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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

#81
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan, but in what was is this, or any other topic, undemocratic to have debates and votes on? The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for. > These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available. Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

This topic is undemocratic because it's part of the constant attempts to rephrase and resubmit the same unpopular proposal. It's p-hacking democracy. If a proposal has 5% chance of passing just resubmit it twenty times under different names with minor variations. It wastes time that lawmakers could spend on proposals that the public actually want.

It hasn't been resubmitted yet, has it? The proponents keep it alive without putting it to an actual vote, AIUI. They try to wait until they think they have a majority, and keep their proposal ready for a vote on short order before their majority dissipates.

Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.

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

#82
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

And who runs the EU? The MEPs and members of the countries government. It's not like it's a different country imposing their way onto us. Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented.

> And who runs the EU?

How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?

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

#83

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…

This is utter nonsense. The "technology and encryption make law enforcement harder" narrative is pushed by people to gain power. That's all there is to it. Technology has, if anything, made surveillance and law enforcement so much easier than it ever has been before. Law enforcement always wants to look helpless and like the victim though because they want absolute control over your life.

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

#85

Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...

It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.

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

#87

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 fea…

Worth noting that with RIPA (2000, activated in 2007) UK has enforced key disclosure. It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason (including random data).

I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...

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

#88
post #2

> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union. I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.

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…

> 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. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.

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

#89

Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...

It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.

[dead]

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

#90
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

And who runs the EU? The MEPs and members of the countries government. It's not like it's a different country imposing their way onto us. Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented.

The problem is the indirection. Only the European Commission can propose legislation [1], so the legislative direction of the EU is entirely determined by them - MEPs can only slow it down.

And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.

[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.

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