> 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.
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...
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.
Because of this issue, many departments put in much stricter protocols for dealing with this kind of material. Only certain people would be exposed to classify/tag it, and these people would only hold that post of a limited period of time. The burden on those people doesn't change, but it can be diluted to mitigate it somewhat.
Its a real and sad problem, but not one that I think can be fixed with technology. To much is on the line to allow for a false positive from a hallucinating robot to destroy a person(s) life.
Absurdly good? What are you talking about, it means entire company processes of trying to identify this has cost so much time and effort and tracking and lost trust from the public and finally reporting... and then they still screw it up half the time
You're misinterpreting what they mean by "50% false positive rate". Let's say there are 10 child traffickers in the country. A 50% false positive rate might mean this system detects 7 of them, but then also detects 7 people who are not child traffickers. The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare. If one in a million people are child traffickers, and you have a false positive rate of 50%, it means that the average person has no more than a one in a million chance of being a false positive.
Let me put it another way. Let's say you are an Egyptian Pharaoh and a man tells you he can predict when solar eclipses will happen. You give him a calendar and he marks down 20 days in the next few decades where he claims there will be an eclipse. On 10 of those marked days, there actually is an eclipse. That would be a 50% false positive rate. By the standards of an Egyptian Pharaoh, that probably looks like an absurdly good false positive rate.
But still, is this good? So 14 cases are referred to law enforcement. They catch 7 people doing really terrible things, and they also catch 7 who are innocent. The police are notorious for treating weak signals as strong and forging causes for suspicion, terrorizing suspects, getting them fired from their job, killing their pets, upending their lives, etc.
If you ruin as many lives as you save, will you sleep well at night? This is why a 50% false positive rate is terrible and privacy advocates are against this.
The consequences of a false positive for an eclipse when one is predicted is trivial, unless there's something about eclipses I don't know. Maybe there's some diffuse monetary loss across society.
I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion.
It is your right to do so.
However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork.
Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side of things, simply because I know my tolerances.
> The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare
If their 50% false positive rate resulted in 100,000 false positives among the German population of 85 million... it's not as rare as all that - you have greater than 1-in-1,000 odds of being a false positive.
This is the classic precision versus recall discussion. The discussion centers around how you think about the cost of a false positive versus false negative.
Some people think it's fine for the process to have low precision but high recall. Low precision is that of the number of conversations the process flagged as a positive, some unacceptable (to you) percentage turned out to be a not/false "positive". High recall is that of all the actually positive conversations, the process flagged an acceptable (to you) percentage of them as positive (i.e. only "missed" a few/false negative).
What does it cost to wrongly identify conversation a positive when it's really not a positive (false positive)?
What does it cost to wrongly identify a conversation as a negative when it's really a positive (false negative)?
Standing on the street holding a bag open, and catching a fish falling from the sky one time, would also be an absurdly good catch rate no matter how long I had to wait - it's just that shit of a system
Only half the conversations being a waste of law enforcement's time is also an impressive rate - we all recognize that it's just a shite system that is bound to have a lot of false positives.
Fortunately, law enforcement was able to catch pedophiles and terrorists before they came up with the idea of permanently ending everyone's privacy, unlike your obviously ridiculous analogy - nobody has ever caught fish falling from the sky by standing in the street holding empty bags.
”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.
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". *Only targeted interception* of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
A decision by the European Court of Justice or any other court does not apply to any legislative branch like the EU commission (not parliament), when making new laws. New laws simply override old laws (to be interpreted as specializations, more or less exceptions, to the old laws)
It's weird how "rights" went from "the government can't do X to you" to "the government can force private actors to do Y (but these rules don't apply to us)."
It's perfectly sufficient to have laws against that sort of thing. As governments are above the law (in that they can just add new laws that say they can do whatever they want), you need something else. A bill of rights is such a something else.
Not under ECHR, which has twice as much signatories as EU has members and the other half is twice less chill compared to the EU.
I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a forest and send army to shoot at protesters of the wrong kind.
Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws.
However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here?
Edit: I'm aware that the EU is only afforded "competences" given to it by treaties, so perhaps human rights don't fall into any of these...?
However, I also wonder if legislation such as Chat Control, etc, might fall outside its competences.
In the end, the question is whether there is a legal mechanism by which the introduction of laws such as those in question here can be prohibited?
That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.
It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.
In this regard, note that the EU can only propose legislation that falls under one of its "competences". For example, national militaries, income tax, education, most of foreign policy, etc, do not fall under EU control.
The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.
So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???
.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!
There is no loophole really, EU can repeal it's own laws the same way it passes them -- it needs to get the commission, the parliament and enough national governments on board.
>Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
Doesn't matter really. No right in any treaty is absolute. Not even the right to life itself -- the police can and does shoot people and it's legal for them to do under specific conditions. And of course the chat control law says that whatever it is supposed to be doing should be done in the most privacy respecting way possible.
In theory the court (any court really) can weight whether the measures are proportionate and whether negative obligations (not invade privacy) are in a balance with positive obligations (you know -- protective children is also important) and whether the balance is appropriate of a democratic society.
The problem everybody is trying to not see - there is no right to E2E encryption under any law right now. There is no right to have a communication channel that government can't possibly listen to. It's not a thing. The same way there is no right to have your house unsearchable by police and your freedom unbound by a court that can jail you. There are strict limits when any of those things happen, but they do fact happen all the time for good reasons and for bad ones too.
Add: if I would attack it from a legal standpoint, I would not focus on privacy so much, but rather say that creating mass-scaning capability is a threat to the democracy itself.
It's not that I like chat control or think that mass surveillance can lead to any good.
What I'm saying, is -- just because the balance isn't where you want it to be, and the policy is bad, that alone doesn't mean the law is unconstitutional, against the EU treaties or ECHR or should be impossible to pass through the legislative.
It's the same in French (obviously), though equally this does not permit mass surveillance:
>Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales:
>Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale
>1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance.
>2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dans l'exercice de ce droit que pour autant que cette ingérence est prévue par la loi et qu'elle constitue une mesure qui, dans une société démocratique, est nécessaire à la sécurité nationale, à la sûreté publique, au bien-être économique du pays, à la défense de l'ordre et à la prévention des infractions pénales, à la protection de la santé ou de la morale, ou à la protection des droits et libertés d'autrui.
I'm talking about the 1948 version which has the following:
> Article 12
> Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.
ECHR is a convention with a court hearing the cases, as opposed to declarations which is just good vibes PR. Of course the actual working instrument has loopholes.
it escapes you because all these treaty clauses read like safeguards, but in practice they’re just friction. Once a government decides it needs mass surveillance for ‘security,’ the law bends. The real question isn’t what the ECHR allows... it’s why people still think legal frameworks can meaningfully restrain a state that has already decided not to be restrained.
Sort of. It's not quite like anything else. The EU has mostly trade and standardization powers, and lots of the other stuff is an outgrowth of that.
But mostly, EU law just sets a baseline, and almost all execution of it is devolved to the member states.
Edit: the EU does not have a constitution but a constitution shaped update of the Treaties.
Now, lots of politicians are happy to blame the EU for unpopular stuff, but the council is the national politicians and they basically run the EU.
And it's not just EU politicians who ignore their constitution. US politicians have been ignoring the US Constitution for oh (checks history books) at least 85 years.
You can’t defend any rights by reference to legal authority. As long as it’s a legal domain, any exceptions are permitted, even on the “human” rights level. Rights can only be defended on moral grounds, like rights to freedom or self-defense.
Because they don't get banned from being able to either take a sit in a political position for life after they went to jail for a few years for high treason agaisnt the people.
the 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."
Let's be pragmatic about this. Chat Control and this new thing are not post-hoc rationalizations, they are attempts to justify a proposed change.
If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that public opinion around these initiatives still matters. Public opinion is something we can all influence. Maybe discussing the legalese is a waste of time, but discussing the rhetoric and how to combat it definitely isn't
I don't think it's about public opinion so much as pushing the goalposts. The whole erosion of privacy since the 60s (maybe further but at least since then) has been a 'boiled frogs' situation.
What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).
A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"
States are not all mighty entities acting without any restriction. Wannabe rulers have to go through that kind of abstract notions to manipulate people at scale, but they have limited skills and abilities to use these tools that people about m accept only under certain conditions.
ECHR is on same ontological level as the notion of state. If no one concrete is willing to enforce it, it has zero agency.
Politicians can ignore constitutions like citizen can ignore laws. Politicians can send military forces on manifesters, and people can make politicians meet the guillotine.
It’s arguing why something that just happened is impossible. It’s justifying not doing anything because doing anything is pointless. Nihilism justifying laziness.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
No, this is just being pragmatic and realizing that against a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push, legal arguments fall short. Until you address the root causes of something like Chat Control being tried again and again until it passes, any victory is just a brief respite.
You need political will to ensure freedom is respected and wanted by all. After decades of media and reactionary propaganda about crime scaremongering, it's hardly surprising that politicians are able to draft such laws with a straight face.
(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.
(f) ‘relevant information society services’ means all of the following services:
(i) a hosting service;
(ii) an interpersonal communications service;
(iii) a software applications store;
(iv) an internet access service;
(v) online search engines.
(2) ‘internet access service’ means a publicly available electronic communications service that provides access to the
internet, and thereby connectivity to virtually all end points of the internet, irrespective of the network technology
and terminal equipment used
===
Calling it Chat Control is itself an understatement, one that evokes "well I'm not putting anything sensitive on WhatsApp" sentiments - and that's incredibly dangerous.
This bill may very well be read to impose mandatory global backdoors on VPNs, public cloud providers, and even your home router or your laptop network card!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But it doesn't take a lawyer to see how broadly scoped this is.)
> (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries.
It's quite wild to see child sexual abuse continue to be cited as a justification for far-reaching, privacy-invading proposals, allegedly to empower government actors to combat child sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, we have copious and ever-increasing evidence of actual child sexual abuse being perpetrated by people with the most power in these very institutions, and they generally face few (if any) consequences.
Laws targeting service providers usually always apply to all providers providing services in the respective jurisdiction. It would be unusual if it was any different.
I am going to assume your question is genuine and not rethorical hyperbole.
Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.
If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.
I mean this (mostly) as a joke, however, I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
But the near daily proposals getting tossed out in their desperate attempt to turn their countries into daycare centers is just annoying to people trying to build things for other adults.
> I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
This would involve them taking about a 30% hit to revenue (or more, depending on the company), so yeah, entirely implausible.
But, it's also worth noting that the US constantly does stuff like this. Like, the entire financial services panopticon of tracking is driven almost entirely by the US, and has been around since the 70s. Should the EU then wall off the US?
Personally, (as an EU citizen), that would really hurt if they did, but getting completely off the dollar based financial system would remove a lot of the US's control (and as a bonus/detriment reveal to the US how much of their vaunted market is propped up by EU money).
Most governments are bad, and these kinds of laws are international, so I'm not sure walling off the EU would make your life much better.
And let's be honest, you should expect the tech industry to end up as regulated as the financial industry over time, the only difference will be how long it takes to get there.
"First Amendment Rights" only applies to the State, not private companies.
For example, Hacker News has no obligation to preserve your "First Amendment Rights" on this website. They are free to mute you, ban you, or even just surreptitiously change what you say without you knowing.
If a website which otherwise wouldn’t censor you begins to censor you because of threats from foreign nations, that’s a foreign nation pressuring an American company into suppressing rights of American citizens.
That’s a foreign nation imposing on your rights. In the past that used to require an invasion, so it was a bit more obvious what was happening, but the result is still the same.
Yes it’s through a website, which is owned by a company, which technically speaking owes you nothing.
In the digital age though, where are you going to use your speech, if not on a website?
What you (and others) are doing is trying to reduce the significance of a major transgression over a minor technicality. Way to miss the forest for trees.
The EU can stuff it on this one. And I supported (still support!) the GDPR.
Semantics are literally the only reason we write laws down and argue endlessly about exactly which words to use
Outside of law, I have never once heard "that's just semantics" in a context that made sense, or said by an intelligent person. Not once. Maybe it turns out semantics are never "just semantics", and instead it's something that always matters.
So you’re just going to accept a digital invasion happening and not care, because of some semantics and details somewhere in a document which was penned 200 years prior to the internet being invented?
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems kind of naive and short sighted.
You can still care about forthcoming invasions of one's privacy and while still understanding that the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is only intended to prevent state and federal governments from censoring you. Not corporations.
Semantics are very important when it comes to legal matters.
You can object to the "digital invasion", but using the phrase "freedom of speech" as some sort of magical shield is pointless.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The U.S. federal or state governments, courtesy of that amendment, have very limited authority to control your speech. That's where the legal authority ends.
So you see no problem with using jurisdiction washing like Five Eyes to remove our rights?
If we don't tolerate a government we elect abridging our freedom of speech, why would we accept a foreign government doing that?
When foreign governments try to force conpanies to abridge free speech by Americans on American soil, that is an attack on something that we deem important enough to have enshrined in our constitution.
How 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?
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.
When 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.
I 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.
Isn’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?
Power/wealth asymmetries. The incumbent organizations are powerful, have many resources and actively work to prevent other organizations from achieving the same level if competency.
The 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.
That argument is so tiring. Yes, we know, we all understand this, that’s true of every draconian law proposal. What’s the point of repeating that over and over every time? If you want to give up, do, but let others fight without needless discouraging. If everyone thought like you, this would have passed first time.
There is also an alternative, which is the way problems with governments used to get solved in the past. Not that we should aim for that to be necessary, but it often seems that our politicians are hellbend on getting there quickly. I guess it's all "to hell with the consequences!" for them.
Denmark 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.
The 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
I would not categorize Denmark as particularly technocratic, on the contrary. Many politicians here go against science and research because “I simply disagree”.
This was done to appease the racist voters, who are unfortunately a relatively big factor here.
The law was installed in 2016, (colloquially called “Smykkeloven”/The Jewelry Law) after Syrian refugees walked up through Europe and Denmark, and a myth arose about super rich refugees with bags full of gold.. in 2022 this law had been used in 17 instances.
I cannot roll my eyes enough at the policians here.
Denmark is pretty famous for the fact that people consider themselves pretty centrist and moderate, while the policies they implement, each analyzed separately, are the most leftist of all the EU on all modern topics (ie not classical communism of course - just climate change, women, immigration etc). But when you’re surrounded with likeminded people and little diversity of the press, it sounds logical.
There are monied interests and special interest groups behind it. No matter who is at the head, it will continue to be pushed by these interests.
Europol, Julie Cordua (CEO of Thorn), Cathal Delaney, former Europol who now is on Thorn's board, Alan Parker, billionaire and founder of the Oak Foundation that's been bankrolling the fake charities lobbying for chat control, Chris Cohn, another billionaire and hedge fund manager who has been funding anti-encryption lobbying in both the US and the EU, Sarah Gardner, former Thorn employee and part of the network of fake charities lobbying to ban encryption. SHe also focuses on lobbying in the US as well, and Maciej Szpunnar, Polish Advocate General and the European court of justice, wants to use chat control for prosecuting copyright infringement.
And don't forget Peter Hummelgaard: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communite on encrypted messaging services."
So you have a few billionaires running lobbying organizations disguised as fake "for the children" charities that operate in both the EU and the US, Europol, and a group of powerful people that are fundamentally opposed to privacy.
> Thorn works with a group of technology partners who serve the organization as members of the Technology Task Force. The goal of the program includes developing technological barriers and initiatives to ensure the safety of children online and deter sexual predators on the Internet.
> Various corporate members of the task force include Facebook, Google, Irdeto, Microsoft, Mozilla, Palantir, Salesforce Foundation, Symantec, and Twitter.
Apparently Thorn scratched that list from their current website, but the Wiki page has an archive link.
Genuine question: is that Denmark reintroducing this proposal? It's not clear when it's mentioned "the EU commission's revised proposal..." - and second question, if it's "Denmark", who from Denmark has the authority to do so? Any elected Danish member from the EU council?
Denmark holds the EU Presidency. That means they chair the Council of the EU, set the agenda, organize meetings, and drive forward legislative work in that period.
EU council works like US senate worked before senators were elected. So the right answer for who is Danish PM.
Not to be confused with EU parliament which is elected by popular vote and EU comission, which is the executive branch of EU and us voted in by Parliament
Nothing 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.
I 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...
Surveillance, 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.
This 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.
The strength of the EU is based on the EU institutions not having too much power. It's why the EU does not attempt to expel, hopefully temporarily, reprobate nations such as Hungary.
This 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.
Unfortunately 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.
The 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.
If they really ban everyone under 16 from texting, this would also become kind of a time bomb. A lot of those affected teens will be allowed to vote very soon. And they might have a very different mental image of the EU than the generations before. The EU used to be a gate to all of Europe, free traveling, no cell roaming fees, Erasmus student exchange. The next generation of voters might perceive the EU as some dystopian institution that takes away fun and freedom.
So, 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?
The 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.
fightchatcontrol.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.
Thanks 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.
The 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.
I 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).
Good, 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"?
Grateful 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.
I 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.
Well, unless 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.
Apparently 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.
“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.”
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.
The 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?!
It's the establishment putting measures in place to entrench their position with an uncertain future coming towards us, fast. They are setting up systems to prevent revolution.
Yeah 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.
The 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".
It'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.
That strain of libertarian rhetoric is overwhelmingly encountered on American-dominated fora. I won’t say it doesn’t exist in Europe, since Europeans can pick up on American internet culture, too, but it is too marginal in Europe to affect politics much. There is no significant libertarian party in the EU. Some of the far-right parties stoking and benefiting from popular discontent even promise to uphold the welfare state, but simply deny it to immigrants.
Cool, but it's anything but libertarian, which is what we were discussing in this thread.
Regarding democracy, we have pretty severe failings, which you won't hear about because the EU is busy with Poland/Hungary/other conservative countries.
Not as a major political force to which Denmark’s Chat Control could be responding as the OP claims. Moreover, expressions like “milked and oppressed” ring American libertarianism to the ears of this European poster who is familiar with long years of European cypherpunk activism.
Cypherpunk activism is closer to anarchist ideals, and criticism of the State and its coercive power is central to its ethos. Yes, citizens are being milked and oppressed against a state and a political caste that has grown too powerful.
American right-libertarianism is a joke that originally started as an anarchist branch and has degenerated into getting in bed with the state to further its selfish ideals. Criticism of the state has nothing to do with those posers, as their goal is solely to become the state (i.e. the oppressor), rather than truly pursue the ideal of a free society.
So 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
I'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?
I 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.
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.
If 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?
This 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.
Governments don't change constitutions pretty much anywhere. More also constitution changes are notoriously hard from requiring 75% of parliament votes, to 66% in two consecutive parliament assemblies (need to pass an election), and all versions in-between (or not having a codified constitution).
> Governments don't change constitutions pretty much anywhere.
They do sometimes manage to just ignore parts that they don't like sometimes, at least temporarily, as the recent and continuing mess in the DPR-US illustrates.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
You need a means for citizens to hold the powers that be accountable. Unfortunately, the EU is largely designed without such a mechanism, as its initial scope and ambition was much smaller than the superstate it is growing into it wasn't deemed necessary.
Every branch except for the European Parliament risks consequences only if they fuck up so badly that the majority of EU citizens in their home countries (or in some cases, the majority of member states) deem their actions so reprehensible that they consider punishing the EU more important than electing their own national government, since it's effectively the same vote.
This is technically still a means of accountability, but it's not really a threat in practice.
This seems to be more about political power and government overreach than money. The narrative seems to be focused solely on concentration of the later, lately.
I expect economical and political power to get along well. You normally acquire both organically; except in some cases, suddently acquiring much of one will buy some of the other.
It's too bad we can't withdraw our votes for a politician continuously, with the politician having to leave office if the vote changes enough.
I'm not sure it can be solved without everybody writing down their vote, but this would be one way that would make pushing through unpopular policies, whether because of changing opinions, mismatches where politicians misrepresent their plans or corruption, much more difficult.
I have had this idea for a long time: An online realtime voting platform, where you can change your mind about policies at any time, and what the people want needs to be implemented. And of course all issues and policies must be put on the platform for people to vote on.
Of course initially we would have to learn, that changing our minds too often will lead to things not getting done at all. And it is doubtful, that a lot of people are even capable of becoming informed and reflecting beings, not to be swayed by a hip populist radical, and thus causing shit to happen. Also the sheer number of issues and policies would be so many, that most people couldn't make up their mind on everything. But that's OK, since people can raise awareness and simply vote later, when they became aware. Another issue would be what the choices are that people have on the platform. How to give all relevant opinions as choices? How to know what is relevant? Or can voters apply for adding a new opinion? But then who grants the right to add a choice? How to prevent spam?
So there certainly are huge issues with the idea. But maybe, over time, we would develop into politically reasonable societies and politicians would have to fear the opinion of the people, because one scandal uncovered, and they could end up kicked out tomorrow. Maybe it could also better designed, so that there is some minimum time between being able to change ones stance about something. Or some maximum of policies one can have an opinion about per day.
Even initially to have such a platform without real political consequences of voting, would be super interesting, because you could lookup what the current opinions of the people are.
> It's too bad we can't withdraw our votes for a politician continuously, with the politician having to leave office if the vote changes enough.
I think that would empower ill-conceived (and/or ill-willed) populist & short term movements, with everyone in constant fear of being "un-vote bombed" by armies of easily led, and likely make the lobbying problem worse.
If not continuously, there needs to be mechanisms to recall a politician (or an entire government), and re-hold elections for both failing to govern and failing to represent the interests of the people over the interest of billionaires.
To use the recent US shutdown as an example. Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held. Every single position in power at the time, gone, the whole thing gets re-elected because they have proven that the current group cannot adequately govern.
The ability to recall needs to work similarly. Vote should be able to be initiated by the people at anytime, and a successful vote means the government dissolves and new elections are held.
We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails. It failed the first time, it should not be able to be immediately reintroduced whether in the same or a different form. There should be some sort of cooling off period where that piece of legislation (or its goals) cannot be reintroduced for x number of years.
These are good ideas, but they do have some pretty big sticking points. The ability to trigger a re-election has the same problems we're trying to avoid in the larger thread: If a bad actor (say a business) wants a politician out, they can just continually issue recall votes until they wear out the population and get lucky. Unfortunately, I think the only solution here is exactly what we have: Politicians have to be re-elected every couple of years.
The cooling off period also has problems, because sometimes a piece of legislation is a good idea, but has a major flaw that causes people to vote against it. What happens when people want a law passed, but not in the form it's presented in?
Re-election every couple of years does not solve the issues, as demonstrated by most elected governments around the world. People are too lazy, uninformed, stupid, to vote for their own good, and will be made to vote against their own interest, time and time again. As societies we are mostly not ready mentally to vote properly. This is in the interest of the people in power. Have stupid and confused subjects, so that you can rally them for whatever cause you need them to rally for.
> Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held.
It's important to note that this is a basic principle, almost the basic principle, of English-style parliamentary democracy. You have a monarch who makes decisions (through their chosen government, ever since the English cut off a few heads), and the rest of the Parliament (a bunch of nobles, clergy, and eventually representatives of commoners) is there to withdraw financing from that government when they disapprove.
> We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails.
We usually do, it is called a "session." The problem is the inability to pass negative legislation (which also has a pretty long history) i.e. we will not do a thing. Deliberative assemblies explicitly frown on negative legislation, and instead say that purpose is served simply by not doing the thing.
The problem is that individual rights are provided by negative legislation against the government: think the US Bill of Rights. Instead, we have systems where exclusively positive legislation is passed by majorities, and repealing that legislation takes supermajorities. The only pragmatic way to create new rights becomes to challenge legislation in courts, and get a decision by opinionated, appointed judges that X piece of legislation is superseded by Y piece of legislation for unconvincing reason Z, and this new "right" is about as stable as the current lineup of the sitting justices.
What we need is to pretend like "democracy" is a meaningful word rather than an empty chant, or more often simply a euphemism for the US, Anglosphere, Western and Central Europe, and whoever they currently approve of. Democracy is rule by the ruled, and the exact processes by which the decisions are made define the degree of democracy. Somehow, elites have decided that process is the least important part of democracy, and the most important part is that elites get their preferred outcomes. Anything else is "populism."*
Decisionmaking processes in "democracies" need to be examined, justified, and codified. The EU needs either to cede a lot more leverage to its individual members (and make that stupid currency a European bancor, rather than a German weapon) OR become more directly responsive to European individuals. If you're not serving the individual states, and you're not serving the individual citizens, you're exclusively serving elites.
But they have ways to evade the law.
And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.
What 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?
> 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.
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.
It does? Really?
What are they teaching kids in school these days? According to the books I studied, nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone.
Taxes are ~irrelevant to billionaires. When you say "you can't be a billionaire" what you're saying is "you cannot own any significant amount of a large business" because billionaires aren't liquid, their status is based on their assets and primarily their shares in large businesses.
I agree that wealth inequality is horrible and taxes on the wealthy should be much higher. But if someone owns 10% of a trillion dollar company, that's $100B in shares. They can sell off 900M$ worth of shares and "not be a billionaire" in terms of income and money (and thus taxation). So what do you do?
- Seize control of their shares and thus their control over private industry
- Or, accept that billionaires exist
This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
Most people hate the idea of billionaires, but people generally also hate a centrally planned government where the government owns a controlling stake in all businesses preventing any insider from having any real control.
We should be discussing strategies to tackle this. Not just go "oh lets just accept it".
Just how many people have 100B+? Do you see them trying to interfere in governance and elections? Maybe we can have annual wealth taxes. Just like property taxes. There are many ways to tackle this. That's what we should be discussing. Not just giving up. Absurd wealth inequality will cause societal collapse.
> This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.
> No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
The business is already paying taxes (i.e. property taxes). You're proposing a new tax on top of the existing taxation scheme, an ownership tax that likely requires the owner to reduce their ownership. Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
Again, I agree that billionaires are bad. I don't think taxation or incentive structures will fix it. I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
> So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.
All tax is theft by that argument. Whether they liquidate or not is up to them. They just need to pay x tax. They aren't selling their stake to the government. They are free to pay the tax from their general annual income or by selling their stocks in the market like they do today every year.
> Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
How are folks paying property taxes today? They are paying x% of the properties annual value yearly.
> Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
If stock is being sold to pay tax its being sold to someone else in the market not the govt. The govt is not owning the business.
> I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
I agree. But I don't share the sentiment that nothing can be done. None of what I said is radical. Its reality in many european countries. And wealth equality is far less. eg. an annual 1% wealth tax. 1% of 1B is 10M. That's peanuts to them. Heck their stocks appreciate far greater than that yearly.
>Its reality in many european countries. And wealth equality is far less. eg. an annual 1% wealth tax. 1% of 1B is 10M. That's peanuts to them. Heck their stocks appreciate far greater than that yearly.
Ah yes Europe, where businesses are largely uncompetitive globally and the countries are more than ever completely at the mercy of global superpowers. I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally. Their stock market is also considered mediocre and many European prefer to invest in US markets instead.
Just pointing out that "more taxes" isn't some panacea and there's a real cost to competitiveness going this route. If the US went this way, the BRICS nations especially China would eclipse the western world within a generation on the back of more absuive practices, and become the global superpowers easily pushing the west around.
I suppose that's nicer for this generation of citizens, although potentially catastrophic for the generation afterwards. And I don't necessarily envy the geopolitical reality of Europe right now, even if I do envy many of their healthcare systems.
European businesses are uncompetitive because of excess regulation. Not the ultra wealthy having to pay more tax. I'm pointing out they have wealth tax and haven't turned into a communist hellhole. None of the things you complain about whether its Europe refusing to build up their military or its business competitiveness is because of wealth tax. The USA has an annual property tax based on the properties value and isn't a communist nation.
> I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally.
This isn't even true. The US has the same inequality as Russia. Every top EU country is far far lower. Maybe we are communist after all.
Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.
>Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.
Talk about a low-faith strawman! Let me eviscerate this garbage argument.
The 900 billionaires in America control around $7.8 trillion USD in assets (US yearly GDP is over $30 trillion, for reference)
Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.
Pack it up boys, we completely solved wealth inequality and will be a glorious european nation with our $78 billion dollars! If we applied that to nationalized healthcare (estimated cost $3 trillion per year) we just paid for 2% of the healthcare system!
Or maybe we just redistribute that $78 billion. That's $588 dollars per US household per year. Problem = solved.
> Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.
Excellent point. I'm glad you see how much of a pittance 1% annually is. Though I've made the same point before(remember I said 1% of 1B is just 10M, thats a joke for billionaires). Increase the % as you wish. 1% does nothing for inequality given stock gains are far higher yearly.
My whole point is that its a problem that needs to be solved. How we can solve it is a great thing to discuss. Your entire argument so far is that it can't be solved. Which I don't agree with.
And for some reason you just ignore some points. eg. property taxes: "in 2023, approximately $363 billion in property taxes was collected on single-family homes across the United States. Property taxes generally account for about 10-11% of total U.S. tax revenue.". You said "Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.". Turns out thats not true.
Tax the billionaires. You seem to think the current trend is bad as well. You just happen to think my suggestions to fix it is bad. That's fine. But I think its a better constructive use of your time trying to think of better ideas than give up.
Also 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.
>EU parliament is the only legislature in the world that needs permission to legislate
It makes sense, because EU law is mostly technical stuff that commission has to draft and all the national governments have to agree to.
With the commission being elected by the parliament itself and vote of no confidence being a thing, it's not like the parliament doesn't have power -- the power is intentionally nerfed to not overreach where national governments don't want it to.
On paper the UK house of commons can pass a bill. In reality bills are driven by the executive. The same executive that (until brexit) drove the bills via appointing the EU commissioner and being the EU council.
The reason that EU Parliament can't pass bills is because constituent governments don't want to lose power to parliament.
People are not able to be experts in everything they are asked to vote on, thats why we delegate it, just like people delegate their healthcare, plumbing, flying to a holiday destination, growing food, etc.
People en-mass are just as easy to manipulate as elected members, if not easier.
Can you point to examples of bad outcomes in Switzerland’s referendums? I mean unequivocal examples, of the sort that would convince everyone here that that model is undesirable as a whole.
How about that time in 2020 the Swiss voted in favor of an immigration restriction proposal that was so fundamentally incompatible with existing EU treaties, the government was forced to bullshit their way out of implementing entirely because doing so would have basically ended Switzerland as a nation? This is the kinda thing that really cannot happen in a working system. The only reason the government is not sued into following through is because the courts have conspired with other branches to shut down any attempt at doing so. Real democratic.
Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:
* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...
* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.
So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.
That doesn't mean anything, because they're not necessarily educated on the topic, and yet are making decisions that affect everyone.
When it's so cheap to enact mass propaganda, selective omission and manufactured intent, it becomes impossible to just say, "well, the people want it." Their decision making process is compromised by the same people pushing these policies through.
Democracy is indeed broken, and we have to take that seriously if we're going to fix it.
Please quantify "a lot". What percentage of the population wants all private communication between adults to be monitored and censored by a government agency? Can we put it to a vote - right after publicly discussing (debunking) all of the false beliefs that its proponents have?
The question that is at the core is “police can wire tap calls but they cannot wire tap chats. Should this change?” The details are not all that important to people.
Legal interception requires a court order, Chat control is mass surveillance.
Trying to build support for mass surveillance by misrepresenting it as targeted tool with checks and balances is exactly the kind of bad faith discourse I'm talking about.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
Other than hoping for a large meteorite or the second coming to end this misery, or stirring up the bloodbath a la Nepal - then, by recognizing the power of large numbers of people doing little things, like sabotaging the system at the personal level. But that implies unity, and unity and mutual support have been deliberately annihilated in this society for too long. Thus, this outcome is even less probable than the first two.
I'm downvoting you because complaining against downvotes like this is against site guidelines. Your comment would have a better foundation if that part was omitted.
The States are learning the hard way that the disproportionate accumulation of wealth is an irresistible force which will eventually erode all checks and balances, corrupt all systems, and ultimately capture the entire government. We we were doing mostly okay with "constrained capitalism" but as soon as we let our guard down, money flooded into politics and that was the end of restraint.
Chat Control isn't something being pushed in the States though, so your criticism just seems like you're taking a random shot at the USA rather than accepting the uncomfortable truth that the EU is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
Relating our experience in the US, we planned for exactly this, it went okay for a while, until it didn't. The answer to parent is "do this but a little better" :-)
I’ve seen this strategy many times in the US. For example, in blue states they will repeatedly propose the same gun control laws that restrict the rights of law abiding citizens and violate the constitution, which guarantees a right to own firearms. Each time such a law is proposed, people have to show up to hearings, submit comments, pressure legislators, protest, and all of that. Those laws may then be pulled back, but the same laws will get brought up every single legislative season, and citizens who have other responsibilities in life have to give up time and money repeatedly to fight for their constitutional rights.
I’m sure there are other examples of such legal abuse of different political biases - I’m just using this as an example because there is such a long history of it. Eventually, legislators will pass whatever they want anyways. And then your recourse to regain rights is to go through an expensive years-long legal battle that ultimately requires the Supreme Court to take the case. This type of “attack” is a serious flaw in many modern democracies.
I think the fix is to have personal consequences for legislators, judges, etc that make bad decisions that violate the constitutional rights or fundamental rights of citizens. The idea that people are immune from consequence just because they’re serving in an official capacity is insane. This shouldn’t be the case for anyone serving in political office or other public roles - as in, you shouldn’t get immunity whether you are a lawmaker or policeman or teacher or whatever else.
That was more than a decade ago. Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.
> Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.
I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
By choosing "people-vs-individual-politician" fight over "people-vs-government-system". Like, literally, make politicians personally responsible for this bs.
> 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
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.
At 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.
The "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.
Society 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.
These 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.
I 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.
This 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.
While 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.
The 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.
A 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.
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.
The 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
I 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.
This 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.
I 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.
Honestly 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!
The 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."
what 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.
Privacy for me is not that important. I have nothing to hide, nothing I am ashamed of. For me it's more of a way of protecting from abuse that a need of its own. I realize it's just me and I do advocate for privacy, but if you look around: we lost. Our data is everywhere and there are no consequences whatsoever.
PS: I did mention in my original comment that Google and many others already send drones with cameras to spy on your backyard and that is considered "fine". I am not inviting them to come to your house; they are already doing it. Just check Google Maps.
> Privacy for me is not that important. I have nothing to hide
“Saying you don’t need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward Snowden
It’s a very privileged position to believe you have nothing to hide and not be worried about the consequences. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. Many people live in fear for their freedom and lives for elementary things they can’t change and shouldn’t have to hide, such as one’s sexual orientation. We should think of them as well.
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.
What I’m taking issue with is that you said you never really cared about privacy. I care about my family’s privacy. I’m not asking you to care about yours. I’m sorry you’ve given up on something that wasn’t important to you anyway, or whatever.
I think you misunderstood him for me. Regardless, giving up is not something I mentioned. You guys just inferred it. I just feel we need to approach the battle very differently. What we have been doing it's not working.
it’s hard to take that at face value when you also said privacy in and of itself is not that important to you. If you want to build a glass bathroom, be my guest, but I’ll keep putting up better walls for me and mine
Yes, 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.
> 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.
It is probably a reference to the report mentioned in this article from September https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports...
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...
I 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.
I read about that here: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
This remains one of the best things I've found on HN.
Because of this issue, many departments put in much stricter protocols for dealing with this kind of material. Only certain people would be exposed to classify/tag it, and these people would only hold that post of a limited period of time. The burden on those people doesn't change, but it can be diluted to mitigate it somewhat.
Its a real and sad problem, but not one that I think can be fixed with technology. To much is on the line to allow for a false positive from a hallucinating robot to destroy a person(s) life.
OK, 50% "not criminally relevant".
How many of the other 50% were guilty and how many innocent after an investigation?
Absurdly good? What are you talking about, it means entire company processes of trying to identify this has cost so much time and effort and tracking and lost trust from the public and finally reporting... and then they still screw it up half the time
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You're misinterpreting what they mean by "50% false positive rate". Let's say there are 10 child traffickers in the country. A 50% false positive rate might mean this system detects 7 of them, but then also detects 7 people who are not child traffickers. The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare. If one in a million people are child traffickers, and you have a false positive rate of 50%, it means that the average person has no more than a one in a million chance of being a false positive.
Let me put it another way. Let's say you are an Egyptian Pharaoh and a man tells you he can predict when solar eclipses will happen. You give him a calendar and he marks down 20 days in the next few decades where he claims there will be an eclipse. On 10 of those marked days, there actually is an eclipse. That would be a 50% false positive rate. By the standards of an Egyptian Pharaoh, that probably looks like an absurdly good false positive rate.
I agree the GP math is wrong.
But still, is this good? So 14 cases are referred to law enforcement. They catch 7 people doing really terrible things, and they also catch 7 who are innocent. The police are notorious for treating weak signals as strong and forging causes for suspicion, terrorizing suspects, getting them fired from their job, killing their pets, upending their lives, etc.
If you ruin as many lives as you save, will you sleep well at night? This is why a 50% false positive rate is terrible and privacy advocates are against this.
The consequences of a false positive for an eclipse when one is predicted is trivial, unless there's something about eclipses I don't know. Maybe there's some diffuse monetary loss across society.
Yes, this is good.
I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion.
It is your right to do so.
However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork.
Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side of things, simply because I know my tolerances.
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> The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare
If their 50% false positive rate resulted in 100,000 false positives among the German population of 85 million... it's not as rare as all that - you have greater than 1-in-1,000 odds of being a false positive.
> It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio
This is the classic precision versus recall discussion. The discussion centers around how you think about the cost of a false positive versus false negative.
Some people think it's fine for the process to have low precision but high recall. Low precision is that of the number of conversations the process flagged as a positive, some unacceptable (to you) percentage turned out to be a not/false "positive". High recall is that of all the actually positive conversations, the process flagged an acceptable (to you) percentage of them as positive (i.e. only "missed" a few/false negative).
What does it cost to wrongly identify conversation a positive when it's really not a positive (false positive)?
What does it cost to wrongly identify a conversation as a negative when it's really a positive (false negative)?
You decide.
Standing on the street holding a bag open, and catching a fish falling from the sky one time, would also be an absurdly good catch rate no matter how long I had to wait - it's just that shit of a system
Only half the conversations being a waste of law enforcement's time is also an impressive rate - we all recognize that it's just a shite system that is bound to have a lot of false positives.
Fortunately, law enforcement was able to catch pedophiles and terrorists before they came up with the idea of permanently ending everyone's privacy, unlike your obviously ridiculous analogy - nobody has ever caught fish falling from the sky by standing in the street holding empty bags.
The 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-h...
”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.
Mass surveillance has already been ruled to be in contravention of the Human Rights act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". *Only targeted interception* of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
The loophole there is "targeted" so they'll declare that Son of Chat Control is to be targeted.
A decision by the European Court of Justice or any other court does not apply to any legislative branch like the EU commission (not parliament), when making new laws. New laws simply override old laws (to be interpreted as specializations, more or less exceptions, to the old laws)
That's not true, because there is a hierarchy of legality.
If a principle of the EU legal order is at stake, such as the right to privacy, then that constitutional imperative can very well override a new law.
The commission and parliament are well aware of this risk. They often choose to have laws advised on by the courts, in advance. To avoid a legal mess.
This is normal in a functional democracy. To avoid abuse of power / overreach by any institution.
Yeah the whole thing is full with these loopholes. Your rights are rights only as long as we wish at some point to add laws that inhibit them.
It's weird how "rights" went from "the government can't do X to you" to "the government can force private actors to do Y (but these rules don't apply to us)."
Maybe it's because rights should be "government CAN do X to you", and whatever isn't listed in rules government CANNOT do?
Basically a useless document.
Companies like Flock and Clearview have set up gigantic dragnets in the US.
I'm not happy with everything the EU does, but to call it useless is to be ignorant of the rest of the world.
It's perfectly sufficient to have laws against that sort of thing. As governments are above the law (in that they can just add new laws that say they can do whatever they want), you need something else. A bill of rights is such a something else.
The way it's written and the way ECHR court works, the government has to actually argue it's way, not just say "national secirity".
ECHR court however can't repeal the law, only fine the governmemt for actual violation of convention rights.
Is there any mechanism for preventing the introduction of a law that violates the ECHR? It would seem obvious that that should be the case, no?
Not under ECHR, which has twice as much signatories as EU has members and the other half is twice less chill compared to the EU.
I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a forest and send army to shoot at protesters of the wrong kind.
Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws.
However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here?
Edit: I'm aware that the EU is only afforded "competences" given to it by treaties, so perhaps human rights don't fall into any of these...?
However, I also wonder if legislation such as Chat Control, etc, might fall outside its competences.
In the end, the question is whether there is a legal mechanism by which the introduction of laws such as those in question here can be prohibited?
That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.
It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.
In this regard, note that the EU can only propose legislation that falls under one of its "competences". For example, national militaries, income tax, education, most of foreign policy, etc, do not fall under EU control.
The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.
So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???
.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!
There is no loophole really, EU can repeal it's own laws the same way it passes them -- it needs to get the commission, the parliament and enough national governments on board.
>Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
Doesn't matter really. No right in any treaty is absolute. Not even the right to life itself -- the police can and does shoot people and it's legal for them to do under specific conditions. And of course the chat control law says that whatever it is supposed to be doing should be done in the most privacy respecting way possible.
In theory the court (any court really) can weight whether the measures are proportionate and whether negative obligations (not invade privacy) are in a balance with positive obligations (you know -- protective children is also important) and whether the balance is appropriate of a democratic society.
The problem everybody is trying to not see - there is no right to E2E encryption under any law right now. There is no right to have a communication channel that government can't possibly listen to. It's not a thing. The same way there is no right to have your house unsearchable by police and your freedom unbound by a court that can jail you. There are strict limits when any of those things happen, but they do fact happen all the time for good reasons and for bad ones too.
Add: if I would attack it from a legal standpoint, I would not focus on privacy so much, but rather say that creating mass-scaning capability is a threat to the democracy itself.
Most rights are held in balance, as you describe.
However, mass surveillance cannot reasonably be held in balance with detection of crimes, as most people are not criminals
It's not that I like chat control or think that mass surveillance can lead to any good.
What I'm saying, is -- just because the balance isn't where you want it to be, and the policy is bad, that alone doesn't mean the law is unconstitutional, against the EU treaties or ECHR or should be impossible to pass through the legislative.
It's just bad because it's bad.
Good god what a meaningless "right" where all of the exceptions eat the rule.
It depends the version of the declaration, the french one has zero exception listed.
It's the same in French (obviously), though equally this does not permit mass surveillance:
>Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales:
>Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale
>1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance.
>2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dans l'exercice de ce droit que pour autant que cette ingérence est prévue par la loi et qu'elle constitue une mesure qui, dans une société démocratique, est nécessaire à la sécurité nationale, à la sûreté publique, au bien-être économique du pays, à la défense de l'ordre et à la prévention des infractions pénales, à la protection de la santé ou de la morale, ou à la protection des droits et libertés d'autrui.
—
I'm talking about the 1948 version which has the following:
> Article 12
> Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.
And that's it, no other additions.
> arbitraires
That's the key word.
Since all chats would be monitored regardless of the citizen, this fullfills the definition.
Is that the same France which arrested the CEO of a E2E chat provider (without even trumped up charges) and forced them to make backdoors for them?
I never said the country follows it though
ECHR is a convention with a court hearing the cases, as opposed to declarations which is just good vibes PR. Of course the actual working instrument has loopholes.
> It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this.
There is no penalty for doing so.
If something is outlawed but there is no negative consequence for doing it, then it’s not really outlawed in practical terms.
it escapes you because all these treaty clauses read like safeguards, but in practice they’re just friction. Once a government decides it needs mass surveillance for ‘security,’ the law bends. The real question isn’t what the ECHR allows... it’s why people still think legal frameworks can meaningfully restrain a state that has already decided not to be restrained.
it escapes me hwo so many can be so naive.
> it’s why people still think legal frameworks can meaningfully restrain a state that has already decided not to be restrained.
The EU isn't really a state, though. The members are states, but not the EU.
As the saying goes, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”
EU law and its constitution have primacy.
Sort of. It's not quite like anything else. The EU has mostly trade and standardization powers, and lots of the other stuff is an outgrowth of that.
But mostly, EU law just sets a baseline, and almost all execution of it is devolved to the member states.
Edit: the EU does not have a constitution but a constitution shaped update of the Treaties. Now, lots of politicians are happy to blame the EU for unpopular stuff, but the council is the national politicians and they basically run the EU.
And it's not just EU politicians who ignore their constitution. US politicians have been ignoring the US Constitution for oh (checks history books) at least 85 years.
You can’t defend any rights by reference to legal authority. As long as it’s a legal domain, any exceptions are permitted, even on the “human” rights level. Rights can only be defended on moral grounds, like rights to freedom or self-defense.
Because they don't get banned from being able to either take a sit in a political position for life after they went to jail for a few years for high treason agaisnt the people.
You have no right to privacy from authorities. In fact, you'll find that Europeans have very few actual rights.
> It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this.
You make use of the silent assumption that politicians are not criminals. :-(
First time?
The idea of constitutional guarantees, which should be defended absolutely and in their strongest sense only exists inside the US.
Especially the EU, with limited democratic oversight, does not have to be too concerned about things like this.
Gotta find those with illegal opinions somehow.
Think 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.
Wow, 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…
"having something to hide" or defending a human right. who cares. easy to tell where this one gets their feed
I assumed the post was sarcastic, but Poe's Law I suppose, sadly..
Only boring people have nothing to hide.
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the 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."
Let's be pragmatic about this. Chat Control and this new thing are not post-hoc rationalizations, they are attempts to justify a proposed change.
If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that public opinion around these initiatives still matters. Public opinion is something we can all influence. Maybe discussing the legalese is a waste of time, but discussing the rhetoric and how to combat it definitely isn't
I don't think it's about public opinion so much as pushing the goalposts. The whole erosion of privacy since the 60s (maybe further but at least since then) has been a 'boiled frogs' situation.
What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).
A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"
States are not all mighty entities acting without any restriction. Wannabe rulers have to go through that kind of abstract notions to manipulate people at scale, but they have limited skills and abilities to use these tools that people about m accept only under certain conditions.
ECHR is on same ontological level as the notion of state. If no one concrete is willing to enforce it, it has zero agency.
Politicians can ignore constitutions like citizen can ignore laws. Politicians can send military forces on manifesters, and people can make politicians meet the guillotine.
> once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification
This is defeatist, fatalist nonsense.
Alternative take: OP meant that we ought not to trust any justification for the expansion of surveillance like posted.
How?
It’s had to return. “Disguised.”
It was defeated once. It can be again. What might change that is lazy nihilism masquerading as wisdom.
I 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.
> 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.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
No, this is just being pragmatic and realizing that against a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push, legal arguments fall short. Until you address the root causes of something like Chat Control being tried again and again until it passes, any victory is just a brief respite.
You need political will to ensure freedom is respected and wanted by all. After decades of media and reactionary propaganda about crime scaremongering, it's hardly surprising that politicians are able to draft such laws with a straight face.
You do realize the headline matches what you just quoted?
From https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/council-presidency-lewp-csa-r... pp 35:
(f) ‘relevant information society services’ means all of the following services: (i) a hosting service; (ii) an interpersonal communications service; (iii) a software applications store; (iv) an internet access service; (v) online search engines.
And via https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... pp 8:
(2) ‘internet access service’ means a publicly available electronic communications service that provides access to the internet, and thereby connectivity to virtually all end points of the internet, irrespective of the network technology and terminal equipment used
===
Calling it Chat Control is itself an understatement, one that evokes "well I'm not putting anything sensitive on WhatsApp" sentiments - and that's incredibly dangerous.
This bill may very well be read to impose mandatory global backdoors on VPNs, public cloud providers, and even your home router or your laptop network card!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But it doesn't take a lawyer to see how broadly scoped this is.)
> (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries.
It's quite wild to see child sexual abuse continue to be cited as a justification for far-reaching, privacy-invading proposals, allegedly to empower government actors to combat child sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, we have copious and ever-increasing evidence of actual child sexual abuse being perpetrated by people with the most power in these very institutions, and they generally face few (if any) consequences.
> worldwide
Laws targeting service providers usually always apply to all providers providing services in the respective jurisdiction. It would be unusual if it was any different.
So 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?
I am going to assume your question is genuine and not rethorical hyperbole.
Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.
If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.
I mean this (mostly) as a joke, however, I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
But the near daily proposals getting tossed out in their desperate attempt to turn their countries into daycare centers is just annoying to people trying to build things for other adults.
> I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
This would involve them taking about a 30% hit to revenue (or more, depending on the company), so yeah, entirely implausible.
But, it's also worth noting that the US constantly does stuff like this. Like, the entire financial services panopticon of tracking is driven almost entirely by the US, and has been around since the 70s. Should the EU then wall off the US?
Personally, (as an EU citizen), that would really hurt if they did, but getting completely off the dollar based financial system would remove a lot of the US's control (and as a bonus/detriment reveal to the US how much of their vaunted market is propped up by EU money).
Most governments are bad, and these kinds of laws are international, so I'm not sure walling off the EU would make your life much better.
And let's be honest, you should expect the tech industry to end up as regulated as the financial industry over time, the only difference will be how long it takes to get there.
I was under the impression that the strong and independent Americans had thicker skin than this.
luckily, this is a sample size of one (1)
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Neither the EU nor American companies are Congress, so they are not bound by the 1st amendment.
Wait, Congress is bound by the first amendment?
Someone should tell Congress.
"First Amendment Rights" only applies to the State, not private companies.
For example, Hacker News has no obligation to preserve your "First Amendment Rights" on this website. They are free to mute you, ban you, or even just surreptitiously change what you say without you knowing.
That’s just semantics.
If a website which otherwise wouldn’t censor you begins to censor you because of threats from foreign nations, that’s a foreign nation pressuring an American company into suppressing rights of American citizens.
That’s a foreign nation imposing on your rights. In the past that used to require an invasion, so it was a bit more obvious what was happening, but the result is still the same.
Yes it’s through a website, which is owned by a company, which technically speaking owes you nothing.
In the digital age though, where are you going to use your speech, if not on a website?
What you (and others) are doing is trying to reduce the significance of a major transgression over a minor technicality. Way to miss the forest for trees.
The EU can stuff it on this one. And I supported (still support!) the GDPR.
Semantics are important when talking about matters of law. Very important, in fact.
Semantics are literally the only reason we write laws down and argue endlessly about exactly which words to use
Outside of law, I have never once heard "that's just semantics" in a context that made sense, or said by an intelligent person. Not once. Maybe it turns out semantics are never "just semantics", and instead it's something that always matters.
So you’re just going to accept a digital invasion happening and not care, because of some semantics and details somewhere in a document which was penned 200 years prior to the internet being invented?
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems kind of naive and short sighted.
You can still care about forthcoming invasions of one's privacy and while still understanding that the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is only intended to prevent state and federal governments from censoring you. Not corporations.
Semantics are very important when it comes to legal matters.
You can object to the "digital invasion", but using the phrase "freedom of speech" as some sort of magical shield is pointless.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The U.S. federal or state governments, courtesy of that amendment, have very limited authority to control your speech. That's where the legal authority ends.
> That's where the legal authority ends.
So you see no problem with using jurisdiction washing like Five Eyes to remove our rights?
If we don't tolerate a government we elect abridging our freedom of speech, why would we accept a foreign government doing that?
When foreign governments try to force conpanies to abridge free speech by Americans on American soil, that is an attack on something that we deem important enough to have enshrined in our constitution.
> accept a digital invasion
It looks like the possibilities are endless once you throw semantics out of the window, so I could see why you're so fond of doing so.
It isn't your right to comment on somebody else's website. Your argument makes no sense.
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How 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?
We have that in Sweden and Finland: 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.
When 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.
Although this has been eroded, at least in Sweden.
https://www.publikt.se/debatt/insynen-maste-varnas-26420
I 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.
That would only "prove" that government officials should be exempt from government surveillance.
Isn’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?
God, thats a hard fight in that case :(
Eternal vigilance is needed to stop this. Good luck! It will take just one (manufactured) crisis.
We have to win every time. They only have to win once and it's game over.
Why can't we put up legislation to repeal over and over until it is repealed?
Power/wealth asymmetries. The incumbent organizations are powerful, have many resources and actively work to prevent other organizations from achieving the same level if competency.
Because legislation like this is a ratchet.
"Over and over" is the hint.
> Why can't we put up legislation to repeal over and over until it is repealed?
We can. It’s just easier to throw a wrench in a legislative process than to start it. (By design.)
The 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.
That argument is so tiring. Yes, we know, we all understand this, that’s true of every draconian law proposal. What’s the point of repeating that over and over every time? If you want to give up, do, but let others fight without needless discouraging. If everyone thought like you, this would have passed first time.
There is also an alternative, which is the way problems with governments used to get solved in the past. Not that we should aim for that to be necessary, but it often seems that our politicians are hellbend on getting there quickly. I guess it's all "to hell with the consequences!" for them.
Denmark 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.
Denmark 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.
The 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
I would not categorize Denmark as particularly technocratic, on the contrary. Many politicians here go against science and research because “I simply disagree”.
Populism largely runs Denmark.
Look at America to see what happens when things are decided based on the popular interests vs actual data and expertise.
One does not take out the other, balance is always the best.
I agree; that's just not the impression I got from GP.
Denmark is a strange nation with regards to liberty and personal belongings:
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/4963/Denmark:-Exemptin...
This was done to appease the racist voters, who are unfortunately a relatively big factor here.
The law was installed in 2016, (colloquially called “Smykkeloven”/The Jewelry Law) after Syrian refugees walked up through Europe and Denmark, and a myth arose about super rich refugees with bags full of gold.. in 2022 this law had been used in 17 instances.
I cannot roll my eyes enough at the policians here.
Denmark is pretty famous for the fact that people consider themselves pretty centrist and moderate, while the policies they implement, each analyzed separately, are the most leftist of all the EU on all modern topics (ie not classical communism of course - just climate change, women, immigration etc). But when you’re surrounded with likeminded people and little diversity of the press, it sounds logical.
I respectfully disagree that Denmark is left-leaning wrt. immigration. 20-30 years ago that was true, today not at all.
From https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2lknr2d3go.amp
“UK seeks Danish inspiration to shake up immigration system”
“Shabana Mahmood will model some of her new measures on the Danish system - seen as one of the toughest in Europe.”
There are monied interests and special interest groups behind it. No matter who is at the head, it will continue to be pushed by these interests.
Europol, Julie Cordua (CEO of Thorn), Cathal Delaney, former Europol who now is on Thorn's board, Alan Parker, billionaire and founder of the Oak Foundation that's been bankrolling the fake charities lobbying for chat control, Chris Cohn, another billionaire and hedge fund manager who has been funding anti-encryption lobbying in both the US and the EU, Sarah Gardner, former Thorn employee and part of the network of fake charities lobbying to ban encryption. SHe also focuses on lobbying in the US as well, and Maciej Szpunnar, Polish Advocate General and the European court of justice, wants to use chat control for prosecuting copyright infringement.
And don't forget Peter Hummelgaard: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communite on encrypted messaging services."
So you have a few billionaires running lobbying organizations disguised as fake "for the children" charities that operate in both the EU and the US, Europol, and a group of powerful people that are fundamentally opposed to privacy.
Adding to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization):
> Thorn works with a group of technology partners who serve the organization as members of the Technology Task Force. The goal of the program includes developing technological barriers and initiatives to ensure the safety of children online and deter sexual predators on the Internet.
> Various corporate members of the task force include Facebook, Google, Irdeto, Microsoft, Mozilla, Palantir, Salesforce Foundation, Symantec, and Twitter.
Apparently Thorn scratched that list from their current website, but the Wiki page has an archive link.
Worth noting that Thorn also makes scanning software and would stand to profit greatly from chat control.
As with all these types of legislation, always follow the money.
Genuine question: is that Denmark reintroducing this proposal? It's not clear when it's mentioned "the EU commission's revised proposal..." - and second question, if it's "Denmark", who from Denmark has the authority to do so? Any elected Danish member from the EU council?
Denmark holds the EU Presidency. That means they chair the Council of the EU, set the agenda, organize meetings, and drive forward legislative work in that period.
EU council works like US senate worked before senators were elected. So the right answer for who is Danish PM.
Not to be confused with EU parliament which is elected by popular vote and EU comission, which is the executive branch of EU and us voted in by Parliament
Presumably someone is paying really well to push this over and over again.
The 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/1155418089245415...
Nothing 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.
Article on Breyer’s own site: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-th...
Thanks, we'll put that in the toptext as well.
I 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...
Surveillance, 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.
This 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.
Agreed.
The strength of the EU is based on the EU institutions not having too much power. It's why the EU does not attempt to expel, hopefully temporarily, reprobate nations such as Hungary.
This 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.
Unfortunately 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.
The 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.
If they really ban everyone under 16 from texting, this would also become kind of a time bomb. A lot of those affected teens will be allowed to vote very soon. And they might have a very different mental image of the EU than the generations before. The EU used to be a gate to all of Europe, free traveling, no cell roaming fees, Erasmus student exchange. The next generation of voters might perceive the EU as some dystopian institution that takes away fun and freedom.
After Brexit no one's ever leaving the EU
So, 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?
The 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.
This might keep happening if nobody knows who "they" are. Those individuals need to be found and publically shamed.
fightchatcontrol.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.
Thanks 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.
The 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.
That 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
The “you voted wrong and will make you keep voting until you get it right” type of “democracy”.
"Not right now", "Remind me later"
I 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).
Good, 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"?
Oof good luck trying to convince a popular vote against that.
How Could You Possibly Be Against This?!?!? Regulation
Isn’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?
It's better to have zero big bully. It's actually the sole sane desirable state of affairs.
Grateful 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.
I 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.
>A lot of messaging services won't implement chat control.
Why not?
Signal 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.
But MEP will be exempted, so they can continue to use Signal. Rules for thy.
No. Signal will pull out their services from EU. Nobody will be able to download or access Signal.
Well, unless 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.
Apparently 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):
This.. 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.”
I 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.
The 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?!
what is it they’re so concerned about people talking about these days exactly anyway?
The usual stuff.
- members of opposition of the wrong kind (as defined by incumbent);
- journalists investigating the government;
(if the incumbent is brazen enough, those above can be and already are selectively targeted with paid exploits)
- political opponents of the wrong kind (aka the extrimists, which kinda overlaps with #1);
- actual enemy combatants (aka the terrorists), spys and traitors;
- organized crime of the day with unwarranted delusions of grandeur (R. Taghi, his antics and aspirations to kill the Dutch PM);
- immigrants and immigrants to be of the wrong kind and people who smuggle them;
Gotta make sure you aren’t saying the wrong things, like criticising rich and powerful people.
people have been doing that for a long time, but the level of urgency from the system hasn’t been at this level.
It's the establishment putting measures in place to entrench their position with an uncertain future coming towards us, fast. They are setting up systems to prevent revolution.
Yeah 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.
The 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".
It'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.
That they're so damn tired being milked and oppressed by the organized crime groups calling themselves governments, maybe?
That strain of libertarian rhetoric is overwhelmingly encountered on American-dominated fora. I won’t say it doesn’t exist in Europe, since Europeans can pick up on American internet culture, too, but it is too marginal in Europe to affect politics much. There is no significant libertarian party in the EU. Some of the far-right parties stoking and benefiting from popular discontent even promise to uphold the welfare state, but simply deny it to immigrants.
Half of Europe has living memories of oppressive governments, from fascism in Franco's Spain to communism in East Europe.
Must be why they're so itching to get it back
[dead]
Perhaps, or perhaps not, but its now a democracy, not a fascist dictatorship.
Cool, but it's anything but libertarian, which is what we were discussing in this thread.
Regarding democracy, we have pretty severe failings, which you won't hear about because the EU is busy with Poland/Hungary/other conservative countries.
It isn't specifically "libertarian" to accuse some governmental systems as being criminal.
Are you aware that anti-big-government and pro-privacy political philosophy is not limited to (the joke that is) American right-libertarianism?
Not as a major political force to which Denmark’s Chat Control could be responding as the OP claims. Moreover, expressions like “milked and oppressed” ring American libertarianism to the ears of this European poster who is familiar with long years of European cypherpunk activism.
Cypherpunk activism is closer to anarchist ideals, and criticism of the State and its coercive power is central to its ethos. Yes, citizens are being milked and oppressed against a state and a political caste that has grown too powerful.
American right-libertarianism is a joke that originally started as an anarchist branch and has degenerated into getting in bed with the state to further its selfish ideals. Criticism of the state has nothing to do with those posers, as their goal is solely to become the state (i.e. the oppressor), rather than truly pursue the ideal of a free society.
So 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
I'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?
I 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.
Will 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.
If 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?
There are millions of people voting against that stuff. But it would require hundreds of millions to stop it.
This 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.
Constitutions are a pretty common way to say "no to this kind of thing".
Constitutions have a lot of "except in cases prescribed by the law" exceptions which makes it possible to pass into law all kinds of abuses.
Indeed. It seems that the only way out is to elect a government that would have that on their program. Dubious that this will happen.
Governments don't change constitutions pretty much anywhere. More also constitution changes are notoriously hard from requiring 75% of parliament votes, to 66% in two consecutive parliament assemblies (need to pass an election), and all versions in-between (or not having a codified constitution).
> Governments don't change constitutions pretty much anywhere.
They do sometimes manage to just ignore parts that they don't like sometimes, at least temporarily, as the recent and continuing mess in the DPR-US illustrates.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
You need a means for citizens to hold the powers that be accountable. Unfortunately, the EU is largely designed without such a mechanism, as its initial scope and ambition was much smaller than the superstate it is growing into it wasn't deemed necessary.
Every branch except for the European Parliament risks consequences only if they fuck up so badly that the majority of EU citizens in their home countries (or in some cases, the majority of member states) deem their actions so reprehensible that they consider punishing the EU more important than electing their own national government, since it's effectively the same vote.
This is technically still a means of accountability, but it's not really a threat in practice.
We stop allowing the rich to become so rich. Billionares are not compatible with democracy or the greater good.
This seems to be more about political power and government overreach than money. The narrative seems to be focused solely on concentration of the later, lately.
Money is political power. A billionaire can afford to lobby and “donate” as much as they want.
You see this happening a lot where criticisms of capitalism gets laundered in with criticisms of political power as a means to deflect.
Billionaires inherently get political power. When they’re more socially adept than Musk, they can even have the power without having the plebs notice.
Yup, going full autist in public is a good way to get the public angry at you and try to find a way to make your life more difficult.
You mean, going full asshole. Not all autists are assholes.
The issue isn’t that he was being an asshole - plenty of politicians can be assholes and be cheered for it.
He was being straightforward, direct, matter of fact, technical, and an asshole.
You gotta lube up the plebes, or they get butthurt, and that is what is causing the issue.
I expect economical and political power to get along well. You normally acquire both organically; except in some cases, suddently acquiring much of one will buy some of the other.
TLDR: Billionaires hold political power.
It's too bad we can't withdraw our votes for a politician continuously, with the politician having to leave office if the vote changes enough.
I'm not sure it can be solved without everybody writing down their vote, but this would be one way that would make pushing through unpopular policies, whether because of changing opinions, mismatches where politicians misrepresent their plans or corruption, much more difficult.
I have had this idea for a long time: An online realtime voting platform, where you can change your mind about policies at any time, and what the people want needs to be implemented. And of course all issues and policies must be put on the platform for people to vote on.
Of course initially we would have to learn, that changing our minds too often will lead to things not getting done at all. And it is doubtful, that a lot of people are even capable of becoming informed and reflecting beings, not to be swayed by a hip populist radical, and thus causing shit to happen. Also the sheer number of issues and policies would be so many, that most people couldn't make up their mind on everything. But that's OK, since people can raise awareness and simply vote later, when they became aware. Another issue would be what the choices are that people have on the platform. How to give all relevant opinions as choices? How to know what is relevant? Or can voters apply for adding a new opinion? But then who grants the right to add a choice? How to prevent spam?
So there certainly are huge issues with the idea. But maybe, over time, we would develop into politically reasonable societies and politicians would have to fear the opinion of the people, because one scandal uncovered, and they could end up kicked out tomorrow. Maybe it could also better designed, so that there is some minimum time between being able to change ones stance about something. Or some maximum of policies one can have an opinion about per day.
Even initially to have such a platform without real political consequences of voting, would be super interesting, because you could lookup what the current opinions of the people are.
> It's too bad we can't withdraw our votes for a politician continuously, with the politician having to leave office if the vote changes enough.
I think that would empower ill-conceived (and/or ill-willed) populist & short term movements, with everyone in constant fear of being "un-vote bombed" by armies of easily led, and likely make the lobbying problem worse.
That would just strengthen the incentives for continual populism and propaganda.
If not continuously, there needs to be mechanisms to recall a politician (or an entire government), and re-hold elections for both failing to govern and failing to represent the interests of the people over the interest of billionaires.
To use the recent US shutdown as an example. Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held. Every single position in power at the time, gone, the whole thing gets re-elected because they have proven that the current group cannot adequately govern.
The ability to recall needs to work similarly. Vote should be able to be initiated by the people at anytime, and a successful vote means the government dissolves and new elections are held.
We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails. It failed the first time, it should not be able to be immediately reintroduced whether in the same or a different form. There should be some sort of cooling off period where that piece of legislation (or its goals) cannot be reintroduced for x number of years.
These are good ideas, but they do have some pretty big sticking points. The ability to trigger a re-election has the same problems we're trying to avoid in the larger thread: If a bad actor (say a business) wants a politician out, they can just continually issue recall votes until they wear out the population and get lucky. Unfortunately, I think the only solution here is exactly what we have: Politicians have to be re-elected every couple of years.
The cooling off period also has problems, because sometimes a piece of legislation is a good idea, but has a major flaw that causes people to vote against it. What happens when people want a law passed, but not in the form it's presented in?
Re-election every couple of years does not solve the issues, as demonstrated by most elected governments around the world. People are too lazy, uninformed, stupid, to vote for their own good, and will be made to vote against their own interest, time and time again. As societies we are mostly not ready mentally to vote properly. This is in the interest of the people in power. Have stupid and confused subjects, so that you can rally them for whatever cause you need them to rally for.
> Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held.
It's important to note that this is a basic principle, almost the basic principle, of English-style parliamentary democracy. You have a monarch who makes decisions (through their chosen government, ever since the English cut off a few heads), and the rest of the Parliament (a bunch of nobles, clergy, and eventually representatives of commoners) is there to withdraw financing from that government when they disapprove.
> We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails.
We usually do, it is called a "session." The problem is the inability to pass negative legislation (which also has a pretty long history) i.e. we will not do a thing. Deliberative assemblies explicitly frown on negative legislation, and instead say that purpose is served simply by not doing the thing.
The problem is that individual rights are provided by negative legislation against the government: think the US Bill of Rights. Instead, we have systems where exclusively positive legislation is passed by majorities, and repealing that legislation takes supermajorities. The only pragmatic way to create new rights becomes to challenge legislation in courts, and get a decision by opinionated, appointed judges that X piece of legislation is superseded by Y piece of legislation for unconvincing reason Z, and this new "right" is about as stable as the current lineup of the sitting justices.
What we need is to pretend like "democracy" is a meaningful word rather than an empty chant, or more often simply a euphemism for the US, Anglosphere, Western and Central Europe, and whoever they currently approve of. Democracy is rule by the ruled, and the exact processes by which the decisions are made define the degree of democracy. Somehow, elites have decided that process is the least important part of democracy, and the most important part is that elites get their preferred outcomes. Anything else is "populism."*
Decisionmaking processes in "democracies" need to be examined, justified, and codified. The EU needs either to cede a lot more leverage to its individual members (and make that stupid currency a European bancor, rather than a German weapon) OR become more directly responsive to European individuals. If you're not serving the individual states, and you're not serving the individual citizens, you're exclusively serving elites.
* A term made into meaningless invective by elites who hated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States), a party who believed in things that were good.
It seems more likely to me this is being pressed by intelligence agencies than billionaires. Billionaires have secrets too.
But they have ways to evade the law. And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.
What 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?
> 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.
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.
It does? Really?
What are they teaching kids in school these days? According to the books I studied, nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone.
> It does? Really?
Yep.
> nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone
You don't believe in democracy and equal rights? Anyway billionaires love their 10 digits not 8.
Taxes are ~irrelevant to billionaires. When you say "you can't be a billionaire" what you're saying is "you cannot own any significant amount of a large business" because billionaires aren't liquid, their status is based on their assets and primarily their shares in large businesses.
I agree that wealth inequality is horrible and taxes on the wealthy should be much higher. But if someone owns 10% of a trillion dollar company, that's $100B in shares. They can sell off 900M$ worth of shares and "not be a billionaire" in terms of income and money (and thus taxation). So what do you do?
- Seize control of their shares and thus their control over private industry
- Or, accept that billionaires exist
This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
Most people hate the idea of billionaires, but people generally also hate a centrally planned government where the government owns a controlling stake in all businesses preventing any insider from having any real control.
> So what do you do?
We should be discussing strategies to tackle this. Not just go "oh lets just accept it".
Just how many people have 100B+? Do you see them trying to interfere in governance and elections? Maybe we can have annual wealth taxes. Just like property taxes. There are many ways to tackle this. That's what we should be discussing. Not just giving up. Absurd wealth inequality will cause societal collapse.
> This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
> "Annual wealth taxes"
So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.
> No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
The business is already paying taxes (i.e. property taxes). You're proposing a new tax on top of the existing taxation scheme, an ownership tax that likely requires the owner to reduce their ownership. Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
Again, I agree that billionaires are bad. I don't think taxation or incentive structures will fix it. I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
> So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.
All tax is theft by that argument. Whether they liquidate or not is up to them. They just need to pay x tax. They aren't selling their stake to the government. They are free to pay the tax from their general annual income or by selling their stocks in the market like they do today every year.
> Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
How are folks paying property taxes today? They are paying x% of the properties annual value yearly.
> Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
If stock is being sold to pay tax its being sold to someone else in the market not the govt. The govt is not owning the business.
> I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
I agree. But I don't share the sentiment that nothing can be done. None of what I said is radical. Its reality in many european countries. And wealth equality is far less. eg. an annual 1% wealth tax. 1% of 1B is 10M. That's peanuts to them. Heck their stocks appreciate far greater than that yearly.
>Its reality in many european countries. And wealth equality is far less. eg. an annual 1% wealth tax. 1% of 1B is 10M. That's peanuts to them. Heck their stocks appreciate far greater than that yearly.
Ah yes Europe, where businesses are largely uncompetitive globally and the countries are more than ever completely at the mercy of global superpowers. I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally. Their stock market is also considered mediocre and many European prefer to invest in US markets instead.
Just pointing out that "more taxes" isn't some panacea and there's a real cost to competitiveness going this route. If the US went this way, the BRICS nations especially China would eclipse the western world within a generation on the back of more absuive practices, and become the global superpowers easily pushing the west around.
I suppose that's nicer for this generation of citizens, although potentially catastrophic for the generation afterwards. And I don't necessarily envy the geopolitical reality of Europe right now, even if I do envy many of their healthcare systems.
European businesses are uncompetitive because of excess regulation. Not the ultra wealthy having to pay more tax. I'm pointing out they have wealth tax and haven't turned into a communist hellhole. None of the things you complain about whether its Europe refusing to build up their military or its business competitiveness is because of wealth tax. The USA has an annual property tax based on the properties value and isn't a communist nation.
> I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally.
This isn't even true. The US has the same inequality as Russia. Every top EU country is far far lower. Maybe we are communist after all.
Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.
>Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.
Talk about a low-faith strawman! Let me eviscerate this garbage argument.
The 900 billionaires in America control around $7.8 trillion USD in assets (US yearly GDP is over $30 trillion, for reference)
Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.
Pack it up boys, we completely solved wealth inequality and will be a glorious european nation with our $78 billion dollars! If we applied that to nationalized healthcare (estimated cost $3 trillion per year) we just paid for 2% of the healthcare system!
Or maybe we just redistribute that $78 billion. That's $588 dollars per US household per year. Problem = solved.
Great argument.
> Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.
Excellent point. I'm glad you see how much of a pittance 1% annually is. Though I've made the same point before(remember I said 1% of 1B is just 10M, thats a joke for billionaires). Increase the % as you wish. 1% does nothing for inequality given stock gains are far higher yearly.
My whole point is that its a problem that needs to be solved. How we can solve it is a great thing to discuss. Your entire argument so far is that it can't be solved. Which I don't agree with.
And for some reason you just ignore some points. eg. property taxes: "in 2023, approximately $363 billion in property taxes was collected on single-family homes across the United States. Property taxes generally account for about 10-11% of total U.S. tax revenue.". You said "Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.". Turns out thats not true.
Tax the billionaires. You seem to think the current trend is bad as well. You just happen to think my suggestions to fix it is bad. That's fine. But I think its a better constructive use of your time trying to think of better ideas than give up.
We iterate.
Also 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.
> And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult.
as in: not possible
the EU parliament can't legislate to remove it, at least not without permission from the two organs (commission, council) that keep pushing this
EU parliament is the only legislature in the world that needs permission to legislate
>EU parliament is the only legislature in the world that needs permission to legislate
It makes sense, because EU law is mostly technical stuff that commission has to draft and all the national governments have to agree to.
With the commission being elected by the parliament itself and vote of no confidence being a thing, it's not like the parliament doesn't have power -- the power is intentionally nerfed to not overreach where national governments don't want it to.
> With the commission being elected by the parliament itself and vote of no confidence being a thing
you only need 50%+1 to appoint the commission, but 66% to vote them out
so practically impossible
On paper the UK house of commons can pass a bill. In reality bills are driven by the executive. The same executive that (until brexit) drove the bills via appointing the EU commissioner and being the EU council.
The reason that EU Parliament can't pass bills is because constituent governments don't want to lose power to parliament.
>How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
Swiss style democracy with public referendums?
"Think of the children" buys a lot of votes of common people.
plebiscite -> populism -> bad outcomes
People are not able to be experts in everything they are asked to vote on, thats why we delegate it, just like people delegate their healthcare, plumbing, flying to a holiday destination, growing food, etc.
People en-mass are just as easy to manipulate as elected members, if not easier.
Can you point to examples of bad outcomes in Switzerland’s referendums? I mean unequivocal examples, of the sort that would convince everyone here that that model is undesirable as a whole.
How about that time in 2020 the Swiss voted in favor of an immigration restriction proposal that was so fundamentally incompatible with existing EU treaties, the government was forced to bullshit their way out of implementing entirely because doing so would have basically ended Switzerland as a nation? This is the kinda thing that really cannot happen in a working system. The only reason the government is not sued into following through is because the courts have conspired with other branches to shut down any attempt at doing so. Real democratic.
Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:
* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...
* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.
So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.
They have the eight highest MEDIAN wealth per capita, USA is in place 15th.
42 homicides year 2021, so an extremely safe country too.
Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist. They are literally in top 10.
I can tell you our politicians where usually picked up from high school, never been to college, and had worse grades than the general public.
So direct democracy might be like capitalism… the worst system besides all the others.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
For one, we can try to get laws passed that point in the opposite direction: explicitly ban the things being proposed here as broadly as possible.
The people that push this agenda reside on secrecy. We need to expose the people involved and let the press do their jobs.
Agree, but it's rather "expose the people involved and DON'T let their pocket press puppets do their jobs!"
Which press? The same that keeps this war in the shadows?
It's just Ashton Kutcher trying to save our children.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
A lot of society wants this. A lot of parents are asking for this.
That doesn't mean anything, because they're not necessarily educated on the topic, and yet are making decisions that affect everyone.
When it's so cheap to enact mass propaganda, selective omission and manufactured intent, it becomes impossible to just say, "well, the people want it." Their decision making process is compromised by the same people pushing these policies through.
Democracy is indeed broken, and we have to take that seriously if we're going to fix it.
Please quantify "a lot". What percentage of the population wants all private communication between adults to be monitored and censored by a government agency? Can we put it to a vote - right after publicly discussing (debunking) all of the false beliefs that its proponents have?
The question that is at the core is “police can wire tap calls but they cannot wire tap chats. Should this change?” The details are not all that important to people.
Legal interception requires a court order, Chat control is mass surveillance.
Trying to build support for mass surveillance by misrepresenting it as targeted tool with checks and balances is exactly the kind of bad faith discourse I'm talking about.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
Other than hoping for a large meteorite or the second coming to end this misery, or stirring up the bloodbath a la Nepal - then, by recognizing the power of large numbers of people doing little things, like sabotaging the system at the personal level. But that implies unity, and unity and mutual support have been deliberately annihilated in this society for too long. Thus, this outcome is even less probable than the first two.
Agree completely. We're like sheep that are cluelessly watching other sheep being slaughtered.
This.
I'm downvoting you because complaining against downvotes like this is against site guidelines. Your comment would have a better foundation if that part was omitted.
Now that's some recursive self-fulfilling prophecy, my friend! But thanks for chiming in.
The States are learning the hard way that the disproportionate accumulation of wealth is an irresistible force which will eventually erode all checks and balances, corrupt all systems, and ultimately capture the entire government. We we were doing mostly okay with "constrained capitalism" but as soon as we let our guard down, money flooded into politics and that was the end of restraint.
Chat Control isn't something being pushed in the States though, so your criticism just seems like you're taking a random shot at the USA rather than accepting the uncomfortable truth that the EU is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
No, I was directly responding to parent:
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
Relating our experience in the US, we planned for exactly this, it went okay for a while, until it didn't. The answer to parent is "do this but a little better" :-)
I’ve seen this strategy many times in the US. For example, in blue states they will repeatedly propose the same gun control laws that restrict the rights of law abiding citizens and violate the constitution, which guarantees a right to own firearms. Each time such a law is proposed, people have to show up to hearings, submit comments, pressure legislators, protest, and all of that. Those laws may then be pulled back, but the same laws will get brought up every single legislative season, and citizens who have other responsibilities in life have to give up time and money repeatedly to fight for their constitutional rights.
I’m sure there are other examples of such legal abuse of different political biases - I’m just using this as an example because there is such a long history of it. Eventually, legislators will pass whatever they want anyways. And then your recourse to regain rights is to go through an expensive years-long legal battle that ultimately requires the Supreme Court to take the case. This type of “attack” is a serious flaw in many modern democracies.
I think the fix is to have personal consequences for legislators, judges, etc that make bad decisions that violate the constitutional rights or fundamental rights of citizens. The idea that people are immune from consequence just because they’re serving in an official capacity is insane. This shouldn’t be the case for anyone serving in political office or other public roles - as in, you shouldn’t get immunity whether you are a lawmaker or policeman or teacher or whatever else.
This is true and yet we managed to kick SOPA to the curb (one of Aaron Swartz's finest hours)
That was more than a decade ago. Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.
> Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.
I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".
Did you notice that SOPA reappears every couple of years since then?
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?
By choosing "people-vs-individual-politician" fight over "people-vs-government-system". Like, literally, make politicians personally responsible for this bs.
> 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
It 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/
At 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.
The "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.
Elon 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.
Society 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.
They will keep trying until some version of it passes.
Privacy needs codified! The illusion of safety is not worth it for the fascist regime who turn keys it into a panopticon.
These 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Same here. I got no answer. Ahhhh, no: I got one! An automated answer from a deputy on vacation.
They 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.
But I was told that the EU was the good guys…
If I'm an EU citizen, who do I call and email to yell at about this? I assume my relevant MEP, but anyone else?
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#contact-tool
I 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.
This 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.
While 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.
The 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.
It's a foregone conclusion that it will pass. There is no such thing as saying "no" to EU power encroachment.
This Chat Control 2.0 nonsense has to be killed off once for all.
Dystopian BS. It's unfortunate that we've got people in society that are keen on mass surveillance
Again? 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.
It will eventually pass, it's EU after all.
A 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
[1] 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.
Writing about yourself in third person like this is really odd.
The 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
I 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.
This makes me feel pissed off. I used to be Pro EU, now I'm not so sure. (Suddenly I understand Trump voters.)
Same 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.
This 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.
I 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.
Honestly 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!
The 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."
what 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.
Privacy for me is not that important. I have nothing to hide, nothing I am ashamed of. For me it's more of a way of protecting from abuse that a need of its own. I realize it's just me and I do advocate for privacy, but if you look around: we lost. Our data is everywhere and there are no consequences whatsoever. PS: I did mention in my original comment that Google and many others already send drones with cameras to spy on your backyard and that is considered "fine". I am not inviting them to come to your house; they are already doing it. Just check Google Maps.
> Privacy for me is not that important. I have nothing to hide
“Saying you don’t need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward Snowden
It’s a very privileged position to believe you have nothing to hide and not be worried about the consequences. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. Many people live in fear for their freedom and lives for elementary things they can’t change and shouldn’t have to hide, such as one’s sexual orientation. We should think of them as well.
Whether 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.
What I’m taking issue with is that you said you never really cared about privacy. I care about my family’s privacy. I’m not asking you to care about yours. I’m sorry you’ve given up on something that wasn’t important to you anyway, or whatever.
I think you misunderstood him for me. Regardless, giving up is not something I mentioned. You guys just inferred it. I just feel we need to approach the battle very differently. What we have been doing it's not working.
it’s hard to take that at face value when you also said privacy in and of itself is not that important to you. If you want to build a glass bathroom, be my guest, but I’ll keep putting up better walls for me and mine
What??
For 5000 years there were no surveillance cameras or ways to surveil communications! (other than the little that was said by mail)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908672
My Europe doing european stuff...
The GDPR, DMA, DSA are good.
Do you know where there is no chat control possible? XMPP / Jabber [1]. Private, convenient, reliable, distributed, free.
[1] https://xmpp.org/
Isn'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
Yes, 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.
Unless you are going to self-host, you would be required to provide government ID for registration on a server.