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ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

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Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#111

Post by reliabilityguy »

raverbashing wrote: post #47
_t9ow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The accepted solution is to have a constitution that says otherwise And the willingness and ability to enforce it. The current iteration of ChatControl is pushed by Denmark, which is at present the President of the Council of the European Union. The Danish Constitution itself enshrines the right to privacy of communication [0], but this is not stopping Denmark from wanting to ratify ChatControl anyway. [0]: https:/…

Yes but unfortunately courts are mostly reactive, not proactive Sometimes there are some mechanisms to block unconstitutional (or other regulation) laws from passing but they're limited Not sure how that would apply at the EU level or even at the Danish level

> Yes but unfortunately courts are mostly reactive, not proactive

I think it’s always the case, no? Unless the unconstitutional law is approved, there is nothing to dispute in court.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#112

Post by happyopossum »

delusional wrote: post #79
iLoveOncall wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem it's trying to solve is mass surveillance...

You mean like the mass surveillance already implemented by Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon? That's already here. I think you should consider that this law might be aiming at some other goal.

> You mean like the mass surveillance already implemented by Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon?

No, GP is referring to mass collection and analysis of all of your communications. Google, Apple, et. all don’t have that capability today.

Hell, apple can’t even read my text messages, nor do they know I’m writing this - and I’m doing it on an iPhone.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#114

Post by 1gn15 »

goneri wrote: post #98
Alejandro9R wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this idea frankly. Where are the hacktivists when we need them?

You can become an "hacktivist" by taking 15 minutes of your time to write an email to your MEP. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

I think "hacktivist" here means hacking into the politician's inboxes and leaking the contents, like "politicians want to do this to you; let's see how they like it when it's done to them" sort of thing.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#115

Post by reliabilityguy »

_t9ow wrote: post #97
rapind wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this is not stopping Denmark from wanting to ratify ChatControl anyway. What the TLDR of the motivation behind this? Is it just politicians playing to their base (think of the children) or corporate lobbying. or religion, etc? Seems to me that the negatives of passing something like this are super obvious and dystopian.

I suspect it's a mix of many Danish politicians' own authoritarian tendencies/ambitions and corporate lobbying, though I have no proof of the latter when it comes to ChatControl specifically. Generally speaking , there is a lot of dark money in Danish politics, and the EU has repeatedly flagged Denmark as a country lacking in transparency with regards to corporate lobbying: https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/eu-kritik-a…

Interesting. I am not expert on politics of Denmark, so my question is: is this push universal across political parties or it’s a feature of a specific political block that rules for the past X years and consistently worked in this direction?

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#116

Post by frumplestlatz »

DangitBobby wrote: post #102
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of constitution as a contract between the citizens and the state and the (judiciary?) Like, constitution both defines the rights of citizens and the limits of those rights and the same goes for the states. I feel as if the creators of constitutions think that it is a set of checks and balances... Just as if how a citizen violates something written in the constitution, the state can punish it. In the same mann…

A large portion of the population either does not believe or does not mind the violations of our constitution to achieve their desired outcomes. As an American, it came as a surprise to me that we do not, in fact, have broadly shared values about our system of governance. This year has been a devastating blow to my confidence in our democracy and the ability of people to govern themselves generally.

The thing I find most interesting about your reply is how it demonstrates that we live in wildly subjective realities.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#117

Post by 1gn15 »

meta-level wrote: post #96

Can anyone explain to me what keeps anyone who doesn't want to be monitored from just sending PNGs (or similar) containing messages encrypted in each pixels LSBs? Doesn't all that just force everyone who has something to hide to use something else, less obvious?

Probably friction. Will you be able to convince your friends to do that?

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#118

Post by Bender »

palata wrote: post #109
dcanelhas wrote: post #14

I wonder where platforms like slack would land in all of this, and how would they go about akeeping people from just using their own encryption e.g. pgp over unencrypted channels? Is public key cryptography too weak to matter?

Slack is not end-to-end encrypted and belongs to a US company. So there is no need for ChatControl there: the US government already has access to everything that is written on Slack.

I believe they are referring to using GPG to encrypt data before putting it into Slack, much like using the out of band OTR. In that case all the data shared between those using GPG or OTR would only be accessible to those with the right out of band keys. There are probably not a lot of people doing this, or not enough for governments to care. I do this in IRC using irssi-otr [1].

If that ever became illegal because encryption then groups of people could simply use scripts or addons to pipe through different types of encoding to make AI fuzzy searches harder. They can try to detect these chains of encoding but it will be CPU expensive to do every combination at scale given there are literally thousands of forms of encoding that could be chained in any order and number.

Mon -> base64 -> base2048 [2]

Tue -> base2048 -> base131072 [3]

...and so on.

[1] - https://irssi.org/documentation/help/otr/

[2] - https://github.com/qntm/base2048

[3] - https://github.com/qntm/base131072

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#119

Post by happyopossum »

vessenes wrote: post #33

This was precisely some of the motivation behind pushing RCS onto Apple. The RCS spec has a termination point between providers -- a great spot to read some data for telecom providers and government agencies. Despite this, RCS is called "End to End" all the time. It's not. Use Signal or iMessage, depending on your security choices in iCloud.

RCS is not called “end to end” by anyone - even Apple and Google explicitly state it’s not currently E2E encrypted. Apple has pledged to add e2ee to RCS on iPhones but they’re never claimed it’s that way today.

They go out of their way to warn you it’s not the same level of security as iMessage.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#120

Post by happyopossum »

meta-level wrote: post #96

Can anyone explain to me what keeps anyone who doesn't want to be monitored from just sending PNGs (or similar) containing messages encrypted in each pixels LSBs? Doesn't all that just force everyone who has something to hide to use something else, less obvious?

Presumably the distribution of an app that facilitates that would become illegal as well.
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