20 ms·

Chat Control Must Be Stopped

788 points by _p2zi 1y ago

siva7 1y ago
[flagged]
dkdcio 1y ago
it would be great if this article actually explained what Chat Control is somewhere at the top. it says it will, but I’m quite a few paragraphs in and have no idea what I’m supposed to be mad about yet
- warkdarrior 1y ago
  If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it. From that section: > "In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Although this first derogation was not mandatory, some policymakers kept pushing with new propositions. > A year later, a new regulation (CSAR) was proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs to make scanning messages for CSAM mandatory for all EU countries, and also allow them to break end-to-end encryption. In 2023, the UK passed a similar legislation called the Online Safety Act. These types of messaging mass scanning regulations have been called by critics Chat Control."
  - dkdcio 1y ago
    right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is? the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is
    - warkdarrior 1y ago
      The other page I was referring to does have some more detail: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future-of-privacy/#what-is-chat-control https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future...
  - dwedge 1y ago
    People who know about it are generally already annoyed. The trouble is most people don't know what it is, and those are the people who should be targeted
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal. > The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section). >The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."
  - dkdcio 1y ago
    ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is: > Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." thanks!
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      > including end-to-end encrypted ones How the hang are they planning to do that? I mean, if someone has an end to end encrypted conversation, it's encrypted when it gets to the carrier, and the carrier shouldn't (technically, not anything related about whether they are allowed to or not) be able to decrypt the conversation. If the carrier is terminating the connection, then it's either not end to end encrypted, or it's broken. edit: sorted the grammar/punctuation at the end to improve clarity
      - LocalH 1y ago
        I imagine they'll push for apps to do the scanning prior to encryption and directly after decryption.
closewith 1y ago
For context, this refers to the proposed EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...
77pt77 1y ago
For those complaining the article doesn't explain at the very begining what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... EU's latest attempt to squash privacy rights.
- fbhabbed 1y ago
  Even the title of that Wikipedia page is misleading and choosen in a way that almost forces your opinion on this (you can't be against a regulation made for such a noble intent, can you?) Why not just call the page Chat Control 2.0?
  - 77pt77 1y ago
    It's not the official name. I'm surprised nazi is not part of the title like it has in the past at the national level.
Humorist2290 1y ago
> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scope of such a dragnet, the economic impact, the societal damage, all seems rather broad. Yet why don't any major operators in the EU take a stance? Is it really so below the radar, or being kept so below the radar? Just the network egress costs to whatever state sanctioned scanner gets built will in aggregate probably exceed a few hundred MEUR yearly.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  Having the service provider handle the encryption is very convenient for the users. And, it turns out, the government.
  - Humorist2290 1y ago
    Sure, but the way this was written it also includes everything from Gmail to root access servers hosted by Hetzner. Gmail has been doing this for years, but (I assume) not Hetzner. If even hosting providers are dragged into this the scale grows dramatically. Can Hetzner really not even be bothered about having to comply with such ridiculous requirements? To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.
- api 1y ago
  Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out. Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.
riazrizvi 1y ago
Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping. You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  > Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. fuck this attitude with a rake
  - kypro 1y ago
    In the UK we take this a step further – if you're by an abortion clinic and the police believe you could be praying in your head for those getting an abortion they can charge you. There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.
    - giveita 1y ago
      Any case law for first claim?
      - DontBreakAlex 1y ago
        Apparently that is Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Article regarding the claim: https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-convicted-for-praying-silently-near-abortion-facility https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-conv... > In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped. I'm all for women's rights, but that's not how to do it
bapak 1y ago
Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children. Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for? I do not understand.
- 77pt77 1y ago
  I do. Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? I know it's diseingenuous but these laws are crafted with that in mind. People that might take a real chance in challenging this are weeded out long before they get to these positions.
  - Bender 1y ago
    I expect moms sharing bathtime pictures and videos with each other to get caught up in this as the censors get aroused by the content and project their own feelings of arousal and cognitive dissonance onto the parents sending bobbies and armed police to kick down doors. The legal costs and permenant damage to reputation will undoubtedly destroy many people.
    - the_sleaze_ 1y ago
      Please direct your complaints to our friendly chatbot who is always there to assist 24/7 365
  - jasonlotito 1y ago
    > Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? [sic] This is already happening. This is not about that.
- Humorist2290 1y ago
  From Patrick Brewer's analysis [0] it seems like written into the proposal is to enable members of the government to have access to excepted systems, if applied for things like law enforcement or "national security." If I had to guess, at least a few MEPs expect they will be able to use such an exemption for their personal communications. [0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
noduerme 1y ago
Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- betaby 1y ago
  > How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?
- svachalek 1y ago
  As someone who's only visited, a foreign phone with foreign SIM will get you out. But I think using VPN on a Chinese SIM is somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.
  - oefrha 1y ago
    > somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days. It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).
- anikom15 1y ago
  The Chinese SIM is the key. If you are a foreigner and want to use a phone, either use a burner phone with a Chinese SIM or use international roaming with a non-Chinese SIM. You should not use a Chinese SIM. Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.
- alisonatwork 1y ago
  You're not thinking about it the right way. Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc. When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.
coldblues 1y ago
Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The level of incompetency and ignorance when it comes to privacy & security makes me deeply angry and frustrated to a level that brings me to nihilism and misanthropy
- Marsymars 1y ago
  "People showing disregard for your privacy" is a matter of scale when going from analog to digital, it's at least not inconsistent. e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.
  - OkayPhysicist 1y ago
    You need better friends. Most people I chat with regularly absolutely would not volunteer anything to law enforcement.
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      Yeah, bullshit. "Tell us this thing or you are going to jail. Might have a trial in a week or a month." I promise you you aren't the main character in your friends' lives and they will absolutely give up information on you to save their career and their family.
- nullc 1y ago
  Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities. Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation. The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)
gjsman-1000 1y ago
As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground. Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92. Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.
- jonaharagon 1y ago
  Realistically the EU only cares about protecting their citizens from private companies, and especially American ones. When it comes to government overreach they know virtually no bounds. Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all. Two approaches with the same outcome, absolutely.
- didibus 1y ago
  I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government. The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so. Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you. Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc. And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well. In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc. In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime. Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.
tailfra 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
kylemaxwell 1y ago
This is a terrible article about what sounds like a legitimate problem. Even in the section, "What is Chat Control?", the answer to the question is buried in the middle of the seventh paragraph. If the writer of this post wants people to oppose it, they really should do a better job of explaining at the very top what "it" is.
- ryanisnan 1y ago
  I think you're being hyperbolic. It wasn't terrible, but I do agree, I had to dig for "What is Chat Control". It read to me like a panicked person, repeatedly saying, "You've gotta hear this..." over and over, before getting to the point.
0x008 1y ago
This is one of many laws the EU and member states are pushing in order to implement more online surveillance. I always wonder why individuals (representatives) would push for these kind of surveillance laws? I think politicians usually pass laws which help themselves or their lobbies gain power and influence on economical levels, but I wonder why anyone would push for these kind of legislation even before an authoritarian state is on place. What is there to gain on an individual level?
- pas 1y ago
  individuals mostly have a few things they care about, but most people don't understand shit especially technology especially information technology politicians are selected for being people-oriented therefore most are hopelessly underinformed and it's very very very easy to get caught up in ideologies and then means to an end seems like business as usual
- dchftcs 1y ago
  Even if a system doesn't look authoritarian, corruption happens all the time. Those involved in corruption naturally want more power for themselves. Additionally some people actively thirst for more power for whatever reasons, and most people don't want to be constrained in their jobs, and they are all aligned in expanding governmental power. You need some discipline to commit to the idea that "I don't want the ability to see encrypted chats, even if that makes my job 90% easier to do", and I don't trust most people to have it.
roscas 1y ago
Just read something on Reddit "Is WhatsApp lying about it's end-to-end encryption?" so no need to write down again here. As long as you know when you're being used by their fake services.
nashashmi 1y ago
The Usual. Govt trying to harness private systems for the purpose of public surveillance. They do this using warrants. And subpoena. We need a personal declaration of rights that says private systems are not in anyway obligated to extend the reach of govt surveillance networks, without the consent of the private party. It is a small protective measure. The next step will be for govt to bully everyone to give consent to their surveillance systems … or else. But as of right now, the law is arbitrarily taking for granted that private surveillance systems belong to govt regulations.
MaKey 1y ago
I emailed all MEPs for my country one month ago. Apart from out-of-office notices I didn't get anything back yet.
- fbhabbed 1y ago
  You will eventually get a canned AI made reply (just like all the canned AI mails they have received these days due to websites creating templates for them).
7373737373 1y ago
Patrick Breyer is doing god's work!
zmmmmm 1y ago
Of all the arguments presented I'm surprised to see absent the one that seems most obvious to me: encryption is just math, there's no way to actually ban it. If criminals think their conversations are going to be detected they aren't going to just say "oh well let's not crime now". They are going to simply spin up their own e2e encrypted channels. The software is nearly trivial, the technical barriers are very low - it's hard to think why it won't happen. So then what? They start outlawing encryption altogether? knowledge of math? How would you claw back all the public and freely available software that people can already use to encrypt messages to each other?
- jonaharagon 1y ago
  > They start outlawing encryption altogether? This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.
  - Tade0 1y ago
    Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".
      - Tade0 1y ago
        "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.
chairmansteve 1y ago
Samizdat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  Self-host may be the new Samizdat.
EGreg 1y ago
Would chat control also force open source software to put in backdoors? Like if users run their own little servers somewhere, and those load websites, or they sideload apps to the app store (thanks to EU hehe).
- sterlind 1y ago
  I'd personally like to have a FOSS, privacy-aware CSAM (or even generic gore/porn) detector I could plug into Matrix/Lemmy/Mastodon servers. something self-hostable, so I could run those services without worrying about pedos and trolls ruining my platform. I'm not sure if something like it exists. I'm not sure if it could exist. PhotoDNA (the old CSAM detector) ended up being somewhat reversible, so that you could actually turn signatures back into obscene material. because of this, the signature databases were shared under strict NDA, only to large players. probably the most realistic solution is a generic porn classifier convnet. if it blocks adult porn, it should block CSAM too (hopefully?) they are not reliant on image hashes, and reversibility concerns apply less because the dataset used to train it was presumably legal (if distasteful.)
  - beeflet 1y ago
    I am working on something like this using multimodal models
piker 1y ago
It seems like the golden age of freedom is behind us for now, and we’re going to descend for a while back into nationalism and authoritarianism
- seneca 1y ago
  While I agree with you about rising authoritarianism, I'm confused what this has to do with nationalism. Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization. If anything, this sort of transnational authoritarianism is a bigger threat, and likely to promote nationalist backlash.
  - piker 1y ago
    I meant them as independent threats.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    > Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization It is not. It is being pushed by certain politicians from certain member nations onto the commission.
- gobdovan 1y ago
  Funniest part is, current EU politicians are setting these systems up just as nationalist and authoritarian politicians (their adversaries) start to dominate the scene. Introducing this now seems like self-sabotage.
  - getcrunk 1y ago
    Or … part of the plan
- octo888 1y ago
  WW2 was the immense shock that gave us that golden age of the 1960s-1990s. But WW2 is now a distant memory for most.
  - 1y ago
isaacremuant 1y ago
This is 1984 installing a camera in your room to monitor your private conversations and criminalize them. That's it. It means that the government asserts the right to bug all your conversations. They've already assured the right to put you in prison for dissenting with the government on policy and you have little to no recourse. Now it's this. You loved this during covid, you'll love this now, "or else". Signed, your local nanny state.
- hackinthebochs 1y ago
  You're right. I've been comparing it to 1984 all this time, when in fact it literally is 1984 just with modern technology. It's interesting how the story 1984 strikes a chord in many people, but something like Chat Control just seems normal. I guess having a camera in your house feels more invasive on a visceral level, despite the fact that we're now putting our whole lives on our phones and online services.
jongjong 1y ago
The only long term solution for this is for people to use more different platforms. Communities should be seeking out new platforms, building their own chat platforms with their own protocols. There is no such thing as a single 'decentralized protocol' - There are incompatible protocols and then there are centralized protocols. When it comes to censorship resistance, incompatibility is a feature. Lack of adoption (unpopularity) is a feature. If other people around you recognize the name of a chat platform you're using, then it's not decentralized and it's almost certainly monitored.
- 0xc0ff338 1y ago
  I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved than that, 99% of people aren't going to do it.
  - jongjong 1y ago
    What about web-based apps which users can access in the browser without download? They can be very user-friendly. Big companies which do surveillance make their browser-based web apps crappy on purpose in order to coerce people into using their app-store app; precisely because it gives them more surveillance capabilities (e.g. location, file access, camera access, ...). A well-intentioned chat app does not need such permissions so a web app is a good medium.
    - 0xc0ff338 1y ago
      I don't know if that's the case now, but not many years back Safari on iPhone wouldn't let you subscribe and receive push notifications. Even something as simple as that is enough to render a web based messenger useless. There's also no API to synchronize your contacts, which is something a 'normal' user would expect, nevermind rather awkard mobile browser tab management which confuses even me, someone who is intimately familiar with how web browsers work.
jjangkke 1y ago
Weird the countries that are all in agreement with chat control all have migration/integration related problems now at odds with local european population that have grown fatigue to the excessive empathy and virtue signaling that have eroded their own identity and safety. Could it be that this is a last ditched attempt to presumably stop a civil war that seems to be brewing by predominantly muslim vs european populations? If this isn't a sign that the integration and the multicultural experiment has failed completely in Europe then I don't know what. A free democratic society that is peaceful would never need wide surveillance net like this. It seems that non of the HN comments touch on the internal demographic tensions that has been going on for quite sometime. Western Europe and Scandinavia reminds me very much of Lebanon before civil war broke out between the Muslims and Christians.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Can you expand more on how many of the key seeming counterexamples to this in the map support this conclusion (e.g. DE should be the most red of them all, no?) or how the desire for CSAM surveillance is a proxy for the mixing rate of different religions in the regions? It feels unlikely we will agree about it, but I'm curious what you're seeing in this data that makes it seem so clearly the causal reason to you.
deadbabe 1y ago
Sometimes I think if this stuff ever got really bad, abandoning smart phones altogether wouldn’t be so bad. I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my interaction with people is through comment sections. I have no interest in being in group chats, I’d rather meet up with people in person and socialize that way. It’s not the end of the world if smartphones just become a convenient way for governments to track you, there is totally a different way to live without them, and maybe it’s simple and beautiful. If you really have a serious use case for peer to peer end to end encryption, you should be using something like Meshtastic.
- bojo 1y ago
  This was my thought as well. Back to dumb devices and call it a day.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Yup. Everything a smartphone does can be done by other things way better.
- poly2it 1y ago
  Enlightening, I'm already looking forward to the next ten years of civilisation!
thw_9a83c 1y ago
As both an EU citizen and a computer programmer, I applaud this article, and I generally agree with its sentiment. But let's be realistic. Chat control is going to happen sooner or later. This is a Hacker News forum. The audience here is very knowledgeable about computer science and fully aware of how technologically impractical the idea of fighting CSAM in this way is. But the general public is somewhere else entirely. They genuinely believe that this will help, to whatever they think it will help. They have no idea that real CSAM distributors will simply adapt by encrypting files into ZIP (or whatever) with strong passwords or using different channels. I've tried explaining this to some of my non-IT friends and family members. I think they now think I'm a pedophile. It's kind of stupid for a father of two teenage daughters, but that's the general public. They want it; they'll get it.
- eigenspace 1y ago
  I dont think it should be taken as a given that it'll happen. While this may be something the public is generally in favour of or ambivalent towards, there's a LOT of EU countries and MEPs that are not at all in favour of this, and already a few EU countries whose courts have ruled that this would violate their constitutions. While its certainly possible it'll happen, it's far from certain. It can be stopped. Of all the currently 'undecided' countries, if just Germany came out against it, that'd be enough to sink it. Germans are pretty pro-privacy people, and the government would win no popularity by supporting it. Even if the German government supported it though, the German MEPs would likely still end up mostly voting no
  - thw_9a83c 1y ago
    I know there are some countries that are surprisingly sane in this respect, and Germany is one of them. Also, the EU parliament is probably still mostly against it, too. So it will certainly be some time before this happens. However, we should never underestimate the "salami" method, this matter will certainly go through.
- asdff 1y ago
  Of course the elephant in the room is all of this content and bad behavior predates the internet entirely. The internet is used because it is more convenient than mailing polaroids to a dead drop address. Not because it enables anything that wasn't happening previously. Makes it a little easier perhaps, but even that is arguable given the oversight today.
mnls 1y ago
Don't worry people. If you are not a European let me tell you how it goes. The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it. Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.
- giveita 1y ago
  Would this have been UK/Germany back in the day?
  - octo888 1y ago
    UK-Germany-France collectively I think
  - enlyth 1y ago
    Probably better for you guys that UK is out now, our government would have been salivating at the thought of spying on every citizen without repercussions
    - tremon 1y ago
      It's one of the reasons they wanted out. Theresa May was very explicit that she considered the European Court of Human Rights an obstacle.
    - gausswho 1y ago
      The UK got what they wanted. Apple still hasn't reenabled ADP so iCloud backups are available for snooping.
- dv_dt 1y ago
  europeans should still use the opportunity to organize against it and future attempts
- wsc981 1y ago
  > ... The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. ... I disagree with this sentence. The unofficial bosses are both Germany and France. Which is also the reason why the people in the richer EU countries will suffer economically when the upcoming bailout for France /will/ happen.
causal 1y ago
The article gives some examples of scope creep but missed the biggest one IMO: copyright enforcement. I suspect if you follow the money, copyright is what keeps things like Chat Control coming back. Fully expect Sony, Disney and other IP to be added to the list of flagged content, keeping us safe from dangerous pirates.
mmaunder 1y ago
“We want to be able to look into all your private spaces to ensure you’re not a child rapist. If you’re not ok with that you must be a child rapist. Now. Do you support keeping our children safe?”. This needs to be a South Park episode if it isn’t already.
thatxliner 1y ago
Regarding all the chat control posts, I've not seen any comments regarding the potential use for homomorphic encryption to abide by this law: if chat control is only used for the detection of CSAM (which is another issue in itself; Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash), then could "allowing the government to snoop" be letting them have the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext? Disclaimer that I actually don't know what the full extent this chat control law is asking for, except for the fact that it will deeply compromise encryption
- sterlind 1y ago
  so you encrypt your image, send it to the government, the government runs its CSAM detector on the encrypted image and gets... an encrypted result. then what? you decrypt the answer and send it back to them? promise that you totally didn't change the answer? FHE is the wrong tool for the job. you'd want verifiable computation (e.g. ni-ZKP) instead. both are too complex and faaar too computationally expensive for actual use.
- beeflet 1y ago
  It would be useless because predators won't run the homomorphic encryption. >Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash "Solved"
g42gregory 1y ago
Events like this always remind me of President George W. Bush's timeless saying: "Freedom is on the march!"
txrx0000 1y ago
They control the guns, so you can't fight back with bullets. They control the airwaves, so you can't fight back with ideas. You're running out of options. The next step is to control your mind.
idiomat9000 1y ago
[dead]
petermcneeley 1y ago
The people of europe need to stop pretending that whatever controls europe is interested in democoracy, free speech, justice or freedom.
- Nursie 1y ago
  Why? Democracy is being served. People want this stuff. HN people maybe not, but let's not pretend we represent anything but a noisy minority. It's entirely democratic AFAICT, "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" won the argument some time ago. Free speech is not held as an absolute in many countries as it is in the US, and never has been. It is in a bad state in some places (the UK seems to be performing poorly on this measure) but a lot of places feel the right to spew whatever toxic lies spring to mind without consequences might not be entirely healthy either. Justice? I think justice is performed better in many European nations than most of the rest of the world. And freedom... lots of people like to claim the US is the most free place on earth, but it's really not clear that's true. There are freedoms in other countries not enjoyed in the US. Here in Australia for example, I am free to collect the rainwater and filter it for my drinking-water supply, something that's not true in every state.
  - petermcneeley 1y ago
    If you've seen nothing and if the crimes of the government remain unknown to you then ... well enough said. Enjoy your water.
    - Nursie 1y ago
      The point is that things can be bad without being melodramatically the end of democracy. Is this an authoritarian move that ought to be spoken against by those who know and care? Absolutely. Does it mean that there's no more democracy in Europe? No, that's a little ridiculous.
      - petermcneeley 1y ago
        Who are you trying to convince? I cant help you.
Waterluvian 1y ago
> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is. The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!
sirmike_ 1y ago
Sounds like JD Vance was right. Huh. This with respect is the EU's monster to worry about.
spwa4 1y ago
I hate how people say things like "unquestionably well-intended law enforcement". This is being done for is to protect-the-children, as per usual. So did anyone ask the question ... is law enforcement actually helping children, when they act? This of course often results in the state raising such children, so the real question is how well that works, compared to not acting at all. Turns out there's a huge study on this, and of course the answer is a big fat no. And that was before another 10+ years of funding cuts. https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-02-foster-study_N.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usato... https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDocumentID=9316 https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc... So no, this is not about law enforcement helping children, because they don't provide a solution for the damage they do when acting. The result is law enforcement, on average, makes things worse for children, not better. These institutions are also getting systematically defunded across the EU, it's not getting better. It is not reasonably believable this is about protecting children. You want to protect children? FIRST, you restore the budget of the institutions caring for children after law enforcement "helps".
egorfine 1y ago
I'm afraid the Chat Control will pass, sooner or later. The procedure is very simple: reintroduce the bill every other year until the public will not be bothered to hear anymore. Now, you may think you are the smart one and can always revert to the good old days of OTR[1]. But no, the next thing I can see happening is the smartphone OS conveniently doing client-side scanning of everything on the screen for you. You know, for developers' convenience. And then it's game over: you will not be able to take a look at the Tiananmen Square picture in any installed app. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging
cphoover 1y ago
I'm no expert but to me, what's particularly silly about "breaking encryption" is it does nothing to prevent using user agents from employing their own encryption layers over other messaging system like gpg/pgp or others. So this does nothing to stop someone who is intent on hiding illegal content and it decreases security and privacy for the average user.

788 points by _p2zi 1y ago

[flagged]

it would be great if this article actually explained what Chat Control is somewhere at the top. it says it will, but I’m quite a few paragraphs in and have no idea what I’m supposed to be mad about yet

warkdarrior 1y ago
If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it. From that section: > "In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Although this first derogation was not mandatory, some policymakers kept pushing with new propositions. > A year later, a new regulation (CSAR) was proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs to make scanning messages for CSAM mandatory for all EU countries, and also allow them to break end-to-end encryption. In 2023, the UK passed a similar legislation called the Online Safety Act. These types of messaging mass scanning regulations have been called by critics Chat Control."
- dkdcio 1y ago
  right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is? the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    The other page I was referring to does have some more detail: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future-of-privacy/#what-is-chat-control https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future...
- dwedge 1y ago
  People who know about it are generally already annoyed. The trouble is most people don't know what it is, and those are the people who should be targeted
SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal. > The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section). >The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."
- dkdcio 1y ago
  ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is: > Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." thanks!
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    > including end-to-end encrypted ones How the hang are they planning to do that? I mean, if someone has an end to end encrypted conversation, it's encrypted when it gets to the carrier, and the carrier shouldn't (technically, not anything related about whether they are allowed to or not) be able to decrypt the conversation. If the carrier is terminating the connection, then it's either not end to end encrypted, or it's broken. edit: sorted the grammar/punctuation at the end to improve clarity
    - LocalH 1y ago
      I imagine they'll push for apps to do the scanning prior to encryption and directly after decryption.

closewith 1y ago

For context, this refers to the proposed EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...

77pt77 1y ago

For those complaining the article doesn't explain at the very begining what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... EU's latest attempt to squash privacy rights.

fbhabbed 1y ago
Even the title of that Wikipedia page is misleading and choosen in a way that almost forces your opinion on this (you can't be against a regulation made for such a noble intent, can you?) Why not just call the page Chat Control 2.0?
- 77pt77 1y ago
  It's not the official name. I'm surprised nazi is not part of the title like it has in the past at the national level.

Humorist2290 1y ago

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scope of such a dragnet, the economic impact, the societal damage, all seems rather broad. Yet why don't any major operators in the EU take a stance? Is it really so below the radar, or being kept so below the radar? Just the network egress costs to whatever state sanctioned scanner gets built will in aggregate probably exceed a few hundred MEUR yearly.

mr_toad 1y ago
Having the service provider handle the encryption is very convenient for the users. And, it turns out, the government.
- Humorist2290 1y ago
  Sure, but the way this was written it also includes everything from Gmail to root access servers hosted by Hetzner. Gmail has been doing this for years, but (I assume) not Hetzner. If even hosting providers are dragged into this the scale grows dramatically. Can Hetzner really not even be bothered about having to comply with such ridiculous requirements? To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.
api 1y ago
Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out. Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.

riazrizvi 1y ago

Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping. You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

dingnuts 1y ago
> Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. fuck this attitude with a rake
- kypro 1y ago
  In the UK we take this a step further – if you're by an abortion clinic and the police believe you could be praying in your head for those getting an abortion they can charge you. There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.
  - giveita 1y ago
    Any case law for first claim?
    - DontBreakAlex 1y ago
      Apparently that is Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Article regarding the claim: https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-convicted-for-praying-silently-near-abortion-facility https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-conv... > In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped. I'm all for women's rights, but that's not how to do it

bapak 1y ago

Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children. Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for? I do not understand.

77pt77 1y ago
I do. Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? I know it's diseingenuous but these laws are crafted with that in mind. People that might take a real chance in challenging this are weeded out long before they get to these positions.
- Bender 1y ago
  I expect moms sharing bathtime pictures and videos with each other to get caught up in this as the censors get aroused by the content and project their own feelings of arousal and cognitive dissonance onto the parents sending bobbies and armed police to kick down doors. The legal costs and permenant damage to reputation will undoubtedly destroy many people.
  - the_sleaze_ 1y ago
    Please direct your complaints to our friendly chatbot who is always there to assist 24/7 365
- jasonlotito 1y ago
  > Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? [sic] This is already happening. This is not about that.
Humorist2290 1y ago
From Patrick Brewer's analysis [0] it seems like written into the proposal is to enable members of the government to have access to excepted systems, if applied for things like law enforcement or "national security." If I had to guess, at least a few MEPs expect they will be able to use such an exemption for their personal communications. [0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

noduerme 1y ago

Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
betaby 1y ago
> How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?
svachalek 1y ago
As someone who's only visited, a foreign phone with foreign SIM will get you out. But I think using VPN on a Chinese SIM is somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.
- oefrha 1y ago
  > somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days. It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).
anikom15 1y ago
The Chinese SIM is the key. If you are a foreigner and want to use a phone, either use a burner phone with a Chinese SIM or use international roaming with a non-Chinese SIM. You should not use a Chinese SIM. Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.
alisonatwork 1y ago
You're not thinking about it the right way. Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc. When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.

coldblues 1y ago

Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The level of incompetency and ignorance when it comes to privacy & security makes me deeply angry and frustrated to a level that brings me to nihilism and misanthropy

Marsymars 1y ago
"People showing disregard for your privacy" is a matter of scale when going from analog to digital, it's at least not inconsistent. e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  You need better friends. Most people I chat with regularly absolutely would not volunteer anything to law enforcement.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Yeah, bullshit. "Tell us this thing or you are going to jail. Might have a trial in a week or a month." I promise you you aren't the main character in your friends' lives and they will absolutely give up information on you to save their career and their family.
nullc 1y ago
Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities. Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation. The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)

gjsman-1000 1y ago

As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground. Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92. Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.

jonaharagon 1y ago
Realistically the EU only cares about protecting their citizens from private companies, and especially American ones. When it comes to government overreach they know virtually no bounds. Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all. Two approaches with the same outcome, absolutely.
didibus 1y ago
I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government. The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so. Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you. Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc. And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well. In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc. In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime. Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.

tailfra 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

kylemaxwell 1y ago

This is a terrible article about what sounds like a legitimate problem. Even in the section, "What is Chat Control?", the answer to the question is buried in the middle of the seventh paragraph. If the writer of this post wants people to oppose it, they really should do a better job of explaining at the very top what "it" is.

ryanisnan 1y ago
I think you're being hyperbolic. It wasn't terrible, but I do agree, I had to dig for "What is Chat Control". It read to me like a panicked person, repeatedly saying, "You've gotta hear this..." over and over, before getting to the point.

0x008 1y ago

This is one of many laws the EU and member states are pushing in order to implement more online surveillance. I always wonder why individuals (representatives) would push for these kind of surveillance laws? I think politicians usually pass laws which help themselves or their lobbies gain power and influence on economical levels, but I wonder why anyone would push for these kind of legislation even before an authoritarian state is on place. What is there to gain on an individual level?

pas 1y ago
individuals mostly have a few things they care about, but most people don't understand shit especially technology especially information technology politicians are selected for being people-oriented therefore most are hopelessly underinformed and it's very very very easy to get caught up in ideologies and then means to an end seems like business as usual
dchftcs 1y ago
Even if a system doesn't look authoritarian, corruption happens all the time. Those involved in corruption naturally want more power for themselves. Additionally some people actively thirst for more power for whatever reasons, and most people don't want to be constrained in their jobs, and they are all aligned in expanding governmental power. You need some discipline to commit to the idea that "I don't want the ability to see encrypted chats, even if that makes my job 90% easier to do", and I don't trust most people to have it.

roscas 1y ago

Just read something on Reddit "Is WhatsApp lying about it's end-to-end encryption?" so no need to write down again here. As long as you know when you're being used by their fake services.

nashashmi 1y ago

The Usual. Govt trying to harness private systems for the purpose of public surveillance. They do this using warrants. And subpoena. We need a personal declaration of rights that says private systems are not in anyway obligated to extend the reach of govt surveillance networks, without the consent of the private party. It is a small protective measure. The next step will be for govt to bully everyone to give consent to their surveillance systems … or else. But as of right now, the law is arbitrarily taking for granted that private surveillance systems belong to govt regulations.

MaKey 1y ago

I emailed all MEPs for my country one month ago. Apart from out-of-office notices I didn't get anything back yet.

fbhabbed 1y ago
You will eventually get a canned AI made reply (just like all the canned AI mails they have received these days due to websites creating templates for them).

7373737373 1y ago

Patrick Breyer is doing god's work!

zmmmmm 1y ago

Of all the arguments presented I'm surprised to see absent the one that seems most obvious to me: encryption is just math, there's no way to actually ban it. If criminals think their conversations are going to be detected they aren't going to just say "oh well let's not crime now". They are going to simply spin up their own e2e encrypted channels. The software is nearly trivial, the technical barriers are very low - it's hard to think why it won't happen. So then what? They start outlawing encryption altogether? knowledge of math? How would you claw back all the public and freely available software that people can already use to encrypt messages to each other?

jonaharagon 1y ago
> They start outlawing encryption altogether? This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.
- Tade0 1y ago
  Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".
    - Tade0 1y ago
      "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

chairmansteve 1y ago

Samizdat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
Self-host may be the new Samizdat.

EGreg 1y ago

Would chat control also force open source software to put in backdoors? Like if users run their own little servers somewhere, and those load websites, or they sideload apps to the app store (thanks to EU hehe).

sterlind 1y ago
I'd personally like to have a FOSS, privacy-aware CSAM (or even generic gore/porn) detector I could plug into Matrix/Lemmy/Mastodon servers. something self-hostable, so I could run those services without worrying about pedos and trolls ruining my platform. I'm not sure if something like it exists. I'm not sure if it could exist. PhotoDNA (the old CSAM detector) ended up being somewhat reversible, so that you could actually turn signatures back into obscene material. because of this, the signature databases were shared under strict NDA, only to large players. probably the most realistic solution is a generic porn classifier convnet. if it blocks adult porn, it should block CSAM too (hopefully?) they are not reliant on image hashes, and reversibility concerns apply less because the dataset used to train it was presumably legal (if distasteful.)
- beeflet 1y ago
  I am working on something like this using multimodal models

piker 1y ago

It seems like the golden age of freedom is behind us for now, and we’re going to descend for a while back into nationalism and authoritarianism

seneca 1y ago
While I agree with you about rising authoritarianism, I'm confused what this has to do with nationalism. Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization. If anything, this sort of transnational authoritarianism is a bigger threat, and likely to promote nationalist backlash.
- piker 1y ago
  I meant them as independent threats.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  > Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization It is not. It is being pushed by certain politicians from certain member nations onto the commission.
gobdovan 1y ago
Funniest part is, current EU politicians are setting these systems up just as nationalist and authoritarian politicians (their adversaries) start to dominate the scene. Introducing this now seems like self-sabotage.
- getcrunk 1y ago
  Or … part of the plan
octo888 1y ago
WW2 was the immense shock that gave us that golden age of the 1960s-1990s. But WW2 is now a distant memory for most.
- 1y ago

isaacremuant 1y ago

This is 1984 installing a camera in your room to monitor your private conversations and criminalize them. That's it. It means that the government asserts the right to bug all your conversations. They've already assured the right to put you in prison for dissenting with the government on policy and you have little to no recourse. Now it's this. You loved this during covid, you'll love this now, "or else". Signed, your local nanny state.

hackinthebochs 1y ago
You're right. I've been comparing it to 1984 all this time, when in fact it literally is 1984 just with modern technology. It's interesting how the story 1984 strikes a chord in many people, but something like Chat Control just seems normal. I guess having a camera in your house feels more invasive on a visceral level, despite the fact that we're now putting our whole lives on our phones and online services.

jongjong 1y ago

The only long term solution for this is for people to use more different platforms. Communities should be seeking out new platforms, building their own chat platforms with their own protocols. There is no such thing as a single 'decentralized protocol' - There are incompatible protocols and then there are centralized protocols. When it comes to censorship resistance, incompatibility is a feature. Lack of adoption (unpopularity) is a feature. If other people around you recognize the name of a chat platform you're using, then it's not decentralized and it's almost certainly monitored.

0xc0ff338 1y ago
I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved than that, 99% of people aren't going to do it.
- jongjong 1y ago
  What about web-based apps which users can access in the browser without download? They can be very user-friendly. Big companies which do surveillance make their browser-based web apps crappy on purpose in order to coerce people into using their app-store app; precisely because it gives them more surveillance capabilities (e.g. location, file access, camera access, ...). A well-intentioned chat app does not need such permissions so a web app is a good medium.
  - 0xc0ff338 1y ago
    I don't know if that's the case now, but not many years back Safari on iPhone wouldn't let you subscribe and receive push notifications. Even something as simple as that is enough to render a web based messenger useless. There's also no API to synchronize your contacts, which is something a 'normal' user would expect, nevermind rather awkard mobile browser tab management which confuses even me, someone who is intimately familiar with how web browsers work.

jjangkke 1y ago

Weird the countries that are all in agreement with chat control all have migration/integration related problems now at odds with local european population that have grown fatigue to the excessive empathy and virtue signaling that have eroded their own identity and safety. Could it be that this is a last ditched attempt to presumably stop a civil war that seems to be brewing by predominantly muslim vs european populations? If this isn't a sign that the integration and the multicultural experiment has failed completely in Europe then I don't know what. A free democratic society that is peaceful would never need wide surveillance net like this. It seems that non of the HN comments touch on the internal demographic tensions that has been going on for quite sometime. Western Europe and Scandinavia reminds me very much of Lebanon before civil war broke out between the Muslims and Christians.

zamadatix 1y ago
Can you expand more on how many of the key seeming counterexamples to this in the map support this conclusion (e.g. DE should be the most red of them all, no?) or how the desire for CSAM surveillance is a proxy for the mixing rate of different religions in the regions? It feels unlikely we will agree about it, but I'm curious what you're seeing in this data that makes it seem so clearly the causal reason to you.

deadbabe 1y ago

Sometimes I think if this stuff ever got really bad, abandoning smart phones altogether wouldn’t be so bad. I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my interaction with people is through comment sections. I have no interest in being in group chats, I’d rather meet up with people in person and socialize that way. It’s not the end of the world if smartphones just become a convenient way for governments to track you, there is totally a different way to live without them, and maybe it’s simple and beautiful. If you really have a serious use case for peer to peer end to end encryption, you should be using something like Meshtastic.

bojo 1y ago
This was my thought as well. Back to dumb devices and call it a day.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Yup. Everything a smartphone does can be done by other things way better.
poly2it 1y ago
Enlightening, I'm already looking forward to the next ten years of civilisation!

thw_9a83c 1y ago

As both an EU citizen and a computer programmer, I applaud this article, and I generally agree with its sentiment. But let's be realistic. Chat control is going to happen sooner or later. This is a Hacker News forum. The audience here is very knowledgeable about computer science and fully aware of how technologically impractical the idea of fighting CSAM in this way is. But the general public is somewhere else entirely. They genuinely believe that this will help, to whatever they think it will help. They have no idea that real CSAM distributors will simply adapt by encrypting files into ZIP (or whatever) with strong passwords or using different channels. I've tried explaining this to some of my non-IT friends and family members. I think they now think I'm a pedophile. It's kind of stupid for a father of two teenage daughters, but that's the general public. They want it; they'll get it.

eigenspace 1y ago
I dont think it should be taken as a given that it'll happen. While this may be something the public is generally in favour of or ambivalent towards, there's a LOT of EU countries and MEPs that are not at all in favour of this, and already a few EU countries whose courts have ruled that this would violate their constitutions. While its certainly possible it'll happen, it's far from certain. It can be stopped. Of all the currently 'undecided' countries, if just Germany came out against it, that'd be enough to sink it. Germans are pretty pro-privacy people, and the government would win no popularity by supporting it. Even if the German government supported it though, the German MEPs would likely still end up mostly voting no
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  I know there are some countries that are surprisingly sane in this respect, and Germany is one of them. Also, the EU parliament is probably still mostly against it, too. So it will certainly be some time before this happens. However, we should never underestimate the "salami" method, this matter will certainly go through.
asdff 1y ago
Of course the elephant in the room is all of this content and bad behavior predates the internet entirely. The internet is used because it is more convenient than mailing polaroids to a dead drop address. Not because it enables anything that wasn't happening previously. Makes it a little easier perhaps, but even that is arguable given the oversight today.

mnls 1y ago

Don't worry people. If you are not a European let me tell you how it goes. The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it. Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.

giveita 1y ago
Would this have been UK/Germany back in the day?
- octo888 1y ago
  UK-Germany-France collectively I think
- enlyth 1y ago
  Probably better for you guys that UK is out now, our government would have been salivating at the thought of spying on every citizen without repercussions
  - tremon 1y ago
    It's one of the reasons they wanted out. Theresa May was very explicit that she considered the European Court of Human Rights an obstacle.
  - gausswho 1y ago
    The UK got what they wanted. Apple still hasn't reenabled ADP so iCloud backups are available for snooping.
dv_dt 1y ago
europeans should still use the opportunity to organize against it and future attempts
wsc981 1y ago
> ... The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. ... I disagree with this sentence. The unofficial bosses are both Germany and France. Which is also the reason why the people in the richer EU countries will suffer economically when the upcoming bailout for France /will/ happen.

causal 1y ago

The article gives some examples of scope creep but missed the biggest one IMO: copyright enforcement. I suspect if you follow the money, copyright is what keeps things like Chat Control coming back. Fully expect Sony, Disney and other IP to be added to the list of flagged content, keeping us safe from dangerous pirates.

mmaunder 1y ago

“We want to be able to look into all your private spaces to ensure you’re not a child rapist. If you’re not ok with that you must be a child rapist. Now. Do you support keeping our children safe?”. This needs to be a South Park episode if it isn’t already.

thatxliner 1y ago

Regarding all the chat control posts, I've not seen any comments regarding the potential use for homomorphic encryption to abide by this law: if chat control is only used for the detection of CSAM (which is another issue in itself; Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash), then could "allowing the government to snoop" be letting them have the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext? Disclaimer that I actually don't know what the full extent this chat control law is asking for, except for the fact that it will deeply compromise encryption

sterlind 1y ago
so you encrypt your image, send it to the government, the government runs its CSAM detector on the encrypted image and gets... an encrypted result. then what? you decrypt the answer and send it back to them? promise that you totally didn't change the answer? FHE is the wrong tool for the job. you'd want verifiable computation (e.g. ni-ZKP) instead. both are too complex and faaar too computationally expensive for actual use.
beeflet 1y ago
It would be useless because predators won't run the homomorphic encryption. >Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash "Solved"

g42gregory 1y ago

Events like this always remind me of President George W. Bush's timeless saying: "Freedom is on the march!"

txrx0000 1y ago

They control the guns, so you can't fight back with bullets. They control the airwaves, so you can't fight back with ideas. You're running out of options. The next step is to control your mind.

idiomat9000 1y ago

[dead]

petermcneeley 1y ago

The people of europe need to stop pretending that whatever controls europe is interested in democoracy, free speech, justice or freedom.

Nursie 1y ago
Why? Democracy is being served. People want this stuff. HN people maybe not, but let's not pretend we represent anything but a noisy minority. It's entirely democratic AFAICT, "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" won the argument some time ago. Free speech is not held as an absolute in many countries as it is in the US, and never has been. It is in a bad state in some places (the UK seems to be performing poorly on this measure) but a lot of places feel the right to spew whatever toxic lies spring to mind without consequences might not be entirely healthy either. Justice? I think justice is performed better in many European nations than most of the rest of the world. And freedom... lots of people like to claim the US is the most free place on earth, but it's really not clear that's true. There are freedoms in other countries not enjoyed in the US. Here in Australia for example, I am free to collect the rainwater and filter it for my drinking-water supply, something that's not true in every state.
- petermcneeley 1y ago
  If you've seen nothing and if the crimes of the government remain unknown to you then ... well enough said. Enjoy your water.
  - Nursie 1y ago
    The point is that things can be bad without being melodramatically the end of democracy. Is this an authoritarian move that ought to be spoken against by those who know and care? Absolutely. Does it mean that there's no more democracy in Europe? No, that's a little ridiculous.
    - petermcneeley 1y ago
      Who are you trying to convince? I cant help you.

Waterluvian 1y ago

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is. The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!

sirmike_ 1y ago

Sounds like JD Vance was right. Huh. This with respect is the EU's monster to worry about.

spwa4 1y ago

I hate how people say things like "unquestionably well-intended law enforcement". This is being done for is to protect-the-children, as per usual. So did anyone ask the question ... is law enforcement actually helping children, when they act? This of course often results in the state raising such children, so the real question is how well that works, compared to not acting at all. Turns out there's a huge study on this, and of course the answer is a big fat no. And that was before another 10+ years of funding cuts. https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-02-foster-study_N.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usato... https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDocumentID=9316 https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc... So no, this is not about law enforcement helping children, because they don't provide a solution for the damage they do when acting. The result is law enforcement, on average, makes things worse for children, not better. These institutions are also getting systematically defunded across the EU, it's not getting better. It is not reasonably believable this is about protecting children. You want to protect children? FIRST, you restore the budget of the institutions caring for children after law enforcement "helps".

egorfine 1y ago

I'm afraid the Chat Control will pass, sooner or later. The procedure is very simple: reintroduce the bill every other year until the public will not be bothered to hear anymore. Now, you may think you are the smart one and can always revert to the good old days of OTR[1]. But no, the next thing I can see happening is the smartphone OS conveniently doing client-side scanning of everything on the screen for you. You know, for developers' convenience. And then it's game over: you will not be able to take a look at the Tiananmen Square picture in any installed app. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

cphoover 1y ago

I'm no expert but to me, what's particularly silly about "breaking encryption" is it does nothing to prevent using user agents from employing their own encryption layers over other messaging system like gpg/pgp or others. So this does nothing to stop someone who is intent on hiding illegal content and it decreases security and privacy for the average user.