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Chat Control Must Be Stopped

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Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#201

Post by petertodd »

asdff wrote: post #149
petertodd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. If online privacy was that impossible Ukraine couldn't successfully organize sabotage operations in Russia. They do it all the time.

On the open internet? The drone strike in January that made headlines was not quite that simple. The drones were directed using dead reckoning. The drivers of the trucks were not informed what was happening with their cargo. Even the American government was kept in the dark.

Not at all. Ukraine had operatives inside Russia. The trucks were not driven in from outside Russia. The system was assembled inside Russia. Also, every single drone had its own pilot: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq69qnvj6nlo

That's also just one of many operations inside Russia. There's lots of sabotage and assassinations that have been done.

You just can't do operations like that without secure communications.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#202

Post by [deleted] »

DontBreakAlex wrote: post #128
giveita wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any case law for first claim?

Apparently that is Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Article regarding the claim: https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-conv... > In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped. I'm all for women's rights, but that's not how to do it

[deleted]

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#203

Post by petertodd »

nullc wrote: post #100
coldblues wrote: post #21

Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The l…

Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities. Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate s…

> making it impossible to reliably delete material

That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).

If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#204

Post by marcus_holmes »

api wrote: post #18
Humorist2290 wrote: post #10

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scop…

Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out. Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.

Except that it creates a market for circumvention tech that would also cut Big Tech out from understanding what its users are saying to each other.

Age restriction laws don't stop underage folks from doing anything, they just increase the market demand for VPNs, and improve VPNs so they get less easily detected. The net result is that platforms can't use IP addresses to meaningfully infer anything about their users.

Same with this. This legislation will create a demand for private encryption tech that isn't part of the platform. Someone is going to provide that and make money, and in the process may remove the demand for the platform in the first place.

I get the logic you're talking about, and agree that they must be thinking this, but it's very short-sighted.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#205

Post by giveita »

cobbzilla wrote: post #137
kypro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK we take this a step further – if you're by an abortion clinic and the police believe you could be praying in your head for those getting an abortion they can charge you. There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.

I am curious what would happen if one of those people tried to pray while having a sign above their head that said “I’m praying for to win their next game” Could they still arrest you?

They probably could. Especially given the magistrate deciding and no jury to convince.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#206

Post by bapak »

jonaharagon wrote: post #62
bapak wrote: post #14

Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children. Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for? I do not understand.

> Do they think they're above it? Yes, the lawmakers literally exempt themselves from this law in this law.

You can't exempt yourself from the backdoor you carry in your pocket.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#207

Post by noduerme »

alisonatwork wrote: post #167
noduerme wrote: post #20

Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

You're not thinking about it the right way. Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the…

>> You're not thinking about it the right way.

I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon.

You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws.

More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree.

So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#208

Post by [deleted] »

petertodd wrote: post #203
nullc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities. Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate s…

> making it impossible to reliably delete material That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day…

[deleted]

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#209

Post by petermcneeley »

Nursie wrote: post #199
petermcneeley wrote: post #155

The people of europe need to stop pretending that whatever controls europe is interested in democoracy, free speech, justice or freedom.

Why? Democracy is being served. People want this stuff. HN people maybe not, but let's not pretend we represent anything but a noisy minority. It's entirely democratic AFAICT, "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" won the argument some time ago. Free speech is not held as an absolute in many countries as it is in the US, and never has been. It is in a bad state in some places (the UK seems to be perfo…

If you've seen nothing and if the crimes of the government remain unknown to you then ... well enough said. Enjoy your water.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#210

Post by port11 »

Humorist2290 wrote: post #10

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scop…

I agree with most reasons others have pointed out (fatigue, lack of good journalism, deplatforming, alienation…).

Another one: it's holiday season, a clever time to get things through.

Another one: most EU parties stand for it, even my usual go-tos, namely Greens, S&D, and The Left.

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