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Chat Control Must Be Stopped

privacyguides.org

211–220 of 272 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#211

Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping. You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

In other words, the people in power get to dictate which thoughts you're allowed to have/express? Even in the privacy of your own house? And if the people in power decide acts of kindness or expressing love for your children are illegal…?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#212
post #210

> 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.

Time consider your party affiliation then.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#213
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that things can be bad without being melodramatically the end of democracy.

Is this an authoritarian move that ought to be spoken against by those who know and care? Absolutely. Does it mean that there's no more democracy in Europe? No, that's a little ridiculous.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cas…

If you are starting from the point of view that Chinese society is a panopticon, and that no other society has ever experienced or had to deal with anything comparable, but totalitarian laws are about to make it inevitable in the west, and therefore it's important for someone to ask questions on HN if people in China can obtain phones that allow them to avoid state spyware... I don't know what to say. The line of questioning comes across as nonsequitous in a discussion of the proposed regulations and how they might affect people in the EU.

The answer you seem to be looking for is that in China, just like in every other country, there are devices that exist which do not come with a state spyware component that is constantly transmitting everything to the authorities. Some devices are locally manufactured, others are imported, some are regulated, others are not, and people communicate using those devices and others, across all forms of media, including face-to-face.

To elaborate: China isn't a totalitarian hellscape where everyone has a gun pointed at their head and they're all forced to use the same, identical, CCP-branded phone or else face execution. It's a huge, diverse country filled with millions of hackers and entrepreneurs, people with different interests, people with different means. There are countless devices and app stores and popular trends. Regulations are often unclear and are enforced differently in different regions and by different layers of the bureaucracy. Not everybody's threat model is the same. Just as in the west, people find ways to communicate that meet their comfort level - sometimes that's through systems monitored by the authorities, other times not. There's no one special technology or technique.

The main difference in China is that citizens can be disappeared without much recourse because the legal system is opaque and there is no free press or democratic process to hold the government to account. But that's not the case in most of the EU. There is certainly democratic backsliding happening in parts of the EU, but that's a separate discussion.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#215
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculously different, there's no single person or country that can do anything like that there are multiple ways to make EU law, there are regulations (that apply directly) and directives that member states need to implement (basically ratify) the Commission proposed something and then the Council votes on it and then there's the EP which votes on it this one is a regulation proposal https://en.m.wikipedia.org…

Why this even got to a stage of being official? It's something a Nazi regime would implement today had it existed. There is no one in the EU that would tell those people are you fkin insane and give them a sack?

I assume from your comment history you are from the USA.

It’s surprising how quickly you have forgotten CISPA, EARN IT, etc - which were much more invasive proposals than chat control (slurping of all data of everyone, not just client side scanning for csam).

Of course, now you just cram unrelated shit into “big beautiful bills”, speed it through with minimal oversight using loopholes, and hope no one will notice. Has no one told you how fkin insane that is?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#216
post #138
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean enshrine a right to messaging privacy in a constitution? That's going to be difficult.

The US constitution already has a provision against unreasonable search properly enshrined, and well tested in courts. Things like KOSA can be rejected as clearly violating it. The EU does not seem to have such simple and ironclad norm.

This means nothing when the Supreme Court is playing Calvinball. It turns out a constitution has zero value if you purchase the highest courts.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#217

As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground. Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92. P…

I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government. The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they be…

The problem with that framework is that even if you believe the EU Governments are the "good guys", it's not going to be just them who get access to the data.

It opens it up potentially to anyone with the means to infiltrate these systems - rogue employees of the companies running the messaging and cloud services, cyber criminals who will be able to hack into them, foreign states who will be able to hack it (we very recently saw this how China had infiltrated CALEA backdoors into telephone systems around the world for many years).

Which of course is part of the reason that companies are so on-board with end to end encryption in the first place - being able to ensure that rogue employees can't access customer's private messages and files, and that if cyber criminals hack in and infiltrate data that there are no encryption keys accessible is a huge benefit to them - but the moment you try to open it up to "lawful intercept" you open it up to all the unlawful intercept too...

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#218
post #211

Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping. You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

In other words, the people in power get to dictate which thoughts you're allowed to have/express? Even in the privacy of your own house? And if the people in power decide acts of kindness or expressing love for your children are illegal…?

Rather, the expansion of surveillance legislation in 1986, and 2001, introduced the idea that private material on your computer can be criminal, which opened the door to government installed malware to monitor you, whereas before that, criminal activity involving information was restricted to communication or social organization. Then later in 2003 with the introduction of private contractors to implement this tech, there was a further expansion in the people who had access to this information. An example of what happens when people have this power is captured in this Bloomberg article [1] and this New Yorker article [2]. And we know that some Silicon Valley leaders do not believe in market fairness/competition.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa....

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#219
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.

Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#220
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been mostly deplatformed for any kind of organized action against it, there's just writing an email to your MEP or... a change.org petition. Yes really. Nothing official one could sign their name under. But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal, it's up to the parliament and the courts to something about it afterwards. And they should gi…

Any EU citizen also has the right to petition the EU parliament directly.

Which is totally useless. Various lobbies have infinite money and time, unlike citizens.
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