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EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

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Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#61

What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.

> What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz. "Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in…

I get what you mean, but Datenschutz and the bizarre processes built to appease it make an appearance almost every day here.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007. Europeans in general like or is indifferent towards the EU.

> EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007. My observations are different.

Here’s some data. Skepticism is pretty low and approval is pretty high

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1360333/euroscepticism-e...

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#63
post #38
post #11

I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly. Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). W…

Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee. What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push b…

Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it. OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?

> How do I vote out Ursula [von der] Leyen? This can only be done indirectly. Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.

>This can only be done indirectly.

So the short answer is "YOU can't".

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#67
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion. Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. F…

Agreed. Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm. I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apar…

It's the same reason police (in every country) are always asking for more powers, and then end up not using them effectively. It's a cycle where crime is not perfectly prevented/punished, politicians blame the police, police blame not having enough powers, and then they get more. But the wrong ones to prevent the next tragedy, well, in hindsight of course. So new powers are needed yet again. (And no-one needs to examine why the existing powers are not used effectively, since the underlying problems there would probably be a lot more expensive and boring to fix, e.g. better pay/hours, better management, education, outreach, blahblahblah.)

Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#68
A few comments about the state of security and privacy in the UK so let me reply with a top level comment instead:

People forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.

> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66028773

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That approach has spectacularly backfired for the UK, as they used to do the same thing too. ;)

UK is much worse than EU in terms of privacy and encryption.

It is, but i would rather take toothless UK's one over EU's Orwellian nightmare.

UK's one is easily avoided.

But reality is that NONE of those options should be even considered.

Re: EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

#70

People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial. It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology. silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomabl…

But they do find them without the tools. Every other week there are terror suspects arrested. Every week some pedophiles are arrested.

If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.

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