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Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

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Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#231

Post by A1kmm »

isodev wrote: post #64
CrisMystik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MEPs are directly elected by citizens, not governments. It's the Council instead where representatives (ministers) of all national governments sit

Yup, edited to clarify I mean the MEPs bring “the will of the people”. Clearly not enough has happened on local level to raise awareness / lobby against chat control. I don’t think many outside tech are even aware if the slippery slope of the surveillance machinery.

The European Council (heads of states) sets the agenda, the European Commission (delegates from each state) writes the laws, and the MEPs (elected by the public) decide whether or not to accept the laws.

The Council decided Chat Control was on the agenda, the Commission wrote the law, and the MEPs voted to reject said law in March. Then the president of the parliament (not the MEPs at large) asked the Council to ignore the March vote and proceed with the agenda under urgency as if it had passed.

Now a minority of the MEPs (331 out of 720) - but a majority of who were present at the time and chose not to abstain - have voted to deal with the matter under urgency, but haven't voted on the substance of it. This makes the actual vote happen on the last sitting day, when apparently they are hoping a lot of MEPs will be away.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#232

Post by Bender »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #230
Bender wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can host their own private or semi-private forum, chat server, chan board, etc... and choose not to re-encode the images and/or permit .tar .7z .zip archives and so on. Keep the bots away with basic auth to minimize skiddie risk to platform RCE's. It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are tem…

Joining a private space that's set up for steganography, or facilitating such a space either by self hosting or by logging in somewhere as an administrator, is sort of at odds with the nothing-to-see-here approach that steganography takes. An adversary that has compromised one message can then use whatever metadata is intrinsic to that space to suss out which other plaintexts might contain a secret, and which other h…

In that case I think you may be out of luck as most platform change the images. Sometimes they just remove exif data but some compress or optimize in their view the images. In that case maybe find a public site that allows archive files.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#233

Post by sunshine-o »

dgellow wrote: post #161
vslira wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the EU as a system has an undemocratic backdoor it's descriptively correct to call it undemocratic. Not to play too hard on the HN user stereotype, but you wouldn't call a computer system that is mostly secure other than a known privilege escalation exploit secure, would you?

Every single democratic system relies on norms at some level. Democratic isn’t a boolean flag. When the French prime minister is using the 49-3 rule to bypass the parliament that’s undemocratic, that doesn’t make the system itself undemocratic. When a US president is using an executive order to pass a law that’s undemocratic, that doesn’t make the system itself undemocratic. Here the maneuver goes against the spirit…

No.

The way the EU is designed has nothing to do with the US or France. First the Parliament and Council (the bodies democratically elected) do not have power of legislative initiative.

Then the Commission, which is a "super" executive power, is not democratically elected. Unlike France or the US (the two you mentioned).

The EU has an architecture that is fundamentally different from the US or French system. In many way it is actually closer to something like the UN or PRC.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#234

Post by p0w3n3d »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
iamnothere wrote: post #2

From a post on Mastodon: > democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.

They only have to win once. You have to win every time.

If someone's asking too many times it's abuse.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#235

Post by StrLght »

gmueckl wrote: post #145
cherryteastain wrote: post #107

Reminder that EU institutions were designed from ground up to smother democracy: - Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no - EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is neede…

This is all fixable by changing the treaties. The first step to fixing it, however, is to give up fundamental opposition to its existence and instead support the underlying ideals and approach the shortcomings from a constructive angle. The alternative is feeding nationalistic right wing extremism, which we really don't want in Europe.

This is a false dichotomy. There's way more options on this spectrum than 2 extremes.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#237

Post by StanislavPetrov »

AngryData wrote: post #194
inigyou wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't actually think of a good reason that the law should prohibit a company from having the option to automatically scan private messages for CSAM. Can you? Certain implementations may fall afoul of data protection laws however.

Because they shouldn't be scanning private messages indiscriminately no matter for what. Lets rephrase it and look at it from "private companies will scan their users private messages for evidence of crimes and report people to police." Where is the limit here? I think it is naive to assume this will stop at csam and will soon be used as a judicial bludgen to extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other…

>extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other case nobody would ever care or know about.

With the massive, byzantine web of local, state and federal laws everyone is violating numerous laws and regulations all the time. The goal here isn't to arrest everyone all the time for petty crimes and regulatory violations, it is to give the ability to the powers-that-be to select anyone engaging any frowned-upon behavior and pull up a list of legal violations that can be used to silence and/or imprison them. Activists, protesters, political opponents, people who are against whatever latest war the government chooses to engage in or speaking up against "chat control" or whatever the latest Orwellian government seizure of power is will be the ones who are targeted. The end game, which we are rapidly approaching with the elimination of privacy and individual autonomy, is totalitarianism.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#238

Post by arjie »

soco wrote: post #30
iamnothere wrote: post #2

From a post on Mastodon: > democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.

So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.

Well, you can imagine a bunch of scenarios that match the "try repeatedly until it succeeds".

One good case: The original rule was good but had specifics that made it unpopular. Retrying repeatedly is a pathway to refining it into the minimal valuable version that is acceptable to all.

One bad case: The original rule is terrible and progress was stopped only because of public outrage. The assumption of the public is that a groundswell of opposition will cause a fundamental rethinking. However, because such outrage cannot last, repeated attempts will cause fatigue in the public opinion and resignation to pass anything.

If the situation is closer to the front it's "democratic". If it's closer to the back it's "not democratic". One represents a refinement to match the will of the people; the other relies on our human inability to focus tremendous energies continuously on a broad front. Both match a representative democracy repeatedly tabling (haha) a bill.

Re: Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

#239

Post by inigyou »

AngryData wrote: post #194
inigyou wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't actually think of a good reason that the law should prohibit a company from having the option to automatically scan private messages for CSAM. Can you? Certain implementations may fall afoul of data protection laws however.

Because they shouldn't be scanning private messages indiscriminately no matter for what. Lets rephrase it and look at it from "private companies will scan their users private messages for evidence of crimes and report people to police." Where is the limit here? I think it is naive to assume this will stop at csam and will soon be used as a judicial bludgen to extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other…

Has this happened before?

The NSA wiretaps all phone calls - do they extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other case nobody would ever know or care about?

Microsoft has your browsing history - we know this because of the recently unsealed court case. Do they do it?

Facebook already ignores this law and scans the content of all private messages anyway. Are they doing what you predicted?

I don't think even the actual Stasi was stopping people at random for petty crimes, right?

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