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EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

digitalcourage.social

181–190 of 279 posts

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#181
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orban doesn’t need to crack down on political opposition he has a strong majority in his country.[1] I guess you have a wrong opinion about Hungary and Orban because the media doesn’t like him because he is a pain in the ass for many plans of the European Union and gets bad reporting. Hungary has by the way not even 10 million residents. 1. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarians-vote-orbans-...

I think one real good test of a democracy is to plot a line with years and above the name of the person ruling the country. In the US you will see at least every 8 years a different name on top of the line. I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years. Anything below won’t be stable enough for mid/long term policy changes. Anything above will be good for the leader…

So 8 years is fine but 10 isn’t?

Policy dictated by a single elected leader is better than policy set by a group of elected people?

Just because your cultural and educational background has told you that the relatively new US model of democracy is better than that of other countries doesn’t make it so.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#182

German government will print out all messages on paper and hire thousands of civil servants to read each message. It's gonna be a Beschäftigungswunder.

Well somewhere in Czech Republic, some public servants are receiving well formed digital XML messages, and transcribing values from them manually to an information system. Sometimes they make a mistake and swap some values, which is how we know.

Information age is upon us.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#183
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah normal here in the UK as well. I was at a party last year and someone just ordered coke off WhatsApp. This turned into a mess because they wanted to pay the "menu price" as advertised and two guys with a shooter turned up and took £500 off them instead of £200. So we have extortion, illegal drug dealing and illegal guns in one fine evening. ChatControl is not the solution however. Reporting it to the police didn…

The solution to that problem is simple: legalize the sale of all drugs. Extortion is a common practice of drug gangs, whether they sell online or not.

I am for legalization. The state and pension funds should profit, rather than cartels.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#185
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the "sudo tools" so they can override any protection to catch the bad people and that they are respected mature people so it is OK to grant them with these privileges, they will be careful and won't abuse it. Obviously that's bad idea and a bad practice as we know it from IT systems. Maybe their intentions a…

> There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the "sudo tools" I don't care in what they believe or how they explain they need in the total control over you. In fact, it's just a slavery, and I'm sure internally they know that and they like that. For some people it's the meaning of life to achieve that kind of power over other people. Unfortunately, a…

You assume a lot of bad intent where there is (usualy) none. I worked with people related to cybercrime investigation a lot, and they are always driven by idea to help people. But when you see for a hundredth time that a struggling single mother loses her life savings because she fell victim to a phishing scam, you start being angry at the criminals. And when you invest months of your life to locate the perpetrator, and the investigation is thwarted by, let's say, encrypted chats, you start blaming the tools.

Now, I (obviously) don't agree with this, just trying to explain how something like chat control could be proposed in good faith by someone.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can vote outside of any country pretty much if youre a citizen of that country. US included.

Many countries do put restrictions on this. Some examples: Until literally this year, the UK removed the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad, and Canada even used to restrict that right to just 5 years. Even now, civilian US citizens living abroad whose intent to return to live in the US is uncertain or who don't intend to return, and Canadian citizens living abroad regardless of intent to return, are only…

Indeed the U.K. did not give the right to vote for U.K. citizens living in the EU when there was a vote about stripping their citizenship.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#187
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, there are EU countries like Lithuania, which have a very privacy-conscious culture, and have not had any meaningful terror attacks for nearly all their history. The last notable one was 30 years ago[0]. No one died. In Lithuania, privacy is quite meaningfully enshrined in its constitution[1]. I remember that Google StreetView faced significant regulatory challenges in simply photographing people’s…

Lithuania? Just pitch it as a way to fight back against Russia, and it will pass in a jiffy just like all the other anti-russian laws they've been rolling through

I know you are somewhat joking. But there is an undertone of truth in what you say.

Oppressive state surveillance in the USSR (commonly verging on persecution of undesirable groups) was a strong reason for countries breaking away from it between 1990 and 1991, when the union collapsed. Lithuania was arguably the first one.

The privacy protections we see today are a reaction to some extent, but Lithuanians enjoy them. It was not an over-reaction.

It would be wise to use the examples of heavy-handed state surveillance in history in arguments for privacy laws. The US did this to argue for their economic model quite effectively. Whether that ultimately is good — I mean that some people have become so afraid of communism that they can’t agree on some fundamental social welfare systems and duty of care for each other as people — I don’t know. But contrasting liberal capitalism with planned-economy communism was effective in galvanising people towards the former. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that.

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#188

This could be abused in any number of ways and would probably make people and their precious children less safe in the long run rather than more safe. You can be sure Viktor Orban would use it to crack down on political opposition in Hungary, for example. In the wrong hands, could be used to have these precious children or their parents killed or worse. Authoritarian governments often do things, or threaten to do thi…

[deleted]

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fascism you're looking for is in the UK and France this month.

I still can’t get over that the UK arrests people over social media posts. Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.

- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)

- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)

- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)

Re: EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

#190
post #171
post #97

You can just send encrypted text through a unencrypted channel, look, these are instructions for the next terrorist attack: vss8uATnfADT6Z/XN3yUcjq3R5e8P8HjIkm2GbS6e8CbOnQb5qx0112mmjgUezWbAMxSPegGo8TSMIj3rEEe9mG/JYzsDb9g2tm6zfeLEYA=

I wonder if there's precedent in court regarding that? I mean, how does one prove that a message is anything but gibberish if they don't have the means to decode it?

I can XOR it with a "key" to produce any message I want!
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