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The disguised return of EU Chat Control

reclaimthenet.org

301–310 of 354 posts

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#301
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not under ECHR, which has twice as much signatories as EU has members and the other half is twice less chill compared to the EU. I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a…

Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy? It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws. However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here? Edit: I'm aware that the EU is on…

That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.

It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We stop allowing the rich to become so rich. Billionares are not compatible with democracy or the greater good.

It seems more likely to me this is being pressed by intelligence agencies than billionaires. Billionaires have secrets too.

But they have ways to evade the law. And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#304

This shady approach of trying it again and again is so disgusting to me. Just be upfront about. If you will do it anyway at some point, just fucking do it. It's not like other countries like China that are much further than we are in this regard are in constant turmoil over it. I guess we won't be either. Instead we take a moral high ground over Russia banning and blocking what are basically non-compliant messaging p…

I second this. And it would only be half as bad, if there was a chance to democratically undo this, when people realize the consequences. But no, this will stay forever and only become worse.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#305
They just try and try again. They only have to succeed. Once. The people who care about privacy have to succeed every time.

The only real solution is to counterattack. Get legislation through the EU parliament that guarantees a right to privacy and anonymity.

Dunno if there's any chance of that happening.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#306

> 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…

It is probably a reference to the report mentioned in this article from September https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports... According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false…

I feel this is a good place to add something...

I recall a half decade back, there was discussion of the quit rate of employees, maybe Facebook?, due to literal mental trauma from having to look at and validate pedophile flagged images.

Understand there is pedophilia, then there's horribly violent, next level abusive pedophilia.

I used to work in a department where, adjacently, the RCMP were doing the same. They couldn't handle it, and were constantly resigning. The violence associated with some of the videos and images is what really got them.

The worst part is, the more empathetic you are, the more it hurts to work in this area.

It seems to me that without this sad and damaging problem fixed, monitoring chats won't help much.

How many good people, will we laden with trama, literally waking up screaming at night? It's why the RCMP officers were resigning.

I can't imagine being a jury member at such a case.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#307

> 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…

It is probably a reference to the report mentioned in this article from September https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports... According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false…

OK, 50% "not criminally relevant".

How many of the other 50% were guilty and how many innocent after an investigation?

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#308

> 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]

This is the classic precision versus recall discussion. The discussion centers around how you think about the cost of a false positive versus false negative.

Some people think it's fine for the process to have low precision but high recall. Low precision is that of the number of conversations the process flagged as a positive, some unacceptable (to you) percentage turned out to be a not/false "positive". High recall is that of all the actually positive conversations, the process flagged an acceptable (to you) percentage of them as positive (i.e. only "missed" a few/false negative).

What does it cost to wrongly identify conversation a positive when it's really not a positive (false positive)?

What does it cost to wrongly identify a conversation as a negative when it's really a positive (false negative)?

You decide.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#310
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Yes, this is good.

I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion.

It is your right to do so.

However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork.

Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side of things, simply because I know my tolerances.

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