The "EU" is not "greenlighting" that proposal this week. The Council of the EU will vote on their negotiation stance, which is merely one step in the legislative process, after which the Commission (which is pro-scanning) and the parliament (which is broadly against it) will get involved.
Are there ways to circumvent this? Selfhosting? Encryption before sending?
Not for the masses. They cannot be bothered and most likely don't care until it is too late.
For the technologist, it is easy to circumvent in the private sphere of life at least.
I foresee however, a digital ID that will be tied to all your essential services, that you will be required to have in order to live, and that's the tracking and communication point that will be used to get a hold of you.
Kind of like the chinese social credit score, but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
I won't say that future will never happen only because "never" is a long time, but that's not happening in the foreseeable future.
I'm in Germany right now, and theoretically my ID card can be used online.
In practice, "Digitalisierung" is kinda a joke here, much like "paperless office".
For example, I have to visit an office to activate that feature of my ID card, and another to tell them I've moved.
During the pandemic, they briefly realised they didn't need to do that, then they forgot.
Likewise with health, there's more than one health insurance provider just in Germany, let alone the whole EU, and if I move country (not just travel, move) my previous insurance isn't likely to work in the new place anyway — it would take substantial improvements before it would even be possible for someone to corrut it the way you're afraid of.
Germany is a lot less digital than the rest of Europe though. Germans by-and-large even refuse to use debit cards (pin&chip). It's so strange visiting Germany as a tourist and not being able to pay with my card in a restaurant for example.
Germans by-and-large even refuse to use debit cards (pin&chip)
I’d call that a minority, especially since Covid.
not being able to pay with my card in a restaurant for example
An even smaller minority, especially for restaurants, slightly larger for non-chain fast food places that probably also cheat on taxes.
I don’t carry cash with me and pay almost everything with my MC debit or AMEX credit card, even in cases I can’t do that, I’d be able to pay with girocard (non-MC/Visa debit card, a widespread local system) if I had one.
>An even smaller minority, especially for restaurants, slightly larger for non-chain fast food places that probably also cheat on taxes.
Personal anecdote, but I've been travelling through Germany this winter and outside of motorway petrol stations and big supermarkets pretty much no one would accept my Visa/MasterCard cards - "EC Karten" only everywhere. We went to a big restaurant which I assumed would be ok because I could see the card terminal at the till, and at the end they told me it's EC Karten only - had to drive around at 11pm to find a working ATM just to withdraw some euro to pay them, while my wife and son waited at the restaurant - absolute nonsense.
Weird, I wonder if that’s the south? Up here in Lübeck, even the small stores now almost always accept everything thanks to the small SumUp terminals.
Are you sure it's not just that your card has both EC and Visa Electron/Mastercard Meastro or similar, and that it's the EC part they accept?
It's been a few years since I've been to Germany, but for comparison, in Norway - while it's nearly unheard of now - you also used to be able to find places that'd take "BankAxept" bank cards, which would be pretty much every domestic debit card, and is similar to EC Karten, but not Visa Electron/Mastercard Maestro debit cards.
If you had a domestic debit card, you'd almost certainly have a Visa/Maestro logo on it as well and so it'd be easy for people to assume that was what they were paying with.
Yes, I am, N26 only gives you a Maestro card if you pay extra, and even that (which I don’t have) doesn’t support girocard. The one I have is MC only.
Wow, it's really bizarre to have a bank issuing debit cards not linked to the dominant local bank network...
Works fine for me, as I said, I can pay with MC debit almost everywhere. The bonus is no-fee foreign currency payments, just for the basic MC exchange rate. Back then I checked, and the only others that offered that were mobile-only banks.
But from all the comments, I’m starting to wonder if SumUp had some focus on Lübeck and Hamburg for other places to not have the huge advances in card payments of recent years.
Was travelling through Sassnitz / Rugen last year and the restaurants we visited didn't accept cards. We had to run around late trying to find an ATM the first evening. And that is a tourist region even..
I work in Mitte in Berlin, 30 minutes walk from Brandenburger Tor, and just got lunch from a pizza takeaway in a building that didn't exist 5 years ago.
They only took cash.
Overall it seems more common than when I first moved here, but that's starting from a low bar, I'd guess going from 1/6th to 1/2 of the cafes and restaurants.
I live in the northern half of Germany and not even the postal office near me accepts Visa. (Let alone the many non-chain shops around me.)
Germany has a very well established electronic cash system in the form of Girocard because the overwhelming majority has a Girokonto and thus no need for a separate payment method. So why should any business in Germany go through the trouble to offer additional payment options for the extremely few cases where a customer cannot pay via Girocard or with cash? If you are frustrated that you cannot use your card you should blame whoever issued it to you. It's their responsibility to convince businesses to offer their payment method.
The future is here in the Netherlands though. Your driver's licence is tapped to your phone so your banking app can read it via NFC, etc. - would not be surprised if other apps require the same (after all, we need to vet who is on social media - it could be kids!)
I self-host a standard XMPP server for my family. Let's see how long it takes before this is illegal too.
At the end, it could be a OS-based scanning, so no matter if the message is encrypted in transit, or self-hosted, then if the message is displayed it could be transmitted and scanned.
Nobody wants terrorists, right ?
That will never fly in every Linux distribution (if any at all), so there’s never going to be a way to stop this for even reasonably proficient criminals.
NSA already considers and flags Linux users as "extremists", so it was only a question of time before agencies in EU would do the same
From a compliance perspective, TPM/signed bootloaders might be a "solution" against illegal Linux distributions.
You actually get them to use it? That's the problem with most of these ideas: sure, you can just roll your own encryption, chat program, etc., but getting the people in your life to use it is another matter. My mom has enough trouble using the popular and ubiquitous chat app we communicate through; something custom is going to be beyond her.
Yes, I get them to use it, but I help them setting up a suitable client. I deleted all the walled garden apps like WhatsApp.
Going custom is beyond the majority of people, of course pedophiles will still be able to avoid being spied on, while the everyday Joe won't spend time to. I even doubt everyday Joe will know about this
There is this in the table:
"All services normally provided for remuneration (including ad-funded services) are in scope, without no threshold in size, number of users etc."
"Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope"
Weird right? But it would be weirder if they would outlaw the application of mathematical operations on your own messages... oh wait that's what they are proposing... Try and stop me. Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
Them: "If you don't show us your messages, you are probably going to jail. So if you don't change your mind, and end up in jail without having shown us your messages, that means whatever was in those messages was way worse than going to jail. You probably knew you were going to get a longer sentence if you showed us those messages, and preferred to go with a shorter sentence of 'refusing to collaborate'."
Oh dear don't give them ideas. I know like one password by heart if someone tries to force me to write it down.
Yeah, it's my Bitwarden password for me... So the $5 wrench will be very effective.
"I forgot the password, sorry". I really do not hope they will start putting people in jail for being forgetful.
Drive your tractor to Brussels and set some barricades on fire. Violent protests seem to be the way to change the EU commission's mind :(
You'll have to wait in line with every other protest going on, then. Some group is protesting something every day in Brussels.
They're all insane and whining over the smallest things, except the ones aligned to my personal political vieuws, of course.
Worked for deprioritizing biodiversity efforts for the sake of mass produced animal products, because, more processing steps => higher economic yield. Money talks.
Self-hosted E2E encryption via Matrix might be one way: https://matrix.org/docs/matrix-concepts/end-to-end-encryptio...
Selfhosting?
I presumed self hosting a chat service becomes illegal with these laws?
Many, and most of them are easy enough that anyone seriously concerned with privacy or secrecy will use them. They do take effort though, which means that while journalists, lawyers, corporations, governments, privacy nerds, and criminals will use them, the average person will not.
What we would lose is that secure communication is actually mainstream now. Billions of people, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encrypted" means use messaging services with strong encryption including WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, even Facebook chat in some cases. These services make mass surveillance difficult or impossible, and targeted surveillance of their users requires significant effort, such as installing malware on a target's device.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-...
Let your voice be heard! Contact your representatives (bottom of the page)!
There were elections about a week ago, so people voted for that, did they change mind in a week ?
If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?
I guarantee you the number of people who voted in the EU elections thinking of this is negligible
And also the council has its own legitimacy which is not dependent on the EU elections, if the EP voted on this as a lame duck you'd have a point, but that doesn't seem to be happening
Most people are just concerned about economic and social issues, and the implications this proposal has on freedom of speech and what that means to democracy seems to be unknown to most. In Portugal, this proposal was not debated nor was it present on most parties' electoral agendas. Furthermore, I got no replies from the MEP candidates I emailed about their opinion on chatcontrol. Even if I wanted to vote accordingly to this proposal, I simply couldn't.
this specific proposal had the benefit of already having had votes on it, so you could've probably found the parties' voting records there. But yeah, there's a broader issue with how european politics is approached since it is always so nationalized that these kind of votes end up as referendums on the national government, which in turn breeds ignorance of what the EU is responsible for and for what it isn't which feeds the vicious cycle of apathy
I'm mildly optimistic it'll get better since the EU and EU politicians are getting more visible. I just hope we don't overshoot and end up where the US is right now where people seem to think the president does everything at all times at all levels
Btw, I'm assuming you meant "MEP candidate" when you say "deputy candidate", in english as far as I can tell deputy lost the meaning of "legislature member" in common use, that remained common in Latin languages (italian here, we use the same term)
Just an FYI that it might confuse some people (like it did with me before I switched to thinking about it in italian) why you were asking the deputies of a candidate instead of the candidates themselves
Fixed deputy -> MEP. Thanks!
The elections were not for the EU Council, which represents the governments of the member states.
People voted for the EU Parliament, which has a far more negative attitude to this proposal.
The EU Council is not the same as the EU parliament.
Yes, some of the parties did. In Sweden for example, the government parties just decided to greenlight the EU proposal that is up for vote now, even though their EU parliament representatives (from the same parties) had said before the recent EU election that they were against it (they even celebrated publicly last autumn when the proposal was downvoted last time). It's a mess trying to keep track of the party politics to be fair and it's possible the EU parliament members are voting in one way while their "mother party" in the home land votes in another way. But it did feel like a rug pull here.
If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?
No. An explicit feature of a representative democracy is that the will of the majority can be ignored.
The EU isn't a direct democracy where people can vote on particular issues, they vote on national parties, which send representatives to create EU wide parties.
Voted and changed their mind for what though? What has this proposal to do with what people voted for? Most people have no clue this is going on; it wasn't in any party program 'for the layman' that said
[x] 'privacy invasive scanning of everything personal, BUT for the benefit of the children and Kutcher'
Most people (even tech people) didn't/don't know about this and also, most people really don't care in the face of other more urgent things (housing, immigration, climate, inflation, etc etc etc).
If you sit down with them and explain (something like: what if this happens and you agree to the scanning, 20 years from now Putin invades your country and you get dragged off the gulag on day #1 because 17 years ago you sent a derogatory image of him to someone; they said they would delete everything!?!), most would probably vote against, but no-one is doing that.
It is good that you are getting to understand how 'democracy' works.
That website is a mess. I'm in the Netherlands.
I started here:
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
Then checked Netherlands under sublevels and wound up here:
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
and that seems to have the email address bre@minbuza.nl ?
and finally I end up at https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/pr-eu-brussels which has no contact info.
I'll try that email address anyway.
I guess this is who I contact? https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/pr-eu-brussels
edit:
Well apparently NL is clear in opposing it but I am a citizen of Ireland (it's not really clear who my representation is in that case) so will try them...
I just contacted the representation for where I am resident, not where I am from (I am also from NL and they seem to be against already). Can't hurt.
If you're in Spain, you can contact Spain's permanent representation in the EU here: https://es-ue.org/contactar/
Another day I'm happy my country (Switzerland) respects its citizens wishes to not join EU
What's Switzerland's stance on this (message scanning)? From what I have seen this entire topic keeps coming up in the US, the UK and some European countries and is just impossible to keep dead, because some citizens are strongly lobbying in favor of it.
The answer is to play the game, pay the piper, and lobby against it.
I'm not sure if this can work long term unless some fundamentals change. A lot of victims of CSEM will keep that topic alive. It's rather unpopular to stand against this given that "live with it" is sort of the only alternative.
The Swiss don't need this law because they have their own tradition of informing on each other.
It's easier to run a country when it is holding all the drug cartel and dictator money of the planet. You do not have to steal from your citizens as much.
Are you optimistic that Swiss citizens are unaffected by this?
Well it's not a "wish", we voted for it.
Considering the current relationship between the Federal Council and the EU, I don't think it would be close this time around.
Edit: Actually there was a votation for adhesion to the European Economic Area in 1992, but also for full adhesion to the EU in 2001 (rejected at 76.8%). Switzerland is not even close to become a member state.
1- if you talk to a person from eu, your data will be affected 2- nobody guarantees switzerland will not want to do the same thing, just like UK. 3- switzerland is not part of eu, but certain behavior of sw is influenced by the eu's decisions, since basically all the border is shared with eu countries and those can put pressure on switzerland to adapt certain laws (ofc not openly)
As a Norwegian, I’m not sure this matters. You think app publishers are going to release a Swiss/Norwegian version that doesn’t have that? Nah, they’ll just release the same version with chat control in all of Europe. (Besides the fact that Norway usually rubber stamps EU rules without much consideration, which maybe isn’t a problem in Switzerland)
They won't stop, won't they.
The joys of representative democracy. The people are told they are free, but it's the oligarchy in their ivory tower that decide for you.
Every few years you get told you can vote for the next liar to do their bidding in your name, and we, the people, keep the circus alive by telling each other "your vote counts! It's your fault if they're all thieves!"
Government won't stop monitoring each and every citizen, and citizens have stopped any form of resistance, political or technological. Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams. We have lost.
I don't think this discussion is happening against people's wishes.
I think people outside of tech (99% of people) are far more likely to support such a law.
You may argue that this is due to them not being sufficiently informed, but that's not to be blamed on representative democracy.
Are you saying that most people are likely to support this, or that people actually demanded it?
No one asked for this law, but you can convince the populace a posteriori that this is good for them, certainly. It's all part of the game.
The fact that the hoi polloi can be easily persuaded in any direction is not a reason for the people in power to do whatever the f they want with our rights, hiding beneath the banner of democracy.
Also, whoever says that we, the nerds, should do more to educate the masses is disingenuous when the people in power have massive reach. I can go rant on a blog about what this means for our privacy, while the politician goes on a TV show and on mass media campaigns to claim that this law is to save the children from the baddies.
Call me a silly idealist, but representative democracy is a bloody scam.
Do you believe someone who uses Windows, chats on Discord and posts on Instagram cares about surveillance?
I think there are only two groups of people who still care about this:
- Tech people who are willing to give up QoL to cling to privacy-respecting alternatives. (People like us.) These people are a tiny minority which would be irrelevant in any democratic system.
- Old people who haven't yet arrived in the digital age. These are also a minority, and keep becoming fewer.
I think the vast majority of people have fully accepted constant surveillance of their digital activity by companies (and therefore governments) as simply the way things are.
To these people, this law is a benefit to security with zero tradeoff.
Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.
And only evil people would use encryption and anonymization, right?
(Tangent 1: Goverments could educate people in a representative democracy, too. People could also use the educational material readily available. But I think most people don't want to be educated on the majority of topics.)
(Tangent 2: I don't think direct democracy is a good system. I think that the vast majority of people (including me) are incapable of making good laws. I believe only a trained professional, aka a politician, is capable of understanding and predicting all the possible long term effects a law, such as e.g. a trade deal, can have. I certainly cannot.)
(ETA: I would go so far as to say that this law being controversially debated is the result of representative democracy working well. I'd claim that in a direct democracy it could easily get passed without much scrutiny.)
Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.
This is a depressing realization. I did convince my mother to use Ublock Origin, just to realize Iphones does not allow it.
The amount of techical competence needed is just way too high when most companoes and states are hostile to your privacy.
Everyone is part of some 1% group. Like imagine how many BS laws e.g. farmers or dentists have to deal with that we don't understand the full lunacy of.
> Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams.
I agree.
The tendency to over-criticize and deride is part of the self-inflicted helplessness. Every attempt to improve things gets a fair deal of scorn and criticism...which is not exactly good.
No they won't. Thanks for the technological advances the perfect state is finally scientifically feasible.
Technically yes, but whether the implementations will work in perpetuity is another matter. Think how much resources are needed to keep legacy infrastructure running in the present day. Will these costs go down significantly once the next round of even more complicated bureaucratic management software comes into effect?
The heavy surveillance states of today will prove an interesting case study of software/data upkeep.
Why is anyone surprised about this? This will be a global phenomenon since LLMs together with ubiquitous surveillance brings down the costs of policing to 0. Just add police drones and you have a foolproof system. There is not a single country in this world whose leaders will decide that "nah we dont need perfect surveillance"
Just add police drones and you have a foolproof system
except you don't.
And this is exactly the issue here: by removing police from the streets, doing policing work, not repression as they do in the US, people started feeling less and less secure, which is somewhat also kinda true and they will gladly accept anything that promises more security, which in turn will increase the sense of insecurity and promote more technological surveillance, in a never ending shitty feedback loop.
The loop is intentional though. You need political will to pass laws like these so you have to create crises for it. But as you say its a self sustaining cycle and the end result will be fully automated repression. The old arguments of "Oh well the policemen have families too" will go away once drones can enforce your dictatorship
The loop is intentional though
Of course, but it's also a consequence of being rich countries. Nobody wants to actually be a cop anymore, after studying for years to get a degree and finally get a cop's salary, and I understand them.
The good news is that unless you are Japanese living in a dystopian anime, automated (kawaiiii) drone repression will never work in practice.
https://theglorioblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/psychop...
Over here in NLD they dont make them study. They mostly hire morons and give them a course so stupid a above average intelligent person could pass the exam within a month. And it shows on the streets. ( They even taser unarmed elderly on a mobility device and no one bats an eye ) Nobody wants to work for a corrupt and imbecile organisation.
They mostly hire morons
yeah, same here, that's part of the problem though, which reinforces the idea that police can be replaced by autonomous robotic agents. Which is not true.
Some examples from my country, some are laughable, some are horrifying
https://www.gardapost.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/robot-ya...
https://www.gedistatic.it/content/gnn/img/ilsecoloxix/2023/1...
Oh I wasnt envisioning this when I talked about the situation above. I guess my vision is 20 years from now where you will have LLMs scanning everything and predicting your danger level, if it arises over a certain threshold they just send killbots to deal with you if you dont comply by reporting to your local private prison
Shame, I would have enjoyed the kawaii look more than the DJI suicide drone look
Has anyone in power thought through the scale of this? Even if it has a frankly exceptional error rate of just 0.001%, that still means tens of thousands of innocent Europeans will have their lives ruined every day. And, assuming there's a human in the loop, who are we going to traumatize to check The Machine's work? Is it going to be Kenyans again^, or Eastern Europeans this time?
^ https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-tr...
Life ruined as in being flagged and investigated? Or as in, you sent some medical pics of your son's crotch to the dokter and some sicko on the scanning program looks at that photo and spreads it in his network?
Both I guess...
you sent some medical pics of your son's crotch
and permanently lose access to your google acount, even after lots of stress and the police declaring you innocent[1]. Replace google acount by some other important thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
I know the story, it's why I picked it as an example. I wonder how many humans have since seen the son's crotch.
>Has anyone in power thought through the scale of this?
Why would they? People in power and judges are always exempt from warrantless mass surveillance. They get actual privacy.
France managed to get in an exemption in the proposal for their police and security workers, who can keep their privacy. I think the wording is that this would only apply to apps available to "the public". So if "the public" can't download your app, you're safe...
I think it just shows it won't be possible to implement this in a useful way. Let's hope...
Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.
In the proposal, they write that the service providers have to figure out a way to make the false positives reported to the police "minimal". This is obviously a major burden to put on the service providers, in effect completely excluding all small outfits (and I'm sceptical the large companies want to deal with this either).
Germany have had some similar tech in place according to Der Spiegel, but the entire increase in positives was found out to be legal dickpics and flirty messages between teenagers etc. The only result was that the police now have a huge database of teenager's naked pictures and kids on the beach, which can hardly be a good way to minimize pedophile activity.
It will be a shitshow beyond comprehension if this eventually gets implemented.
I'm going to be the controversial one here and just claim that more harm is currently done by unrestricted social media than any privacy invasions. Predators have free reign to do whatever they wish anonymously and get away with it.
I don't want a dystopian big brother watching over my back, but that's where we are going if somebody doesn't come up with alternatives to control the abuse.
I would personally vote for government issued public/private key cryptography. Sign with your key to verify that you are a citizen of such and such state, gaining a trusted unique identifier without subjecting yourself to a privacy invasion outside a court order. Or a similar system. I'm not an expert on the matter.
Free spaces are still allowed, but as you don't have an pseudonymous identifier, nobody will trust you and should not. Also legislation around this should be built.
thing is, this chat control will not help. Criminals will use illegal tools while all the rest of the population will be subject to gov investigation (including monitoring political adversaries). And that's one thing - if the system is wrongly implemented, this backdoor could be accessed by 3'rd parties/hackers and at that point it would be a clown show. Unrestricted social media is another problem that should be solved, it'll not be solved by this law, in fact it may worsen it if certain actors will want to alter backdoor mechanism so that the access to all the data will not be shared only with govt
It will help. Just as any system that has trade-offs. So much of human existence would be much simpler and happier if we didn't have to build systems to control crime and bad behavior.
Is it a system I want? No. I think there are better options. Do I see people in this thread proposing any better options? No. So the default seems to be Orwellian as everyone is too dismissive, arrogant and lazy.
everyone is too dismissive
I am, indeed dismissive. I don't believe any crime justifies mass surveillance. Client-side scanning in all public chat apps cannot be described any other way. I am therefore opposed to it without any room for subtlety.
That does not mean I don't care about child abuse. If someone wants to propose more funding for law enforcement to investigate crimes against children and additional resources to support victims, I'm all for it.
better option is to leave privacy as is. You basically trade a dream of catching criminals (that will switch to illegal tools to keep their data hidden) to a reality where govts,hackers and big corpos can get your data much easier and use it against you. If you think there are better options, the solution is to cancel this privacy invading law and start discussing abt those better solutions instead of implementing a law that will hurt ppl by design by offering much more power to govs, corporations and much bigger surface attack for hackers
This sounds like the privilege of never having been persecuted by your own government. And the lack of empathy towards and acknowledgment of those who are.
True. But I have been subjected to a massive amount of hybrid war and influence operations by other adversarial entities. Persecution is bad. So is degrading democracy and turning people against each other.
Dear HNautes,
Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing. It might even have an adversarial effect.
If you want to be helpful, please consider more strategic alternatives such raising awareness among the general public, writing thoughtful arguments, or joining specialized non-profits or political parties.
Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing
Nobody likes this. A concise, thoughtful call or message carries a premium in the states, but only if you’re demonstrably a constituent.
The reason is simple: it shows conviction. If you’re willing to pick up the phone, you might be willing to stump for an opponent. If you’re unwilling to do that, or are raving at the politician such that you would never be won over by them, you’re messaging you’re a lost cause.
Calls, emails, tweets, and texts are ephemeral and easily ignored.
Send a handwritten letter to cuts through the noise because no one does it anymore.
Oh I'm sorry, how dare I inconvenience a public servant.
Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing. It might even have an adversarial effect.
tough luck, it's their job. if they lash out due to that they are unfit to be in positions of power.
The folks over at Tuta interviewed Patrick Breyer about this yesterday and his explanation of Chat Control is downright sinister. Link here: https://youtu.be/wSEI-dg3Hpo
Let's keep spreading the word about this, the whole Chat Control debate seems to be ignored right now in the media.
Let's keep spreading the word about this, the whole Chat Control debate seems to be ignored right now in the media.
Maybe it is not purely by chance that the EU is dealing with this topic during the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Euro_2024 ? ;)
99.99999% not a coincident. These far reaching proposals almost always have critical stages when the public is concerned by something else.
Shit, I never thought about that
ofc, some guy at every TV channel can't wait to call up his homie at that gov. institution that gets to process all that data. marketaching*can y'all here the cashier dancing?
I'm not specifically talking about tfa, but I defo feel less enthused about net neutrality and such these days.. For a few reasons.
1. Internet is bad now
In the 80's a new and truly utopian vision of personal computers, the internet, the web, was actually realised. But since then it's been taken over by monster corporations, the net has simply gone through the same process as systems before it (telegraph, telephone, TV) as described in "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu. In reality, for most users in 2024 it's no longer a utopian freeing force, its the opposite, a completely locked down system governed by utterly ruthless and reckless megacorps.
2. Internet is harmful
There's loads of data appearing about the negative health effects of social media, screentime, etc.
3. Geopolitics
The era of the peace dividend seems to be drawing to a close, and a new era of great power struggles beginning. Western democracies vs Autocracies (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) It seems the autocratic countries are taking advantage of the weakness of the open net of the west, and using it to spread chaos and discord and destroy them from the inside. Stuff like the "Internet research Agency".
Having the internet restricted by relatively trustworthy regulators like the EU, seems preferable to me to letting megacorps dominate and abuse it, causing harm for profit, or to let autocracies use it to sow chaos. I actually think it'd be a good idea nowadays to ban social media tbh.
It's not one or the other. No fundamental law states that the internet must be controlled by either powerful corporations or powerful governments. If governments did their job and enforced anti-trust and other consumer protection laws then neither would be the case.
I am thinking that wanting to fix the net might be living in the past. We'll never return to the old utopia. Like no effort ever fixed the previous systems of telegraph, telephone, radio, and tv, we just made new disruptive systems that ignored the old busted systems and created their own new one. Maybe the hackers of today should be focused on something like that instead of fighting a lost cause.
all of this will not be solved by this law. In fact it'll make internet worse. Having a backdoor opens possibilities for hackers/third parties to try to circumvent it and gain access to the data (while with e2ee it's much much harder). Big players/corpos can alter the system in a way so that not only govs will have access to this data and to share it with 3'rd parties to enhance the ads business. Also - govs will get huge power with this law and in case some country/group of countries will get ppl like orban/putin in power - consequences may be drastic since nothing will stop them to abuse their power
"Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope"
So, what's the use of this law anyway?
I do wonder what open source means though. Is Signal opensource? The client is, the server is not... Matrix is fully open source... And Whatsapp (which my country runs on) which has open source encryption...?
So I can set up a server for my family and do no scanning, and that's not illegal. Can I let my neighbour join. How far down the street am I allowed to offer this service before it becomes in scope? Can I make a preconfigured, plug-and-play appliance that runs an encrypted chat server on a home internet connection and give that to someone I know? Someone I don't know?
This is one of those extremely frustrating laws that's just going to hit everyone EXCEPT the ones who deserve it.
Thinking like I want to take advantage of the letter of the law:
"End-to-end encrypted messenger services are not excluded from the scope"
This was probably added precisely to include Signal, XMPP with OMEMO, etc.
"Hosting services affected include web hosting, social media, video streaming services, file hosting and cloud services"
So not even self-hosting NAS, since this probably will be interpreted as "sharing with your family is still providing a file hosting service to them".
Extremely clickbait title after the vote was supposed to happen today.
It hasn't happened, it is postponed to tomorrow.
sorry, wasn't intended - updated it
Also it's the link to the generic page, not a news article (which has been debated several times in the past days)
OTOH this generic page seems to explain it better and in a less sensationalistic way
(on the other other hand I feel that privacy advocates should hire some PR companies to enhance the job of raising awareness - the pro-scanning NGOs put a lot of money on it)
It's sickening how corporations like Apple and governments like EU council use child abuse for wide, unrestricted invigilation of common folk.
"Guilty until proven innocent" seems to be the new reality.
It's the easiest topic matter to push agenda's from. As out of the two below, which is more fearful?
"Your child could be used in pornography"
"Criminals are selling weed via text message for €5 a gram"
The Simpsons "won't someone think of the children" meme demonstrates it well.
The problem with the current state of the EU is that it is governed by unelected politicians - the EU Comission, and they are very out of touch with reality. Plus the fact they managed to make themselves very hard to control or remove from power.
Latest example being farmers that are being targeted and until they did not come to Brussels to dump manure in the streets, the EU Comission did not care a bit of the harm they were causing them. And it did not care even then until France used its power to get it to listen.
The EU started as a nice project that is slowly becoming something thst not even in the wildest communist dreams was thought not possible.
In this specific example it's not the Commission that drives this initiative, but the Council, which is formed of head of states for the individual members.
How will this affect companies in a technical aspect? Just no more e2e encryption available in the clients? Or will it be some kind of weird e2e with a backdoor (which is not how encryption works)…
Does it mean that chat communications with steganography would also be outlawed in EU?
I find it very funny that this law's entire purpose could very well be defeated by another recent-ish EU law, namely the Digital Markets act.
This law is somewhat workable if you assume that App Stores are the only way for mobile apps to be distributed. If users are allowed to sideload, as an app maker from a non-european country, you can just refuse to comply.
This isn't possible with Apple's current implementation of this law, but that implementation is extremely likely to be ruled noncompliant anyway based on what the EU authorities are saying.
Whatever your position on this, can we have higher quality sources - we've already discussed this clickbait activist blog:
Where all the “that’s an America problem, here in the EU…” posters?
at some point we need to bring back the idea of direct democracy on the table (online voting with blockchain or whatever) so that "representatives" are not needed anymore and cant be lobbied year on year against individual interests
There is something weird about EU approach to online child protection. They project themselves as being hell-bent on solving the problem, yet, as with the US with the Jeffrey Epstein case, they are curiously inactive when it comes to prosecution of pedophiles. As if they're keen to find them, but not so keen to lock them up. WTF do they do with these pedophiles once they find them? Promote them to public office so they can be extorted and controlled? It doesn't add up.
Seems like there is something weird about EU and pedophilia. Coincidentally, it seems as if the EU is operating under the thumb of a foreign power. After being involved in the tech sector there, it has been a recurring theme. I never heard about that stuff when working for US tech companies. In other countries, they also handle the problem but they don't constantly virtue-signal about it. Also when I was in the crypto space working on EU-backed projects, I heard rumors that some of the founders had been victims (or maybe also the other way? Like a cult) I inferred that they were being extorted. When I read conspiracy theories about that sort of stuff, it oddly resonates with some of my experiences in the tech sector when you get close to the big money and big politics.
The increase of popularity of conspiracy theories and the recurring theme of pedophilia is also starting to seem suspicious.
This site is not very good at getting you to oppose this - two links to get to EU info on who to contact to oppose this - one click on EU info
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
one click there to get to your particular country.
It sure would be nice if it had a list of people to contact at the top.
Also HN is killing patrick-breyer's site, so it is even more difficult for all these committed people to find the place they should go look for who to contact.
Contact in Denmark - brurep@um.dk is evidently the one.
This shit is because of an organization that pushes their shitty products. Lobbysm in the EU is fucking out of control .
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
I've (with help of ChatGPT) written an email that I've sent to all representatives. Feel free to use it!
To: info.belgoeurop@diplobel.fed.be, mission.brusselseu@bg-permrep.eu, eu.brussels@embassy.mzv.cz, brurep@um.dk, info@bruessel-eu.diplo.de, permrep.eu@mfa.ee, irlprb@dfa.ie, mea.bruxelles@rp-grece.be, reper.bruselasue@reper.maec.es, courrier.bruxelles-dfra@diplomatie.gouv.fr, hr.perm.rep@mvep.hr, rpue.rpue@esteri.it, cy.perm.rep@mfa.gov.cy, permrep.eu@mfa.gov.lv, office@eu.mfa.lt, bruxelles.rpue@mae.etat.lu, sec.beu@mfa.gov.hu, maltarep@gov.mt, bre@minbuza.nl, bruessel-ov@bmeia.gv.at, bebrustpe@msz.gov.pl, reper@mne.pt, bru@rpro.eu, slomission.eu@gov.si, eu.brussels@mzv.sk, sanomat.eue@formin.fi, representationen.bryssel@gov.se
Subject: Urgent: Chat Control
Dear Representative,
I am writing to express my deep concerns regarding Chat Control. As a citizen of the European Union, I am committed to safeguarding our fundamental rights and freedoms, particularly the right to privacy and the protection of personal data.
The Chat Control Chat Control poses several significant risks:
Invasion of Privacy: The proposed measures would lead to the mass surveillance of private communications, undermining the privacy of all EU citizens. This broad surveillance is disproportionate and infringes on our fundamental right to private correspondence.
Security Risks: Weakening encryption to facilitate the monitoring of communications makes all users more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Encryption is essential for protecting sensitive data, including financial information, personal communications, and sensitive business data.
Potential for Abuse: Granting authorities the power to monitor private communications without adequate checks and balances can lead to misuse and abuse of power. This undermines trust in both governmental and digital platforms.
Stifling Innovation: Chat Control could have a chilling effect on tech innovation within the EU. Companies may be discouraged from developing new technologies or offering their services in the EU due to increased regulatory burdens and privacy concerns.
I urge you to oppose Chat Control and advocate for solutions that protect children online without compromising the privacy and security of all citizens. Alternatives such as targeted interventions, improved digital literacy, and support for responsible online behavior are more effective and less intrusive ways to achieve these goals.
Protecting the privacy and security of our digital communications is crucial for maintaining trust in the digital economy and upholding the values of the European Union. I hope you will consider these points and vote against Chat Control.
Thank you for your attention to this critical matter.
Yours sincerely,
[your name/address/etc.]
I am writing to express my deep concern regarding the proposed Chat Control legislation, despite not being a resident of the European Union. As someone who values privacy and security in digital communications, I believe this legislation has far-reaching implications that extend beyond the borders of the EU.German contact: https://bruessel-eu.diplo.de/eu-de/staendigevertretungeu/kon...
I tried, but got back answers like "in this security climate? that sounds like a good idea". I've just finished setting up Matrix, I'm tired of this.
[dupe]
Incorrect link to match title, lots of recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993
It feels so polarizing with the EU at one point they push for strong privacy laws the next they push shit like this.
It's like their gun law that was a response to the Islamic terrorists using smuggled ak47 from the balkans but the law flat out bans anything bugger than a pistol pretty much.
And at every stage people will talk about how horrible EU is as if this has already passed, just like last time.
The fact that we have to deal with this bullshit every couple months is a pretty depressing fact on its own.
I wish there was a way for EU citizens to punish the council this behaviour. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be anything in place for that.
There is: stop electing the people that make these decisions in positions that can land them in the EU Council.
Your vote alone doesn't change anything.
Yet, you should still vote.
I should do whatever I find useful. Voting for unknown electorate funded by involuntary collected money it is not.
I wish that we had this possibility, but here in France the bad political parties have strong regulatory barriers to prevent independent and need comers to be candidate or have a chance to be president and sometimes parlement members...
Same here in Germany. Parties need at least 5% of the vote to get elected into Parlament. That’s 2-4 million votes every year straight into the trash
You can vote for a different president/prime minister.
Sure, I can vote people into office, and after their tenure they disappear. But I can't vote their incompetent arses out of offices or prevent them from ever getting elected again when they display blatant disregard for human rights.
Yeah my idea was people need a positiv or a negative vote. Honestly I would mostly vote negative also against a Candidate.
Idea of voting - giving up our responsibility to electorate - is wrong in scale like centralised EU.
You cannot solve problems for millions idividuals by centralised regulations.
thats about as indirect as it goes
What if people choose their governments over more pressing concerns than $SCARE_QUOTE_PHRASE to defeat $STRAWMAN?
There is: EU citizens can engage their peers in dialogue on how this behaviour is terrible and they can try their darnedest to convince their peers to never vote for politicians who are part of the problem.
Yes that will work. Just like referendums work in the Netherlands for example. 90% the population vote in a referumdum against a particular agreement. The government voted for it anyway and then got rid of referendums.
That's how effective and democratic this all is.
Could you be more specific which case this was?
I would prefer to have decentralised government. This centralised rules for millions doesn't work and eventually escalate badly.
Just because we give up our responsibility to electorate in hope that they solve our problems. How could they possibly do that for millions of individuals with different problems and needs?
Replace your national government during national elections.
Your vote doesn't matter and most likely wont change anything.
Divide and conquer.
Add on top of that bullshit, the new plastic caps that the EU imposed instead of doing a refundable deposit per [bottle/cap pair].
I'm sorry, are you talking about the plastic caps that stay attached to plastic bottles so that they are more likely to be disposed of properly rather than end up in some marine (or other nature) environment?
I cannot believe you're comparing that (an effort designed to make recycling more effective, which is generally a good thing) to EU citizens entirely losing our access to privacy in the digital world.
The same, it solves a marginal problem (people that throw away on the highway only the plastic caps, and somehow keep separate the bottle), in an absurd way that punishes all the nice users, again, just to solve a small % of very cases.
The guys who somehow enjoy throwing away plastic caps, will likely remove it anyway.
The same with the spying, all users will suffer, but those who want to work around it, will find a way.
The irony is that it makes driving more dangerous now, as you need two hands to drink from a water bottle.
Punish is a strong word, it slightly inconveniences all "the nice users".
It's really not that big of a deal honestly, you unscrew the bottle, flip the cap up (it kinda locks like that and stays out of your way in one of the designs I've seen, in the other it's just attached and can easily be kept out of the way with a finger), then you drink, I fail to see how you suddenly need two hands as opposed to before...
Not debating the merits of this case.
There are many regulations that slightly inconvenience the many, to address the problems of a few. Individually these cases are benign. As a group they compound complexity.
Each new reform should be evaluated on both its benefits and the burden that it brings.
Wholeheartedly agree. But we (as a society) have neglected the environment for far too fucking long now, some inconvenience for tiny gains is valid until we start seeing societal and environmental improvements.
If anything, I've come to like them because you now don't need to hold on to the cap.
Stop using weak language and call a spade a spade.
What? That is absurd, you don't need two hands just because the lid remains attached.
The lid scratches your nose or eye so you need to use the second hand to hold the lid
(or one of the five fingers of the first hand)
I use these caps one-handed plenty...
How exactly do bottle caps in the EU end up in marine environments? And if they do that should be pretty easy to fix.
These regulations won’t do anything to stop countries in Asia, Africa and other places from pumping their garbage into rivers and oceans…
To be fair I don’t really mind the bottle caps (unlike the plastic straw ban) but it hardly accomplishes anything beautiful allowing people in the EU to feel better about themselves because they are doing their part (which is possibly actually counterproductive).
The solution was an EU-wide plastic bottle deposit, this way, it pushes people to bring back intact bottles with their caps and get ~0.10 EUR back for each.
And if you are too lazy to bring it back or just a person who throws away stuff carelessly, someone else will do (big sorting centers as it's a big revenue-stream, the cleaners, the homelesses, some bored students, etc).
I'm all for requiring bottle deposit/returns schemes. I loved the Norwegian one for example, but if you require the return of both or nothing, you will likely end up with a net reduction in returned plastic. If you were to reward returns separately, maybe. But even then you'd be more likely to ensure caps don't get lost if they stay attached.
But they are, as it becomes easier to just produce one version the bottle caps attached to the bottle will spread to other countries[1]
[1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
Even the idea makes me loose all faith in the institution. How can you be okay with people as deranged as this making rules about the future of your country?
"Not everyone is insane", just isn't a particularly strong point.
When did the EU become a country though...?
How do EU rules not influence the countries which are member states?
I would certainly hope they do, it'd be entirely pointless if it didn't.
Doesn't change that it's not a country.
But the rules the EU makes impact the country I live in.
The EU does not need to be a country for their rules to have impacts on countries. I think this is pretty self explanatory though?
This is awkward. I think I misinterpreted your initial comment after rereading it just now. I must've been quiet dumb unless you edited it earlier.
My initial comment doesn't really make sense in this context
Could instead be like the US where citizens aren't even allowed to read parts of the spying laws that apply to them. The endgame being to surreptitiously bug every device and application with local scanning; changes in ToS that allow this invasion are helpfully conflated with the same language a corpo would use if they wanted to train models on your content.
The documents for chat control got leaked by the press. Nothing was released by the EU.
Source?
Passing is one thing. They waste everyone's time by threatening to pass idiotic legislation every 6 months. But perhaps that is the goal so people do not investigate why the EU is getting poorer and all money goes into housing and healthcare.
The median EU citizen is not getting poorer relative to the median US citizen. Don't confuse growing income inequality with "national wealth".
GDP per capita of EU used to be higher than the US.
I'm not sure that's ever been true on PPP? It may have been on a nominal basis from time to time due to a weak dollar (1 EUR hit 1.60 USD or so during the financial crisis), but that's of limited interest for the average person.
And then poorer countries joined the EU. I'm not an economist but I think that's how it's supposed to work.
Can't EU be terrible, just because those ideas get this far?
The EU is terrible because ideas are discussed and put to a vote? That's one way to view things I guess
For context for non EU people:
So, the part of the EU appointed by member governments is the part driving this. The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by national governments.
But if the representatives are chosen by the, presumably, democratically elected governments how are they "anti-democratic". Unless representative democracies are inherently undemocratic (and therefore most European government themselves undemocratic), I fail to see how this can be described as "anti-democratic".
In basically every democracy there is a way for the elected representatives to push through legislation which is unpopular or only supported by a small portion of the population. But this is an intentional feature.
If you read >The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by national governments. as >The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by democratically elected national governments.
This is a perfectly fine statement. The policy is argued to be anti-democratic because of its substance, not because of how democratic the process is by which it is adopted.
A measure with broad popular support can be anti-democratic, a measure only supported by a small portion of the population can be pro-democratic. It's orthogonal and if anything there is an inverse correlation.
The issue of chat control is also orthogonal to it's "democracy". It is neither democratic nor anti-democratic. It obviously in no way invalidates people's rights to determine their government, labeling arbitrary issues as "anti-democratic" just because you don't like them is very unhelpful.
Nonsense. Chat control is prior constraint of speech. You can't argue that automated content filters are not censorship. You can agree with the ends (or what content is filtered, and even the governance), but the means themselves are thoroughly anti-democratic. And rife for abuse.
If this issue got put to a straight referendum, and won >80% of the vote, would it then be democratic?
See my earlier comment.
This is simple stuff.
Are you guys being disingenuous?
The problem is they see democracy as only the power of the people and not the power of the people in humanitarian context. So if 80% want to kill 20% that’s ok with them but wouldn’t be ok with people with a humanitarian democracy view.
Would you apply same approach to abortion laws? Because technically it is legal killing people.
Tyrannical democracy vs humanitarian democracy? (Tyranny of the masses)
Without expressing my stance on this policy itself: Many measures can be reasonably called "democratic" or "anti-democratic" because they have the potential to affect the ability of the populace to express dissent, and organise political opposition, or because it is seen of creating the tools for the government to create a chilling effect in that respect. As such, it is not at all "obvious" that everyone will agree that it does not affect peoples democratic rights, whether you think so or not.
But it can do that, if / when it starts getting misused.
There was this "SS not all criminals" political party, AfD in Germany, that got lots of votes during the EU elections. AfD + Chat Control is not any good
Not really
The member states are as much a part of the EU as the parliament is.
It's disingenuous to say that this is not the EU, of course it's also disingenuous to say that the EU is a monolith who wants this at all levels, but two wrongs don't make a right
It is still possible to contact your EU permanent representative group via email. Op link in "what to do" section has a precompiled email which you can send to your permanent representation group.
As little as it may be, I sent it to the Italian representative group, to the team that oversees telecommunications
Edit if you're Italian you can find the email(s) here, scroll to trasporti e telecomunicazioni https://italiaue.esteri.it/it/chi-siamo/
It shows one common email and website doesn't work for Czechia.
Excuse my ignorance, updated the title. Seeing the discussion here, it did attract the wrong audience...
Technically the commission came first, after this vote it'll go to parliament and then if there's a need for mediation the commission will be involved together with parliament and council