Chat Control Must Be Stopped

Cory Doctorow points out a lot of things: https://pluralistic.net/

But I don't think mainstream journalism points out computer nonsense because they're so intertwined with it all.

I mean, "we have a surveillance state" first points to "advertising" which is their revenue stream.

Maybe it's safer not to say anything.

Sure, but the way this was written it also includes everything from Gmail to root access servers hosted by Hetzner. Gmail has been doing this for years, but (I assume) not Hetzner. If even hosting providers are dragged into this the scale grows dramatically. Can Hetzner really not even be bothered about having to comply with such ridiculous requirements?

To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.

Time consider your party affiliation then.

That's exactly my point though. Google, AWS, Meta etc all stand to gain from this. But plenty of middle tier providers are entirely silent even if it poses a potentially existential threat. Some people are going to get rich from this of course, but many will be ruined.

And that's before even accounting for the lives to be destroyed by a blurry photo of a tree being classified as abuse material.

Except that it creates a market for circumvention tech that would also cut Big Tech out from understanding what its users are saying to each other.

Age restriction laws don't stop underage folks from doing anything, they just increase the market demand for VPNs, and improve VPNs so they get less easily detected. The net result is that platforms can't use IP addresses to meaningfully infer anything about their users.

Same with this. This legislation will create a demand for private encryption tech that isn't part of the platform. Someone is going to provide that and make money, and in the process may remove the demand for the platform in the first place.

I get the logic you're talking about, and agree that they must be thinking this, but it's very short-sighted.

I hadn't thought of the regulatory capture implications. As if this could not get worse.

Totally. This is exactly the problem with things like Chat Control in the EU and KOSA in the US. They will just introduce the same bill over and over and over again until they get the desired result.

What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.

It’s this. Even when an effort fails, there are no consequences for the politicians behind it. Nobody gets voted out of office. Nobody loses power. All they need to do is wait a year or two or five and try again. Eventual success is almost guaranteed.

Trust only software and systems you control and even then, approach with a hefty amount of side-eye.

the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance

It's hard to reach normal people, too. At least here in America the right wing has consolidated a lot of propaganda power into cable news like Fox

Any EU citizen also has the right to petition the EU parliament directly.

Would it be correct to compare the EU's autocratic pronouncements to Presidential executive orders in the US? In the sense that they can pass whatever they want with little feedback but then the courts can tear them apart?

Probably better for you guys that UK is out now, our government would have been salivating at the thought of spying on every citizen without repercussions

UK-Germany-France collectively I think

I know there are some countries that are surprisingly sane in this respect, and Germany is one of them. Also, the EU parliament is probably still mostly against it, too. So it will certainly be some time before this happens. However, we should never underestimate the "salami" method, this matter will certainly go through.

I beg your pardon. :) I already explained that I did my part and the result was hopeless. Perhaps you should do your part, too. Don't bother arguing on Hacker News, because it has no material effect on the EU population outside the narrow IT crowd. Besides, I'm not a defeatist at all, because I know GnuPG! However, the non-IT EU civilians who also coincidentally agreed with this, are unfortunately lost.

This "bad behavior" could easily regress into encrypted files stored on CD-R discs and distributed via the postal service at any time. However, we will all suffer from an invasion of privacy due to constant, non-transparent online monitoring. The real criminals won't notice anything, and the rest of us will simply accept that we are being constantly watched by mega-corporations, the police, and the government.

Rather, the expansion of surveillance legislation in 1986, and 2001, introduced the idea that private material on your computer can be criminal, which opened the door to government installed malware to monitor you, whereas before that, criminal activity involving information was restricted to communication or social organization. Then later in 2003 with the introduction of private contractors to implement this tech, there was a further expansion in the people who had access to this information. An example of what happens when people have this power is captured in this Bloomberg article [1] and this New Yorker article [2]. And we know that some Silicon Valley leaders do not believe in market fairness/competition.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa....

In the UK we take this a step further – if you're by an abortion clinic and the police believe you could be praying in your head for those getting an abortion they can charge you.

There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.

WhatsApp is the new living room for families. Living rooms are part of an English house. A castle, if you like.

But won't they hqve to email people @gmail, for their personal communications?

You can't exempt yourself from the backdoor you carry in your pocket.

I expect moms sharing bathtime pictures and videos with each other to get caught up in this as the censors get aroused by the content and project their own feelings of arousal and cognitive dissonance onto the parents sending bobbies and armed police to kick down doors. The legal costs and permenant damage to reputation will undoubtedly destroy many people.

> Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? [sic]

This is already happening. This is not about that.

Or … part of the plan

It's eerie how immediate the regression is right around when the last eyewitnesses are dying. Did their children not listen to their parents at all?

I meant them as independent threats.

>> You're not thinking about it the right way.

I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon.

You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws.

More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree.

So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.

Add to that - most normal, everyday people are entirely in favour of invasive government monitoring if it can be painted as being 'for the children' or 'to catch terrorists'.

So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.

> somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.

It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).

People who know about it are generally already annoyed. The trouble is most people don't know what it is, and those are the people who should be targeted

right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is?

the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is

ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is:

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

thanks!

Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.

I mean, not just the UK - it eventually changed in the US, but anything deemed too strong to crack was classified as a munition for a while in the 90s and 00s, and some things are still banned from being shipped to some places -

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

"It's just math, you can't ban it" has never been true.

> Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number.

This had never occurred to me before but is totally obvious in hindsight. An interesting corollary is that, given an infinite natural number space, all programs that have ever and will ever exist can be found as a single point on this natural number plane. The larger the number, the more complex the program. What else is emergent from this property?