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Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

threema.ch

231–240 of 341 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#231

"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.

it's not on the EP schedule. the council vote is of course not meaningless, but it doesn't mean much by itself.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...

... the submitted article is complete nonsense "EU citizens would no longer be able to communicate in a safe and private manner on the Internet." ..

no, here's the draft law

https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2024/05/2024-05-28_Cou...

see page 39,

"Without prejudice to Article 10a, this Regulation shall not prohibit or make impossible end-to-end encryption, implemented by the relevant information society services or by the users."

It's a broad framework and - based on my cursory reading:

  - providers have to set up a counter-abuse team and fund it
  - authorities and industry-wide cooperation on trying to come up with guidelines and tech
  - counter-abuse team needs to interpret the guidelines, do "due diligence"
  - provider needs to have monitoring to at least have an idea of abuse risks
  - if there are, work on addressing them if possible without breaking privacy
As far as I understand the point is have more of services like "YouTube for Kids", where you can give your kid an account and they can only see stuff tagged "kid appropriate" (and YT simply said we are going to be sure there are no bad comments, so there's no comment section for these videos - which hurts their engagement, which hurts profitability).

There's a section about penalties and fines, up to 6% of global revenue, if the provider doesn't take abuse seriously. And - again, based on my understanding - this is exactly to prod big services to make these "safer, but less profitable" options.

see page 45 for actual things providers might need to implement

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#232
post #28

I too instinctively bristle at this kind of legislation. It's likely to be abused, with many false positive that make it more effective at sweeping up innocent people, while the guilty just find workarounds. But all coming on here and saying "ooohh, this is bad, innit!" is not very interesting, and unlikely to prevent it. Why is the EU doing this? Which political groups are supporting and opposing it? Why now? How ar…

There are organizations which are selling AI tools to filter content. For instance, Thorn, a US organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, is building such tools and heavily lobbying for Chat Control in EU. "Ashton Kutcher is a tireless advocate." https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

Also concerning that he seems to have more input on policy than all EU citizens together. This democracy the EU is implementing is becoming a joke.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#233
post #55

> 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…

today's voice recognition tools are pretty good, look at meta's recent results. I wouldn't be that sure that phone discussions will not be monitored in some future. It's likely the other way - phone service providers are few in nr, it could be easy to force the change on them

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#234

I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.

One of its champions, Ursula von der Leyen, is pretty popular. One of the main reasons for that is that people don't understand what she is saying.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#235

This is the sort of stuff that made Brexit appealing to me. Remainers make out that we (UK) are xenophobic in some way, because we left the EU. No - we don't hate European people, they're great - we just hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions.

do you think uk will not implement something similar?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#236

I don't support this legislation but I also do not live in the EU. Honest question, why do we (US, EU, wherever) not have more harsh punishment for child SA? Why not castrate the offender after two strikes or even one? I am sure there are other biological reasons for this to happen but I got the impression a lot of abusers were abused as children.

When discussing extreme punishments like this, you must consider false convictions. Only in a perfect justice system (which is not achievable) could we allow such punishments. FWIW, I also feel this way about the death penalty.

When proposing “permanent” punishments like this, always put yourself in the shoes of someone who is falsely convicted. And consider that false convictions can (and do) happen for a wide variety of reasons: racial bias, political bias, cover ups, government oppression, etc.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#237
post #216
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle. That conclusion is logically wrong and does not follow from the premises. You are decrying fallacies in other arguments while making them y…

> That conclusion is logically wrong and does not follow from the premises. I am not saying "the good argument is moderation" (argument to moderation fallacy), I'm saying "the two extremes are obviously wrong, and, it turns out, the middle is smarter". The argument to moderation fallacy is when you are saying that the good answer is good because it is in the middle. I don't do that, I find the good answer and I just…

> The argument to moderation fallacy is when you are saying that the good answer is good because it is in the middle. I don't do that, I find the good answer and I just state that it happens to be in the middle.

If that’s your position you should remove the word “therefore” from your final sentence. Because that word means that the conclusion was drawn from the previous statements.

> if indeed you cannot trust no-one

That’s not what I said. Though admittedly my argument was too compressed and assumed the reader would understand I’m referring to the often used “good guy law enforcement” arguments. My fault for not having been clearer, I went for brevity.

> That's a fallacy. YOU are spending your time answering my comment instead of working to stop this legislation.

I don’t see how that’s a fallacy. Which one is it? You could maybe call it hypocritical or inconsistent, but none of those are fallacies. Furthermore, the point—which feels ridiculous that it needs to be spelled out—is not that you need to be fighting the legislation 24/7, but that when discussing it you should strive to focus on what it is, not what it could or should be.

> you are, incorrectly, arguing that the best strategy would be to not propose any alternative

Again, that is not what I said. Though in this instance you seem to be taking a bad faith position. I have said twice that it’s worth to have the conversation. I even said I’d read up more on your example because I wasn’t familiar with it. You’re misconstruing my argument in a way that feels really dishonest.

> and antagonize the innocent people that are being fooled by the bad guys.

Especially here. This part is just plain absurd and an attack with zero basis in reality.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#238
post #26
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nothing is. Local politicians fail upwards to the EU (at least in Germany) or some private job, if they fail at all. Most of the time, you can do what you want, and the voters don’t care.

"and the voters don’t care." Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something? Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.

> Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU?

That is one of the issues, no EU election would have changed what the commission is doing at all.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#239
post #189

This is the sort of stuff that made Brexit appealing to me. Remainers make out that we (UK) are xenophobic in some way, because we left the EU. No - we don't hate European people, they're great - we just hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions.

You keep saying “we”, as if yours is the prevailing UK opinion. Not only was Brexit a close vote, people who voted to leave have largely been regretting it. https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people... In the aftermath of Brexit I remember reading time and again of people who voted to leave and by doing so screwed up their own business (e.g. florists whose flowers come from abroad). They expressed…

I could say the same thing to you. You don't get to define "we" any more than I do. In fact my use of the collective "we" was directed primarily towards the claim of xenophobia - which definitely WAS an accusation thrown at people who supported Brexit. The thrust of my point was to single out the political ruling class in the EU for their refusal to listen to the opinion of their subjects. (I can't call them constituents, as that would imply some sort of representative democracy was taking place).

"So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”,"

Yes they very definitely did. The economic arguments were never the main drivers of Brexit. It was about national sovereignty, and electoral accountability - and this new Orwellian EU law, (enacted "for the children", of course) only serves to reinfoce that view.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is exactly the EU governance that lacks democratic representation, enabling unfavoured politicians to remain in significant power. You can only elect MEPs (via party lists) locally. The majority of legalislation is drafted by the technocratic European Commission and legislation is mostly passed through parlaiment unchanged from there. There are many nationally disgraced politicians seating in the EP, EC or…

In this specific case I believe that it's the EU Council that pushes for the current iteration of the law, which is formed of the head of states for each EU member. So, even if they might not be explicitly elected to be in the EU governance, most of them have reached that spot through more or less democratic means. "More or less" because Prime Ministers are usually nominated not elected, but that's still as part of e…

The level of indirection is very important and you can only elect a very small part of the council. There are a lot democratic deficiencies.

It lately became en vogue to deny the problem completely and EU politics only got dumber from that.

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