 2y ago
the issue cannot be "solved" it's a false myth that the issues need to be "solved". Have we solved murder yet? And why in the US the murder rate is 10 folds the European one? Are US politicians lobbying for more homicides? It's too easy to frame the issues in a context where I am right and the other part is wrong, because yes. I used to run a service free as in speech and as in free beer to host little snippets of text to pass them around, I started it because I was tired of not being able to easily share some piece of information from my mobile phone to some other device. It's astonishing the amount of spam and illegal material, from simple copyright infringement to porn - probably revenge porn or people sharing media of unaware victims-, that the service was getting used for in a very short amount of time. I guess there are probably botnets scanning the entire internet for vulns or open services to abuse them. I shut it down voluntarily, nobody reported me or said anything to me or forced me to do a thing, I simply did not want to be part of something like that and and had no time/resource to properly fight the spam. This is the sad state of affairs and refusing to even discuss about it, to me means burying your head in the sand.

WhackyIdeas 2y ago

PGP encryption should be taught in school. Ingrained. Data privacy used to be trampled on with the fear of ‘terrorism’, but the Americans blasted the airwaves with the word so much that it diluted the word to the point it instills zero fear. Now the new words of the times to trample on privacy is CSAM. And like utter fools, the public fall for the same crap time and time and time again. The truth is, the world will always be shit and have shit people in it. Those shit people will do shit things. It’s a fight over your soul now. And the AI is going to love love love everything it has on every single person on the planet. I can’t wait for the AI to come for us all - we are collectively just awful (and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something). I am mad.

ironSkillet 2y ago
Please give examples of how the authoritarian, repressive, conformity-demanding CCP is less awful and soul destroying than Western democracy, as flawed as it is.
- dzonga 2y ago
  western democracy is good for people in the west. not other countless nations that have been enslaved, colonized, invaded, subjugated, stripped in the name of democracy and religion. Russia, CCP etc are horrible too - but let us not forget history. The Global South Remembers.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Western nations aren't solely responsible for insufficient historical education.
  - zirgs 2y ago
    Germany committed the Holocaust in my country. They murdered more than 100k of our citizens. And even more died in the WW2 that they started. But now we are in the same political, military and currency union with them, because countries and their ideologies change.

romankolpak 2y ago

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused. If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

KptMarchewa 2y ago
We just won't catch some criminals, and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
Sander_Marechal 2y ago
Same way as they have always done. Identify suspects, get warrants, confiscate computers and other electronic devices, build a case, etc.
cbeach 2y ago
There are criminals operating behind the safety of closed doors with locks on. We need to compromise all door locks, in order to keep everyone safe from criminals.
Rucadi 2y ago
If a message platform is gov controlled, criminals will use other alternatives that are not monitored, which they probably already do. What you end up is just having the gov having all information about private citizens, which can be used against us. For example, the government of Spain constantly shares private citizen data of people near political adversaries for political reasons, also, I don't want people knowing what I share with my girlfriend, regardless of it they do something or not with it publicly.
WhackyIdeas 2y ago
It’s not a stupid question. But to think that it will make people more safe is double think. Right wing dictorship is on the rise across Europe and the World. No-one knows the future, but it’s sure looking bleak. We are all making ourselves less secure to the future. And with AI… ooft. AI will get to a point where it takes over, and decisions like these help it to. We are destroying our future fast.

ForHackernews 2y ago

Following the links from this article to the EU directory[0] I tried to visit the site listed as my country's official representatives only to find a literal blinking "under construction" gif: http://www.irelandrepbrussels.be/ http://www.irelandrepbrussels.be/ Amazing. [0] https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organization/COREPER/MDR_COREPER_123CS https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...

DebtDeflation 2y ago

> And EU professionals like lawyers, journalists, and physicians could no longer uphold their duty to confidentiality online. This is the point that needs to be hammered home. Allowing governments access to everyone's confidential information is a massive security disaster waiting to happen because bad actor's will target this backdoor.

nbzso 2y ago

[flagged]

taylorius 2y ago

This is the sort of stuff that made Brexit appealing to me. Remainers make out that we (UK) are xenophobic in some way, because we left the EU. No - we don't hate European people, they're great - we just hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions.

latexr 2y ago
You keep saying “we”, as if yours is the prevailing UK opinion. Not only was Brexit a close vote, people who voted to leave have largely been regretting it. https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people-regret-brexit https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people... In the aftermath of Brexit I remember reading time and again of people who voted to leave and by doing so screwed up their own business (e.g. florists whose flowers come from abroad). They expressed nothing but regret. So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”, they voted leave because they didn’t understand the big picture and were tricked by unscrupulous politicians making false claims (probably the most famous being that a lot more money would go into the national heath service).
- taylorius 2y ago
  I could say the same thing to you. You don't get to define "we" any more than I do. In fact my use of the collective "we" was directed primarily towards the claim of xenophobia - which definitely WAS an accusation thrown at people who supported Brexit. The thrust of my point was to single out the political ruling class in the EU for their refusal to listen to the opinion of their subjects. (I can't call them constituents, as that would imply some sort of representative democracy was taking place). "So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”," Yes they very definitely did. The economic arguments were never the main drivers of Brexit. It was about national sovereignty, and electoral accountability - and this new Orwellian EU law, (enacted "for the children", of course) only serves to reinfoce that view.
  - latexr 2y ago

sensanaty 2y ago

I'd support legislation that made it mandatory for any politician of any capacity to keep all of their communications publicly searchable, and I do mean all. Let's see how quickly proper privacy laws get implemented when these parasites are actually affected by the laws they're setting forth.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

infecto 2y ago

I don't support this legislation but I also do not live in the EU. Honest question, why do we (US, EU, wherever) not have more harsh punishment for child SA? Why not castrate the offender after two strikes or even one? I am sure there are other biological reasons for this to happen but I got the impression a lot of abusers were abused as children.

intunderflow 2y ago
Similar reason why there's no death penalty. If you get the wrong person and you lock them up you can release them with compensation, it won't fix it but its better. You can't un-castrate someone the same way you can't revive them after an execution. Courts convict innocent people all the time, hence no irreversible punishments.
- tichiian 2y ago
  Locking someone up is a one-way punishment, they will not get their years back. Branding someone as a child-molester, even if they are later vindicated, is permanent. We already have irreversible punishments.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- infecto 2y ago
  Ok but after two strikes? If you have gotten into trouble twice, I don’t have much concern. Life is not fair sometimes. Happy to see if there are better ways to treat abusers that improve recidivism but I am not convinced prison time works. There is something deeply wrong with people who not only have the desires but are willing to act on them knowing it will hurt their victims.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    The threat level doesn't make your proposal a necessity and I believe it is founded in the same irrational fears that this policy suggestion plays on.

chaostheory 2y ago

This is more proof that the GDPR was nothing more than protectionist laws.

meiraleal 2y ago

A controversial take but I'm in favor of this kind of legislation. Big tech platforms is currently taken by criminals, anyone pretending it's not is lying. They need to be regulated and it will come in the form of regulating users. What's the alternative? Communication tools that don't have a central server. What's the problem here? This legislation has the potential to unlock a golden age for local-first software

deleted 2y ago

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pieter_mj 2y ago

It's a Five Eyes effort impo. https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/#netzpolitik-pw https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17914935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17914935

darkblackcorner 2y ago

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krick 2y ago

Just want to point out that the blogpost doesn't seem very effective it achieving it's stated goal. I'm curious how many people actually acted on it (i.e., approached their MEP representatives) and if their actions had any effect. You are urged to take action, but neither of the linked posts makes it easy for people to do that. Ok, there is a link to a website where I can find some email address for "Permanent Representation of <country name>", thanks. Is it it? Should I send an email? Like, do I have to prove I'm a citizen of <country name> or is emailing them anonymously from some batman69@gmail.com email account is totally fine? I have no idea. Who is my counter-agent, how should I talk to them? Should I assume they are very well aware of the proposal and have their opinion, or are they most likely ignorant about all that stuff? What do I write? What this is supposed to achieve? Do I just email the url to this blog-post? Well, this should be actually a preferable solution, I imagine, but the blogpost doesn't seem to be written in a way to be convincing to a random MEP (assuming he NEEDS to be convinced). I don't claim I could do better (I'm totally ignorant about all that stuff), but just saying it isn't as actionable as it could probably be.

nurettin 2y ago

Orwellian surveillance is all fun and games until you get to Kafkaesque imprisonment.

Barbara230 2y ago

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