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EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

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Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#81

Post by petcat »

sillyfluke wrote: post #21
permo-w wrote: post #11

why are specifically the Danish so obsessed with pushing this through? it always seems to come back to them

I guess it never hurts to try and find alternate ways of placating the US in order to make them get over their Greenland obession.

I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#82

Post by hn_throw2025 »

arlort wrote: post #68
andrepd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?

They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter

Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#83

Post by scrollaway »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #50
arlort wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened an…

This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of pe…

People’s attention span has decreased to a matter of days now, if not hours. Have you seen how quickly front page news in the US is forgotten?

The democratic process needs a revamp but it shouldn’t be driven by the general populations attention span.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#84

Post by 4bpp »

arlort wrote: post #68
andrepd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?

They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter

"The plans for scanning your chats were on display for fifty Earth years at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri"?

Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.

If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#85

Post by KronisLV »

As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:

  * Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
  * The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
  * The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
  * That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
  * If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
  * If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
  * This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#86

Post by GuB-42 »

sph wrote: post #54
epolanski wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobbying. EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists. Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen. It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch cri…

> Palantir and Thorn lobbyists So, US interests? Which means the NSA?

No need to look that far.

Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business.

I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#87

Post by BoxOfRain »

bluescrn wrote: post #69
iLoveOncall wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a fool if you think the UK is better. I've moved from the EU to the UK and it is worse in every way when it comes to authoritarian measures. I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.

The UK is perhaps less competent at it's authoritarianism

I genuinely think the public sector being a bit hopeless is a major check on tyranny in the UK.

Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a public list of non-compliant websites that anyone who doesn't want to give their ID to a shady offshore firm can browse for example.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#88

Post by john01dav »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #40
snvzz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business, eh. Maybe it's time to go open source and fully distributed peer-to-peer. Something like Tox[0] or SimpleX[1]. The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next. But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing. 0. https://tox.chat/ 1. https://simplex.chat/

> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.

I have been successful in getting non-technical people onto Signal. As far as a technical product goes, Signal is kindof shit (among other things: no support for non-Debian-based Linux forcing users to use sketchy third party repos when they are a massive target for backdoors, really shitty UX for backups), but it gets the job done and seems to have robust encryption from what other people say (I am not qualified to evaluate this myself).

If a P2P solution that solved the aforementioned Signal issues were to have excellent UX, then that could probably work.

Lastly, what counts as "excellent UX" for technical and non-technical people seems to differ. For example, I consider Discord and Slack to be quite intuitive and easy to use, but multiple technical people have expressed to me that they find it to be very confusing and that they prefer other solutions, such as GroupMe in one example. To me, GroupMe shoving the SMS paradigm into something that's fundamentally not SMS is more confusing and poor UX, but to these non-technical people that seems easy. I suspect that Signal's shortcomings that I perceive are an example of this: making UX trade-offs that work great for non-technical people but are less good for technical people. I'm not sure what these specific UX trade-offs are, but I suspect that it's something akin to having a conceptually sound underlying model (like Discord or Slack servers/workspaces and channels), versus having really obvious "CLICK HERE TO NOT FUSS" buttons like GroupMe, while having graceful failures for non-technical users that can't even figure that out (like just pretending to be SMS in GroupMe's case if you can't figure out how to install an app, or don't want to put that effort in, something that many people know how to use).

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#89

Post by tiborsaas »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #40
snvzz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business, eh. Maybe it's time to go open source and fully distributed peer-to-peer. Something like Tox[0] or SimpleX[1]. The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next. But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing. 0. https://tox.chat/ 1. https://simplex.chat/

> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.

This seems a bit more polished: https://tryquiet.org/

But some friction is to be expected.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#90

Post by arlort »

hn_throw2025 wrote: post #82
arlort wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter

Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.

> the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure

Completely immune is overstating it, and the power to initiate legislation is not that meaningful given that the EC initiates what the council tells it to initiate and can't actually turn it into law without parliament and council

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