Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reclaimthenet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 449 posts

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

#281

Post by ben_w »

gf000 wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so. > Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise. Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send. "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the…

> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time. It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text. It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

> It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what?

If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail.

> It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

It's also economically unfeasible.

Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?

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

#282

Post by DangitBobby »

ben_w wrote: post #259
Xelbair wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so. > Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise. Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send. "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the…

It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.

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

#284

Post by Fnoord »

If as journalist or activist this is what you quote:

> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”

From this translation:

https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...

Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.

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

#285

Post by voidfunc »

sillyfluke wrote: post #213
petcat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.

This is 1814 we're talking about, right? That's only a decade after Louisiana Purchase just for reference and before the Mexican-American war. I guess we might as well give all that back to the Mexicans? You can play this game to the end of time. There's a reason for statute of limitations in law.

I mean if Mexico wants to come up here and invade us to take it back they can try, but it's not going to end well for them.

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

#286

Post by sebtron »

margorczynski wrote: post #22

How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents? Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".

> Child porn?

This, the article says so in the first paragraph. The bullshit justification hasn't change in the last couple of years afaik.

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

#287

Post by oblio »

paganel wrote: post #233
oblio wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU Parliament, that has to vote to pass the law. Let's be better at commenting than Libertatea, circa 2010 (or The Daily Mail, for international readers).

The EU Parliament is a lame-duck thing, we both know that, let’s not pretend that this won’t pass at some point. It’s also not a parliament by definition, as it cannot propose any legislative measure, it can only propose “resolutions”, this is as lame-duck as it gets.

But it can block laws. Which matters. Just like in this case.

And guess what, national governments are the ones blocking the European Parliament from proposing laws, the EP has proposed multiple times that it be allowed to laws.

So EU member states themselves are the ones that don't want the EP to become a full blown parliament.

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

#288

Post by spencerflem »

GuB-42 wrote: post #86
sph wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Palantir and Thorn lobbyists So, US interests? Which means the NSA?

No need to look that far. Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business. I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".

Thiel also has a religious angle, where he thinks himself a god and imagines a perfect society where every human is watched at all times

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

#289

Post by ben_w »

DangitBobby wrote: post #282
ben_w wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so. > Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise. Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send. "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the…

It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.

Irrelevant.

1) Illegal telecoms equipment can be seized

2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets *never ever* went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.

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

#290

Post by npodbielski »

latexr wrote: post #121
npodbielski wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a first step, after that they will expand it and force to do it effectively boiling the frog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

From the second paragraph in your link: > While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog plac…

It is just a saying my dear friend. I added link because I was not sure how known it is in other countries - if at all.

But of course some HN commenter had to do: 'well actually...'. :D If I would write something like: 'Better late than never' would you be correcting me too? 'Well actually studies shows that it is better never...'

I recommend some chilling with a nice cup of tea.

Post reply on HN