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EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

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Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of pe…

Is there a website that tracks these? That would be a nice divulgation process.

There is the Parliament's legislative train website [1]. However, it only tracks actual legislative steps, not the intra-Council negotiations, so the proposal's page appears to be have been largely inactive since 2024 [2].

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/

[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-new...

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#242
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail. You're assuming they continue to use monitored channels to carry it out.

I am assuming that the entire (EU in this case) internet is monitored for un-decryptable messages, and that they use the internet. Can you square the circle, even in principle, without questions of cost?

The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.

and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.

If you look up comments on fintechs, trading platforms, and even legit banks on reddit and review websites there has been surge of these practices in last maybe 12 months. Basically "all savings and accumulated funds are illegal by default". In the past I only had heard horror stories about Paypal but now this it widespread.

That's the blessing of the KYC/AML laws/regulations for ya.

Moving money needs source of funds, documentation etc... doing any business requires you to doxx yourself to the world and to vendors in the name of transparency.

Luckily though none of this is a problem for large multinationals :) which the EU cares about most in the end

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#244
post #150

Seems to me this is a kind of advanced persistent threat. You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.

The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people. Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.

This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).

The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.

Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.

I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is. This shouldn't move forward at all, regardless of how many steps are involved and how small they are.

Anyone can and does say this about their pet favorite bit of legislation. And so journalists are more than happy to pull this shit with every other topic, too.

That's okay. I can just choose not to read the stuff I'm not interested in.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have constitutional barriers that would obstruct something like this.

As a US citizen, I have to say that you are completely mistaken. The US is a privacy hellscape.

Last I checked the US isn't trying to force legal backdoors into encryption which puts it firmly above the EU.

Source: US citizen which gives me special knowledge

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too. How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen. All maybe they will not and EU will block signal. Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning. And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they wil…

Simplex Chat looks like a decent alternative. It also has the benefit of not needing a phone number or email address.

They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.

From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.

Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.

SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.

XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.

On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.

For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#248
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").

Democracy means that the people decide. Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”

And those politicians there form their own little interest groups across members states and vote accordingly, which is the exact opposite of what we think of democracy.

You'd basically have to rely on magic to know how those politicians you vote in will decide to vote on because they join some sect that lobbies them to vote against your interests.

And we all know no voter aside from the 1% will ever think this far. It's exactly like you called it, the illusion of choice

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#250

As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be: * Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE * The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if y…

Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.

Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.

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