Posted by Improvement 4 days ago
I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scope of such a dragnet, the economic impact, the societal damage, all seems rather broad. Yet why don't any major operators in the EU take a stance? Is it really so below the radar, or being kept so below the radar?
Just the network egress costs to whatever state sanctioned scanner gets built will in aggregate probably exceed a few hundred MEUR yearly.
Yes, I would think that if there were any real journalism left, they would be all over this. For the sake of their profession, and the protection of their sources.
But I don't think mainstream journalism points out computer nonsense because they're so intertwined with it all.
I mean, "we have a surveillance state" first points to "advertising" which is their revenue stream.
> Majority of news outlets have government subsidies of one sort or another
Or are you calling ads subsidies? Sure, gov pays these news outlets for ads, but that's because of their size and reach. They aren't spending nearly as much for smaller outlets, though yeah, local outlets get ads for local campaigns.
Either way, I think the argument falls short. I said in the short term yes. That includes ads. But in the long run it is a bad strategy. Lack of quality journalism has been making the public more distrusting of the news. It gives legitimacy to claims of "fake news" even if such a thing is not binary and if those claims are being used liberally.
I'll put it this way. Would you rather have a million dollars now or make $10m per year for the rest of your life? I'd call someone a fool for taking the former option, yet it is the option most take. The only difference is I said the second option out loud.
Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.
And that's before even accounting for the lives to be destroyed by a blurry photo of a tree being classified as abuse material.
Age restriction laws don't stop underage folks from doing anything, they just increase the market demand for VPNs, and improve VPNs so they get less easily detected. The net result is that platforms can't use IP addresses to meaningfully infer anything about their users.
Same with this. This legislation will create a demand for private encryption tech that isn't part of the platform. Someone is going to provide that and make money, and in the process may remove the demand for the platform in the first place.
I get the logic you're talking about, and agree that they must be thinking this, but it's very short-sighted.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/investigation-seattle-cop-use...
https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
If the lowest level of law enforcement can figure out how to use the system for this, imagine what a government ministry can do.
What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.
It might be interesting to go the other way: Get it put into the constitution of a major country that these kind of backdoors are banned world-wide and you can't do business in that country if any part of your enterprise implements them anywhere else.
To begin with this would make it harder to pass laws like this in other places -- domestic companies with international operations would put up stronger opposition because it would compromise their ability to do business elsewhere, and legislators might actually be concerned about that. And then on top of that it would force the companies to choose which subset of the world they want to operate in, allowing people in oppressive countries to pick up uncompromised devices from the places where compromised devices are banned.
The EU does not seem to have such simple and ironclad norm.
For reference, the EU does have an equivalent norm: https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...
In comparison to the US constitution, EU "norms" might as well be toilet paper. For example, they have some notion of "free expression" which sounds like free speech but is defined to be so weak as to be useless. The european public broadly does not seem to care, they certainly aren't willing to kill for their rights.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with it: in the absence of due process, that can happen to citizens too.
Make a law that says companies have to protect the data of their citizens without the possibility of any intentional backdoor, perhaps. Make a law that says companies can't require people to dox themselves with ID scans simply to use a publicly available internet platform that provides no services in the physical world. Make a law that says OS developers can't create client-side scanning services that upload results off-device without revocable user consent.
Since decades.
Pass your 'no KOSA' law. And then when they want KOSA, they just pass KOSA with a sentence that says this KOSA law supersedes prior 'No KOSA' laws.
You need to limit their power to do that and the only way is constitutionally.
Trust only software and systems you control and even then, approach with a hefty amount of side-eye.
Whlie it sounds accurate that maybe 1-2% of the population watches it live, it is also the most highly rated and influencing "news" outlet in the US. Their reach is far deeper than 1-2%. It gets retweeted, talked about, and trickles down. It sure seems like at least 1/3rd of the population has a FOX brainworm infection. I've seen in on 24/7 in hotels and some sport bars or restaurants too.
All the main news outlets totalling less than 9 million viewers? That's not compelling at all.
Except that it's the opposite. The Dakotas are over-represented in the electoral college but getting them from 60% Republican to even 99% Republican wouldn't gain them a single electoral college vote. Meanwhile states like Michigan and Ohio where changing minds could change outcomes are under-represented in terms of electoral college votes.
But the vote allocations are the least impactful part of the electoral college. If you got rid of the +2 electoral college votes for each state independent of its population, votes in Arizona would still matter more than California. The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.
There's a bit more to it than the +2 electoral votes from the senate, because even within the House the representations are skewed due to the strange decision to cap the size of the House at 435 seats while guaranteeing each state at least one seat. Thus California has 52 times as many reps as Wyoming although its population is about 67 times greater.
> The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.
Strictly speaking this too could be changed to some extent without changing the electoral college itself, namely by states switching to allocate their electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, instead of winner-take all. That is entirely possible now and two states already do it, but it has minimal effect because those states are tiny. But if, for instance, you could win 20 EVs in CA by winning ~40% of the popular vote, you can bet that some campaign dollars would shift to CA from, say, Ohio, because Ohio doesn't even have a total of 20 EVs. You could win more EVs in California while losing the election than you could by winning in Ohio! But most states will not do this because usually the party that wins all the EVs is also the party that controls the state government, and they don't want to give away half their EVs to the other party.
Capping the number of seats is dumb but the way they're apportioned doesn't give any major advantage to small states because the size of the average district and the size of the smallest state aren't very far apart, to the point that some of the districts in states with more than one district have lower populations than some of the states with a single district. Out of the 50 smallest districts, two are state-wide districts; out of the 50 largest districts, two are state-wide districts. The largest district is less than twice the size of the smallest district.
And there is no partisan divide in which states are over or under-represented because of this. Some of the most over-represented districts are currently in Rhode Island and Vermont. Some of the most under-represented districts are currently in Idaho, West Virginia, Utah and Texas. It's basically random because it depends on how evenly the state's population divides the national population, so the only consistent thing is that districts in the biggest states will tend to be of average size and districts in smaller states will tend to be either over-represented or under-represented.
Or to put it another way, California has 52 reps but its population is 71 times the population of the average district in Rhode Island. Except that these are both blue states.
> But most states will not do this because usually the party that wins all the EVs is also the party that controls the state government, and they don't want to give away half their EVs to the other party.
In some sense this is strong evidence that the government is bad at representing the constituents, i.e. the principal-agent problem is real. Constituents in safe states like California would be better off if candidates actually had to care about their votes. Even if you're in the state's majority, it's better for you that candidates from both parties have to address your issues rather than taking you for granted. It might even cause a shift in national priorities towards those of the state because both parties would have to do more to appease them. But then the state's representatives have more loyalty to the national party than their local constituents.
If states like California wanted to be clever they would allocate their electoral college votes something like "if a candidate gets more than 50% of the state's popular vote, they get 50% of its electoral votes plus 5% for each 1% over 50%, with the remainder going to the second place candidate". Which means that in the typical case where the Democrats get >=60% of the state's popular vote, they still get all of the electoral college votes -- 50% + 5x10%. But then that 10% difference between 50% and 60% becomes important to both parties, because each vote in that range is worth five times its weight in electoral votes.
And meanwhile if the Democratic candidate was going to get less than 60% of the vote in California they were very likely to lose the electoral college regardless.
I'm increasingly skeptical of the idea that the composition of government organs whose authority extends over a large jurisdiction should be determined by mini-elections in sub-jurisdictions. It makes sense to have sub-jurisdictions insofar as they can set local policy, but if a legislative body is going to make laws for the whole US it should, as a whole, be accountable to the whole US. Especially in the modern age, the relevant constituencies are defined as much by beliefs as by geographical location.
You can solve this using a cardinal voting system (e.g. STAR voting) even with single member districts, because FPTP is what produces a two-party system and if there are multiple parties then there are no safe seats because e.g. a left-leaning district would still have a race between the Democrats and the Green Party.
Which also thwarts gerrymandering because if an extremist party draws the lines to try to give themselves more seats, they dilute their base and lose them all to a moderate party, but if they try to concentrate their base they don't get many seats.
And you can also implement that in the US without major constitutional changes.
> It makes sense to have sub-jurisdictions insofar as they can set local policy, but if a legislative body is going to make laws for the whole US it should, as a whole, be accountable to the whole US.
The premise of this stuff is supposed to be checks and balances. Single member districts in the House would be fine if we used STAR/score/approval voting instead of FPTP.
The original purpose of the Senate was to represent the states in the federal government; Senators were originally elected by state legislatures. The idea being that the state legislators would send people inclined to temper populist federal overreach. And it worked pretty well until the people who wanted to do a big round of populist federal overreach changed it to cause Senators to be directly elected.
And that's what messed up the US Presidency. The original design was to have an extremely limited federal government and have the states do most everything, and then if the federal government doesn't do much, having only a single elected position in the executive branch makes sense. Meanwhile states have elected positions for everything from sheriffs to comptrollers to dogcatchers. There wasn't supposed to be a federal-level SEC or FDA -- that's state stuff -- so the US Constitution doesn't establish any elected position to be the head of it even though there ought to be if it's going to exist.
My understanding is that Nielsen does track what people encounter at hotels etc. (though only recently), so that should be included (?)
To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.
Correction, not the EU, the member nations.
Another one: it's holiday season, a clever time to get things through.
Another one: most EU parties stand for it, even my usual go-tos, namely Greens, S&D, and The Left.
But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal, it's up to the parliament and the courts to something about it afterwards. And they should given that it's unconstitutional in many EU countries and incompatible with GDPR as it currently exists.
there are multiple ways to make EU law, there are regulations (that apply directly) and directives that member states need to implement (basically ratify)
the Commission proposed something and then the Council votes on it and then there's the EP which votes on it
this one is a regulation proposal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...
the treaties have some areas that are under "Special legislative procedures" where the EP cannot propose amendments, but still has consent power, but in some cases like internal market exemptions and competition law only consultation right
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
It's something a Nazi regime would implement today had it existed.
There is no one in the EU that would tell those people are you fkin insane and give them a sack?
It’s surprising how quickly you have forgotten CISPA, EARN IT, etc - which were much more invasive proposals than chat control (slurping of all data of everyone, not just client side scanning for csam).
Of course, now you just cram unrelated shit into “big beautiful bills”, speed it through with minimal oversight using loopholes, and hope no one will notice. Has no one told you how fkin insane that is?
there is at least one very bad quasi-dictatorship in the EU, Hungary, where "protecting the children" is used as the perfect propaganda slogen, but when it comes to holding abusers accountable, things are 240% farcical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Nov%C3%A1k_presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G%C3%A1bor_Kaleta...
and of course Hungary supports this. who would have thought.
Unlike the president the EU commission are unelected and the commission is the only branch of government which can propose laws, however they can't force anything through in the same way the US president can with an executive order (it must go through parliament).
I guess it's good/bad, but in different ways to the US. It's bad in the sense EU citizens can't elect the people proposing their laws, but it's good in the sense that the commission can't just force things through without approval from the parliament which consists of MEPs which europeans elect.
As far as I'm aware the courts function in more or less the same way. Here in the UK parliament is sovereign and therefore can overrule any court decision with new law. This isn't true for the EU and I believe it also isn't true in the US.
The EU is founded on the pooled sovereignty of the member states (unlike in the US, where the reverse is the case). The Council represents those member states (each has a seat), and so holds this pooled sovereignty.
The EC can’t pass anything.
For anyone reading this drivel, this is a complete misrepresentation of how the EU works. The commission changes and is appointed by the elected heads of the member nations to do their bidding. The push for chat control is coming from the member nations, not some "evil mysterious third party" that appeared out of nowhere to control us all.
People who don't understand the EU and resort to blaming it for these sort of problems are actually causing more harm, because they're directing people's anger at the wrong targets. Target your own elected officials, because they are the ones pushing for this and the ones who steer the commission.
Government trying to break your privacy is routine at this point.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/the-a...
If you give away something for nothing, that usually means you're a sucker. But it takes a real genius to justify giving everything away for nothing.
If online privacy was that impossible Ukraine couldn't successfully organize sabotage operations in Russia. They do it all the time.
That's also just one of many operations inside Russia. There's lots of sabotage and assassinations that have been done.
You just can't do operations like that without secure communications.
Some combination of cowardice, conflict of interest, and fear of ICE.
In the end, these organisations want to slice and dice private conversations. It will be a goldmine for AI training and hence the push and silence.
This is all corrupt.
How? If they're end-to-end encrypted, they really can't be monitored unless there's a flaw in the encryption system. Don't trust messages to systems that aren't auditable.
Yes, it is that fascist.
We need end-to-end encryption on phones to have reasonably convenient privacy. We can definitely lose that, and open source software won't help.
Worse, once phones are locked down desktops and laptops can be locked down as well.
I mean, look at all the geniuses saying "I'll just use a VPN" in response to the latest ID for age verification. A week later, the law was amended to also involve VPNs.
No you will not have freedom to choose how to use your own property.
this is happening now on most* services.
* ok, not every single one.
This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is.
The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!
While its certainly possible it'll happen, it's far from certain. It can be stopped. Of all the currently 'undecided' countries, if just Germany came out against it, that'd be enough to sink it. Germans are pretty pro-privacy people, and the government would win no popularity by supporting it. Even if the German government supported it though, the German MEPs would likely still end up mostly voting no
Even if that is true—which you don’t know, because you cannot predict the future—later is definitely better than sooner. Later is worth fighting for.
Your defeatist attitude is exactly what these bad actors want, you’re playing right into their hands. Thankfully not everyone thinks like you, or Chat Control would have passed first time and no positive change would have been enacted ever about anything.
What I see in your post is that you tried to explain to a few people in your life what Chat Control is, it was an utter failure, and now you’re spreading defeatism to strangers on the internet.
In contrast, everyone in my life I explained it to understood that it is an urgent problem and that it must be stopped. Consider that your explanation might’ve been the problem, and that truly doing your part involves learning from the mistake and improving the messaging, or at least encourage others who can do it better, or at the very least not discourage them, which has the same effect as supporting the bad outcome. We need people ready for action, not defeatists bringing everyone down. You’re hurting yourself and the cause by doing so.
> Besides, I'm not a defeatist at all, because I know GnuPG!
That is incredibly naive. What does that even matter, in a world where everyone around you is surveilled.
It's more like I took a bit cynical view about the current situation. However, this view is based not only on my own experience, but also on what I read in the linked article.
- 14 EU countries in favour of Chat Control
- 5 EU countries not in favour
- 8 EU Undecided / Unclear
> That is incredibly naive. What does that even matter, in a world where everyone around you is surveilled.
I think this comment was unnecessary. My notion of GnuPG was humorous satire.
When we know that a particular political party will win an election, stating that fact isn't being hopeless. It just is what it is.
If anything, technology will always win over the legislation if it happens at scale. It may even lead to some new breakthroughs.
Citation needed?
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
That's only one survey, but I'd say it still beats anecdotal evidence.
You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa....
fuck this attitude with a rake
There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.
Could they still arrest you?
> In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped.
I'm all for women's rights, but that's not how to do it
> During the case, brought by BCP Council, the court heard Smith-Connor had emailed the council the day before to inform it about his silent vigil, as he had done on previous occasions.
> On the day, he was asked to leave the area by a community officer who spoke to him for an hour and 40 minutes - but he refused.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo
So he told the council he was going to have a silent vigil against abortion, and then it had to take place within the buffer area to protect women from anti-abortion activism.
He was totally free to walk a few yards away and do whatever he wanted, but he refused.
Sounds like he wanted to stir the pot to preserve the right to menace women seeking medical care.
Freedom of speech and banning vigils/demonstration is a different debate that we already have all the time...
Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?
I do not understand.
They're somewhat out of touch with tech, and caught up in police narratives around encrypted apps blocking their attempts to find pedos. Tech firm lobbyists sell them some lies about the capabilities of these systems.
Ultimately these are politicians stuck in the notion of "but the police can open your [physical] letters, this isn't any different" completely unaware of how times have moved on.
Matters like how people are already being harassed by CSAM being sent to their DMs, how people raid discord servers and try to have them taking down by spamming CSAM, etc, are completely lost on these politicians.
On top of that it's just cowardice. Not daring to be seen as "aiding pedos".
Yes, the lawmakers literally exempt themselves from this law in this law.
Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators?
I know it's diseingenuous but these laws are crafted with that in mind.
People that might take a real chance in challenging this are weeded out long before they get to these positions.
This is already happening. This is not about that.
The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it.
Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.
I disagree with this sentence. The unofficial bosses are both Germany and France. Which is also the reason why the people in the richer EU countries will suffer economically when the upcoming bailout for France /will/ happen.
This needs to be a South Park episode if it isn’t already.
It is not. It is being pushed by certain politicians from certain member nations onto the commission.
That's it.
It means that the government asserts the right to bug all your conversations. They've already assured the right to put you in prison for dissenting with the government on policy and you have little to no recourse. Now it's this.
You loved this during covid, you'll love this now, "or else". Signed, your local nanny state.
How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there?
Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?
Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc.
When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.
I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon.
You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws.
More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree.
So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.
The answer you seem to be looking for is that in China, just like in every other country, there are devices that exist which do not come with a state spyware component that is constantly transmitting everything to the authorities. Some devices are locally manufactured, others are imported, some are regulated, others are not, and people communicate using those devices and others, across all forms of media, including face-to-face.
To elaborate: China isn't a totalitarian hellscape where everyone has a gun pointed at their head and they're all forced to use the same, identical, CCP-branded phone or else face execution. It's a huge, diverse country filled with millions of hackers and entrepreneurs, people with different interests, people with different means. There are countless devices and app stores and popular trends. Regulations are often unclear and are enforced differently in different regions and by different layers of the bureaucracy. Not everybody's threat model is the same. Just as in the west, people find ways to communicate that meet their comfort level - sometimes that's through systems monitored by the authorities, other times not. There's no one special technology or technique.
The main difference in China is that citizens can be disappeared without much recourse because the legal system is opaque and there is no free press or democratic process to hold the government to account. But that's not the case in most of the EU. There is certainly democratic backsliding happening in parts of the EU, but that's a separate discussion.
So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.
It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).
Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.
Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?