221–230 of 341 posts
It took a bit of time but we are finally reaching sovietic dream of mass surveillance. We just need extremist to be in power (oh wait!) so it can be enabled for other purposes and we'll get full powered Stasi.
Well they do keep electing communists in Europe so it makes sense the Soviet dream state is near completion.
"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.
Also, the parliament is still 'new'… perfect time to push something like this through before the dust settles
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...
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Similar reason why there's no death penalty. If you get the wrong person and you lock them up you can release them with compensation, it won't fix it but its better. You can't un-castrate someone the same way you can't revive them after an execution. Courts convict innocent people all the time, hence no irreversible punishments.
Locking someone up is a one-way punishment, they will not get their years back. Branding someone as a child-molester, even if they are later vindicated, is permanent. We already have irreversible punishments.
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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.
Mao Zedong's CCP is as relevant to the present discussion as say Adolf Hitler, US treatment of Native Americans or British/French/Spanish colonialism. All awful, yet not awfully relevant.
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This isn't necessarily true: the Identity and Democracy faction is explicitly pro-privacy, digital rights and against Chat Control. - https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site) - https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview) - https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site) The…
FYI, 84% of ID has voted pro chat-control in 2021. https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID
Seems like only the Greens, the left and within ID the AFD voted against.
> Besides, there’s no way of really knowing whether Chat Control would actually be (or remain) limited to CSAM. I definitely agree with the article here. Probably after Chat Control will be implemented for CSAM this would act as a gateway towards using this tehnology for other things. I am curious whether chat control will extend to mail or other means of online comunication, if it will be implemented ofc(hopefully n…
Talking to people is great. I write science fiction for a hobby. In my stories, when two people want to have a private conversation to discuss some economic barter that can be construed as tax evasion, they take off all their clothing and go swimming to a beach with noisy waves. But there is always that lingering fear about if anybody surreptitiously got a microphone implanted during their latest root canal treatment...
Truth be told, I'm a very unimaginative bloke, because in my current jurisdiction banks are already forced to report on their customers, and in my previous one, the government had a decided phobia of cell-phones and attributed to computer printers in the hands of civilians the same dangers of an independent printing press.
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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.
western democracy is good for people in the west. not other countless nations that have been enslaved, colonized, invaded, subjugated, stripped in the name of democracy and religion. Russia, CCP etc are horrible too - but let us not forget history. The Global South Remembers.
The wording in the current draft seems to indicate that it applies to "providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services". So unless this includes ISPs, I wonder if that means a decentralized P2P service is not covered.
Not applicable, nor enforceable. If this were to pass then the next Signal will be P2P. There are already some good protocols like Tox. Ironically the pervs will still be using WhatsApp, and just put their CSAM in a password-protected zip file before sending.
Even if you use an open-source clone without scanner, your contacts most likely will use an app with builtin scanner. Your communications will be scanned on their end.
At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery.
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…
Terrorists on the other hand will find illegal ways to overcome the restrictions. It's the same with encryption - (open-source) tools with e2ee are already broadly available, sideloading is available - nothing will stop terrorists/other criminals to just install that and continue doing what they want.
On the other hand this chat control opens a huge area of opportunities for govts to spy on citizens or maybe journalists/other politicians that they dislike. And this is if we assume the system doesn't have bugs that would allow third parties/hackers to break it and get all the info by themselves, or bugs that can trigger a false-positive event.
That's why it's a bad idea. Criminals will find ways to overcome the limit, govs will get new tools for suppression (even if current govs are 'good', what if the next govt is some ultra conservative or radical nationalist, do you think they'll not use these new tools?) and normal ppl are basically left without any privacy
"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 ?
Quite often a government body has missed some performance targets, suffered cost overruns or has other bad news which they need to announce publicly at some point. But they can choose when the announcement comes out.
Then along comes September 11th 2001, planes crash into the twin towers, and while the towers are still burning government PR teams are rushing out the announcement that they've badly missed their train punctuality targets.
They know the news and social media are going to be full of the big event for days or weeks. By the time things are quiet enough that the newspapers have space to report on train punctuality, the bad figures are old news.
This works equally well with big good-news stories like royal weddings and big sporting events.
The "good day to bury bad news" quote is interesting because someone leaked an e-mail where a government PR boss literally encouraged it. Usually such encouragement would be by telephone or whatsapp to avoid creating a paper trail.