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Suspicionless ChatControl must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law
- w4rh4wk5 1y agoAlright, please now add this to your constitution. Hopefully other countries will follow.
- 9dev 1y agoGermany doesn’t have a constitution, but surveillance without grave suspicion is already illegal, hence the references to rule of law.
- w4rh4wk5 1y agoWhat do you mean, they don't have a constitution (Ger: Verfassung)?
- raxxorraxor 1y agoIt more or less a constitution. It is not effective though. It proposes your home is protected against state access, but that privilege is lost if you call a public official a dick. Such a constitution is empirically useless. No constitution is perfect, but the US one is probably still more or less the top spot.
- yencabulator 1y ago3rd paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law_for_the_Federal_Republic_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law_for_the_Federal_Repu...
- rsynnott 1y agoIt's questionable whether Chat Control would have survived an engagement with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (to avoid annoying eurosceptics, efforts to recast the treaties as a constitution were abandoned); other mass-surveillance-y stuff, notably the Data Retention Directive, were nuked by the ECJ.
- yencabulator 1y agoAlready done! > However, Finland cannot support the most recent compromise proposal because it contains a detection order that has been found problematic from a constitutional standpoint. https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/ministerial-committee-on-european-union-affairs-discusses-proposal-for-eu-regulation-on-combating-sexual-violence-against-children https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/ministerial-committee-on-euro... (Now the challenge is just holding politicians to it.)
- viccis 1y agoThe state of exception wants what it wants, unfortunately.
- kubb 1y agoQuestion to Chinese citizens on HN: do you feel oppressed by your government? Do you feel that rule of law exists in China? The notion of encrypted private communication didn't exist a couple of decades ago and people are talking about it as necessary for rule of law. There's a missing logical link in there somewhere.
- nerdsniper 1y agoOne of the founders of the United States Thomas Jefferson was a pretty big encryption enthusiast. He invented[0] his own disk cipher that is on display in the National Museum of Cryptography. The concept of Americans sending encrypted messages had been normalized since before the United States existed. People have always been able to send each other handwritten letters securely encrypted with OTP's / etc. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk
- kubb 1y agoYeah, they could. -- You've changed the contents of your comment. I don't adhere to the American Civil Religion, so I don't need to consider opinions of the founders of the project.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnd still can.
- alejoar 1y agoI think you are mixing two separate things: rule of law vs privacy. Sure, we didn’t have encrypted communication a couple decades ago, but we did have an expectation of privacy: letters, phone calls, even in-person conversations. Encryption is just the modern way of preserving that same right in a digital context.
- kubb 1y agoAm I mixing it, or is Germany's Minister of Justice?
- JoshTriplett 1y agoReferring to "suspicion" at all here is a distraction that suggests it would somehow be okay in other circumstances. There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances.
- hackernewsdhsu 1y agoThe "device" is backdoored. People must be responsible for their own security. Sad, but true. Learn GPG people.
- igor47 1y agoIf the device is already backdoored all hope is lost. The device can exfiltrate your private key and the password.
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoTrue, but government is not a monolith.
- hackernewsdhsu 1y agoYou must assume it is backdoored. Cell [smart] phones are the greatest surveillance network the government has ever created. But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you phone's location can be hundres of miles away. Use it to your advantage.... They do.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoCurrent smartphones are already more careful about cell modems than they used to be. And in an ideal world, cell modems would have even less information than they do, and could be (and should be) powered off by the phone until needed. Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive cellular data connection that was intentionally uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way wifi is. Right now, the only legitimate reason cell networks have to identify specific devices to users is for billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in various ways, either by making it a public good, or by integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data connections.
- nickslaughter02 1y agoHow do you make sure that "suspicion based" Chat Control can't be exploited? All client side scanning must be explicitly banned. The EU had an opportunity to do just that with their AI Act.
- some_random 1y agoWe have infrastructure and precedent for it, you should need a warrant.
- nickslaughter02 1y agoThat would require trust in the same governments that try to pass this mass surveillance law again and again. Needless to say I don't share that trust.
- bluGill 1y agoYou have to trust something though. There are people out to get you - maybe not you personally, but there are evil people. We need to handle criminals, letting them go free isn't not a good answer. You seem to be saying that letting them go free is the best answer we have. This may be correct - it is something we as society need to debate in great depth. However it still isn't a good answer.
- nickslaughter02 1y agoYes, we should be willing to accept a certain level of crime if it means privacy and security for hundreds of millions of regular people. Even more so when their cure is worse than the disease.
- bluGill 1y agoNote that other threads in this post have said "with a warrant" which is different from general lack of privacy. These are things we need to debate as a society and it means understanding details not making two sentences on a discussion board with less than 15 minutes of thought... (I of course have no idea how much thought you may have put into this before this topic came up, I only see the time stamps on our comments... This is why I hate debates - you don't have time to make a well thought response to something new and so you can lose to a bad idea if you don't come up with the right counter)
- nakamoto_damacy 1y agoThe "rule of law" like the "rules-based order" in geopolitics, in the net result. is a facade for the rule of the powerful who are usually corporations and oligarchs whom are protected by the gov because they control the politicians. We all heard about the E[stein files, and who is being protected. And we heard about the pedophile who was arrested in Las Vegas then allowed to flee. We all know that the law does not apply if you hold power. It's all about power.
- rasengan 1y agoSurveillance is the occupation of the mental space and results in modification of behavior. Default mass surveillance, or in other words suspicionless surveillance, then leads to the end of mental sovereignty and, therefore, freedom. That is not a state governed by rule of law, but instead, a peoples being ruled by the power of surveillance.
- BoredPositron 1y agoI am an information totalist. The web/world would be a better place if ALL information was free and available to all. You could actually make informed decisions for yourself without being played by anyone.
- teekert 1y agoSo you have a camera in your bedroom, streaming all the time.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoFeel free to share all your personal information if that is your preference. You don't get to have mine.
- BoredPositron 1y agoI thought the emphasis on ALL was pretty obvious in my initial comment.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoAnd I thought the refusal was pretty obvious in my reply.
- BoredPositron 1y agoYou made it personal while my statement is everything but.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoI'm not making it personal. In general, people who believe that all private information should be shared are free to make that decision for their data but not other people's data.
- baobun 1y ago
- dmitrygr 1y ago> in a state governed by the rule of law we got any of those? please tell me so i can move there
- bluGill 1y agoYou will not find perfection, but Canada, anything in EU, Japan, the US, New Zealand all come to mind (and several more that I am not confident I can spell) as places where rule of law happens. Countries like Brazil and India probably belong on the list despite some faults.
- lucianbr 1y agoAs a romanian, I must tell you that "anything in the EU" is overly optimistic. Maybe anything in Western Europe...
- bluGill 1y agoThe EU varies a lot. However they do have some standards and so even the worse is pretty good on the world stage. (Though Romania is not the only country in the EU with issues, and so if I was to list all countries you would probably be closer to Brazil - but understand I'm don't have much insight into the state of your country)
- simplyluke 1y agoA lot of negative comments here, many of which I agree with, but Germany opposing this is a net-good thing given how influential they are within the EU.
- nickslaughter02 1y agoYes but this sort of wording might suggest they want just small changes. We must keep the pressure.
- r0ckarong 1y agoAlso it would mean that the politicians and lobbyists would be subject to that surveillance by default. Can't have that.
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y agoWhat can we do to make sure any kind of ChatControl, not just "suspicionless", doesn't come to pass? Where should I send my money?
- nickslaughter02 1y agoKeep up the pressure. Write to your representatives. Write and inform the public. Never think somebody else will do it for you. Vote for the right party. https://edri.org/ https://edri.org/ https://noyb.eu/en https://noyb.eu/en https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y agoThank you!
- defanor 1y agoGood for Germany and the EU, but how (or why) is the rule of law supposed to make it a taboo? Is it thrown in just to sound nicer, or did they skip a few steps in the reasoning? I heard "rule of law" being used to justify roughly the opposite (Russian laws, including mass surveillance and censorship), and neither that was clear; apparently it worked simply as an universal justification. The usual definition is that there are written laws that apply to everyone equally, as opposed to a rule by decree and some kind of tyranny, and the laws do not change too often, are not made for particular occasions (so they do not turn into decrees effectively). So I'd think "suspicionless" -- that is, universal -- sounds closer to it, rather than selective/arbitrary surveillance on a suspicion. Unless such suspicion is at least decided by a court, without rubber-stamping.
- jopsen 1y agoJust my personal, not fully conceived opinion: ChatControl cannot exists without criminalizing cryptography (crypto with backdoors is not crypto). When the act of uttering sufficiently complicated mathematics is a crime, we entering the territory of absurdity. Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be arbitrary.
- retrac 1y agoI also think the public generally doesn't understand much of cryptography. It's thought of as some sort of dark art. And to be reliant on computers. But some dice and basic arithmetic will suffice -- though you still shouldn't roll your own crypto system.
- jamesfisher 1y agoHa, a lovely new meaning for “rolling your own crypto”
- didericis 1y ago> Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be arbitrary. I am against criminalizing cryptography and largely agree about it being infeasible given the extent of proliferation and ease of replicating it/am playing devil's advocate: Laws banning math related to manufacturing nuclear weapons can and has been enforced. It's important to take legal threats like ChatControl seriously and not just dismiss it as absurd/unenforceable overreach, even if that's likely true.
- c0nstantien 1y ago[dead]
- jalapenos 1y agoNever seems to matter how many horror stories are written or have actually happened regarding totalitarian states, people just seem drawn to them, like they can't help themselves. What absurd news to be hearing in 2025, that "western liberal democracy" states are discussing whether to have the power to listen in on everyone's conversations - something Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia could have only dreamed of.