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The disguised return of EU Chat Control
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-the-back-door-breyer-warns-the-eu-is-playing-us-for-fools-now-theyre-scanning-our-texts-and-banning-teens/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-th...
- randomtoast 1y agoThe problem is that they can repeat this game indefinitely, Chat Control 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 231.24, ... Just slightly modify the initial Chat Control proposal, make it sound less harsh, and then resubmit it until they achieve a sufficient majority in the EU Parliament, while the general public gets too tired of the topic to create sufficient resistance.
- txrx0000 1y agoThis might keep happening if nobody knows who "they" are. Those individuals need to be found and publically shamed.
- squarefoot 1y agofightchatcontrol.eu published the complete list of all countries stance on Chat Control and all representatives. They can be contacted via mail directly from the site.
- txrx0000 1y agoThanks for the link. While it will help to pressure undecided representatives and see who not to vote for in the future, the root cause of the problem remains unaddressed. Why do these proposals exist? Who/what is motivating them? It seems like nefarious actors are coordinating in secret, and they need to be exposed. We should also try to minimize the number of useful idiots who are genuinely concerned about children's safety. There are two excuses being used to push these surveillance laws: CSAM scanning and content moderation for children. These are bad excuses and we need to call them out as such in every conversation. CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the process by which CSAM is created. The root problem is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. Our efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place. The under-16 social media ban ignores the actual problem of parental responsibility. We could implement configurable IP filters on the device itself at the OS level, with the setting being protected by a password parents can set, and this could be done completely offline. It would be way easier to implement and will work better than any of these remote solutions. And as a matter of principle: it is the responsibility of parents to decide how to raise their own children.
- squarefoot 1y agoThe purpose has never been to protect children; it's just a convenient motivation against which nobody would dare to object, just like mandating age restriction for porn sites is nothing more than an excuse to pushing further for elimination of anonymity, which started with porn sites exactly because nobody would dare exposing themselves for objecting to it. As I already wrote elsewhere, this happens while thousands of children are murdered in various wars, to their complete silence because going anywhere beyond the usual empty public condemnation followed by nothing would put them against very powerful foreign governments.
- demarq 1y agoThat the EU has these “closed door” processes doesn’t sound very democratic. The frequency, aggression and coordination around chat control, both in the Uk and Eu tells me there is a single entity. It’s not just by chance
- BoredPositron 1y agoWriting about yourself in third person like this is really odd.
- sixhobbits 1y agoThe site is in his name but it has a lot of content - I don't think he writes it all. The stuff I've seen from him directly is mainly in German so I think often people on his team write e.g. English summaries and quote what he said as a translation
- thw_9a83c 1y agoApparently it didn't work last time, so why not try again with a more vague language, an expanded scope and even slapping the age verification on top of it? And all of this while still preserving our privacy. This time, we should feel 100% completely reassured (from the proposal): Regulation whilst still allowing for end-to-end encryption, nothing in this Regulation should be interpreted as prohibiting, weakening or circumventing, requiring to disable, or making end-to-end encryption impossible.
- doublerabbit 1y agoThis.. seriously “Digital House Arrest”: Teens under 16 face a blanket ban from WhatsApp, Instagram, online games, and countless other apps with chat functions, allegedly to protect them from grooming. For which I agree. “Digital isolation instead of education, protection by exclusion instead of empowerment – this is paternalistic, out of touch with reality, and pedagogical nonsense.”
- johnisgood 1y agoI completely disagree. I would not know English or anything about computers, and my childhood would have been quite sad were there such a retarded ban[1]. I do not care about WhatsApp and Instagram, but online games and apps with chat functions? Come on now. "Allegedly" is the keyword. At any rate, see Roblox and Discord. Do something with those platforms first. :) [1] I was around 12 years old when I met an older guy IRL who I have met in an online game initially. Can you imagine the safety? :D He showed me his laptop on which he had a Linux distro installed, and the rest is history.
- eldgfipo 1y agoSo many attempts over the years to infringe upon citizens privacy and civil liberties, I don't know about the rest of EU population but I'm done with it. Might as well let it go pure evil so when the time comes, the people will be less hesitant to get rid of the whole EU bureaucracy and the armies of corporate lobbyists altogether
- r14c 1y agoI'm curious about this mindset. Wouldn't it be easier to reform your system before it has gone "pure evil"? Or do you expect nobody cares enough to do that without the threat of impending doom to motivate them?
- kennykartman 1y agoI believe people will typically not stand for their rights (even less so for other's rights) unless they are significantly bothered or led to think the situation is dire. This is not great, but it is also natural for the human condition: unless one is well-informed and especially conscious about the issues that come with reduction of rights, they will not even realize what is happening until it is happening.
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoI poked my Europarliamentarians. But it's -like- already almost 15:00 on the european mainland, so I'm not sure how much it still helps.
- kennykartman 1y agoSame here. I got no answer. Ahhhh, no: I got one! An automated answer from a deputy on vacation.
- dfawcus 1y agoThese things are rather pointless, as one could always use a standalone encryption app, and copy&paste text to and from a non encrypted chat app. i.e. how one originally made use of PGP. The difficulty which PGP had of key exchange could be handled somewhat like Signal does now, via a personal physical sync of the phones. At which point, the authorities will still be able to make use of "traffic analysis" as they always have. So they'll be able to tell which parties are communicating, but not what is being said.
- dfawcus 1y agoI find it sadly amusing that the proposed "compromise text" document is marked as "(Text with EEA relevance)" - i.e. they want to push it on the EEA states.
- nik_ca 1y agoDo you know where there is no chat control possible? XMPP / Jabber [1]. Private, convenient, reliable, distributed, free. [1] https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/
- whynotmakealt 1y agoIsn't the same true for matrix as well? I appreciate xmpp as well but I have actually seen uses of matrix in open source community etc. a lot more so what are your thoughts on it? Note for anyone interested in matrix, to not use the main matrix.org but other instances as well to actually have more decentralization/distribution
- nik_ca 1y agoYes, you're right, matrix too. However, I've tried ruining servers for both, synapse for matrix and prosody for xmpp and I should say matrix felt very sluggish and limited, while prosody is fast and insanely flexible. In addition, client software for XMPP is more diverse and feature-rich, I'm particularly impressed by movim (web) and conversations (android). Also, there are variety of bridges for everything, e.g. matrix <-> whatsapp or xmpp <-> telegram, so one is not limited too much while committing to a certain messaging tech.
- mrsssnake 1y agoUnless you are going to self-host, you would be required to provide government ID for registration on a server.
- Caius-Cosades 1y agoIt's a foregone conclusion that it will pass. There is no such thing as saying "no" to EU power encroachment.
- kaboomshebang 1y agoThis makes me feel pissed off. I used to be Pro EU, now I'm not so sure. (Suddenly I understand Trump voters.)
- mrighele 1y agoSame here. If this pass, I may start voting for Anti-EU parties, regardless for my disgust for them. This is too much of an important issue.
- Itoldmyselfso 1y agoThe eu skeptic partiers, unfortunately, seem to be on quite solid footing on claims of EU bypassing democracy in their decision making. How can the same bill effectively be struck down so many times and then get passed through the back door?!
- nowaymo6237 1y agoPrivacy needs codified! The illusion of safety is not worth it for the fascist regime who turn keys it into a panopticon.
- PeterStuer 1y agoEternal vigilance is needed to stop this. Good luck! It will take just one (manufactured) crisis.
- ryandrake 1y agoWe have to win every time. They only have to win once and it's game over.
- ambicapter 1y agoWhy can't we put up legislation to repeal over and over until it is repealed?
- PeterStuer 1y ago"Over and over" is the hint.
- soulofmischief 1y agoPower/wealth asymmetries. The incumbent organizations are powerful, have many resources and actively work to prevent other organizations from achieving the same level if competency.
- dymk 1y agoBecause legislation like this is a ratchet.
- pembrook 1y agoThe number of laws/rules added vs. removed in any given year is like 100:1. New rules lead to profitable business opportunities (and future lobbies), incumbents get to entrench their positions using the new rules, and people get stockholm syndrome and just end up accepting the new normal. Modern representative democracy is Parkinson's law at work. Government is the purest form of bureaucracy and monopoly. Thus, it finds ways to grow itself every year regardless of what happens.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908672
- api 1y agoThey will keep trying until some version of it passes.
- Humorist2290 1y ago(6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union. The article links to the text of the revised proposal. It reads like they're openly planning to push it again, and soon, and worldwide. The UK and EU seem to be setting aside their differences at least.
- josteink 1y agoSo they’re asking American companies to repeal the first amendment rights of American citizens on all websites accessible in the EU. How this not a declaration of war?
- eptcyka 1y agoI was under the impression that the strong and independent Americans had thicker skin than this.
- progval 1y agoNeither the EU nor American companies are Congress, so they are not bound by the 1st amendment.
- pksebben 1y agoWait, Congress is bound by the first amendment? Someone should tell Congress.
- andybak 1y agoThis is an asymmetric conflict. The factions who want this to pass have more resources, time and background influence and can keep pushing this until they get lucky. And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult. How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
- frogperson 1y agoWe stop allowing the rich to become so rich. Billionares are not compatible with democracy or the greater good.
- CamperBob2 1y agoWhat happens when you get what you want, and rather than magically solving every problem confronting society, it doesn't solve anything at all, and in fact creates several more problems, as generally happens when such ideas are put into practice? What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars?
- snek_case 1y agoAlso how do you avoid billionaires worldwide? Not everyone lives under your government. Even if you could, how do you know for a fact that some people don't secretly control hidden assets? Is Xi openly a billionaire? China is a "communist" country on paper. How does he hold so much power? The sad reality is that the world has a nonzero percentage of power-hungry narcissists. We need governments that are more democratic and robust. We all know that the current government processes are broken and corrupted.
- iovrthoughtthis 1y agoWe iterate.
- tock 1y ago> as generally happens when such ideas are put into practice Is this true? Lots of countries with high living standards have high taxes. It doesn't need to solve every problem but it does help solve the problem of one unelected person holding too much power and influence. > What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars? 1B = 1000M. I think thats high enough. Don't see why you need to make it 1000x smaller to try and make a point.
- pokot0 1y agoHonestly I think privacy is lost. Regardless of what side you were (big fan of privacy here) I feel we have nothing to do but move on and think how to live in a world without privacy. I never wanted privacy anyway: I wanted no discrimination, inclusion, healthy democracy, etc, etc. Privacy has always been a tool for me. At this point, selective privacy like we are experiencing today (we cannot know what’s in the epstein files, but google can send a drone and look into my backyard) serves none of the things I am interested in!
- whatshisface 1y agoThe basic structure of your argument is equivalent to, "I've given up on being allowed to leave my house, I just want to go to the places I need to go."
- binary132 1y agowhat a ludicrously insane take. how can you not believe in privacy? do you think what you do in your home should be private, or do you think it’s fine for someone to put cameras in there? If you do, please feel free to invite them to do so; do not feel free to invite them to put cameras in my home.
- iso1631 1y agoWhether you or I want it or not is irrelevant Over the last 5000 years it's been very rare for plebs to have any privacy. For a brief period from ww2 through to the early 21st century power shifted to the plebs, but since the 1980s that power has shifted back to the feudal barons, and our rights will eventually regress. But the SP500 will be at record highs so everyone will be told they should be happy.
- Havoc 1y agoDystopian BS. It's unfortunate that we've got people in society that are keen on mass surveillance
- sMarsIntruder 1y agoThis Chat Control 2.0 nonsense has to be killed off once for all.
- binary132 1y agowhat is it they’re so concerned about people talking about these days exactly anyway?
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y agoGotta make sure you aren’t saying the wrong things, like criticising rich and powerful people.
- binary132 1y agopeople have been doing that for a long time, but the level of urgency from the system hasn’t been at this level.
- AngryData 1y agoYeah but was it to the same extent? People are regularly posting guillotines these days and our economic outlooks for much of the world, and especially the US, is not all roses and sunshine.
- sph 1y agoIt's because they have finally found the perfect trojan horse—"think of the children!"—in a time when people are too busy entertaining themselves to death. This is their best chance for them to enact mass surveillance, before the hoi polloi crack and finally get out of their couches.
- Muromec 1y agoThe urgency comes from having the actual war on the East side of the EU and whatever the hell is happening down South with refugees and what not. Then in the EU proper -- sabotage acts, ammunition dumps being blown up, cabels cut and drones flying above the military bases hosting nuclear fucking warheads, Chinese and r===an spyies in the parliament, armed nazis in the military, etc, etc. The shit has hit the fan about a decade ago already and not calming down at all, but intelligence gathering capability of secret services of all EU countries are being continiously degraded, because everything is E2E by default and money flows are obscured too. Nobody likes to see shit being on fire and having all the dashboards down. Another happening happens, the services are asked why they didn't prevent it or report it being likely -- what do they answer? "We can't read the damn messages, so we can't know if there is a cell that plans to do it again".
- pcrh 1y agoThe right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, article 8 [0]. It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this. [0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-human-rights-article-8-0 https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...
- pfortuny 1y agoThink of the children. You want the police to solve crimes, right? If you are against this it is because you have something to hide. Also it is more than possible that those politicians do not agree with that Convention.
- pigpag 1y ago[dead]
- crest 1y agoOnly boring people have nothing to hide.
- ntoskrnl_exe 1y agoWow, it’s always crazy how the folks who have nothing to hide get mad when the lock on the stall door in a public bathroom doesn’t work…
- sitzkrieg 1y ago"having something to hide" or defending a human right. who cares. easy to tell where this one gets their feed
- 0_gravitas 1y agoI assumed the post was sarcastic, but Poe's Law I suppose, sadly..
- karhuton 1y ago”2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right EXCEPT such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” Are we reading the same thing? This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.
- layer8 1y agoArticle on Breyer’s own site: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-the-back-door-breyer-warns-the-eu-is-playing-us-for-fools-now-theyre-scanning-our-texts-and-banning-teens/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-th...
- dang 1y agoThanks, we'll put that in the toptext as well.
- stackedinserter 1y agoSociety can't win this without fighting the personalities who drive it. In the end, there's a individual that pushes this, so this very person should be targeted personally. Someone said it's an asymmetric conflict, so we need to pull it to our (human-size) level and fight on our chessboard.
- mrtksn 1y agoDenmark has a month and a half as EU presidency to go. I still don't get why they want this to be their legacy so badly.
- throw-qqqqq 1y agoDenmark mostly has authoritative politicians in government. Pragmatic and without ideology. The misguided tools believe they are doing us all a big favor. They handwavingly dismiss all privacy-related criticism with “well our experts say something else!” and insist there are no privacy issues - but at the same time require exemption for their own caste.
- dmix 1y agoThe EU and European parliaments are very much on the technocracy side, where they defer to experts and studies for everything instead of focusing on the popular interests of the public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
- shevy-java 1y agoI remember that back a few weeks ago on reddit, before I left it, I warned people about this. Well - colour me not so surprised. The lobbyists are back at it. I think we need to permanently crush them now. They attack us here. This is a war.
- okokwhatever 1y agoMy Europe doing european stuff...
- xyzal 1y agoThe GDPR, DMA, DSA are good.
- varispeed 1y agoThis is an ongoing terrorist attack and authorities fail to stop it. Please report these people to the police as attempted terrorist attack. People behind Chat Control should be arrested. A snippet I posted before: If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds. The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design. It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent. The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
- probably_wrong 1y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment, I don't think hyperbole is the solution. This legislation, while reprehensible, is not terrorism. Defining terrorism is particularly difficult (the UN has been trying since the 60s and is trying again this year), but if all intimidation for political gains is terrorism then so is every other political ad from the last 30 years. Banksy would probably argue that regular advertising also qualifies - after all, that's what the "F" in "FOMO" stands for and beauty products are definitely pushing an ideology. You don't have to like the official definition of terrorism, but that doesn't mean that you alone get to decide what it should be.
- varispeed 1y agoThe irony is that we only get stuck in semantic arguments because the authorities refuse to treat this as the kind of act it actually is. If prosecutors applied their own standards consistently, we wouldn’t be debating vocabulary on a message board. Germany’s criminal code already recognises coercion of a population for political ends as a serious offence. If a private organisation tried to impose a system that eliminated private communication, criminalised encryption defaults, and created a permanent climate of fear around ordinary speech, they wouldn’t get a policy debate. They’d get an arrest warrant. The only thing making this “controversial” is institutional hesitation. Everyone knows issuing warrants against EU-level actors would cause political embarrassment, so we pretend the behaviour is something milder, something safer to acknowledge. That gap between what the law says and what the state is willing to enforce is exactly where tragedies start. This isn’t about inflating the meaning of terrorism. It’s about refusing to downgrade coercion just because it comes from people in respectable offices. Words shouldn’t shrink to protect those in power. They should describe what is happening. edit: and whilst we are at the semantics - the word “terrorism” comes from the French Reign of Terror, where the state used fear as an instrument of governance. The original meaning was quite literally state-driven intimidation of an entire population to enforce ideological conformity.
- maybelsyrup 1y agoIf I'm an EU citizen, who do I call and email to yell at about this? I assume my relevant MEP, but anyone else?
- butz 1y agohttps://fightchatcontrol.eu/#contact-tool https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#contact-tool
- klabb3 1y agoThis can backfire bigly for the EU. The whole union is sustained on shared values and interests. Sneaking in surveillance is extremely offputting for the sentiment towards EU in many circles. Every member state has plenty of skeptics who want to brexit and this is gasoline for them. And rightly so. This isn’t a fluke from some misinformed non-technical stray politician who ”wants to save the children” (yes, they exist too), but rather a deliberate anti-democratic sabotage of core human rights. In a nation state, it’s easier to pull off authoritarian shifts, because citizens will not usually revolt over such things alone. But the EU relies on sustained support and a positive image. There are already at the very least 10s of thousands EU skeptics created from the last wave alone, and probably much much more to come. Zooming out, I think this is the time when the EU is needed the most, given the geopolitical developments. Both Russia and China are drooling about a scattered Europe consisting of isolated small states. That makes it more infuriating. Someone, ideally the press, needs to dig into the people behind this and expose them.
- ntoskrnl_exe 1y agoThis legislation has a potential to "radicalize" a lot of people. I don't agree with many of the decisions by the EU, but at the end of the day the pros do outweigh the cons and in a hypothetical Brexit-like referendum I wouldn't consider agreeing with leaving. If this passes, however, the pencil in my hand would definitely hover above the YES checkbox for a while and, actually, maybe even tick it. This alone would be enough of a straw to break the camel's back.
- 0dayz 1y agoUnfortunately I don't think so, it'll be more the writing on the wall or the canary ik the coal line but it wont radicalize a lot of people I think because this legislation won't rock the boat enough unless they fuck it up a la UK age verification law.
- andix 1y agoThe UK normalized surveillance for decades. In most other European countries this is a completely different story. The backlash would be far stronger than in the UK.
- nmeofthestate 1y agoI guessed the term Chat Control had to be made up by opponents of the legislation, so searched for the real name. The official name of the legislation is: “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” (COM/2022/209 FINAL). It is often referenced more simply as the “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (CSA Regulation).
- cheschire 1y agoOof good luck trying to convince a popular vote against that.
- MrNeon 1y agoHow Could You Possibly Be Against This?!?!? Regulation
- psychoslave 1y agoGood, where do we start our "Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat mass surveillance and protect children from authoritative abuses through legislative threats on their fundamental right to grow in democracy"?
- baal80spam 1y agoIt will eventually pass, it's EU after all.
- christkv 1y agoI guess pretty much all of us will become criminals if this passes. Have a phone that is running GrapheneOS you are a potential criminal. Running linux probably also a potential criminal.
- esbranson 1y agoThe "risk-mitigation" loophole in EU Chat Control uses the same vague, discretionary language in the Digital Services Act that Elon Musk and others warned lets regulators coerce platforms into censorship and surveillance. I think "oops" or "d'oh" are the phrases we're looking for here.
- mk89 1y agoElon Musk said just the truth about EU until now. Why did he do that, I don't care, but that's a fact. Plus, when you see politicians react the way they did, it's like a code smell.
- oever 1y agoThe original article says: "The legislative package could be greenlit tomorrow in a closed-door EU working group session." That was November 12th. On the 13th, Breyer wrote: > Yesterday, EU gov'ts rejected changes to mandatory backdoor #ChatControl & anonymity-destroying age checks. https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/115541808924541560 https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1155418089245415...
- isodev 1y agoNothing greenlit in a “closed-door EU working group session” can become law. These things need to go through all phases of legislation including the approval of parliament. So yes, if you don’t like chat control, talk to your MEPs and stop voting in populist ministers and council members/presidents.
- mk89 1y agoIt seems it was a matter of time. Germany first voted against chat control 2.0, then they clarified why they were against it, became "undecided". And now "Denmark" came out with a (lighter) version "some others" are more willing to vote for. [0] What a joke. In front of our eyes. Then they wonder why people hate their guts and are becoming increasingly violent, euro-skeptical, etc. [0]: https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/ https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/
- hollowturtle 1y ago> to scan every private message, including those protected by end-to-end encryption. Then it's no end to end, or at least end to end while traveling but easily collectible at rest, I mean it already is, who would stop meta from collecting messages in clear on the whatsapp ui? We should opt for a peer to peer solution or implement one
- Cupprum 1y agoI sort of hope someone will leak all private information about Peter Hummelgaard. He is one of the people behind this proposal, just so he would get a taste of his own medicine.
- wmf 1y agoThat would only "prove" that government officials should be exempt from government surveillance.
- mszcz 1y agoIsn’t it (ChatControl) also „marketed” as „safe and secure”? If they (politicians) don’t have their comms backdoored and still get their data stolen, then why would I trust them to secure (read „safely snoop on”) mine or even know what they’re talking about?
- Cupprum 1y agoGod, thats a hard fight in that case :(
- trallnag 1y agoThis shady approach of trying it again and again is so disgusting to me. Just be upfront about. If you will do it anyway at some point, just fucking do it. It's not like other countries like China that are much further than we are in this regard are in constant turmoil over it. I guess we won't be either. Instead we take a moral high ground over Russia banning and blocking what are basically non-compliant messaging platforms and pushing Russian citizens to Max, which is controlled by the government. All the while these legislations in Europe will lead to the same end result. How am I supposed to to argue against chat control in Russia when we are doing it too, just with a different twist.
- bergfest 1y agoI second this. And it would only be half as bad, if there was a chance to democratically undo this, when people realize the consequences. But no, this will stay forever and only become worse.
- amarant 1y agoAgain? Seriously? We shut them down, what, last week? They really are going for the activism fatigue approach aren't they? I wonder if one could train an LLM to automatically protest all the new chat-control? This is getting ridiculous.
- tomsmeding 1y ago> According to Breyer, the existing voluntary system has already proven flawed, with German police reporting that roughly half of all flagged cases turn out to be irrelevant. A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to: > Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere. then apparently either there are so many perpetrators that regular conversations with partners etc. are about as common as crime, or such regular conversations don't have such a high risk of being reported after all. I don't think chat surveillance is a good idea. But please use transparent and open communication. Don't manipulate us just like the enemy does.
- Humorist2290 1y agoIt is probably a reference to the report mentioned in this article from September https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports-surveillance-encryption-privacy https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports... According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false positives already stood at 90,950. Indeed 50% false positive rate sounds surprisingly good, but this is under the "voluntary scheme" where Meta/Google/MS etc are not obligated to report. Notably missing from the article is the total number of scanned messages to get down to 200k reports. To my knowledge, since it's voluntary, they can also report only the very highest confidence detections. If the Danish regime were to impose reporting quotas the total number of reports would rise. And of course -- these are reports, not actually convictions. Presumably the actual number of criminals caught by this would remain constant, so the FP rate would increase. Unless of course, the definition of criminal expands to keep the FP rate low...
- b112 1y agoI feel this is a good place to add something... I recall a half decade back, there was discussion of the quit rate of employees, maybe Facebook?, due to literal mental trauma from having to look at and validate pedophile flagged images. Understand there is pedophilia, then there's horribly violent, next level abusive pedophilia. I used to work in a department where, adjacently, the RCMP were doing the same. They couldn't handle it, and were constantly resigning. The violence associated with some of the videos and images is what really got them. The worst part is, the more empathetic you are, the more it hurts to work in this area. It seems to me that without this sad and damaging problem fixed, monitoring chats won't help much. How many good people, will we laden with trama, literally waking up screaming at night? It's why the RCMP officers were resigning. I can't imagine being a jury member at such a case.
- periodjet 1y agoBut I was told that the EU was the good guys…
- srcreigh 1y agoIsn’t there precedent for many other governments secretly or openly doing exactly this? Snowden etc? There’s an arms race element to this that I don’t see people discussing. Do EU citizens have any privacy from US tech? Is there anything to protect? Do we want the USA to have exclusive right to spy on the world? Is it better to have 1 Big Brother or 10?
- psychoslave 1y agoIt's better to have zero big bully. It's actually the sole sane desirable state of affairs.
- rambojohnson 1y agothe comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies. you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel. stop treating the ECHR like some talisman that keeps the wolves at bay, as if authoritarian drift politely obeys paperwork. stop playing with this whole “actually, the loophole is X,” “no, the loophole is Y,” like you're debugging a bad API instead of staring at the obvious: when a state wants to expand surveillance, it does, and the justifications are retrofitted later, be it "public safety", or "keeping your children safe."
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification This is defeatist, fatalist nonsense.
- squigz 1y agoHow?
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoIt’s had to return. “Disguised.” It was defeated once. It can be again. What might change that is lazy nihilism masquerading as wisdom.
- squigz 1y agoI really don't see how GP's comment is lazy nihilism. There's plenty of that in this thread, but I felt GP made good points.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> don't see how GP's comment is lazy It’s arguing why something that just happened is impossible. It’s justifying not doing anything because doing anything is pointless. Nihilism justifying laziness.
- andix 1y agoI just don't believe they would be able to roll it out. A lot of messaging services won't implement chat control. If half of the messaging apps are getting blocked, people will get angry. There will be massive backlash towards EU. Texting is just so embedded to the daily life, if the EU causes inconveniences or trouble with texting, this might create massive anger. It could start off Brexit-like campaigns in some countries. I'm not saying that it is impossible this is going to be implemented. But I think it's just some bureaucrats dreaming.
- ThrowawayTestr 1y ago>A lot of messaging services won't implement chat control. Why not?
- andix 1y agoSignal already announced they won't add back doors, even if it means they are going to be blocked. Which is really funny, because the EU commission recommends to their employees to use Signal for texting.
- psychoslave 1y agoBut MEP will be exempted, so they can continue to use Signal. Rules for thy.
- AlgebraFox 1y agoNo. Signal will pull out their services from EU. Nobody will be able to download or access Signal.
- psychoslave 1y agoWell, unless https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp becomes inaccessible, I guess that "all you have to do" is run a bunch of new instances of the server by ourself. Not sure how complicated it is though.
- andix 1y agoWill it possible to "DDoS" those systems? It can't be illegal to role-play a grooming situation between consenting adults in a private conversation. If millions of people do that, they must be buried in reports.
- squigz 1y agoIf you can coordinate millions of people to do... that, couldn't you coordinate them to do something arguably more productive, like voting against politicians/parties that try to enact this stuff?
- andix 1y agoThere are millions of people voting against that stuff. But it would require hundreds of millions to stop it.
- txrx0000 1y agoA device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's not proposed by governments. These online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids, not the government or other people. The other excuse being used to push these laws is CSAM scanning. But CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. A society's efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place. These attempts for more surveillance and control are being pushed under the guise of these very bad excuses, and we need to call them out in every conversation to reduce the number of gullible dorks that might vote for it. People need to actually understand that governments are very close to having the tools needed for authoritarian governance all around the world. It might not happen immediately, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost inevitable. We can't just hope to rely on technological measures because we can't out-tech the law at scale all of the time. But we can and should fight back on both fronts. On the technological front, the first step is securing VPN access to ensure anonymity on the Internet. The best effort at the moment IMO is SoftEther, which is VPN over Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS.[0] It's open-source. It has a server discovery site called VPNGate.[1] You can host a server to let somebody else use, then use a server someone else is hosting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN [1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/ https://www.vpngate.net/en/ We're really only missing a few things before there's decentralized VPN over HTTPS that anyone in the world can host and use, and it would be resistant to all DPI firewalls. First, a user-friendly mobile client. Second, a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a sparse and decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent (or we may be able to make use of the BT protocol as is), and we'd have to build such auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client itself. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its existence for other clients to discover. If we can make and keep the Internet a free place, these discussions can keep happening without fear of censorship and prosecution, and people can coordinate to fight authoritarianism and create better technologies to guard against it in the future. This is very much doable if we tried. So let's ensure the free flow of information is not a temporary blip in the long arc of humanity's history.
- NumberCruncher 1y agoI wish I would not have a standard post for topics like this: Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...
- themafia 1y agoSurveillance, as typically deployed, cannot _stop_ the acts of abuse. It may be helpful in locating evidence that they occurred, but by that point, you've already allowed nearly irreparable harm to a child. Even if it did work it would be completely ineffective at reducing the number of victims. Even if it somehow did by proxy then criminals would simply get smarter and find new ways to completely evade this system. I have a large amount of disrespect for people who should know all this yet push these types of solutions anyways.
- mvdwoord 1y agoSad but true. Many such cases as well not only limited to this field. There is a huge scandal in the Netherlands where it has been shown that Tax officials have repeatedly, and knowingly, did unlawful things which literally drove some people to suicide, and did irreparable damage to lots of people / families. They also repeatedly lied to parliament about this. We have the proof. We do fuck all about it. And yeah, the Dutroux case (as well as e.g. Rotherham c.s.) hit hard. Too hard for most regular people to even properly come to terms with it.
- Vera_Wilde 1y agoGrateful for Breyer's consistent excellent work tracking and opposing these proposals. The Zombie proposal just keeps rising from the dead. The technical/mathematical objections don’t change. I still haven’t seen a counter-argument stating why a mass-scanning architecture should be expected to work, given the base rates and error rates involved.
- zkmon 1y agoSo, you want to negotiate on how much privacy you are willing to give up in order to have a strong state-level control. But what do you have at your disposal, to influence that negotiation? Vote? Technology? Tariffs?
- martin82 1y agoAt this point I 100% see the EU as a failed experiment and I would love to witness a mass exodus of the slavic countries, and then Germany and France. Burn this thing to the ground. Nothing good came out of it.
- bradley13 1y agoThey just try and try again. They only have to succeed. Once. The people who care about privacy have to succeed every time. The only real solution is to counterattack. Get legislation through the EU parliament that guarantees a right to privacy and anonymity. Dunno if there's any chance of that happening.
- xcf_seetan 1y agoHow about applying this kind of surveillance to the government? After all we are paying for them to rules us, so why not publish all government, politicians, law enforcement, military messages for everyone to read? Why everybody must be treated as a criminal, because they cant do their job of keeping us safe?
- Snild 1y agoWe have that in Sweden and Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_official_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_... The principle says that information is non-confidential by default, rather than the other way around. We can request almost any information held by government agencies, including copies of communication like email and documents. One thing that has surprised European acquaintances is the fact that this includes government-held info about individuals, e.g. address and tax returns.
- Gud 1y agoAlthough this has been eroded, at least in Sweden. https://www.publikt.se/debatt/insynen-maste-varnas-26420 https://www.publikt.se/debatt/insynen-maste-varnas-26420
- CrazyStat 1y agoWhen I was in Sweden many years ago I was very surprised that you could just call a phone number and they would tell you the name and address of the person or company a vehicle license plate was registered to.
- nicce 1y agoCurrent Finnish governent is trying hard to hide what they can, unfortunately.
- xaxaxa123 1y agoIs the EU still democratic? serious question...the public is obviously against it, but they want this authoritarian law, no matter what.