Live data from Hacker News

ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

metalhearf.fr

381–390 of 656 posts

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The guns of US citizens have so far prevented this kind of government-led mass citizen genocide from happening. No they haven't. Our system of checks and balances has. At no point has there been a civil war in which the US's citizens attempted to fight back against the US military. If there were, the citizens would lose without even presenting a challenge.

>the citizens would lose without even presenting a challenge. That's not true. The US Army spent 20 years and trillions of dollars trying to impose regime change on Afghanistan, but were defeated by a group (the Taliban) that had very little military capability beyond men with rifles and some explosives to make improvised bombs. (Yes, they also had decades-old weapons with which to shoot down helicopters.) Algeria's…

The Algerian war doesn't really prove much either, except that terrorism works.

The Algerians hid within the population and gradually picked at the French, like flies biting a bull. Eventually the French got bored and wandered off to find a new form of entertainment. If anything the French lost to propaganda, not guns.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#382
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. LOL. People nowadays don't start revolutions not because of weapons or lack thereof. It's because they're thoroughly entertained and fed; even the entire political circus is a sort of morbid reality show: people tune in to the news to shake their head in disgust at today's latest antics, and will do so tomorrow, because it's all panem et circenses for grown-ups. The Internet…

> and reading anarchist philosophy That's literally how we got here. People got a taste of unmitigated unprecedented freedom online for the last three decades, and found it so gross that they allowed things to swing the other way. Even one decade ago, the threat of SOPA/PIPA rallied the internet successfully. Just over a decade later, we're at the point of allowing age verification, for morality's sake, without hardl…

There's no utopia. The value of unmitigated speech is in replacing unmitigated violence.

The people you mention, whoever they are, are grossed out by human nature.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the citizens would lose without even presenting a challenge. That's not true. The US Army spent 20 years and trillions of dollars trying to impose regime change on Afghanistan, but were defeated by a group (the Taliban) that had very little military capability beyond men with rifles and some explosives to make improvised bombs. (Yes, they also had decades-old weapons with which to shoot down helicopters.) Algeria's…

The Algerian war doesn't really prove much either, except that terrorism works. The Algerians hid within the population and gradually picked at the French, like flies biting a bull. Eventually the French got bored and wandered off to find a new form of entertainment. If anything the French lost to propaganda, not guns.

>The Algerians hid within the population

Yes, but we're discussing a civil war or revolution in the US, where the rebels or revolutionaries would be able to engage in terrorism and to hide within the population -- and where there are so many long guns in private hands that the defending force (the government) probably wouldn't be able to deprive the attacking force (the rebels) of long guns simply by punishing any civilian found with a long gun in their home.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#384
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely untrue! Important communications have always been enciphered since language has been created I’d wager, whether that cipher is specific terms (grog means attack that person in 10 seconds!) or a book cipher, e.i. The first letter of a bible verse than the second letter of the next verse etc. Humans have been encrypting communication since communication was possible. It is now only recently possible…

> Humans have been encrypting communication since communication was possible. Were most people encrypting their handwritten letters? Were most people encrypting their messages before sending them by SMS or with WhatsApp? Really?

Not most but some.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#385
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few decades ago, few communications were tracked. When everything is tracked (as it is now), the only way to have privacy is with encryption.

Snowden said otherwise, more than a decade ago.

Which part are you disputing?

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#386

Dear citizens of the EU: If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs. What are you going to do when the government's interests inevitably drift out of alignment with yours? Start a political movement? You will have the police knocking on your door for criticizing the establishment. Start a revolution? You have no wea…

>you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs.

As a UK citizen, can you explain your reasoning here? We haven't implemented anything like the chat control proposal and while a few politicians have brought up similar ideas, there is a lot of pushback against it.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#387
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? And if you say both - how would you rate the relative severity of the two problems? Specifically, if you had to pick between preventing the rape of a child, and preventing N acts of CSAM distribution, how big would N have to be to make it worth choosing the latter?

> Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? It seems obvious that it is entirely the former and not at all the latter. In other words, N is positive infinity. Am I missing something? I only care about kids being hurt. And I think this view is close to consensus.

Ask anyone you know who has been sexually assaulted or raped what they think of the idea of pictures or recordings of that being both kept by the perpetrator and widely disseminated. I think you'll find very few who'd say that's totally fine. But given that there can be no CSAM without child abuse, the direct physical abuse is clearly the primary problem.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you chose to tell us about your interpretation. :-) I had less the current legal interpretation and more the meaning at the time of writing down, as it would reveal itself in current text, in mind, which is relevant to this argument.

I see the conversation differently. KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear. GLdRH said "Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly". I said that modifying the literal text requires going through the amendment process. You said "Comma rules change over time." I reiterated that the literal text does not change except through the amendment process, and also noted that fun…

> maybe you're misreading usernames

Sorry for that.

> KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.

I thought me and GLdRH replied to KPGv2 stating that the 2nd amendment isn't valid grammar and this results in some of the unclarity.

When you have this:

    X -> [grammar rules 18th century] -> 2nd amendment -> [grammar rules 21th century] -> ...
, then when you want to discuss meaning issues due to grammar rules, you need to use 18th century grammar. I perceived GLdRH to use 21th century grammar to encode the same sentence. The literal text does not need to be modified, since it uses 18th century grammar rules. Only when you want to parse it with 21th century grammar rules, you need to preprocess it to adjust the grammar first. This preprocessing doesn't need to be written back, since the grammar rules of the text haven't changed. We are only circumventing the parser not supporting the texts grammar.

> only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.

This is purely about syntactic issues, not about semantics. The Supreme Court applies also semantics, such as the other legal system definitions of the time. I wasn't replying to that aspect.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#389

Dear citizens of the EU: If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs. What are you going to do when the government's interests inevitably drift out of alignment with yours? Start a political movement? You will have the police knocking on your door for criticizing the establishment. Start a revolution? You have no wea…

>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored. One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitive…

If all of your messages can be read in plaintext, your going to have to transfer you keys some other way and it will be very detectable that you are sending encrypted messages which will be next on the chopping block.

Re: ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Algerian war doesn't really prove much either, except that terrorism works. The Algerians hid within the population and gradually picked at the French, like flies biting a bull. Eventually the French got bored and wandered off to find a new form of entertainment. If anything the French lost to propaganda, not guns.

>The Algerians hid within the population Yes, but we're discussing a civil war or revolution in the US, where the rebels or revolutionaries would be able to engage in terrorism and to hide within the population -- and where there are so many long guns in private hands that the defending force (the government) probably wouldn't be able to deprive the attacking force (the rebels) of long guns simply by punishing any ci…

My point is that it wasn't the guns that saved the Algerians. Knives, bayonets, and IEDs would have been equaly effective for the sort of guerilla tactics that eventually won the war.
Post reply on HN