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

It's going to be 0% effective. It won't take long for criminals to use their own encrypted communication systems, and only law-abiding citizens will be monitored.

And then you'll get into a scenario that the government will punish you for wrong-speak, like when people had their bank accounts frozen for donating to the trucker protests. Or they will turn off your access to social media the way the Biden Administration did during the Pandemic.

The mechanisms that attack one attack the other as well. The apparatuses which exist to de-anonymize communication also remove the ability to definitively keep the content of the communication private, and no government (UK or EU or US, etc) that has proposed a ChatControl-like scheme has ever used a method that did not allow them to do both.

If a porn site checks my ID against a gov database, the gov now knows I went to that porn site. That is a loss of both anonymity and privacy.

I'm completely against all infringements of privacy, but,

>If a porn site checks my ID against a gov database, the gov now knows I went to that porn site. That is a loss of both anonymity and privacy.

This is not necessarily true. It is possible to design systems much more like CRL than OCSP, including identity or even just age verification systems. Consider the FedGov sharing a list of public keys tied to identities of people over the age of 18, updated daily, while issuing corresponding private keys to citizens. The citizens could use their private key to sign a challenge issued by the adult media website, who would simply verify that the public key tied to the signed challenge response exists on the list of all public keys tied to identities of people over 18 issued by the fedgov.

With this system, adult websites would not need to send any identifying information to FedGov, nor would private citizens be disclosing any identifying information to the adult website - not their name, not their address, not even their date of birth, just cryptographic proof that they're in possession of a private key that corresponds to the identity of an adult.

Sure, kids could still conceivably obtain cryptographic private keys, just as they can obtain photographs of state-issued government ID that are currently used for age verification.

The real problem with schemes like these isn't the technical feasibility, but rather the capacity of the citizenry to understand and perform their own cryptographic key management.

This is what I think too. There's a huge push around the world for 3 things right now; verified IDs, trusted or attested signatures for software distribution, and monitoring efforts like the one in the article.

The thing people don't seem to realize about the recent Android announcement that they're going to require digital signing for distribution is that it's not about moderating apps. The objective is to make sure developers are forced to disclose their identity when publishing apps because that allows rich companies and individuals to wield the justice system like a weapon. They won't ban something like ReVanced because all they need to do is make sure the system allows others to take legal action against the developers.

The other thing that people don't realize, like some of the sibling comments here, is that using older hardware and tools can only go so far. Normal people aren't going to do that and people that go out of their way to do it are going to be making themselves a target.

There's already a chilling effect in place. All of my teenage relatives were given a mini lecture to absolutely not post about the Charlie Kirk incident on social media and to avoid talking about it in private chat. I still haven't seen an explanation for how the messages in this incident [1] ended up in the hands of authorities.

But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress".

The only way to "protect the children" is through education, not by forcing them to have a digital paper trail for their whole life.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669

> If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government

A little bit off-topic but so called president of the EU is not elected, nor are the figures in so called EU commission :)