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The disguised return of EU Chat Control

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Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#271

Post by ChadNauseam »

anonym29 wrote: post #255
tomsmeding wrote: post #216

> According to Breyer, the existing voluntary system has already proven flawed, with German police reporting that roughly half of all flagged cases turn out to be irrelevant. A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to: > Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears s…

[flagged]

You're misinterpreting what they mean by "50% false positive rate". Let's say there are 10 child traffickers in the country. A 50% false positive rate might mean this system detects 7 of them, but then also detects 7 people who are not child traffickers. The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare. If one in a million people are child traffickers, and you have a false positive rate of 50%, it means that the average person has no more than a one in a million chance of being a false positive.

Let me put it another way. Let's say you are an Egyptian Pharaoh and a man tells you he can predict when solar eclipses will happen. You give him a calendar and he marks down 20 days in the next few decades where he claims there will be an eclipse. On 10 of those marked days, there actually is an eclipse. That would be a 50% false positive rate. By the standards of an Egyptian Pharaoh, that probably looks like an absurdly good false positive rate.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#272

Post by anonym29 »

xethos wrote: post #268
anonym29 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Standing on the street holding a bag open, and catching a fish falling from the sky one time, would also be an absurdly good catch rate no matter how long I had to wait - it's just that shit of a system Only half the conversations being a waste of law enforcement's time is also an impressive rate - we all recognize that it's just a shite system that is bound to have a lot of false positives.

Fortunately, law enforcement was able to catch pedophiles and terrorists before they came up with the idea of permanently ending everyone's privacy, unlike your obviously ridiculous analogy - nobody has ever caught fish falling from the sky by standing in the street holding empty bags.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#273

Post by piekvorst »

pcrh wrote: post #53

The right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, article 8 [0]. It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this. [0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...

You can’t defend any rights by reference to legal authority. As long as it’s a legal domain, any exceptions are permitted, even on the “human” rights level. Rights can only be defended on moral grounds, like rights to freedom or self-defense.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#274

Post by pksebben »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #238
rambojohnson wrote: post #228

the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies. you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel. stop trea…

> once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification This is defeatist, fatalist nonsense.

Alternative take: OP meant that we ought not to trust any justification for the expansion of surveillance like posted.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#275

Post by pksebben »

Centigonal wrote: post #269
rambojohnson wrote: post #228

the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies. you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel. stop trea…

Let's be pragmatic about this. Chat Control and this new thing are not post-hoc rationalizations, they are attempts to justify a proposed change. If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that publi…

I don't think it's about public opinion so much as pushing the goalposts. The whole erosion of privacy since the 60s (maybe further but at least since then) has been a 'boiled frogs' situation.

What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).

A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#276

Post by pksebben »

progval wrote: post #55
josteink wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they’re asking American companies to repeal the first amendment rights of American citizens on all websites accessible in the EU. How this not a declaration of war?

Neither the EU nor American companies are Congress, so they are not bound by the 1st amendment.

Wait, Congress is bound by the first amendment?

Someone should tell Congress.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#277

Post by rendaw »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #271
anonym29 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're misinterpreting what they mean by "50% false positive rate". Let's say there are 10 child traffickers in the country. A 50% false positive rate might mean this system detects 7 of them, but then also detects 7 people who are not child traffickers. The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare. If one in a million people are child traffickers, and you have a false po…

I agree the GP math is wrong.

But still, is this good? So 14 cases are referred to law enforcement. They catch 7 people doing really terrible things, and they also catch 7 who are innocent. The police are notorious for treating weak signals as strong and forging causes for suspicion, terrorizing suspects, getting them fired from their job, killing their pets, upending their lives, etc.

If you ruin as many lives as you save, will you sleep well at night? This is why a 50% false positive rate is terrible and privacy advocates are against this.

The consequences of a false positive for an eclipse when one is predicted is trivial, unless there's something about eclipses I don't know. Maybe there's some diffuse monetary loss across society.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#278

Post by psychoslave »

pcrh wrote: post #53

The right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, article 8 [0]. It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this. [0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...

Because they don't get banned from being able to either take a sit in a political position for life after they went to jail for a few years for high treason agaisnt the people.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#279

Post by psychoslave »

rambojohnson wrote: post #228

the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies. you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel. stop trea…

States are not all mighty entities acting without any restriction. Wannabe rulers have to go through that kind of abstract notions to manipulate people at scale, but they have limited skills and abilities to use these tools that people about m accept only under certain conditions.

ECHR is on same ontological level as the notion of state. If no one concrete is willing to enforce it, it has zero agency.

Politicians can ignore constitutions like citizen can ignore laws. Politicians can send military forces on manifesters, and people can make politicians meet the guillotine.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#280

Post by athrowaway3z »

ekianjo wrote: post #249
marginalia_nu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the whole thing is full with these loopholes. Your rights are rights only as long as we wish at some point to add laws that inhibit them.

Basically a useless document.

Companies like Flock and Clearview have set up gigantic dragnets in the US.

I'm not happy with everything the EU does, but to call it useless is to be ignorant of the rest of the world.

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