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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

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Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#431

Post by flir »

spwa4 wrote: post #414
flir wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up. Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks. This is the crux of it. From your local parish council to the largest supra…

> Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks. Well, yes. But that WAS NOT what was voted upon. What was voted upon were specific proposals to change the EU and have closer integration. The votes (there was more than one) had clear outcomes: "NO". But in a democratic system that should be then of it! And it wasn't. But the truth is the EU has a very long history of overriding democratic votes,…

Ireland rejected. The treaty was modified to address the concerns of Irish voters. Ireland accepted.

"Ireland rejected, the treaty was modified, and the Irish government said 'despite your changes, we refuse to allow our electorate to revisit this'" doesn't sound like a better approach.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#432

Post by Sharlin »

sunaookami wrote: post #131
Sharlin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities. People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy.…

When Trump introduced tariffs everyone screamed but now the EU does EXACTLY the same and suddenly it's okay.

Exactly? I find it very different.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#433

Post by vrsgjye »

palata wrote: post #381
throwawayffffas wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.

> Now i don't know what signal does That makes me question how much you know about end-to-end encrypted messengers, because Signal is the gold standard. > I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection. The problem there is that WhatsApp is not open source, so you can't check. So obviously you have to trust. But there are many, many employees who have access to…

[dead]

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#434

Post by throw-the-towel »

IceHegel wrote: post #370
moniosi wrote: post #189

The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will creat…

this is rational because pedophiles are not a threat to the state. if they were, the bill would look very different.

A modest proposal: have governments consist of underage girls.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#435

Post by spwa4 »

flir wrote: post #431
spwa4 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks. Well, yes. But that WAS NOT what was voted upon. What was voted upon were specific proposals to change the EU and have closer integration. The votes (there was more than one) had clear outcomes: "NO". But in a democratic system that should be then of it! And it wasn't. But the truth is the EU has a very long history of overriding democratic votes,…

Ireland rejected. The treaty was modified to address the concerns of Irish voters. Ireland accepted. "Ireland rejected, the treaty was modified, and the Irish government said 'despite your changes, we refuse to allow our electorate to revisit this'" doesn't sound like a better approach.

You're talking about the first big EU farce, the Nice Treaty. Btw: "Nice", as in the Roman city in the south of France with the excellent Carnaval, not the English word.

But then there was the second farce, the "EU constitution":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu...

Note how many referenda and votes were planned ... but suddenly canceled after voters started rejecting the treaty. And note how the page does not say how the replacement, the "Treay of Lisbon" was adopted. Sure they would vote on it, right? Otherwise, what credibility would they have left?

Well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon

Obviously there were no more votes on any EU future plans, with one exception.

I've worked for the EU Commission. Let me tell you: the bureaucrats there are angry about this. You see, the whole constitution was an attempt for the EU to become more democratic, gain credibility, by "sacrificing" power to voters. By the time the Treaty of Lisbon was created, the EU had lost power (much less than the constitution, but still some. Oh and they lost power to member states, NOT to voters), had "been forced" to push through the reforms anyway AND they had lost all credibility.

The only exception, the only vote on the EU's future? The Brexit vote ...

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#436

Post by echoangle »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #407
topranks wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but messaging apps are really only useful if there are lots of people on them to message. So in the real world a relatively small number of providers, WhatsApp, Signal etc, are in a position where all your friends are going to be on them. And those are the ones likely to be named and told they need to implement image scanning/review.

> So in the real world a relatively small number of providers. Why do we even need providers? Locally store the convos on each device and there's not a need for the server.

No normal user wants that. You would still need some infrastructure to link users with IPs, and if you lose your device, all your chats are gone.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#437

Post by piltdownman »

palata wrote: post #344
moniosi wrote: post #189

The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will creat…

> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps. > also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either. Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that sec…

WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.

When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks.

N.B. China does not allow WeChat to have e2e encryption.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#438

Post by wolvoleo »

soulofmischief wrote: post #429
throwawayffffas wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them. The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years. If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have no…

I totally agree, the problem is difficult however because even if we create a perfectly anonymous system for registering with social media, modern LLMs make semantic analysis trivial. It's going to be impossible to remain anonymous without also using an LLM to strip the unique footprint of your text. Which leads to a very strange and monotonous culture for internet discussions. Might be unavoidable, though, at least…

Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations.

It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#439

Post by damow »

mike_hearn wrote: post #316
tdrz wrote: post #289

I have to admit that I don't understand how they can push for this so often! Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?

This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for a…

> "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."

- Nigel Farage (16 May 2016)

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#440

Post by constantius »

munksbeer wrote: post #409
constantius wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with this: I'm saying that unless the power is of the Council and Commission is restrained, all the goodwill of the Parliament is an uphill battle and all people of the Member States are subjected to the corruption of unelected people like Ursula von der Leyden or of (temporarily?) problematic policies of some of the Member States' governments (like Denmark on Chat Control).

You can't restrain the power of the Council. The Council is the member states. What you're proposing would take power away from the member states and hand it to, who? People already think the EU is undemocratic, imagine after that. The main problem is that people still do not understand how the EU works. They don't understand that almost everything comes from the direction the member states push from the Council. And…

> hand it to, who?

To the people.

There are many ways to restrain the Council that'd make the EU more democratic: enforce more/full transparency into the Council's decision-making, expand the powers of the Parliament (making the Council into the upper house basically), enforce the Spitzenkandidat method for appointing the EC President, allow referenda on major issues to bypass the Council.

None of these is perfect, but they would streamline the democratic processes within the EU by lessening the role of the Council as intermediary.

I agree that the Council themselves would never allow that however.

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