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Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

threema.ch

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Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#141

Post by cauch »

romankolpak wrote: post #105

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused. If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof i…

I'm seeing more value in your comment than, apparently, the other people who have answered it here.

I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle.

I'm not convinced by the other arguments here that usually contains a hint of slippery-slope, what-aboutism or false dichotomy fallacies.

The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. However, it does not mean that the equally terrible situation of having easy way for criminals to avoid justice is the good solution either.

Personally, I think that a good system should be a distributed system where several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt (for example, a message can be decrypted only if Amnesty International, Interpol and the Austrian Justice Department put their 3 keys together, each individual key being useless on its own). In this model, abuses are almost impossible while obvious crime can still be investigated. I don't know any argument that really works to say that this model is not always better than the free-for-all-all-anonymised-messaging.

Such ideas already exist, and David Chaum even came up with proof of concept of something similar https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-a...

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#142

Post by cherryteastain »

saurik wrote: post #95
anonzzzies wrote: post #47

There are exemptions in the document and this article also talks about it; it would be good to know what tools we can use (p2p chat etc) that are exempt from this. I guess most people will blindly accept and won't care, but at least people can move if they do care (and possibly convince others).

I would think a peer-to-peer system would not be exempt from this legislation, particularly given my understanding that the EU courts do not look favorably on gotcha-style analysis of laws that are limited to definitions of words used being twisted to claim "I'm unregulated". If you are a developer who works on a chat client as part of a decentralized service, I'd expect both you and all of the people running the net…

It's impossible for the EU to apply any meaningful enforcement action to a P2P encrypted chat system made by non EU citizen developers residing in a non EU country. Sure, the EU can declare your app is subject to this law, but then what?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#143

Post by pxtail »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #53
lukan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and the voters don’t care." Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something? Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.

How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany? Here in France, the "extremists" got a bit over 30% of votes. But turnout was only 51%. According to [0] average turnout is 51%. Some countries have very high numbers (IIRC voting is mandatory in Belgium?), others ridiculously low. This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care". [0] https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/turnout/

> How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany?

People (including me) doesn't want to bother with voting when the whole thing is a farce - it's beyond my understanding why would someone be enticed to vote for incompetent politicians who get parachuted into EU parliament to earn hefty wage - very often as a reward for outrageous behavior, there are multiple examples of this, influencer from Cyprus, that polish MP who got expelled from Poland's parliament for outrageous behavior - surprise surprise - he got comfy EP seat. Absolutely disgusting.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#144

Post by _heimdall »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #129
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is called a representative democracy. The fix is to vote for representatives who represent your values. Or run yourself.

Representative in what way? 700 MEPs for about 450M people means each one has 640k "constituents". Those "constituents" are really a fraction each person all smeared about. Lastly if they were actual people and an MEP were to hold a consultation to get their views it gives each person less than 1 minute each year assuming the MEP was available 24/7/365.

Well if they're modeling if after what we have in the US they pretty much nailed it. 435 representatives for 330M people or around 758k constituents per rep.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#145

Post by loftsy »

blowski wrote: post #80
loftsy wrote: post #68

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free s…

I think it's worth debating the idea, exploring what it would look like. But I think there's a lot of hidden complexity there. 1. Who is allowed to detect, process or store your identity? For what purposes? 2. What about "right to forget"? Does the data need to be destroyed after a certain period? 3. Who manufacturers and sells these private keys? What happens if I lose mine, or it gets stolen? 4. How does this work…

Good points. Difficult questions. I was thinking it is tied to the physical device. So you would register a laptop when you buy it with the state and the key would be in the HSM. So the main differences would be:

1. Give my name and address to activate a device 2. "The internet" requires authentication via the HSM.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#146

Post by cherryteastain »

loftsy wrote: post #68

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free s…

What technological measures do you propose to block Tor and VPN services to achieve this? Not even China's Great Firewall completely achieves this, though not for lack of trying.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#147

Post by t0bia_s »

latexr wrote: post #136
Hbruz0 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this allow for it to be sneakily applied, as you suggest ?

It creates a diversion. Classic move from cartoons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzYOdO4pEyI It works in real life too. Distract the public for long enough that few people make a stink and the law gets through. When people complain later it’s “Oops, we didn’t know, no one seemed to care. Well, nothing we can do now”. Much harder to do that if everyone is shouting at you to not do the thing.

Similar was transition from covid to war in Ukraine. Suddenly, covid disappeared from media.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#148

Post by nbzso »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #88
patates wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)

You forget they have Mazedonia and Bulgaria as neighbors ;)

Hi, Malakas.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#149

Post by loftsy »

bowsamic wrote: post #133
loftsy wrote: post #68

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free s…

Surely then the government can easily censor anyone who disagrees with them

Very interesting point. Does a well functionality democracy require the right to be anonymous?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#150

Post by gravescale »

hoseja wrote: post #93
gravescale wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica. Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of…

We have to make the more traditional methods popular again.

The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated.

Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".

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