EU to greenlight Chat Control tomorrow

I think one of the main problems "free speech absolutist" have is that they chose such an awkward phrase to self-identify themselves. The word "absolutist" is so unambiguous that it implies that seemingly no one would qualify for it besides true loons which makes the whole idea easy to dismiss.

When you really get down to it, almost everyone supports some type of restriction on speech. This should be especially apparent when discussing legislation like this in which the goal is preventing the distribution of child porn. How can a "free speech absolutist" be okay with a government making certain images and videos illegal to share? Wouldn't a true absolutist fight for people's right to distribute child porn?

The ambiguity of "absolutist" ends up making any reasonable "free speech absolutist" debate the meaning of the word "speech". Suddenly things like child porn, defamation, threats, fraud, and/or the location of Elon Musk's private plane need to be debated as whether they qualify as "speech". The chosen phrase necessitates that the "absolutist" need to weaken the idea of "free speech" in order to seem reasonable. Which in turn makes people who are ostensibly pro-free speech start to question whether something like hate speech should even qualify for free speech protections.

So a "free speech absolutist" either needs to argue some truly extreme views like why child porn should be legal or they weaken the overall pro-free speech side of the whole debate.

Some questions I have from reading Patrick's website:

- How do you even ensure a client is actually self-reporting? On-device attestation doesn't really work.

- As a provider of E2EE chats, should the client report to you or to a third-party (Who?)? If the client reports to you, you are now possessing CSAM. Since even possession of CSAM is illegal, how does that work?

- If a photo are flagged, will it appear in a GDPR access request?

In the "think of the children" scenario the parents are incentivized to consent to some filter. (So they or someone(!!!) gets an alert if the boogeyman is talking to their kids, asking them to send nudes, or sending dick pics.)

See recital 13 on top of page 7 for the definition.

And see 17 on bottom of page 8 for this:

"To allow for innovation and ensure proportionality and technological neutrality, no exhaustive list of the compulsory mitigation measures should be established"

and

(page 46) "... measures shall be ... targeted and proportionate in relation to that risk, taking into account, in particular, the seriousness of the risk as well as the provider’s financial and technological capabilities and the number of users; ..."

This is a framework. It seems to be coming from overly-anxious law nerds who can't stop thinking of the children. (And yes, this usually makes them a problem, because they're nigh unreasonable.)

It seem to be set up as a DIY thing for providers. And, again, for parents it makes sense, let your kids surf on the marked-safe-for-kids part of the Internet. (And nowadays kids really spend most of their time on (in!) certain apps, not in a web browser.)

The ugly part is that there are fines to compel the providers to adjust their risk metrics. (page 104, page 110 mentions max 6% of global turnover)

This clearly seems to be a softish push to assign a cost to internet ecosystems for online child sexual abuse.

On page 45 there are some requirements.

The provider needs to think about risks (but guidelines will come from authorities anyway), have some appropriate budget to actually work on this it the context of its own service, and then if it looks like there are problems it should spend money on remediation. (Ie. spend on content moderation, work with other providers in the industry, have a team and provide UX to notify that team, and allow users to limit what they share with others based on age.)

Wasn't that NATO (aka mostly the US)?