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Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

threema.ch

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Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#291

Post by EasyMark »

neugiergiraffe wrote: post #58

Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ? Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job? Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the…

All police organizations will want complete control. It’s up to democracies to fight back. I think politicians are noticing the public are vulnerable to fear mongering about kids and crime and the “big bad cloud” and using that to get more power for their police apparatus, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a democracy or totalitarian state, governments want more power, all the time, every time. Except in a democracy you can fight back by voting, publishing, contacting representatives. It is getting harder but it’s still possible. Such things aren’t possible in Russia or China without Massive Upheaval and the dictator fearing loss of control, but otherwise no big deal for most changes in the laws.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#292

Post by EasyMark »

IMTDb wrote: post #125
neugiergiraffe wrote: post #58

Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ? Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job? Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the…

In this case it's not really about mass surveillance. I genuinely do not believe it's the intended purpose (even if it is the actual outcome). The issue is that Europe is behind in tech; particularly big communication networks (aka: social networks). One key element here is that the amount of taxes paid by the Facebooks and co. is ridiculously low and their importance in the economy is getting bigger and bigger. This…

They don’t need mass surveillance to crush Facebook/tiktok in the EU, so I don’t see how you can draw this conclusion. They can easily regulate those two (and other)entities out of existence. Just make it illegal for anyone under 21 to use them and require everything to be kid friendly (no porn, no violence, no addictive advertising, etc) and they will be useless to virtually everyone except the elderly and that’s not where the money is. So I feel that this 100% about surveillance for the police state to comb through everyone’s lives looking for crimes to prosecute. There are so many laws and regulations I suspect most of us break multiple ones a day without realizing it.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#293

Post by EasyMark »

Moldoteck wrote: post #233
etrvic wrote: 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

I don’t know about Europe but the US has been scanning trunk lines of domestic and international calls for decades looking for keywords and actually have decades of archived conversations that AI will make it all the more feasible to comb through and look for thought crimes.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#294

Post by EasyMark »

bun_terminator wrote: post #32
Semaphor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Here it had some niche users, but got completely supplanted by signal, which is the clear #2 with the people I know.

Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result. With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.

99%of the people I know and care to communicate with use signal or a group matrix and didn’t really care about the controversy, so I think the effect of what you are talking about is extremely limited in tech circles

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#295

Post by EasyMark »

cryptonym wrote: post #22

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 the police aren’t going anywhere and they are the ones pushing for this tirelessly. This is everything to them to make their power (and politicians) absolute. They will have dirt on everyone if you can’t have private conversations at all. Even if it’s not illegal they will find something immoral to destroy your life. Allowing police (the government) to become nearly omniscient is a very very bad idea.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#296

Post by EasyMark »

ajb wrote: post #34

A lot of despondency about this. But I think part of why this stuff gets through is that techies are campaigning in the wrong way Those advocating for it have a visceral pitch: your kids will be in danger if this doesn't pass. Those against are arguing for abstracts, like freedom and privacy. And sure, people should be in favour of those things - but there's a visceral pitch against, and it's not being used What will…

I think commercials like a local politician looking over a cop’s back saying “I need some dirt on Citizen Z, he fixed my plumbing last week and overcharged me, let’s see what we can find on him”. Then show his plumbing business shut down a week later because of some obscure local law about using imperial wrenches instead of metric.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#297

Post by EasyMark »

infecto wrote: post #187

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.

Is chopping off shoplifter’s hands next? Good grief, let’s not do a new wrong thing to fix an old wrong thing. That biblical stuff needs to stay in the fairy tale book.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#298

Post by EasyMark »

loftsy wrote: post #68

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying. However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think: We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address. This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free s…

That’s an easy one to shoot down because it would lead to endless harassment of innocent individuals and suppression of popular opinion or critical thought. It goes counter to everything that the internet is about. It also would lead to mass genocide by governments seeking to kill of any resistance.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#299

Post by taylorius »

Moldoteck wrote: post #235
taylorius wrote: post #160

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?

For sure - but at least we have the illusion of being able to vote these people out.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

#300

Post by account42 »

gravescale wrote: post #45
darby_nine wrote: post #3

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

My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica. Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of…

Yes, and this trend is self-reinforcing since politicians generally do not actually receive any punishment for their bad behavior. At best the party slowly loses voters but that is over much longer timeframes than individual politician's careers - and meanwhile all other parties pull similar shit anyway because the short-term benefits incentivize that.
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