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EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

cointelegraph.com

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Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#151

Post by Gud »

jjani wrote: post #105

Nowadays the biggest EU parties are ones that are effectively against the EU, so they're using the most effective way to kill it: make their citizens hate it by passing such laws. If you create a diagram of "pro-EU" and "pro-Chat scanning" EU parliament parties, 90% will be in the two quadrants: "pro-anti" and "anti-pro". Yes, this proposal has been around since long before those parties got as big as they are now, b…

This is not just being championed by anti EU parties.

I don’t think this is a fair explanation of what’s going on.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#152

Post by debugnik »

Levitz wrote: post #121
kurthr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Asking your politicians to lie to you is not a substitute for changing their incentives. The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the popula…

>Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here. I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and…

Kicking kittens makes it sound simpler of a choice than it really is, because you're not a kitten and you could protect yours. Would you vote for "the party of beating people like Levitz and opposing chat control"?

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#153

Post by mirko22 »

izacus wrote: post #146
wqaatwt wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. The EU is hardly a democracy. It’s run almost entirely by appointed bureaucrats with delusions of grandeur. The European parliament is there but it’s very weak relative to actual national parliaments and most people unfortunately don’t really care that much about politics on the EU level..

Please stop spreding this bullshit.

How is this BS? Where is democracy in Von der Leyen making deal with USA for example, who voted for that?

Most of the representatives there are local tokens that are there to pull EU money in the pockets of their parties.

EU is artificial state made only out of interest of political elites.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#154

Post by fennecbutt »

vaylian wrote: post #93
johndhi wrote: post #51

Can someone explain how the same group of countries can simultaneously issue book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy to the nth degree, and run around the world trying to force others to do the same, yet also propose these kinds of things?

Many politicians don't have a clue what the technical consequences will be. They just see that the law is meant to protect children and then they don't ask for clarification on the technical details.

Nah they just see it as good ratings and votes. Most democratic politicians are in a popularity contest, doing objectively good things doesn't matter in the slightest in a democracy.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#155

Post by emptysongglass »

efitz wrote: post #44

Do citizens in the EU actually want this? If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible? In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t w…

Danish journalists refuse to inform the public about this.

The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#156

Post by koonsolo »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #144
sunshine-o wrote: post #103

> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted. That sounds worst to me. That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself? In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation: - W…

> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted. And there's really no way to enforce this unless you mandate locked-down devices with attestation. Then again, that's likely the long-term plan here.

You think this is some genius scheme? These politicians have no clue what encryption, client-side scanning, embedded software, and how these would all work together to scan messages means.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#157

Post by k7sune »

bccdee wrote: post #20
izzydata wrote: post #10

I assume this is just a police state overreach rather than genuine intent to stop crime. They must know that anyone actually engaging in criminal activity is going to not be caught by this because they use other forms of encrypted communication.

It'd be extremely easy to circumvent, too. Since the scanning runs client-side on images uploaded into the messenger, you just need an app to mangle and unmangle images. XOR the pixels in your payload with a picture of static, then do it again on the other side. It does not need to be particularly secure—the messages are still E2E encrypted so long as nothing trips the client-side scanner.

I suppose by XOR the payload the image size will multiply many times because no compression, whether lossy or lossless, will be possible.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#158

Post by koonsolo »

I remember a unix command back in the 90's that would list random words that NSA would intercept. You could then feed it to email footers.

ChatGPT thinks it was 'spook', but can't find any references.

Anyway, it seems we need such things again for messages, to overload any system the EU would have.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#159

Post by k7sune »

sunshine-o wrote: post #103

> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted. That sounds worst to me. That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself? In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation: - W…

I think the appeal is much higher than we think. Apple tried to do the same thing with on-device child porn image recognition. The company that markets itself as the privacy advocate.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#160

Post by izzydata »

loeg wrote: post #96
tolmasky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the slightly more sophisticated position is that, regardless of the operational security that is currently employed, if you were to implement something like this, then criminals would quickly adapt to improve their operational security accordingly. Especially because "operational security" in this case is doing a lot of heavy lifting to obscure how easy it would be: just use a good E2E messenger. This is not…

Criminals aren't very smart and don't think about their actions or the consequences very much.

I hear this a lot, but I wonder if that is just because the only criminals you hear about are the not very smart ones doing crime on unencrypted monitored services. This sounds like a survivor bias situation. How can we know how many criminals there are if we only know about the ones we know about?
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