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EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

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Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#71

Post by seydor »

dahwolf wrote: post #65

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is pr…

I 'm actually shocked that people are OK with that. People in countries that have had dictatorships recently probably remember that. Snitches everywhere, the police raiding houses again and again for no reason, with no recourse and people were just accepting it.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#72

Post by leoedin »

908B64B197 wrote: post #70
dahwolf wrote: post #65

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is pr…

Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything. Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?). But what's interesting to see is people from Europe…

I hate to break it to you, but there's plenty of Americans living all over Europe. Here in London there's loads.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#73

Post by gizmo »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #66
gizmo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust your bios? Your usb stack? Your network card firmware? I get the desire to control the entire chain, but nowadays you’re surrounded by cameras and microphones 24/7, every smart device is a surveillance sleeper agent waiting for the magic word. Certificate chains are the least of your worries.

Anything your monitor displays or sound system outputs is subject to ubiquitous surveillance. And, when there's a gap in the surveillance that's also is subject to interpretation. Privacy already is (mostly) lost and the battle now simply is to reliably establish authenticity that can't be impersonated or doubted. That's where encryption remains helpful.

I agree. And moving to e2ee for everything and away from big services like gmail and office 365 is part of the solution.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#74

Post by desas »

908B64B197 wrote: post #70
dahwolf wrote: post #65

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is pr…

Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything. Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?). But what's interesting to see is people from Europe…

Maybe people are voting with their feet for constitutional protections. Maybe it's because the USA is significantly richer and pays more, there's likely to be a whole range of reasons.

I work with several US nationals who have relocated to the EU.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#75

Post by sjy »

max51 wrote: post #44

This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but a…

Rather than assuming bad faith, I think it makes more sense to treat these documents like the codebase for a large open source software project. Perhaps there are reasons, not apparent to someone who hasn’t spent months working on the code and the systems it integrates with, for what appears to be unnecessary complexity. And perhaps it’s reasonable for people to advocate for or against using the project without having read and understood every line of code themselves.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#76

Post by nicoburns »

voxic11 wrote: post #54
jll29 wrote: post #50

Don't believe vendors' lies about "end-to-end" encryption. If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin. Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself. You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your beha…

> You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?

You’ll probably be dead by then anyway.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#77

Post by feanaro »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
max51 wrote: post #44

This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but a…

Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes. That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder b…

Yet at the same time you always hear people repeat that law isn't code, and it isn't dumb, and the spirit of the law is more important than any loophole. That if you try exploiting a loophole, you will just get caught and shot down. So which is it?

And if the wording of the law is meant to prevent loopholes, then this could be accomplished in better ways than writing extremely convoluted sentences over and over again. There are patterns to the loopholes and to the disclaimers meant to prevent them, which means we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with shorter, well-defined qualifiers.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#78

Post by waboremo »

seydor wrote: post #71
dahwolf wrote: post #65

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is pr…

I 'm actually shocked that people are OK with that. People in countries that have had dictatorships recently probably remember that. Snitches everywhere, the police raiding houses again and again for no reason, with no recourse and people were just accepting it.

Many struggle understanding consequences unless it's happening directly to them at that very moment. Until then, the problem ceases to exist for them.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#79

Post by feanaro »

willtemperley wrote: post #51

Funny - the European Commission told its staff to "Switch to Signal messaging app" in Feb 2020: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc... I wonder what changed.

Nothing changed. They'll continue using Signal for themselves, they just don't want you using it too. Or rather, they want you to use it just as long it has a manhole only they can access.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#80

Post by orangepurple »

It's almost like there is a shadow government [1,2,3] which uses these people as puppets for the citizenry. Of course the puppets are clueless. They just need to approve everything the shadow government has on its agenda.

In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-ne...

[2] https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21...

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