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

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

#631

Post by jalapenos »

xp84 wrote: post #179

From the article, the current flavor of "threat" this is being positioned to fight is CSAM. Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses because of the availability of encrypted channels to distribute those products of their crimes? I sure don't. The materials exist because of predators' access to children, which these surveillance measures won't solve. Best case scenario (and this is wildly optim…

The calculus is simple:

- People who go into government want power over others, and they'd therefore prefer more power than less at every junction

- The population put up very little resistance in general - e.g. as we saw with COVID, they'll freely let the government put them under house arrest and destroy their businesses, to protect them against a bug only slightly deadlier than the flu

- However they do need some pretext - with none at all, impinging on people's civil liberties would cause confusion, and the people might even ponder grumbling about it, which would be unnecessarily messy for everyone involved

- Hence they simply need to lay out some half-assed pretext, just to make it easy for people to internally justify their further loss of rights, so that they don't have to have any uncomfortable thoughts like "maybe I should disagree with this?"

- "Think of the children" is a nice easy one. It's basically a farcical meme at this point, but that doesn't affect its effectiveness, for the reasons described. You could use this for literally anything, no matter how extreme (I'm sure for instance the Nazis used it as one reason for exterminating Jews - to protect "Aryan" children & their future etc)

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

#632

Post by tpm »

danielscrubs wrote: post #624
tpm wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brexit did not and will not 'increase democracy' in any way anywhere.

It will, in time. You basically cut the hierarchy in half. A citizen can now meet their politician in the supermarket. The other parts necessary is transparency and democracy but those are on other orthogonal axis.

It won't, you haven't cut any hierarchy, that's not how the EU works (but the UK let themselves get disinformed about that for decades by certain Mr. Johnson and others). A citizen can meet the politician in the supermarket in the same way as before and it does not matter, because the politician lied to him, the citizen believed him and voted for the Brexit and nothing got better. Now the citizen does not believe in democracy in general. Trust is what has been lost.

I can meet my MEP in the supermarket. I can write to him an email and he will reply personally. This is a non-issue.

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

#633

Post by palata »

westmeal wrote: post #630
palata wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes it even less of a problem than what people say. I see that as an argument in favour of ChatControl. If it really "just" compares hashes locally, then the claims that it breaks encryption is even more wrong.

But how is this supposed to protect children if say an abuser takes pictures or videos of the victim?

I don't see this as a valid argument. You can't say "I can find a situation where ChatControl does not help, therefore ChatControl is always useless".

On the contrary, it is an argument in favour of extending ChatControl to using machine learning for detecting such cases.

The problem, again, is that we don't want to have an opaque system that can be extended to surveilling new things, because it's very difficult to audit and make sure it is not abused.

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

#634

Post by ux266478 »

cco wrote: post #475
ux266478 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an American, it came as a surprise to me that we do not, in fact, have broadly shared values about our system of governance. It shouldn't, America is two very distinct nations. The shape and nature of those nations vary wildly in classical Baudrilliardian sidewinding progression, but it's rooted in the very early history of British North America. Two distinct primogenitor colonies and societies, Jamestown and Pl…

I'm kinda struggling to understand how this relates to our makeup today. I can't find the thread. What cultural group today is Jamestown and which is Plymouth?

I think a good introductory text on the deep nature of the divide in America is We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper.

It's mostly a book about the civil war, but it introduces some post-revolution pre-war history and names. That gives you more resources to dig up. You should read as much as you can and form your own opinions on that.

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

#635

Post by cco »

ux266478 wrote: post #634
cco wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda struggling to understand how this relates to our makeup today. I can't find the thread. What cultural group today is Jamestown and which is Plymouth?

I think a good introductory text on the deep nature of the divide in America is We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper. It's mostly a book about the civil war, but it introduces some post-revolution pre-war history and names. That gives you more resources to dig up. You should read as much as you can and form your own opinions on that.

I'm relatively well versed in "the divide" so to speak. But I'm trying to understand what you mean by the Plymouth and Jamestown split as it relates to our modern country today.

It seems like both the spirit of Plymouth and Jamestown are inside the big tent of the Republican party today. But that doesn't sound like what you intended it to mean. Or maybe it is?

That's the part I'm curious about; who is Plymouth and who is Jamestown in 2025 in your eyes?

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

#636

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

palata wrote: post #556
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All falsely flagged communication is. And there will be lots and lots of it, even if it is just a tiny fraction of the total number of messages sent, since the number of messages sent between people is so big. This is the classic problem with statistical methods looking for rare things in large populations which also is why we don't screen everyone for all illnesses all the time - the false positives would do too muc…

If you care about the tiny fraction of the total number being stored by the government, frankly you should care a lot more about all the data being stored by TooBigTech. Feels a bit hypocritical to accept one and not the other. Really, I think that the problem with ChatControl is that it is a weapon for surveillance. Not because of the false positive, but because whoever controls it can decide what gets reported. Dep…

Where did I write that I thought that was OK? I am writing this on a de-Googled phone, I have hosted my own email for over two decades and I avoid big tech like the plague. Please stop with the whataboutism.

I share your other concern, but I think it's related to the one I mentioned. Suddenly false positives turn into true positives, but for things that were totally unrelated to the initially stated goals of Chat Control.

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

#637

Post by ben_w »

lenkite wrote: post #608
willy_k wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm. And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would consider…

> And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would considerably outclass the general population in both intelligence and firepower / strike capabilities. Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that f…

> Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that for every active US soldier there are ~3x retired and opinionated soldiers. Many of them know tactics to take down armor. And how to train civilians.

Arguing over irrelevant details; all that can be true, and the military can therefore respond not by firing tank shells but by drone strikes, which many of the retired soldiers don't know how to respond to because almost all knowledge of modern drone warfare is in the Russian and Ukranian militaries right now.

In this scenario, if the US civilians were very lucky, the US military have learned nothing from the was Russian and Ukranian forces battle today; likely real scenarios are much messier, internal splits within both military and civilians on Trump/not Trump (different to Dem/Rep) lines, militia with ??? training, criminal gangs taking advantage, reduced international trade (perhaps except for whover supplies drone parts who may prop up both sides at the same time to maximise reveue, perhaps not because that's China and they want factories not rubble piles made out of factories), etc.

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

#638

Post by ben_w »

Saline9515 wrote: post #395
palata wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

State secrets are to governments as private keys are to software engineers, except it's much slower to change meatspace things like (to make up a fictional example) the gaps your military found in their CIWS naval defence system, which if leaked means your enemies now know know how to exploit in order to wipe out your navy.

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

#639

Post by ben_w »

Saline9515 wrote: post #567
palata wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying that I agree, just saying that I can imagine it's not done in bad faith.

It's totally done in bad faith, corruption is a real thing in EU politics.

It may cause corruption, because despite lawmaker's attempts to carve out security*- and governance-critical communications, it's almost impossible for this tech to fail to open doors to blackmailers.

But existing corruption is neither necessary nor sufficient for what we see here. Wrong axis.

EU is (mostly, and relatively speaking) un-corrupt as governments go; more corrupt places (and also authoritarian places) will write fantastic laws that they just straight-up ignore.

* Which won't work anyway: consider that the US military had to issue statements and bans because fitbit was revealing too much about military bases.

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