ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by Saline9515 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 9:56 PM UTC

sally_glance wrote: post #355

Saline9515 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals are reactive. If you add a CCTV where drug dealing happens, sellers and buyers will go to another place. In the end, nothing changes.

Sounds like a non-sequitur to me. Yes, this is how it works - in every aspect of life we try to regulate as a society (through laws and enforcement). Criminal activities are prohibited, restricted and monitored. Criminals move on, but the law is also adaptive and soon catches on. Following your argument leads to anarchy and currently western society mostly shares the belief that we're better off with democracy.

No,the logical conclusion is that, on the contrary, liberal democracies end up as authoritarian legalist regimes, as they progressively need more and more laws and enforcement to catch criminals who evade them.

You can see this clearly with the constant inflation of AML laws in the EU, which become more and more restrictive and invasive each year, without any clear effect.

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

#392

Post by chaosbolt » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

txrx0000 wrote: post #287

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…

It's already this dystopic, like any medium where people can talk freely gets eventually controlled by corrupt politicians etc.

Anyways, the control of speech isn't only in surveillance, it's ingrained deeply in culture, taboos, education, etc.

I have talked to religious people before, they all exhibited a certain characteristic, you could talk about somethings but you can't touch on other things, their mind won't accept it, so they bug and start saying nonsense.

I've noticed the same thing with most people when it comes to certain subjects, you'd be talking to an educated person with a relatively high IQ and a mind that is capable to think critically in certain domains, yet once you point out something their mind has been trained to deem anti cultural (like for example who controls what), they turn into Agent Smith and they stop listening to reason.

Anyways, this is HN so what I'm saying is that the control of the controllers is already absolute, it's been linearly increasing for years, they'd cause something then tighten their control of us for "our safety", until one day we get enough and some take out the guillotines and others the bald eagle etc. been happening for millenia, if we as a species were able to rebel on authority before s*it absolutely hit the fan, history would've been a lot cleaner.

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

#393

Post by palata » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #373

palata wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This policy doesn't have a plausible way that it will protect children from being victimized Of course it does. "It will detect and report messages from predators to children, therefore preventing the child to get to the point where they send revealing pictures or meet the predator in person". Done.

Well, maybe the word "plausible" is doing too much work in my statement. Most abuse happens from people known to the child, and of that portion, most are family members. It seems like there is sufficient opportunity in-person comms to route around this limitation. Moreover, even the communications that do happen online can still easily happen through encrypted media; presumably the perpetrators will simply move to ot…

> Most abuse happens from people known to the child

Sure, but it means that at least some happen from people unknown to the child. If ChatControl doesn't cause any problem but helps preventing those abuses, then it's worth it. The question is: what are the problems caused by ChatControl?

Saying "only a minority of children get abused this way, so it's not worth it" won't go far, IMO. It's not a valid argument against ChatControl in itself.

> presumably the perpetrators will simply move to other ways of communicating.

The perpetrators have to contact kids over apps that the kids use. Like Snapchat or TikTok. It's not like the kids will routinely install a weird app to talk to weird people...

> parents _want_ their kids to have access to encrypted communications.

But ChatControl doesn't remove the encryption! It scans everything locally, before it gets encrypted and sent.

> by criminalizing encryption

It's not criminalizing encryption: it's forcing a local scan on your device. Just like there are already scans happening on clouds for non-E2EE data.

Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl. For me the problem is that I see a potential for abuse with the "list" (whether it's a list or a sum of weights) of illegal material. This list cannot be made public (because it's highly illegal material), so it's hard to audit. So whoever has control over it can abuse it, e.g. to find political opponents. That's my problem with ChatControl.

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

#394

Post by pests » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #257

bapak wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA > the proposed legislation includes exemptions for government accounts used for “national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes”. Convenient.

I can buy the military exemption, and maybe some very top level government workers that are effectively military (example: POTUS). But the EU parliament has no reason to be excluded. It is definitely a terrible law if it is so bad that they won't pass it unless they are excluded.

> top level government workers that are effectively military (example: POTUS)

POTUS is very specifically NOT a member of the military. Elected civilian control was the whole point. Even Eisenhower had to (temporarily) give up his general rank to serve as president.

I do understand your core point tho.

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

#395

Post by Saline9515 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #338

Saline9515 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are "just doing their job" why are they asking for an exemption that would apply only to them? No, they firmly believe that safety should be gained at the cost of privacy.

I could imagine that war orders may be interpreted as "illegal" and therefore reported. Which may not be desirable?

So it's ok if the database containing my nudes leaks, but not if it contains state secrets? I feel really protected!

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

#396

Post by palata » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

Saline9515 wrote: post #379

palata wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it like this: your phone already "reads" absolutely everything you put on that phone. Apple or Google could do anything they want with that, but you trust them. You trust that they don't send everything that goes into your phone to their servers. ChatControl would run locally on your phone. It would compare the images that you receive/send to a list of illegal images, and if you happen to deal with one of them,…

Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening. You can then scan for other things, such as "hate speech", or "tax evasion" and then the slope becomes more slippery than a lube party on a vinyl sheet, and Kim Jong Un awaits you at the Ski Bar at the bottom. Those passive surveillance systems have a chilling effect on democracy, just like mandatory ID on social media, and provide politicians a lev…

> Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening.

Exactly! That's the problem!

It's not killing the encryption, it's not sharing all your communications with the government. Those are invalid arguments. The problem is that whoever controls the proprietary part of ChatControl (and that includes the list of illegal material) can abuse it to e.g. detect political opponents, or whatever they can imagine.

I am just asking that we use the valid arguments against ChatControl. I read a lot of invalid arguments that won't help convincing politicians that it is a bad idea. They need to understand why it is a bad idea, the real reason.

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

#397

Post by pests » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #356

blaze33 wrote: post #348

I regularly see similar articles with similar comments here, but there's one thing I still don't understand: From the European Convention on Human Rights[1]: ARTICLE 8 Right to respect for private and family life 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as i…

> what is the legal argument solid enough to justify interfering with everybody's right to privacy? "... except such as is in accordance with the law" And the "interfering" coming from ChatControl is that "some algorithm" locally scans and detects illegal material, and doesn't do anything if there is no illegal material. > Watching everyone's communications also seems at odds with the principle of proportionality It'…

> Nobody would say that your OS is "watching your communications", right?

No what? Everyone has been hating on the spying Microsoft has been doing in windows for years. How do you ask this with a straight face.

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

#398

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

JohnLocke4 wrote: post #331

txrx0000 wrote: post #287

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…

> Software like PGP is easy to use

Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.

Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.

We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.

One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.

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

#399

Post by wkwdiuwnwfny » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #294

Most arguments I see against ChatControl sound like bullshit to me. How do we expect to convince anyone to go against ChatControl with those? I feel unease when it comes to ChatControl; I don't want my devices to run proprietary, opaque algorithms on all my data. And it feels like it fundamentally has to be opaque: nobody can't publish an open source list of illegal material together with their hash (precisely becaus…

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

#400

Post by Saline9515 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #396

Saline9515 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening. You can then scan for other things, such as "hate speech", or "tax evasion" and then the slope becomes more slippery than a lube party on a vinyl sheet, and Kim Jong Un awaits you at the Ski Bar at the bottom. Those passive surveillance systems have a chilling effect on democracy, just like mandatory ID on social media, and provide politicians a lev…

> Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening. Exactly! That's the problem! It's not killing the encryption, it's not sharing all your communications with the government. Those are invalid arguments. The problem is that whoever controls the proprietary part of ChatControl (and that includes the list of illegal material) can abuse it to e.g. detect political opponents, or whatever they can imag…

I think that the correct sentence would be that it kills the purpose of encryption. Which is to prevent anyone aside of the recipient from reading your message.