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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

#161

Post by throwawaylinux »

dmix wrote: post #156
throwawaylinux wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a Russian student studying in Paris, it was a terrifying realization that the mayor can, apparently, prohibit any and all mass protests by simply issuing a decree, no higher authority needed. (This was in 2018 IIRC.) This is apparently part of the anti-terrorist law or something? I dunno, and nobody seemed to care except for the participants of the protests that were happening at the time. That's because the gov…

It’s to easy to explain away this stuff as merely gov deception fooling people. But I’ve seen far too many well educated people on HN making arguments in favour of this stuff. They always have their pet emergencies that are unlike other times in history requiring compromise now and a naive trust in the good intentions of local politicians, who often do care about some real present issue, but lack the capacity to see…

The "well educated people on HN" are some of the most meekly subservient to government authority and blind cheerleaders of its power I've ever encountered, and there is a strong scorn and open hatred for lesser "deplorable" classes of society with incorrect opinions who they need government protection from.

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

#162

Post by seanw444 »

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…

I agree with your point of taking security measures into your own hands, but given how pompompurin was only caught through using a personal email address with his name on it, despite using Windows (!), I think you're a lot safer than you think. Most of the time at least. Problem is that it's impossible to know if now is "most of the time".

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

#163

Post by candiodari »

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.

Secure comms for government, not for you. Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other).

https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-...

"Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence."

Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%.

And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand?

Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.

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

#164

Post by Skeime »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #147
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…

> Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail. I thought we were talking in the context of the EU? It's not a crime for them if the government is doing it (or asking for it). They don't have rights like that.

I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. The EU law will need to be implemented by national laws and at least in Germany, there is Art 10 GG (the 10th paragraph of the constitution) which protects one’s rights to private communication (specifically also against the government; this is the whole point of constitutions!).

Granted, the paragraph also contains a provision for lawful exceptions, but in general, our highest court has ruled that such exceptions need to be reasonable in scope. I have some hope (but less than I’d like) that this will happen here, as well.

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

#165

Post by geysersam »

anonym29 wrote: post #142
CapstanRoller wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to emit signals. Consumer WiFi equipment can already be used as active radar[0] to track individual movement, and ubiquitous deployment of dense high-frequency cellular networking equipment (5G, 6G) will basically render most house walls transparent (especially if you're living in a USAmerican stick-framed drywall house) potentially allowing for things like face tracking at a distance. [0] https:/…

The upside of this is that it just created a business opportunity for Faraday paint :)

Being the one guy in the neighborhood using faraday paint does not sound suspicious at all. ;)

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

#166

Post by raverbashing »

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.

Yes, the people who lived under the Stasi remember it vividly

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

#167

Post by raverbashing »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #106
Kretinsky wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for my government, in the EU, and participated in the creation of such laws. The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text. Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an…

> very few laws to completely shut down dissent except it would mean silencing millions of people, which is frankly more similar to the intro of a sci-fi novel than modern France. See what's happening in Israel, not even the omnipotent Netanyahu could go against the huge popular protests. > Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, That's the same right everyone has in Europe. N…

> first of all because E2E it's about secrecy, not privacy

I think not even the people in EC in favour of this have such a bad argument as this one

Privacy requires secrecy

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

#168

Post by geysersam »

Barrin92 wrote: post #139
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…

Legal documents aren't complicated because some cabal of evil lawyers has decided to make the text hard to understand for you, they're complicated because legal concepts require precision and specificity that ordinary language isn't able to express. It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehensio…

It's interesting to think about how perhaps some ideas from software and programming language theory could be applied in legal settings.

The requirements are quite similar. Unambiguous interpretation of precisely defined concepts.

Particularly, it might allow much more efficient searching in legal texts. Imagine automatically searching for inconsistencies/loopholes or other "bugs" in the legal system.

I'm reminded of the "oops I wrote a compiler" meme reding your comment about legalese requiring "precision and specificity ordinary language is not able to express".

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

#169

Post by watwut »

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.

> People in countries that have had dictatorships recently probably remember that.

Yeah, but also, people in countries that have had dictatorships recently are waaay more likely to support dictatorships.

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

#170

Post by watwut »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #128
rfrey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misreading, or are you arguing that people are more free to protest in Russia than in Paris?

No, I’m not. What I’m saying is that as long as laws on protests are being followed in full (which in the case of Russia means we’re... somewhere in the late 90s, probably? early 00s at most), the authorities in Paris seem to have much wider latitude to stop people from protesting than would be allowed by the Russian constitution, and that latitude was exercised as recently as 2018. That doesn’t mean the French syste…

> people shrug at government actions that would have every post-Soviet human rights activist up in arms

Post-Soviet activists did accepted quite a lot ... and post soviet societies are quickest to fall into authoritarian. There are not that many activists in the first place and activists are looked down upon by too many people.

My point here is that generally, people on the west are massively better at keeping things democracy.

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