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Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

threema.ch

161–170 of 341 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#161

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…

You realize criminals can stack infinitely many layers of encryption onto any compromised (govt-controlled) channel right? So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution??

> So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution??

Who said it is supposed to be the solution?

Almost no crime problems have a the solution. Instead reducing crime is almost always a matter of a variety of measures that each make the crime a little less likely.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#162

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…

> Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy?

You’re hurting yourself more by being too lax with it. Remember that a crime is whatever the law says it is. So if an authoritarian government makes it so criticising them becomes a crime and has access to all your communication, good luck ever breaking that cycle. You can use other examples, like making homosexuality illegal.

These are real examples that real governments (or people with a good chance of being elected) want.

Remember that the ultimate goal of these laws is never to “protect the children”—that’s just the convenient given reason, because how could you be against that—but to exert more control over the populace and cement the position of those in power. Even if the current government employs the technology only for good—highly unlikely—you don’t know about the next one.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#163
I'd support legislation that made it mandatory for any politician of any capacity to keep all of their communications publicly searchable, and I do mean all. Let's see how quickly proper privacy laws get implemented when these parasites are actually affected by the laws they're setting forth.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "chat" with "speak", and suddenly it is trivially obvious to everyone how horrific this is: > If we don’t hijack privacy in speech, how do we fight crime happening in private conversations? If [the] government doesn’t have access to what you say at home, what’s stopping criminals from using their homes and never getting tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof was said behind closed doors? Aren’t w…

> I lived in one of those countries, and I can tell you that it's not at all nice that they tracked what you photocopied, That's all photocopiers & printers though, with US manufacturers being ground zero for tracking, IIRC - https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your...

Which is one reason I stopped using printers entirely.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please give examples of how the authoritarian, repressive, conformity-demanding CCP is less awful and soul destroying than Western democracy, as flawed as it is.

Want to check how many died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria between 2001 and now as a direct consequence of Western military action, versus how many people the PLA killed in foreign interventions in the same period? Hint: the former - hundreds of thousands, the latter - zero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong:

> Mao's policies were responsible for a vast number of deaths, with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions, and his government has been described as totalitarian.

I guess according to you killing your own people shouldn't be counted.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#166
post #124

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…

Crime, whether CSAM or drugs or theft, all have a component in the real-world: it’s never purely in messaging. Stop the CSAM where it’s being created. Catch the drug manufacturers and distributors. Etc. do police work.

Drug manufacturers, like weed farmers (in countries other than the US, for one)? The only reason I am able to use weed as an example is because it pretty much has been normalized, but what about other drugs, say, psychedelics, ketamine, opiates? I would rather not get into the War on Drugs here, anyways.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#167
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, who orchestrated a country's army with its hundred thousand men, tanks, bombs, against another country's, plus its civilians, and then even more civilians needing to run away... as a distraction? From what?

Man, how did this "conspiracy theory" mental illness become so commonplace?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#168
post #124

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…

Crime, whether CSAM or drugs or theft, all have a component in the real-world: it’s never purely in messaging. Stop the CSAM where it’s being created. Catch the drug manufacturers and distributors. Etc. do police work.

What kind of police work are you envisaging?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#169
post #117

"Fun" Fact: it's currently the European championships in football (soccer) in Europe (probably the biggest event of the year), so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak this through without too many people noticing.

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

This is the infamous Dead Cat Strategy[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#170
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VPN is straightforward to solve. For example Apple devices already have "Device Attestation": https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep28afbde6... To do TOR you would need to look at the IP protocol and signing at the packet level. Definitely more difficult.

Device attestation is a way for a server to attest that a requester is e.g. an iPhone. Sure, it can be expanded to cover if the requester is, say, John Smith. But the server has to demand it.

Decentralized platforms tout not doing this stuff as a feature. You'd have to roll out the attestation system and require everyone running a web server to set up this attestation infrastructure; that is, the small guy running a model train forum on his laptop or whatever must risk prison time if he doesn't do attestation. That'd be so draconian that afaik not even China does it.

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