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EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

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Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#191
post #2

> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union. I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.

I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone. But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is…

I think 'restoring the ability to wiretap' is misleading as this is not 'restoring the ability', its more akin to 'wiretapping everyone all the time'.

Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.

Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.

Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#193

People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial. It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology. silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomabl…

> Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

No, this is not "unfathomably good luck", this is how the system works. Most of crimes are repeated crimes, most of the criminals are serial criminals. People who obey the law, then break it once, then obey it ever since -- are very rare and even if they're not caught I wouldn't care much anyway.

And if you're a normal criminal doing your criminal stuff day after day and year after year you'll make mistakes. One of them will get you caught.

Never in the history of humanity did the law enforcement cast a net that caught 100% of crime, it always had been the game of probabilities, luck and persistence. Steal once and you'll likely walk away. Steal every day to make a living and you'll get caught many times in your lifetime.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#194
post #8

This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever. Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the m…

It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

Not exclusive to the EU, the US does the same, as does the UK.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#195
post #182

This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever. Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the m…

Politician can not face consequences when they discuss something illegal. Politicians in parlaments literal job is to define legal and illegal. That they repeat that until success and against the perceived will of the general population is maybe a procedural problem (as in: do not disturb the legal body with stupid stuff) but it is still their job. I 100% agree with your position. Chat control is basically an attack…

>Politician can not face consequences when they discuss something illegal.

Politicians can't face consequences from the legal system when they discuss something illegal. They can, and should, face consequences from the voters.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#196

Whatever happens, at least Signal will not be complicit in this shit show. Will WhatsApp and IMessage bend the knee? I guess we will see.

I mean it’s not hard to predict. Inevitably they will as their parent companies won’t give up such a big market. How well a ban on signal would be enforced if they don’t comply would be interesting. I still feel like this will fail to come into effect like all the other times. But we gotta keep eyes on it.

Apple did not bend the knee in the UK, it forced the hand of the UK to reveal it's goals. Obviously we will see, I don't have much hope either. As for Signal, I hope they pull out as it will get media coverage somewhat on this issue.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For _you_ it isn't. If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.

That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.” It’s a form of concern-trolling: pretending the problem is rhetoric while sidestepping the actual flaw. The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated…

> That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.”

You're acting like I'm trying to derail the argument. That is not the case.

You are putting a lot of assumptions in your wording. This will not help you.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any living person that thinks the UK people want ChatControl? No? Me neither.

With 69% of people supporting the Online Safety Act [1] I'm confident there are people in the UK that would also support Chat Control [1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...

Didn’t the surveys indicate a brexit as a pretty big regret once people understood what it meant?

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#199
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee. What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push b…

Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk

Using another pretext to target someone for their views is definitely a thing. This is not new (e.g., the Assange case) but its frequency is increasing.

I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.

The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.

In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#200

One interesting line in the proposal: > Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes; If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed? If they have it all figured out, this exc…

It is pointless exception. If chat control will pass, everything is vulnerable by design. Or how do you distinguish if WhatsApp is installed on a phone of Joe Nobody or or a phone of a politician? You won't, unless you have some list, which can be leaked and from "do not touch credentials" will turn "target these credentials"

The exception means legally, that category of people, can't be prosecuted even if incriminating stuff were collected through such channels.

The next logical step, after a prosecutor or political push, would be for the Highest Order Courts of Member countries to invalidate evidence collected through such channels for those categories of people.

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