These kinds of laws to ban encryption will continue to be pushed by those that want to prosecute more criminals. The drive will always be there.
And it will always crash against the financial interests that want online commerce and banking to work. And so it will always fail in the end, because we can't kill our economy in order to catch more criminals.
We will keep repeating this cycle. Around and around the merry go round we go.
I don't think it's possible. The politicians needs something to talk, a psuedo-legged horse to ride on. The Mega Corporates need something to do, a psuedo-promise to show that they're not only abiding to the policy-makers and to do good by the users.
No, but that doesn't cancel the desire for law enforcement to pry in unbreakable encryption.
There is ample evidence that breaking or backdooring apps or devices (more or less specifically) targeting criminals, allows the cops to roll up huge crime networks. These are expensive and time consuming one off operations.
Main stream messaging apps like Signal and Whatsapp of course rely one very similar technology so it's probably safe to assume some illegitimate stuff is happening there. I wager that finding those criminal messages in practice has a more serious issue beyond encryption: there is far too much data.
And even if encryption were banned altogether, the criminals would surely find a way to whispers their mischiefs in stenography.
I don't think it's needed, pretty sure both sides agree it does help.
The debate is whether it is worth it or not, banning encryption leaves the nation more vulnerable to authoritarian states, and even leaves its citizens communications more open to criminals because if they hack the state department that has the keys, they get access to all the comms
Yesterday and early this morning there has luckily been a massive push from Belgian media. The proposal this time around came from the Belgian presidency, so it was up to them to withdraw the vote.
It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively in the Belgian elections about two weeks ago.
In an short interview in De Tijd [1] with one of the Belgian MEPs pushing this (Hilde Vautmans, OpenVLD, liberal, lost big), and another short line in De Morgen [2] from outgoing Belgian Minister of the Interior who was part of the talks for this new version (Annelies Verlinden, CD&V, Christian democrats), both of them made it appear like they mostly just care about getting it done (because nobody else has succeeded yet). There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This morning, after the press attention, high rank party officials across the spectrum (and from the parties mentioned above) publicly called the proposal dangerous, so it's likely the pressure worked this time.
Next time this can come up for the vote will likely be from Hungary. They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed. Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't ever get any insight. I wish we could launch some civil legal probe into EU institutions themselves, but that would probably end up being like staring at floating points of a tensor.
We don't get a lot of insight, but we do get some. For example, when it does come up for a vote in the Council, we'll know which countries voted in favour (something you can take into account in your next national elections).
Then the Parliament will have to agree as well, and we can see which parties there voted in favour, which you can take into account in the next European elections.
The Commission is toughest to hold accountable. The Commissioner pushing it (Ylva Johansson in this case) was nominated by a country's (Sweden, in this case) government, so Swedish voters could hold the parties in that government accountable in their next national election, I suppose, but that's a very weak signal.
We don't need this type of insight to act. For all its fualts, the EU does tend to have ample time between the time a law is drafted and made public, and the time it is voted on. And it's relatively clear who you need to try to influence in this period: your local government and/or president for EU Council proposals, your country's EU commissioner, and the government that proposed them for EU Commission proposals, and your MEPs for votes in Parliament, which is anyway the last line of defense.
Why and how exactly this proposed law came to exist in its current form is much harder to figure out, but that's not necessary to fully understand in order to oppose it successfully.
That is something you could say about almost any legislation, and it's correct to some extent. That said, politicians do seem to try and predict what they'll be held accountable for, and pre-empt that. So it's not so much the voting afterwards that potentially influences the behaviour, but the threat of doing so. I also assume that this is why contacting your representatives is important - that is, essentially, making the threat.
I'll give you that it's not a terribly strong signal.
I mean, that's how representative democracy works. You elect someone, see if they are a complete prick on a hundred different issues, and then at some point they might come up for re-election.
Another way that representative democracy works is that for many issues, you get a lot of heads-up on what will be discussed, and can influence your representative accordingly.
This generally requires coordinating your resources and efforts with other people. Lobby, protest, rabble-rouse, bribe.
I wonder why NGO advice does not correlate with decision directions at all. Remember the CCC talks by NGO lobbists, usually culminating for everything they do in a"anyway that was what we advised, they however would vote/do/the thing we advised against". Had a huge speakerscorner going nowhere vibe and europes youth kicked that play pretend democracy in the nuts last election.
I've been donating forever to Signal, and at this point, I'm resigned that it won't reach WhatsApp parity. Just hire some lobbyists to keep encrypted communications legal as a human right.
That wouldn’t help.
The proposal “got around” weakening encryption without outright removing it.
They “just” wanted anything you sent to be scanned before it was sent encrypted.
Stupid and dangerous, the even have sections in the proposal that talk about encryption being important, but somehow less important than thinking about the children and putting a cop looking over the shoulder of every single citizen.
National elections are dominated by the same parties that dominate European Parliamentary elections. It's the same voting system after all, except you have even less choice since there are fewer spots.
>and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
Your MEPs are likely part of a parliamentary group with foreign politicians and coordinate with them on policy.
If your commissioner and MEPs have been solidly opposed to a policy there might not be much you can do. But do you know that that’s a case? Many governments tend to blame unpopular proposals on the EU while the commissioner that they themselves chose vote in favour.
Ylva Johansson was proposed by the previous Swedish government though (a Social Democratic one), which (sort of) lost the last election. No idea why the current (right wing) government is keeping her in place.
In practise, that means she's supported by all except one of the relevant Swedish parties.
Commissioners are typically not replaced when a national government changes, which is a good thing from a stability perspective (countries can often have two or three different executives in a single year). In the end, a Commissioner is proposed by a country but is then meant to work in the interest of the entire Union, in what is largely an administrative role (Council and Parliament are the real political entities). They are supposed to be uncontroversial people, respected across the entire political spectrum, and typically will stay in post for the duration of their mandate unless embroiled in scandals.
The Commission is far more powerful than the Council and Parliament, since it is the only body that can actually propose legislation to be voted on by the other two. If the commission doesn't want something done, that thing doesn't get done - including changing older laws.
No, I disagree. The Commission cannot pass anything on its own, the agenda is set by the Council and directives are effectively drafted by Parliament bodies (since MEPs have the ultimate say). The Commission largely routes things back and forth between other bodies but has very little power in practice, and is technically required to be fundamentally apolitical.
Until a few years ago, nominations for Commissioner jobs were mostly handed to long-serving but lower-level politicians. This has changed a bit in recent times, but not fundamentally so. One of the critiques of the current constitutional setup is precisely that the executive, in practice, can execute very little without constantly going back to the Council.
The commissioner before her was Cecilia Malmström 2010-2019, a liberal party politician (right bloc) whose second term was wholly during a social democratic (left bloc) government because the nomination happened before the election.
Unfortunately, both Sweden’s most recent commissioners have been prominently advocating against encryption and for mass surveillance. I really hope our new commissioner for the 2024-2029 period ends up with a better track record on privacy advocacy.
Unless it's from the Greens/EFA or The Left there's little hope. And considering that the EPP and S&D still hold the majority of seats in the EP, less so.
When voting about the law in the swedish parlament, both the left and green parties voted for chat control despite having campaigned against the law in the EU election.
Both claim it was a misstake, but ironically leaked chat messages seems to indicate that the green party MP Rasmus Ling did vote for it intentionally.
I think this is what happens when you get an appointed council making decisions rather than a democratically elected one. It's a bad idea because it lets the appointees and appointers to point fingers and dilute blame, which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best interest (often the opposite of those for the 99%) passed.
>> which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best interest
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%. Rich or poor, we all use the same communication infrastructure. Rich people don't want their chats monitored either. People don't want this. Intelligence agencies want this. But ask the people working at those agencies, ask them as individuals, and they won't want this on their phones either.
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%
Ideally, yes. In practice, the 1% have resources the 99% don't which allow them to minimize their exposure to mass surveillance. Whether this means carving out exemptions for their own communications or conducting their meetings in person, in private, in other jurisdictions.
Yes, your family doctor is also likely part of the 1%. Unfortunately, the term 1% has shifted to basically mean "the people with most of the wealth and power in a country" which is a much smaller group of people, perhaps even less than 0.01%.
Quibbling over the mathematical inaccuracy of the term is tilting at windmills. You'd have better luck getting people to stop using the word "literally" to mean its opposite.
The top 1% are pretty close to having most of the wealth in the US. They have about a third of it. Then 90-99 have about a third, 50-90 have about a third, and 0-50 have a rounding error.
The top 0.1% have about 15-20% of the wealth, which is very concentrated but not a very big fraction of the entire pie. Meaningful cutoffs are tricky to assign.
I don't know how to measure power. You could probably assign a lot of power to the top 0.01%, but in the US they have a single digit percentage of wealth.
A better metric is "people who have N times the median wealth", since that accurately captures the power disparity that stems from access to more resources. The exact percentage will vary significantly depending on how unequal distribution of wealth is in any given society.
That wouldn't help anyway because most important things happen between national governments and the people they nominate. The EU institutions would work very differently if they were directly formed and managed by the European parliament. Alas the national governments know very well why they won't ever allow that.
This is trying to be a democratic process. There is no single "hero" to worship, but a number of things to consider.
The German Bundesregierung signalled a few days ago they would vote against Chatcontrol (IIRC, it is part of the Ampel coalitions founding contract to vote against surveillance enhancing measures on the EU level.) Nancy Faeser, Social Democrats, Germany's interior minister and usually not against surveillance, and Marco Buschmann, Liberal Democrats, Germany's justice minister, released statements that Chatcontrol is irreconcilable with liberal democratic states of law. The Greens were opposed anyhow and said so the last few weeks. So, unity of sorts.
France had said from the start they would vote against it (but apparently backtracking after the EU election) and with the two biggest countries in the EU against it now, the law had little chance to pass the informal council vote.
Add on top that around 30 MEPs from the Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats already wrote a letter stating that their fractions are opposed, thus ratification would have been unlikely. Add on top strong efforts by economic lobby groups, I guess the Belgian president of the council saw no reason to put the vote forward anymore.
Of course, all this could be wrong. I'm just puzzling things together I read over the last few days and weeks.
Yeah I think you're right, but it's a shame that we have to piece the puzzle together ourselves, and still don't have complete certainty. It's certainly a process where more transparency is possible, as a general point.
They did a soft reset, with Ncuti's new season being marked as the Season 1 of the 2023 version. It's still going strong, with this season being very strong, IMO.
This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive.
There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.
Indeed, this is the standard playbook worldwide for people in power, especially:
1. Politicians in power that want to do something that is unpopular.
2. Corporations that want to implement an unpopular policy.
The evil genius part of it is that it not only allows them to test the temperature of the water, but also to:
1. Claim they are hearing the people and withdrew it, and even claim it as a victory.
2. Shift the Overton window so next time it comes up, people are desensitized.
3. Try again basically forever until they're able to get it passed.
4. Time it better around elections to avoid consequences. Voters have the memory of a goldfish, and are so party/identity-driven that it isn't hard to manipulate them.
It's the standard playbook for anyone who wants to be successful. Persistence is frequently cited as a crucial factor in success, and frequently celebrated in the back stories of stars in business, tech, sports, media, the arts, etc.
Persistence is so important because other people you're competing against are also persistent.
This is not specific to "people in power" and there is no special legislative trick to defeat it. If you care about something, you have to stand up for it, persistently.
They mean any party that's had majority control of parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been introduced
It's not what the comment meant, but worth adding that the UK security forces have wanted this ever since they lost the ability to read everyone's mail and listen to our calls. They actively lobby every sitting government for this kind of bill, and (I have no doubt) promise all kinds of support for politicians who push their agenda.
It's similar in concept to 'in power'. The government holds office, rather than it being in power. It's more to say that the power isn't derived from the government itself, but the office they are elected into.
Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government
I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.
In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out.
And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith.
Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.
There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.
Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.
I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion
> Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.
There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.
Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.
(I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ...
... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-
They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.
That's a common misconception on how democracy (modern democracies at least) work.
Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.
Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?
I'm not sure I want that.
Democracy it's all about proposing the same things over and over again, with slight modifications, until the majority reaches a consensus on the matter.
At least that's what I understood about it.
BTW usually when a proposal is refused it won't be discussed again until the next legislature.
This is not a law per se, It"s a draft being discussed by a technical commission which is working to write a proposal for the parliament to vote.
> Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.
> Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?
Sure, put a cap on it of one parliamentary term if you're worried about it going to infinity.
Liberal democracies are relatively new, but the process of deciding norms that satisfy different groups with conflicting interests is as old as the human history.
In Italy, for example, it's already like that: legislative proposals that are not approved by the parliament lapse at the end of the legislative term.
Laws are not simply voted by the parliament, presenting them it's a process per se, with its specific rules.
Throughout history many tricks have also been developed to work around the limitations of the system, for example presenting the same law with slightly different wordings or use amendment bombing to block some proposal ad libitum (in Italy this happens a lot, there have been examples of software programs written specifically to do that: emit an infinite number of amendments so that they would never run out of them)
Of course if some group is really determined or bears enough power it can push its own agenda while smaller less powerful ones can have a very hard time to get attention, even if their proposals are good. It's not ideal, but democracy it's a process to find tradeoffs, usually not the best one, but the lower common denominator one.
New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems, including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they want).
Enshrining a right to private communication and online anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would easily succeed.
You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights? Perhaps containing the text
> Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual constitution, though those amended treaties are the closest thing the EU has to a constitution.
That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union.
The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that.
Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.
Generally speaking outside of constitutional questions, most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new laws can be written most of the time in most places.
Verlinden's remarks are pretty galling. She wanted to push it through because it would have made her (and Belgium) look good. What an absolutely insane reason to nibble away at people's freedoms.
Her tenure as minister had been pretty underwhelming, notable only for her ineptitude.
I am not German, but when I lived in Germany I got the impression they were very wary of political proposals that infringed on the privacy and liberties that the German people enjoyed.
Not that they didn't pass any shitty laws, but that the question "how can this be misused?" always was present.
This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power.
In the US, by contrast, I see one political power eager to give powers to their candidates which they would hate to give to the rival party. It's like they've forgotten that they are giving power to the Government, not to a party, and if the other party gets power they get those powers.
I don't get that sense at all from Germans, since we're citing some stereotypes, my view on it was that Germans "love" the bureaucracy, and they continue to accumulate it.
The USA is anti-government and authority, fundamentally from the beginning all the way through modern times. Freedom is colloquially synonymous with America and that's in contrast with government, "Live free or die" is the motto of millions of Americans and in various capacities, sometimes alliterated to on state flags.
Germans don't love bureaucracy; in fact, we hate it. But everything must be very correct and thought through, which leads to complicated laws.
On top of that, we have some misplaced idea that everybody must have a lot of local laws. We call it federalism, and it has some benefits, but I think we use it for far too many things.
Both things together make it very hard to reduce bureaucracy or offer digital services. It is very embarrassing.
Only in the USA, for US citizens. Outside the USA; not so much.
Germans do love their bureaucracy, but I get the feeling that's seen as a brake on the politicians; it's hard to make the bureaucracy change, so radical politicians can't do too much damage.
"This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power."
This trait can be found all over the former Soviet Bloc, because we have had enough experience with either one or two homicidal authoritarian regimes (the Nazis and the Communists). That experience was paid in a lot of pain and blood.
Places like Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia or the US, where governments within living memory weren't as oppressive against their own population, have a lot of naive people, "well, they mean it well".
I agree but I fear this is now fading too. '89 was 35 years ago, and for all generations younger than mine (i'm 40) this part of history will be much more abstract and 'out of living memory'.
Yes, such is the nature of the world, that it buries horrors under layers of time.
In some ways, such healing is necessary, even though it comes with risk of repeating the same mistakes.
A week ago, I was in Zaragoza and there is a Goya Museum there. His prints of the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars are absolutely terrifying and ghastly. Today, the French and the Spanish people are on friendly terms. In a hypothetical world where the witnesses of such horrors still lived, those nations would probably be a lot less friendly and more resentful.
Australia is quietly incredibly authoritarian. The rules are really important, and government is encouraged to solve social problems by creating new laws.
You probably never lived in a communist (or any ultra authoritarian) state or never talked to somebody that did. The amount of horror that comes with it is beyond imagination, erosion of basic rights and threat of violent punishment for even the smallest infraction being on top of the list.
Everyone could be snitching on you and everything could be used against you.
Your phone scanning your images probably brings back memories to the older people that most of politicians are.
> They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed.
Even if it does succeed, that would mean the Commission and the Council are in favour, but they'll still have to reach an agreement with Parliament as well. Parliament has already come out strongly against the proposal, but we just voted in a new, more conservative, Parliament, so I'm a bit anxious to see whether it'll stick to that stance.
I get the feeling most of those conservatives entering the parliament are of the libertarian and anti-establishment variety.
Within the European Parliament, The ID Party represents many of the rising rightwing national parties, such as AfD, RN, Lega, PVV. Among other things, the ID Party stands for "Defense of individual freedoms and protection of freedom of expression, in particular digital freedoms"
The concept of a centrally-managed surveillance apparatus in the EU runs contrary to the stated beliefs of the Euro-skeptic ID Party, which wants to reverse the centralisation of power within the EU.
There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.
Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.
I wonder if conservative/progressive and right/left were false dichotomies. At the extremes there are remarkably similar outcomes. Corruption is present at the extremes and the more moderate center. Some of the corruption is more explicit and illegal (pay me and I'll do this), other less so and legal (you did this while in office so now we hire you for big $ to do little.)
They are not false dichotomies, they're just not the only ones that matter. There's a separate scale of liberal/authoritarian that, while not entirely orthogonal to progressive/conservative, allows for a lot of leeway in practice.
It's easy to talk about freedom of speech and expression in the abstract. Practice shows that many political forces that do so adopt much less liberal positions on specific issues when it comes to the kind of speech that they don't like, or that they see as beneficial to target from an appeal-to-the-voter perspective.
So, given that this proposal is entirely framed as a way to combat child porn, and that "liberal pedophile elites" are part of the current far right zeitgeist, I wouldn't be so sure that they would be all that strongly opposed to it. Especially if they get to rewrite it in name (but not substance) to claim credit for it.
I'm not so much concerned about the rise of the ID party in this regard, but instead the growth of EPP and decline of the Greens. And possibly also Renew, though I'm not sure where they stood - if they were in favour then I guess their decline helps here.
Specifically this is being pushed by Ylva Johansson [1] from Sweden, who has (reportedly) financial connections to the organisation Thorn which is hoping to sell this chat monitoring software.
> Only the Commission can propose new legislation.
That is a technicality relying on a shallow look at the word "propose". The commission frequently takes direction from the council when deciding what to focus on which leads to them "proposing" legislation. In this case the push for this has come from the Council and certain national governments combined with a particular commissioner.
The Commission agenda and mandate is set by the Council that nominates it, and periodically reviewed by the same Council. Items are set in meetings, the agenda of such meetings is typically public.
If the Commission pushes, it's because the Council told it to push.
The Commission is formed by commissioners, each of which has been nominated by a different nation's government. The Council consists of actual members of the national governments.
The third party that can't propose legislation but has to approve it (and which strongly opposed this) is the Parliament, which is directly elected.
OK, this is probably some nuance of the English language that I'm missing as a non-native speaker, but I meant that the people that make up the Commission are not part of the national governments. The people that are part of national governments each get to nominate one commissioner though, in addition to being part of the Council.
The Council is as much part of the EU institution and as legitimate a part of them as the Parliament
There's no avatar of the EU manifesting out of thin air in brussels so it makes sense for the EU as a whole to bear the blame for the actions it takes, regardless of where it originated
I think the point is that the EU hasn’t actually taken any actions yet. This is just infighting between different arms of the EU governance structures, trying to figure out what actions should be taken.
So it is unfair to label rubbish coming out of the commission or council as something the EU has decided, when it’s only the first step of many for actually making a decision.
It would be like taking any random bit of legislation proposed by a member of congress, and labelling it as the collective stance of the entire U.S. government, completely ignoring the fact there’s a long road from proposal to enactment.
But commission and council aren't acting in a void (parliament neither), if there's appetite for a legislation amongst national governments the commission will work on a proposal
The same works to a lesser extent with the commission and parliament as well
> Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
I wanted to say. It will return.-
> There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This is one of the things that irks me the most: The abusive, emotional "mislabeling". Children have nothing to do with this, and it is an abuse of public good faith to mislabel these sort of initiatives using "children" as leverage, preying upon a tech-lliterate public.-
In fact, that is also an issue here: The public needs to be brought up to speed (technically) and/or we should at least demand technical expertise from our politicians, when legislating or acting upon mainly technological issues.-
> I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
That is so true.
There is one point I like to use whenever I get into a privacy debate. If they'll say "But I have nothing to hide", then I'll ask "well then give me your email password".
Originally from a TED talk, possibly from Chris Anderson.
I never really understood this line of thought. Corporate interests _are_ citizen interests right? Those corporations are made up of (a lot) of people, and if those corporate systems thrive in a certain condition, then the people within these corporate systems will largely want to maintain or create those conditions. Those citizens do vote as well, and from personal experience, a lot of people vote in their own interest rather than national or moral interest. From research, I could not find conclusive numbers regarding altruistic [0] vs self-interested voting rates.
The more people are working for these corporations, the more we create and sustain the conditions that hold these systems in place. Whether that is 'good' is another debate.
I don't think it's correct to treat the interest of the corporation as manifestation of the combined interest of all its employees. It would be true for shareholders, although even there I think there's a vast difference between those who hold massive amounts of voting shares and minor investors. But employees are effectively trading with the corporation (their labor for wages), and are not meaningfully represented by it.
What's the difference? They "don't care" about it as long as they don't suffer any direct ill effects from their indifference.
Once things get to the point where every facet of our lives is actively under surveillance, and authoritarians in power start abusing their power in ways that affect those who "don't care", they'll start caring really quickly but by then it's going to be too late.
Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being taken for granted.
> Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being taken for granted.
Ironically since fascist (in the broader sense) parties and the likes don't seem to support Chat control (yet, I guess) the other parties have a harder time passing it to not lose votes to them.
It is strange how such an anti-democratic law is pushed so hard but there is still tip toeing around actually passing it.
Being a child from Portuguese revolution, and witness of how the Berlin wall went down, it is really bad that newer generations don't have any sense of what it meant to live during those days, and vote into such parties with protest votes nonsense.
The axiom has always been that People Don't Know, Wake Up Sheeple(tm), but after so much time it's hard to believe that lack of awareness is the problem anymore.
The retail service price of Gmail, Maps, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. together probably would exceed a couple hundred dollars a year. People would rather pocket that money, especially with how tight budgets are becoming.
> After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think it's more that most people don't care about the value of privacy.
I think you've betrayed your own argument, because talking with people would have been more effective than screaming at clouds, to use your metaphor.
Just because you're putting something out there doesn't mean anyone else is receiving it. And if they're not receiving it, you can't judge whether or not they care.
Talking with people and screaming at clouds are the same thing if they hear and go about their day anyway because they don't care.
The axiom that the problem is a lack of awareness starts to defy logic because this has been going on for over 2 decades now. You bet your ass people are aware, they just don't care regardless.
Is this a good thing? Probably not. But the fact remains people don't care about privacy and specifically digital privacy. This isn't 2004 anymore, it's 2024.
I found it very frustrating that in the recent Belgian elections, because the EU and local elections were combined, there was very little debate on this subject and EU programs in general. Luckily it was finally brought up in the media (although way overdue IMO)
I thought we safe and beyond these kind of considerations, especially in the EU, since the wikileaks/snowden/shelsea manning era? Aren’t we? Well, I guess you should never take something for granted…
People are never beyond evil. Just the justification for why they strife for evil will change. And to be fair, with the justification, the impact can also change.
I'd bet good money that the bulk of European intelligence people use Signal, both personally and for non-classified work stuff. So the announcement that Signal would pull out of Europe was probably more influential than anyone will acknowledge.
Orban is authoritarian. During his rule the freedom and democracy of Hungary have taken huge steps back and the country is no longer considered "free" by for example Freedom House.
Coincidentally, a "leak" was reported yesterday suggesting EU MP's intend to exempt "confidential" govt info, as well as police, intelligence, and military personnel from Chat Control:
Ahh, we are against violence, except when it is applied to people we don't agree with. We are against surveillance, it is only to be applied to people not in our group. We are for freedom of speech, but only if you agree with us. The list goes on.
In reading your comment, it suddenly dawned on me that 1984 has turned into a how to manual for modern governments, much the way The Prince is misinterpreted today.
People interested in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell might also be interested in "Limes inferior" by Janusz A. Zajdel, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story" by George Orwell.
Perhaps my biggest criticisms of 1984 is that it tends to make the reader fixate on some group of evil conspirators at the top, at the expense of understanding the banality of evil. I think this portrayal sows distrust in real democracy through presumption of evil intent.
I think we as people should move to have the opposite of this, if you're a public official you should have all your comms public, what are they afraid of? If they do nothing wrong then this shouldn't be a problem lol
This will never happen in reality, but one way to make sure a bill like this doesn't get through is to not allow for any exceptions to being surveiled. So politicians and security people will be treated just like the population at large and have their communications monitored. I mean, think of the children, how bad would it be if a trusted member of society ended up peddling the bad images. So in that respect they need to be surveiled as anyone else.
One enormous advantage of federated systems is that they can route around this idiocy. For example, I host a Mastodon server in California. There was zero chance I’d comply with EU’s law, any more than I would PRC’s. That’s their little policy, not mine.
Believing that legislative issues can be solved with technology is one of the most common fallacies among the IT crowd.
If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become as risky as getting caught for murder. At that point, it would be naive to run a Mastodon server locally, wouldn't it?
P.S. Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running. Quotes like "they already know everything" and "do you have something to hide from the government?" will become ubiquitous in public discourse.
This is defeatist and wrong. Technology can be used to cross political barriers and solve issues, that's what the government intends to stop. They like the App Store and Google Play store, because if dissenting apps pop up they only have 2 companies to call to get it removed[0]. They like people perceiving an iMessage/RCS duopoly because that's only 2 secure channels to backdoor[1]. Threatening you with jail-time is all they can do for escaping their ire, but that's an unjust and disproportionate response from any state-level actor.
The "average consumer" has been joking about their 'FBI guy' and freaking them out with weird porn or spurious Amazon carts for a decade now. We've hit the peaks of disillusionment, we've started down the road of exploitation and most of us are starting to worry that this trend of technological limitation is specifically intended to make us politically weak.
It's not defeatist. The point is that legislative decisions still matter, a lot.
Take the Chinese Great Firewall, for example. Yes, you can use technical means to circumvent it, but the effort required (and inevitably degraded performance) means that the median citizen does not.
I like the quote attributed to Vitalik Buterin about how "whereas most technologies tend to automate on the periphery, blockchains automate away the center."
If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.
I’m kind of fascinated by the often simultaneously held beliefs of “America doesn’t make the world’s rules!” and “…EU does!” Countries can influence each other, sure, but if EU (US or Canada or Brazil) makes a law, it doesn’t apply to people not under those jurisdictions.
> If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.
That's great if you never need to|want to travel.
What about the time you happen to end up in transit through an airport in a country where they've put you on their watchlist, they grab you airside and hold you for hours while they look at your devices....?
If the EU is really coming down hard on people who do mundane stuff like host a Mastodon node and chat with their friends, then I’d avoid them just like I’d avoid North Korea or any other authoritarian country.
As indicated in that article, the UK kinda sucks, so, like, don’t go there. Whatever, they don’t have any good beaches anyway.
We used to have some very nice beaches, but unfortunately the Tory government thought it would be a great idea to allow water companies to discharge sewage into the waterways at will (because shareholders), so I personally wouldn't take the chance nowadays, although it doesn't seem to bother everyone.
You make it sound like the EU is the only one interested in stuff like this... but you do know that all your communications are already monitored and recorded by the NSA and that the person who revealed it is in hiding from the US government, right?
Security services typically don't publicize what they use, for obvious reasons.
Unless you can point out links between the Hungarian government (who announced they will re-table the directive in a few months) and such companies, I'd say Occam stays with the security services.
I’m not going to live my life worried about hypotheticals. What if my plane goes down, I get rescued by North Korea, and they get mad at something I said about Kim Jong Number Un? That’d suck, but the possibility isn’t going to make me self-limit in the mean time. There are enough real concerns on my plate.
Do you comply with PRC law, or even know what it asks of you? If not, why?
I don’t know and don’t care because I don’t have to. I live in a sovereign nation and I’m not obligated to follow their rules, any more than their citizens are obligated to follow mine. That’s how countries work.
If my country signs a treaty with them, then I have to obey that specific law. Absent that, I don’t.
If they had all the things I’d ever said in my life time they’d probably execute me. I speak my mind all the time. That’s what terrifies me though, because in 20 years time they could be running the show. So why would I want to make it so easy for them to know everything I have ever said, why would I want that data stored about me.
People need to stop treating other countries as if they're just the next town over. When you visit a place or do business with them you are in part endorsing how they behave and how they govern themselves. If you have a problem locking people up for blasphemy, don't spend money in a country that does it. If you have a problem with arresting people for illegal gestures, don't fly there to take instagram photos. Stop ignoring behavior you find abhorrent for the sake of personal convenience.
The United States has arrested Marcus Hutchins for violating its laws while he was not inside the United States. This was not the first time, they also arrested Sklyarov for writing software they didn't like -- but the software was written in Russia. This is plain insanity and only the United States could get away with it. (The Sklyarov arrest together with the CFAA was one of the reasons I have chosen not to immigrate to the USA btw.)
For example, imagine you being arrested at Frankfurt airport because you posted something a year ago that falls under Strafgesetzbuch section 86a. You would need to review your entire post history going back years and compare it to the laws of every country you touch during your travels.
> For example, imagine you being arrested at Frankfurt airport because you posted something a year ago
Doesn't this happen all the time? Wasn't David Irving repeatedly arrested and charged in many countries in continental Europe for things he said and wrote while abroad? (Not defending Irving's views, he's a noxious lying toad, but the principle here appears to be the same.)
> If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.
Except the part where the CANZUK/US/EU blocs generally have reciprocal agreements and Interpol is perfectly empowered to enact international law inside of the US, as of 2009.
Choosing to take this stance in one of the Western Nations is foolish to an almost ignorant degree. If one of them feels you broke a big enough law, it's trivial (at best) to execute upon it.
This is complete nonsense (and borderline gibberish - Interpol can't 'enact' any laws in the US).
Extradition generally requires that the thing you're being extradited for would also a crime in the jurisdiction you're in.
For speech offences, this makes many foreign judgments unenforceable in the US due to the First Amendment, not to mention additional formal protections like the SPEECH Act.
>doesn’t apply to people not under those jurisdictions.
Of course not but if an American company in the US caters to EU users with, for example, a localized site it does absolutely apply to them. Same the other way around. Just because you or your server are too small to matter doesn't mean it is irrelevant.
America doesn't make the world rules is often said when they create one set of rules for them and another for everyone else (US can have warships near china but if it was reversed we would have a new Cuban crisis) and when they create rules in places they have the most power to create international laws that fit their world view but not their enemies. In a perfect world the US would have zero power and zero say a meter outside its borders.
Nobody is going to extradite you for not having a cookie banner. EU can't _actually_ make laws like that.
The reason gambling/child porn/fincrime/etc are enforced across national boundaries is that everyone (at least, in the western world) respects those laws and absolutely will extradite. Cookie laws, anti-encryption laws, anti-(adult)-porn laws are not like this.
Did we actually complain about a Chinese freedom of navigation activity? I think the US vigorously supports the right of all countries to send a carrier fleet to hang out in international waters wherever…
> If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.
Try ignoring the GDPR, they will get upset at you really quickly.
I like the GDPR. I comply with the local CCPA version. I’m not legally obligated to follow the GDPR though. I’m unaware of any agreement the US has with EU that puts me under its jurisdiction.
> Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running.
The enormous success of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok is because the average consumer/user can express themselves there and broadcast to the world. Normal people are actually participating in public discourse again, after most of a century of public discourse being one way with the government screaming into the citizens ear what to think and what to do, via radio and TV.
Legislation is much easier to enforce on centralized services than decentralized ones.
As long as encrypted peer-to-peer communication exists on an open internet, there will be no way for a 3rd party to intercept this traffic, or for any government to control it. They can ban the use of specific software, but new software will always be written.
They can ban the use of any software that is "designed to circumvent" such laws, which would be any encrypted peer-to-peer communication software.
And enforcement doesn't need to be 100% effective to make a difference. Fairly simple measures are sufficient to deter and/or block well over 90% of the populace and force them into controlled channels, as China demonstrates.
This isn't using technology (technology happens to be involved). This is a political challenge to Big Cloud (and it's systems being steered around by the many powers that be of the word).
Federation is politics. Federation is about governance. It's about a place between centralized/authoritarian and distributed/anarchy.
> If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become as risky as getting caught for murder.*
It's unlikely to be enforced globally. Every millimeter wrong that statement is, ever chance higher that connecting-with-one-another does try to get shut down on a broadscale, is another reason why we should be doing it, now, asap, and normalizing it.
Having such a narrow view of technology appears to be an even more common fallacy. Legislation is technology. New systems can be invented which continue to work around it, and further, law can be extended to protect certain actions. I don't have a specific answer to this specific problem, but "there's no technological solution" is categorically wrong in almost all cases because it assumes technology is limited to some arbitrary subset of technology that can't solve the problem.
Plus it's naive to think it's just legislature you need to worry about. In recent years VISA and MasterCard have been demonstrating their intent and ability to work as worldwide unelected morality police. And then there's the infrastructure platforms and associated deplatforming (and unfortunately you usually need to work with one of the "big guys" otherwise a cheap DDoS can destroy you)
And the worst part is most of the internet have been cheering it on
This is the advantage of being small enough to fly under the radar, more than the advantage of federation. It's also why Signal can get away with approaches that would have gotten any Big Tech player testifying in front of the Congress, with parents of kids killed by fentanyl or kidnapped by sex predators sitting right behind.
If your service becomes big and important enough, and if politicians hear enough from law enforcement and intelligence agencies that you're a major problem, then all of sudden, your "zero chance" becomes a "non-zero chance" if you ever need to travel to or through the EU, do any business there, etc.
Another case in point: cryptocurrencies. They were government-proof until they weren't, because ultimately, there are people running exchanges and mixers, as well as other counterparties, who can be threatened with prison and fines.
The advantage of federation is you don't need to become big. XMPP works like email; you set up your DNS records and other servers can talk to yours when someone wants to chat with an address in your domain.
Federation certainly helps, in that Americans can run American instances and not worry if the EU dislikes it.
However, federation wouldn't help EU users much if the EU state decided to go for full-on Chinese style control, firewalling the foreign-hosted instances, banning the apps from the app stores, blocking access to payment infrastructure, jail for anyone found with the app sideloaded, PR campaign saying this app is used for child porn and encouraging people to turn in anyone they see using it to the cops, and so on.
It's all fun and games until you get blocked at the DNS level and effectively shadowbanned by all mainstream ISPs. This already happens today in many, many European countries.
That’s true of any provincial law. I’m sure North Korea doesn’t like the things I allow me people to say about their leadership. I’m not going to change what I’m doing here to appease their inapplicable laws though.
North Korea seems like a flimsy example because it's an international pariah, and their reach in the West is essentially limited to hacking you. It's a fairly uncommon situation that's quite different from decisions made by the EU.
(As an aside, the legislators in the US broadly believe the same things about online communications than their EU counterparts, so the noose will keep tightening either way.)
"international presence" can be as simple as a localized site for your German users. Then you are under GDPR etc. Sure you can ignore it if you are irrelevant but that doesn't change the fact that this is how laws work.
For practical purposes, what really matters is whether it can be enforced. So, for example, will your country extradite you if Americans demand it? Or, say, if you travel, will any of the countries that you pass through extradite you?
The reason why DPRK is a particularly bad example is because neither is a concern just about anywhere in the world. But for large and powerful political entities such as US and EU, it is a very real concern.
You would avoid it. The criminals it's ostensibly meant to target will avoid it.
Who won't avoid it is the hundreds of millions of Europeans who use WhatsApp as their primary means of telecommunication, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encryption" means, but effortlessly gain resistance to mass surveillance.
That’s all true. It’s also why we should have smaller networks that are resistant to a given jurisdiction’s laws. WhatsApp has offices and business presences all over the world and now they’re stuck complying with everyone’s laws. That’s a bad situation for us to be in.
I won't argue with that, and I would certainly like for Matrix to get good enough to use as a primary messaging system. Right now, I think if I tried to convince non-technical people to use it, they would find the experience unsatisfactory.
That’s the opposite of my experience. I’ve gotten most of my (very non-technical) family to use matrix through my home server. It’s a simple sign up and tell me your username type of thing and that’s it. One major advantage is that it works perfectly fine even in China which means there is one platform that everyone can use (WeChat is invite only, WhatsApp is blocked).
I find the barrier isn't usually lack of technical skill, but lack of interest and patience. The average American can reach everyone they know by SMS and it's hard to convince them to use Signal or WhatsApp, which take under a minute to set up, are fast and reliable, and have almost no learning curve for people already used to SMS.
You describe a situation where people can't reach everyone all of their family members in the popular ways, and Matrix offers a way to keep in touch you can guide them through and admin for them.
I've had speed and reliability issues with Matrix myself, so I wouldn't try to talk people into using it.
Signal was much easier in that regard back when they had SMS support on Android - then it was just a "better texting app" that also gave you E2EE when both parties used it. Much easier to sell on.
Anecdotally, ever since they dropped this feature, I have seen a significant reduction in Signal use among my own contacts.
historically matrix has had perf problems for sure; we are in the final stages of fixing that tho. to quote someone earlier today in one of the community rooms:
> just downloaded element x from f-droid and wowza it just.. loads instantly? can't believe i now live in the age of element being faster than discord
I think federation is currently the biggest tax on performance. Joining even medium sized groups with only a hundred users takes a few minutes and eats up a ton of resources on the server. It got so bad that I had to turn federation off completely. That said, I only have ~1GB of RAM.
1GB is enough for most things and it has been running smoothly since I turned off federation. You’d be surprised how much you can do with 512 MB of RAM. 1 GB is pretty generous
Thinking that potential CSAM hosting server (as defined by EU) isn't going to get persecuted in US is a new level of naivete. US and EU have broad spanning contracts of cooperation between their respective law enforcement offices when it comes to these cases.
> Each service required to install this “vetted” monitoring technology must also ask permission to scan your messages. If you don’t agree, you won’t be able to share images or URLs.
> As if this doesn’t seem wild enough, the proposed legislation appears to endorse and reject end-to-end encryption at the same time.
I absolutely will not run someone's server-side malware to look at the contents of all the messages my people transmit.
I have zero tolerance for CSAM. I can report, have reported, and will continue to report instances of it that I stumble across as part of my job moderating the server I host. Damned if I'm running EU's "vetted" software though. There's also approximately nil chance of American authorities attempting to force American entities to run EU software on their US-hosted servers. My doctor's office has an encrypted chat where I can ask my doctor questions. You think anyone's going to make them filter those HIPAA-covered messages through the EU?
I'm not sure what you're really going on about here - there's a massive amount of proven history of EU/US law enforcement using each other's surveillance technology and legal loopholes to exchange information. War on drugs, CSAM, human trafficking are oft cited reasons.
There's pretty much zero chance that US would reject use and insight into private communication if EU puts it into law and forces upon messaging apps. We have literally pile of historical examples where FBI & co. were actively pushing for more of such data sharing programs. - So what exactly is your point? Where did you get an idea that you'll be running "EU software" and that US will defend you if you get into a CSAM suspected database list?
Most federated systems likely wouldn't be affected by the proposal as-is. Since most of them are non-commercial, they'd be exempt from chat control as I understand it due to a resolution vote done in the European Parliament.
The businesses who care about taking money from Europeans care. I worked at an American healthtech company and we weren’t GDPR-compliant because 1) we weren’t targeting Europeans, and 2) GDPR and HIPAA are incompatible so we picked the relevant one.
Since my server doesn’t do business in EU, I couldn’t care less about GDPR or other local laws, even the ones I think are good ideas.
American law doesn’t apply to someone running a server in Brussels. The converse is also true.
Which rules it out almost entirely for HIPAA covered entities. Quick example: right to be forgotten vs record retention laws. A European who receives healthcare in the US can’t demand that the provider delete their medical record afterward because HIPAA says they must retain it.
> Quick example: right to be forgotten vs record retention laws.
Record retention laws win, as explicitly stated in the GDPR.
Same reason a murderer can't (successfully) issue a right-to-be-forgotten request to the cops investigating them.
(There's also "processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller" as another exception, which allows, for example, your bank to retain the fact that you owe them $100k on your house still, even if you don't want them to.)
Record retention laws are not the only exception. E.g. you can execute your Hausverbot right only if the person you refuse to serve cannot demand that you forget them. This position was already confirmed by German regulator at least once.
And they couldn't demand that the provider deletes it in EU either, because maintaining medical records is a legal requirement, which overrides the right to be forgotten.
But it does require you to document that requirement and make sure that the data isn't shared beyond that requirement without consent.
HIPAA and GDPR aren't conflicting, they're orthogonal and cover different things.
The right to be forgotten has an explicit exception for circumstances where there's a legal obligation on retention, although it does reference Union and Member State law and not other international entites.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
A European who receives healthcare in the EU can’t demand that the provider delete their medical record if the provider has a legal allowed reason to keep the record.
This is a fundamental aspect of GDPR and part of the central message in the regulation. Companies and organizations are only allowed to keep personal information if they have a legal allowed reason to do so, and must honor requests for deletions unless they have a legal reason not to do so.
What is and what isn't a legit reason depend on circumstance. What companies generally object with GDPR is that generate revenue through personal advertisement is not an legit reason to keep personal data.
Considering European modern history and how the EU white-washes all their tech legislation as "pro consumer rights" (it's protectionism¹ ² ³). One would think that the EU would be the last place on earth to introduce such obvious surveillance legislation.⁴
Similar proposals haven't got this close to passing in any other first world countries.
I'm glad to see that many sane voices (particularly those affected worst by the Nazis) are leading a resistance against such obviously flawed legislation.
Protectionism? That's a funny idea but there's nothing to protect. EU doesn't have any tech companies. We're been reverse colonised by US tech Microsoft/Google/Oracle/Apple.
They have multiple politicians from different countries pushing for legislations, some can be "surveillance" and some "pro consumer" and some both. I would say likes of GDPR are pro consumer.
Also, it is better than pro-business govt, that only acts if their lobbyists like it.
The wave of authoritarianism sweeping the world is pretty alarming.
This bill (only temporarily sidelined) would treat every single person as a suspect of child porn crimes. Previously, you'd need substantial cause to put someone under heavy surveillance.
People talked about how that was due to principles of civil liberty, human rights, and freedom. But apparently it was actually just because it wasn't feasible to watch everything everyone says and does all the time. Now that the technology is here to enable it, our "free democracies" can't rush fast enough to put the boot to everyone's neck all the time.
Pretty obviously this is just the first step. CP is a tactical choice of the first step since practically everyone can agree on how horrible it is. (Come to think of it, this is low key exploiting the vulnerability of children -- nice one, government!) Once everything you say or do is sent to the government for review, you can bet it won't be for just that one thing only.
BTW, I think the government policy makers blow past all the problems with false positives that will inevitably occur because, when your goal is control of the population not the prevention of child abuse, that's a feature not a bug. You want everyone nervous and afraid. You want the stories of the lives of innocent people ruined to circulate. That helps keeps everyone cowed.
This is probably a much more difficult question to answer than you might expect.
If you asked me, I think liberal democracies all around the world are going through a legitimacy crisis. People have not been feeling, for a while now, properly represented by their politicians so they are always seeking to vote for someone that seems like the outsider. Right now, that is represented by these sort of authoritarian, big demagogue politicians.
I think a lot of the problems of the modern world require much more innovative ways of doing politics and our liberal democracies which are based on this concept of the "vote for your representative" are at the limits of what they can do. The systems we have are slow and inefficient in a world that changes rapidly and requires politics to adapt much more quickly than they can.
For this reason, imo, people have grown dejected from politics and the response of the electorate is a sort of self-destruction where they will vote for anyone that can resonate with a message of "i can fix it". Whatever that character might be. It's easy for politicians to play certain cards; say, immigration is the problem and the fix is to stop it. That seems like a simple solution and it's a message that can be understood pretty easily.
But what are the real problems of the 21st century, in Europe, in the USA, in the rest of the world? I think a lot of people might hyper-focus on certain problems and offer solutions just for those problems and act as if that could solve a much more systemic failure. Ultimately, it is my opinion that the problem is politicians/politics itself and so it is rather difficult for politicians to solve it. Politicians are quick to say "we've failed you" but they don't really mean it, it's true though.
A couple books that have really changed my perspective on how politics should be and why our systems are failing are: Systemic Corruption by Camila Vergara and Open Democracy by Helene Landemore. If you wanna know more.
National governments were formed to solve nation-sized issues (trains, taxation rates not changing every 50km, consistent languages and education systems, etc). Modern problems are bigger than that: globalized production chains, tax havens, climate change, migration flows, and superpower conflicts, simply cannot be fixed at the national level.
I can guarantee that all the boats in the Mediterranean and the North Sea will be shot on sight by my navy, but people will still get into Europe from somewhere else. I can ensure all the manufacturers in the country respect stringent pollution laws, but people will still buy cheaper and more polluting Chinese goods. And so on and so forth.
So we move to a super-national, continent-sized model, and we have a better chance to address these problems - but then we're adding more layers of indirection between citizenry and representatives, and we get an issue of legitimacy. It's a thorny subject.
Personally I think we can make good use of sortition to inject legitimacy into the system. Kind of like what has been done in ireland, france, belgium...
Sortition is very scalable and private citizens are actually much "cheaper" a resource than career politicians while imo being more legitimate and more interested in actually solving problems rather than furthering their careers.
It's an underrated social technology. It's why I recommended Landemore's book previously.
But a lot of people in government, even among the EC consists of what is effectively lifers. I don't think citing "outsiders" as the culprit is accurate.
The person who introduced CSAR most recently has been in high government positions for decades, I believe the previous iteration was as well.
Average tenure in the US senate is pretty close to the 2 term limit combined at 12 years, US house of representatives is also a bit over 4 terms combined at 8 years. Junior politicians are definitely not proposing their own legislation, especially with the existence of party whips and similar roles that exist across the world.
If its dejection, OK I can understand that. If it's seeking an outsider, yeah that's likely among the population. Authoritarian demagogues, well you're just labeling politicians what they are inherently, so no push back from me.
But combined together I can't accept. The people doing things like this are people who are familiar to us.
The thing is, the kind of people who become politicians at all are predisposed to this -- they are the kind of people who want to be in charge, to control, to decide.
(It's not just the EU, it's everywhere.)
Without pushback, politicians will just naturally move toward increasing their own authority. The new technology has opened up a new opportunity, so of course they are making their push.
Democracy, as messy, inefficient, and imperfect as it is, is the only form of government that gives all us non-politicians a reasonable chance to push back.
EU citizens don’t directly elect these politicians. They’re made up of heads of state, so people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government, and those resulting heads of state go to the council.
Also the EU isn’t some homogeneous entity, it’s made up of many different countries with many different views, that don’t all align. Asking why EU citizens vote for these types of politicians, is equivalent to asking why some Americans vote for abortion banning republicans. The answer as always is complicated, and there are many different issues that might feed into someone’s vote, and this specific issue might not have been the most important.
> people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government
It's even more complicated than that. For instance, "head of state" of Latvia in the Council which nominated current EU Commission president in 2019 was Karinsh, the prime minister of Latvia. Not being directly elected, the prime minister of Latvia gets nominated by president (not directly elected as well, BTW) and approved by coalition in the parliament. The punchline is that he was the leader of a party that got the least number of votes (and hence, number of seats in the parliament — 8/100) in the corresponding election. The party that got the most votes (and most seats) was not included into the coalition at all.
The fundamental problem with any representative democracy is that people want to vote on issues, but they are instead only given the opportunity to vote for whoever will "represent" them on those issues. Worse yet, it comes as a package deal where you have to basically select the policy package that comes the closest to what you want - which in practice often means "the least bad".
When the UK was in the EU we didn't care about the EU elections. Turnout peaked in 2004 at 38.9%, but could be as low as 24%.
If you asked the average UK citizen who their MEPs were, they wouldn't be able to tell you. And if we didn't care enough to know their names, we certainly weren't paying attention to the policies they voted for.
That makes MEPs very susceptible to lobbying, and the EU system very susceptible to corruption in general.
I wrote to all the UK MEPs when the awful Copyright Directive was being proposed, with its completely impractical technical demands and chilling consequences. Most of the MEPs didn't have a clue what was going on, and they didn't seem to care, because they just parrotted the talking points that the Commission had put forward when it pushed the Directive through, and the MEPs planned to obediently vote for the Directive. The only ones that didn't plan to support the Copyright Directive were the Euro-skeptic MEPs, and thank goodness they were there in the mix.
Because if you don't want to vote for them you are immediately branded far-right and a racist, and Europe will fall into a slippery-slope of re-Nazifying itself.
Based on this Chat Control debacle, sounds like the people saying that have no idea what they’re talking about and should be encouraged to shut up or to be more precise and rigorous in their arguments lol
In fact, I think this kind of effort alienates people and turns them precisely into a direction where they vent their frustration with the system on wrong avenues.
In many ways, the people are voting for far-right politicians because there's been an intellectual elite that has told them again and again "your concerns don't matter, so just shut up for a moment". It turns out, they do matter. We ought to respect each other and listen to each other truthfully to be able to reach agreements.
Overall, I'd say, large groups of people are more than capable of reaching reasonable outcomes. The problem is our system of politics are not really encouraging dialogue and change of mind. In fact, a politician changing their mind is seen as a bad thing and is usually punished. But that's just how the system is set up to be, of course, a politician is supposed to represent an electorate so the politician needs to be rigid in their views and the electorate is the one that needs to change. But this comes with the problem that electorate cycles are slow and "the people" have a much harder time accessing and parsing information than a politician might have.
Ideally we'd ought to have a system where our representatives are capable and encouraged to come into an issue with an open mind, and upon deliberation decanting into a certain position. Regardless of political color.
And I think that's kind of completely the opposite to "these people should shut up", no, they should speak up and be heard. But it should be done in a context that allows for a fair and reasonable debate.
I'd prefer a society where when people say something stupid they are pointed out where they were wrong and why, instead of encouraging people to shut up
Right, but the hall monitors don’t grant that benefit of the doubt to others in the first place. Otherwise what parent pointed out wouldn’t be the case.
You may also be branded far-left too. The authoritarians in the 'center' are also afraid of a strong leftist movement taking their power and money away, not just a rightist one.
You can tell because different pro-surveillance arguments are concocted depending on the audience: for conservatives they say "think of the children, Islamic terrorism, drugs, etc." for leftists they say: "toxic content online, disinformation, right-wing-terror, hate crimes". And because everyone is terrified of the other side, and the Internet and mainstream media can be used to target these messages, we have what we have today.
>since practically everyone can agree on how horrible it is.
I certainly do, but the German government does not. They recently lowered the sentences for it, is now roughly on par with theft.
Which makes this whole thing even more disingenuous. Either it is so bad that half a billion people need surveillance or it is a crime where you can get a couple of months in prison. The third option is, of course, that it is just a cynical argument.
The government not only lowered the sentence, but the "categorization" (lacking a better word) of it, downranking it from a felony.
They did this, because with a felony it is not possible to stop prosecution for "possession of child porn" when common sense would suggest it, e.g. when minors send each other nude pictures of themselves. If you are 16, take a picture of your boobs, you are officially a criminal. According to this official page, those cases made up 41% of the cases: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/DE/202...
And if the possessor of the image is not a minor, as in case of a mother who reported nude pictures from her daughters WhatsApp group to the school principal, they had to be sentenced to at least a year of prison.
>They did this, because with a felony it is not possible to stop prosecution for "possession of child porn" when common sense would suggest it
This is obviously a nonsensical justification. The law should be written in a way, which excludes these cases from prosecution to begin with.
It's completely insane to reduce a sentence for a pretty bad crime just because you can't be bothered to formulate the law properly. And even if you were to do that it still proves that you aren't particularly concerned over that crime.
If the politicians can't write a law which distinguishes a minor sending pictures of him/her to another minors, from organized CSAM distribution, then what can they do. It's either malice or enormous incompetency.
A while ago they made a change to an existing law to increase the minimum sentence from 6 months to 1 year, probably mostly for reasons of political posturing rather than any deep analysis. They were warned it would have absurd consequences, but did it anyway.
Now it was changed back to how it was before, because of exactly what was predicted.
It's doesn't reflect well on the German government, but it also doesn't deserve the amount of histronics it generated.
In the US, pardons and jury nullification would both be able to fix such obviously unjust outcomes. Does Germany not have anything like either of those things?
In some courts "Schöffen" are part of the judges. Schöffen are citizens that volunteer as "amateur judges". As far as I know in some trials they even outnumber the professional judge and their vote has the same weight. They could "bend the law" as far as I know, but it's not how it's supposed to be. Those verdicts, if appealed, would probably not hold in higher courts.
There are pardons by the German president, but I'd guess they don't happen on that scale.
That's pretty absurd. Instead of lowering the classification of this crime they could have introduced reasonable exceptions, like excluding one's own photos.
Iirc the intent of the past two changes was to make liable for punishment both content of sexual acts done to or by the underage victim, as well as the content where an underage victim is simply in the content in any way, posing or being unwillingly or unknowingly photographed. The latter so as to cover the problem of images (selfies, own content) being spread around, but also to cover cases of abuse that wasn't clear physical sexual abuse in the previous conception.
They did this first by adding the new b) and c) under (1.) in both 184b and 184c StBG, for posing. Subsequently they raised the minimum punishment in 2021 to make all liability under 184b a criminal liability due to the one year minimum. The only exception is the clause under ^2 that limits non-factual/non-realistic acts, think writing, art, etc. 184c remained unchanged as far as minimum punishment is concerned.
If you observe StGB 184b you'll notice that it makes it so that the liability will be imposed on anyone who distributes or otherwise makes public, obtains, offers, takes with intent or possesses that which is as described under (1.)-1-a/b/c (child content) is liable to prosecution.
Caveat here is that children (under 14) are not liable for criminal prosecution, they're Schuldunfähig. This is pretty standard EU-wide, and comes from Roman law originally.
In StGB 184c, you will find the operative clause under (1.) and the exception under (4 ), and this article is about the "youth" category, meaning underage but older than 14.
As you'll notice there, the minimum punishment is less than a year and there's the possibility of having to pay a fine.
No matter the article, in both cases, taking a selfie means you're Strafbar, liable (punishable). However, per article 12 StGB, only 184b is a crime, 184c is a misdemeanor, provided the unlawful act is punished with a sentence under 1 year or a fine, yet leaves the door open for criminal liability of a perpetrator who commits a heinous act against a 16 year old, for example. The child under 14 goes "straflos" and is criminally not liable, even in the scenario where that 14yo is a perpetrator. Those aged 14 until 18 are then subject to juvenile criminal law which focuses on rehabilitation over punishment. More importantly, remember the minimum punishment is under a year, allowing the judge to just throw it out as proportionality is nowhere to be found here, if such a case even sees the court, regardless.
So yes, technically you can take a pic of your naked self as a minor and become a criminal because of it, but only in the sense that very mundane, trivial infractions can do the same in any legal system across the world. Almost exclusively limited to it being a criminal act, as opposed to criminal charges by formal accusation from LE.
The only odd part is the broad application on self-owned content, but that seems preferable to letting abusers escape due to the previous loose application.
Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous given that parts of the EU has a living memory of living in a system like this. This isn't some imagined hypothetical scenario. The east bloc had this exact type of arbitrary mass surveillance 40 years ago. It wasn't great.
> our "free democracies" can't rush fast enough to put the boot to everyone's neck all the time
You're saying this in respect of a bill that has repeatedly failed. Yes, the authoritarian pressure is real. But it only wins if this attitude takes root.
Most countries don’t let you bundle legislation together like that. US problem with stuffing everything in giant uber-legislations to work around the congress’s ability to do anything is fairly unique to US, and doesn’t everywhere else.
Heck, in the UK there are even rules around the naming of legislation which makes it illegal to give legislation marketing type titles like “The Patriot Act”. The titles have to explicitly outline the purpose and objective of the legislation (which then results in some very long titles).
If someone opposing it slips up. The reason it failed is because the legislative process slipped up. The public were accidentally given a few days warning.
I think it wins unless this attitude takes root. We cannot trust our "democratic" institutions to survive without constant outward pressure to resist the press of authoritarianism. It is a never-ending fight, and authoritarianism is on the rise because our underfunded history classes tell us it was already won before we were born (among other reasons).
Call me cynical, but I'm sure the globalist centralist fascist powers of the time will not rest until this law, in one form or another, is passed at EU level and made mandatory for all member states.
I hate this Nazification of the EU so much, that I would support my country leaving the EU the same moment this or similar legislation goes through.
Lucky Brits, at least they can vote out the dumbest and most corrupt politicians and let their laws be enacted by their parliament, and not some international body that claims it has supremacy over national legislation.
> In July, the Council Presidency will transfer from Belgium to Hungary, which has stated its intention to advance negotiations on chat control as part of its work program.
> A prominent theme during the Nazi Party's ascendancy was restoring Germany to its former greatness, and Adolf Hitler used the phrase "make Germany great again" upon occasion.
> What's False
> "Make Germany Great Again" was not a (campaign) slogan employed by Hitler, and Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are far from the only politicians who promised to make their countries "great again."
That’s a good thing. Expanded slogans have object-level meanings. Acronyms just stand as identity markers, and are much easier to dismiss.
It’s harder to argue against “Make America Great Again” or “Black Lives Matter”. Their object-level meanings are fairly anodyne and positive. It’s much easier to argue against “MAGA” or “BLM”, since the meaning is obscured by the acronym.
Political movements with nice slogans should avoid turning them into acronyms.
It's even more ironic when Trump uses it. Like, weren't you supposed to do that 8 years ago? What happened? You didn't do it? Why should we think you'll do it this time?
I mean, I guess it's become like a brand name. But if you think about it for a minute, it's carrying a subtext that Trump failed last time.
It’s doublespeak. Orbán is not interested in making Europe or the EU any stronger, just in extracting as much as he can from it. He only cares about Hungary.
However, it is a signal (we cannot really talk of dog whistle here, it’s rather obvious) to other far-right parties with similar nationalist agenda that he’s on their side. So a better reading might be “make [individual countries in] Europe great again”.
> The EU is a behemoth that absolutely steamrolls smaller countries into submission
Yet curiously Hungary has been allowed to steep down into authoritarianism, and none of Orban's excesses like media or judicial overreaches have been been overiden through submission.
> That sounds fine for the people of Hungary whom he represents. What should he do, roll over and take it from Germany? The EU is a behemoth that absolutely steamrolls smaller countries into submission. But the squeaky wheel gets greased.
Gemany pays shitloads of money into the EU so that places like hungary can benefit. If they feel that's being "steamrolled" into accepting things like the contracts they fucking signed they can fuck back off into irrelevance. As a German tax payer i'd appreciate that very much.
As a German tax payer too, i appreciate very much that Orban does not roll over and take blackmailing* from Brussels regarding the migration crisis and what Hungary will allow regarding its remaining sovereignty.
* "Hungary has been ordered to pay a €200m (£169m) fine for its refusal to uphold the rights of asylum seekers"
Germany as well as other countries should be thankful that Hungary actually built border protections, something you will never see from established centrist parties and bureaucrats.
PS: Money, Power(, Football) - will always be of interest, be it for the Commies or the Righties. Corruption on both sides, it is just a human thing.
Yeah another uneducated take from a new account who'd thought. Hungary is paying thos fines because they currently, actively and willingly violate human right laws.[1] Not because they "build border protections". Even if you want a significantly more strict immigration and asylum law, human rights must be protected.
But that's always the trick of the fascists, First violate the rights of the undesired so you can get people used to it, then violate the rights of the rest.
> Even if you want a significantly more strict immigration and asylum law, human rights must be protected.
Says who? As a Hungarian I never voted for these “human rights” that allows third worlders to waltz through our borders and into our backyards.
If they don’t like being detained at the border they can pound sand and go back to where they came from. We never invited them and they went through several safe countries to get here.
I wonder how much migration would it take for the overwhelming majority to realize that these “ideals” are utterly ridiculous and go against the very idea of statehood. 10 million economic migrants? 50mil? maybe a hundred?
I hope they don't use Hungary as the scapegoat to pass this kind of stuff, the fact that something like Chat Control is even discussed is gross already.
I think Hungary recently has had some spats with the EU so maybe they will use the approval of Chat Control as some sort of trade with something else they want to keep doing.
Die Linke (far left), Greens (left), FDP (socially liberal-ish but economically further right than CDU) and AFD (far right) are against it. SPD (left) is internally conflicted about this topic. CDU (right) is in favour.
So essentially everyone who isn't very into law and order type politics and cares about civil rights is against this, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. This is typical for such issues in Germany.
> So essentially everyone who isn't very into law and order type politics and cares about civil rights is against this, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.
I don't even understand why people never look and understand the history that happened outside of their country. Just the sheer risk of having a society like in the DDR is reason enough to not do stuff like that.
The current government coalition is threatened by the CDU (centre-right), not by Linke (that has almost no voters left) or AfD (who no other party wants to form a coalition with).
The most likely outcome after the next election at this point looks like a coalition between the CDU and the Green party.
Unfortunately, CDU is probably in favour (they're pretty "law and order") and the Greens probably won't care enough to oppose strongly.
Just because somebody is called "president" doesn't mean they enjoy the same privileges as a US president. The presidency of the Council does nothing more than calling for discussions. No extra powers, no extra influence, so whoever is in charge matters way less than they'd like to claim (in this particular case to impress Putin, I would suppose).
I am really fed up of governments constantly trying to pass stuff like this that is clearly a breach of the fundamental principles of human rights. Its also become almost impossible to get governments to adopt sensible positions that don't target certain sub groups to harm them.
Its not really governments, its specifically Ylva Johansson, the commissioner from Sweden who keeps pushing this, every time she does the rest of the EU apparatus slaps her down because it fundamentally won't work.
The Left Party are one of the strongest opponents to Chat Control (and no longer include communism in their party platform). Ylvas actual career has been with the Social Democrats, who are basically the only party strongly for Chat Control.
What is your source that the swedish Left Party voted for chat control yesterday? I haven't read that. Or are you talking about the Social Democrats which is a completely different party?
Every party except Centre Party and Sweden Democrats supported the proposal in the Committee on Justice [1], though Green Party and Left Party later said their support was a mistake [2].
"In the 1988 general elections Johansson was elected as a member of the Riksdag for the Left Party – Communists (VPK). She later left the party and joined the Social Democrats."
I mean in this case the problem isn't realy any of that, its that she has financial and personal links to American organisations (Thorn and Co.) who are in the business of selling this chat monitoring software.
It's these kind of people who really enable the far right to exist as well. Once you get to this level of lunacy, whether it's left or right is irrelevant.
I would argue she is behaving rationally. She has financial interests in organisations which sell chat monitoring software, they're going to make a shittone of money if her laws ever get passed.
She's a standard corrupt slug, not a misinformed ideologist.
Right, we need positive legislation that instead enshrines our rights.
Secrecy of correspondence does not currently extend to phones. But more and more of our life is happening on phones, not on paper. If anything, we need secrecy of correspondence on our phones more!
What really gets me with these types of "safety" proposals is that we already have quite some ways to get someone's private information and communication if they are being investigated. Has everyone forgotten that? All that these wide reaching laws do is to allow for governments to investigate without substantiated reasons.
Chat Control is explicitly a proposal for a new mass surveillance mechanism, not a mechanism for targeted surveillance of a person suspected of a crime.
Yep, same thing in most countries. Their exists a legal method to do it if they can get a warrant.... Or a FISA court order.....or a National Security Letter....or they can get around the need for this via just paying some data company or the company to access your data....
> What really gets me with these types of "safety" proposals is that we already have quite some ways to get someone's private information and communication if they are being investigated
How does that work if I'm using an E2E encrypted messaging app?
> The discussions will resume after the summer, once the new Parliament is seated and Hungary assumes the Council presidency from Belgium in July. Hungary has already committed to developing a comprehensive legislative framework to prevent and combat online child sexual abuse and revising the directive against the sexual exploitation of children.
Such as? Does it have anything to do with what "Chat Control" is about? What does Hungary have anything to do with it?
Chat Control is the main proposal, the following paragraph clearly says that they have until 2026 to agree on what that proposal is going to look like. Hungary has already said that it has plans to continue negotiations.
This outrage is about forceful E2EE monitoring and not letting EU users to view links or images unless they agree to the said monitoring. What happened today puts an end to that for the time being, but it is unlikely to come back.
Hungary is set to fight child grooming and exploitation, that is centralised in a few organisations. Very opposite from global dragnet surveillance to "protect children".
And as post soviet country, they are very strict about privacy laws, and protecting civil rights!
wouldnt trust ANY government, but nothing to indicate they are in any way worse than the current ones, which did after all come up with the abomination that is chat control
Is there any reason this couldn't be made into a right to prevent the constant legislative onslaught? Is it a lack of organisation/will or is it something intrinsic to the way the system is setup?
The right to privacy is in quite a few constitutions. The reason nobody wants to stomp Chat Control for good is because of how it has been framed: it’s to protect the children. Parents are fiercely protective, and I suspect that for a majority of them, mass surveillance and a police state is not too high a price to pay for the safety of their little ones.
More "democracy", where you must win every time and the issue will keep coming up again and again, but if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed.
There are certain protections against the government of the day taking away fundamental rights with a simple majority. In the EU, these constitutional principles are enshrined in the treaties that can only be changed unanimously.
On that basis, the highest EU court (CJEU) has ruled several times that mass surveillance is unlawful. Governments are still trying to find a way around these protections, but it's not a certainty that whatever ultimately passes parliament will hold up in court.
What you failed to mention was that the rulings against data retention for example which were indeed invalidated by the European court happened 8 years after the fact.
So what do we do for 8 years while the courts decide which side is right?
Several replies say passing and repealing legislation (and regulation) is technically symmetrical. Who really thinks that's more than technically true?
And this is the main problem. Lawmakers and corporate/nonprofit/activist groups (who write bills for them) just repeatedly abuse the system in violation of unwritten democratic norms to get their way. I see this over and over where I’ve lived (blue states), for example with unconstitutional gun control laws that rely on exhausting opponents or waiting for them to not pay attention. The worst are when they submit bills with no text and substitute the text in at the last minute (so no one can oppose it earlier) with a late night weekend vote soon after. Or when they label everything an emergency measure (which makes it immune to reversal from voter initiatives in some states).
Which is why laws should be made through legislation, not judicial fiat. The majority in Dobbs v. Jackson made it very clear that a law requiring the same principle as Roe v. Wade would be legitimate.
Can you think of literally any law in modern times that granted a government significant power, yet was proactively reversed (as opposed to the handful of laws that were made with time limitations and allowed to expire)?
I think - with 5G warfare being what it is - that we need to go more granular. Democracy is a given when information is a weapon [1]. What kind of democracy serves our interests best?
I like the theory behind liquid direct myself, but it would need extensive field testing before it's the de facto governance model for, say, Mars.
Have you talked with the average voter? Most don't even know (or care) who their representatives are. Direct democracy works for small countries with high education and social cohesion, like Switzerland. And even there it's only used for specific hot issues like pensions.
direct liquid democracy still has vote delegation, it's just possible to reassign your vote in real time. Representatives vote on issues based on how many people assign them their vote, but people can reassign their vote any time.
I actually favor something with a more Bayesian twist that I haven't heard a catchy name for, where I could delegate my vote to different people depending on the subject up for debate. Essentially fantasy sports but for cabinet ministers. That would also be good because someone I trust on most issues might delegate both our votes to someone they defer to in a particular field without me needing to study whose expertise I trust in that field. If someone's heard of a name for that system I'd be interested to hear it. Hard to research innovation in a field when you don't know the buzzwords.
I think the names of systems is largely secondary to what's happening within those systems. James Madison has an excellent quote on this: "The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Your parent comment is alluding to how "we" have to win every time (the proposal is made) but "they" only have to win once (because once surveillance exists its extremely hard to undo).
Thats not democracy. Democracy isn't one side wins - it's the means by which societies balance the needs and contributions of everyone. Valuing the "needs" of spy agencies and corporations over the rights of natural people is the opposite of democracy.
It's not called democracy, democracy just means rule by commoners (the demos.) It's called parliamentary democracy. And there are not only many alternatives, but also multiple types of parliamentary democracies, of which the EU is just one.
I'm wondering if at this point its more of an autocracy of systems. And whilst you can vote for the top layer that (nominally?) governs the system/institution, the system itself is permanent and continuous.
This mechanism would be prone to abuse: a group that opposes a particular issue could effectively time that issue out to prevent a replacement group from pursuing it.
The adage about “being the worst system except for all the other ones” applies well here: your (and my) participation in democracy is a required component, not just a nice thing to have. Devising hacks around our participation will ultimately result in a system that doesn’t allow our participation.
The mechanism is for people to vote for representatives who don't bring up those issues every year or two. The problem is that people just vote along party lines, and then vote for incumbents within those party lines. Without the threat of losing their office, politicians have no incentive to change their behavior from year to year.
Think about how your suggestion would work for other topics, like crime, immigration, social services, etc. It would undermine the government's ability to respond quickly to changes in the external world. It's not worth doing that over this one issue, when the real solution is to just vote for better candidates.
This law is going to pass at some point. They started this crap 4 years ago with Chat Control 1.0 and they won't stop trying.
This is pure madness.
I have decided I am not going to wait around to be spied upon by the EU so I am going set up my own server and move to FOSS IOS/Android clients since these ones are currently exempted from the draft.
The hardest part will be to convince friends and family to move over though.
The EU presidency doesn't have executionary powers like the US presidency. It can set up meetings and topics for discussion but can't enforce or shoot them down.
While I still believe it's mainly about attention seeking and remaining the topic of discussions on the part of the EU, which is not an easy task yet as such mildly effective as we see again, one could get the feeling there's somehow more to it. Like a collusion, however tacit or pragmatic, that would in general work both ways but in this case so as to provide national governments an opportunity to make a few extra points from time to time, (mainly) on domestic ground, and to look prudent or generous, at least to certain groups of voters. In this case a benefaction to the unlikely German "critics" in particular. Its ruling coalition certainly is desperate for it. For anything really. I already had this feeling years ago when we were wearing ourselves out on the darned question of so-called "upload-filters" amid the entire EU copyright law issue. What even became of it? Well, due to ultimately national implementation and copious room for legal interpretation, at least in Germany not much. A kind of nothingburger in fact, certainly relative to to the racket that went before, or shall we say, was supposed to go before. Back at the time it made (then) Merkel's big-coalition government suddenly look a little sunnier. To be blunt, it feels rather artificial to me and I don't expect anything like it being supposed to actually transpire no matter what. That is even without considering how unclear matters of technical realization remain, even if you've seen all the polito-pseudotechnical BS bingo there is to see at the moment. Like, how to even enforce client-side scanning when applications (or OS) are free software? It's just rubbish, and supposedly can be as no one never seriously planned for anything like it. But why not just talk the big talk about it? Maybe it helps. A few very optimistic quarters may even hope for some sort of (shallow) deterrence effect. For a bit of ruffling and scaring up the evil agents. Good luck as for that one.
You can’t vote Council Members out of office. The council is made up of the heads of state for each member country. Depending on the exact flavour of democracy your state operates, will determine if their role is directly elected or not. There are many countries where the head state isn’t directly elected, and even where they are directly elected, there many more pressing national issues that make other candidates even more unsavoury.
This is not correct. At least in most (did not check every country) countries that do not directly elect the head of state, the head of government (who is directly elected) is the council member instead.
Edit: of the 27 council members who are the representatives of their respective countries, only 4 are heads of state (all of them directly elected), the other 23 are heads of government, who are directly elected.
Even heads of government are often not directly elected. Plenty of parliamentary democracies select their head of government based on which ever party got the most votes, and thus their leader becomes the head of government.
In Germany for example you don’t vote for the chancellor directly, you vote for local politicians and nation wide parties, and the winning party or coalition then decides who becomes the head of government. But at no point is there a direct vote to choose the chancellor.
Well, technically you can, just not through EU institutions. Chances are the current French members, for example, will not be there for the next round of Council votes.
Being a constructive part of a democracy is not just standing in the way of every change without budging. It's also about solving problems and finding solutions. Most social and technological issues will not just magically go away if you wait and ignore them to the best of your ability.
I believe standing in the way of mass surveillance is always constructive for democracy. Spying on the private communications of nearly every person is fundamentally incompatible with a free and democratic society.
And, notably, in any kind of government, a group with temporary political power will naturally want to optimize for the preservation of that power. A dampening function that resists rapid change, and specifically resists things like mass surveillance that can distort democratic processes, is a feature, not a bug.
What's even worse would be enforcing the wrong solution that will cause more damage. The French have a saying, fuite en avant (lit. escape forwards) when someone insists on doing something knowing full well that it will not work but they do it anyways because it's better than inaction.
Considering the rise of the far right in the last EU elections, anyone who's seriously considering weakening public encryption must be out of their minds.
child abuse is not a technological issue, but a societal one. Child abuse won't stop or even be reduced by running a hash lookup or an AI model prediction before every single time a picture is sent in a chat platform. It will just introduce a new layer of complexity that bad actors can abuse.
That is a general statement that does not apply here. This "solution" would have created tens of thousands of false positives, which means the victims, even if not prosecuted, would have been put on an observation list for life.
The "solution" would have been abused for other surveillance or been used as a rationale for even more surveillance.
It is a social issue that does not have technical solutions. The worst abuse cases (like the horrific Regensburg Dome boys choir case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/18/boys-abused-ge...) occurred before the Internet. If the EU is so interested in the issue, how about prosecuting known cases instead of a half apology. Chat Control could have done exactly nothing here.
The point is adding a centralized control structure in front of E2E encrypted traffic fundamentally undermines the principals that make E2E work. It creates a massive centralized point of failure, creating an obvious and fundamentally brittle target for hackers to exploit in what's otherwise our only effective privacy and security measures.
There will always be tradeoffs between security/privacy and enforcement. There are ways to target harmful content without undermining E2E. There is no way to replace the privacy and security guarantees of E2E.
There is nothing technologically that you can do to permanently stop CSAM on the internet technically or legally, they will find a way technically to put it out there. Certainly sacrificing all privacy for a half billion people isn’t the way to go about it. It would seem that it’s a societal moral/mental health problem that causes this, as long as that persists then CSAM will exist and they will always find a new underground network for it.
The problem you're hinting at being what? The fact that people use messengers to coordinate crimes?
You might wanna consider that the people you critique here already weighed the pros and cons of the question. E.g. I am pretty convinced some crimes are also discussed in European bedrooms while people have sex. Yet for some reason I believe the police should not be allowed to spy and listen to things happening in every bedroom indiscriminately.
In a world of AI you either have private communications or you don't. In the analog world of the past surveillance systems were still limited by the number of people you had to employ to listen in on your population. This is no longer the case. And that no longer being the case shifts the power dynamic between the state and its citizens in favour of the state. This can be a real problem if you you trust your state, but becomes a terrible problem once you have people in power who don't believe the people are entitled to choosing their leaders.
I don't buy that police is suddenly unable to figure out crimes just because they are unable to read every conversation people have on messengers. If you want total safety and you're so frigthened of the world that you long for a all powerful leader that has insight into all our lives, I got bad news. Historically that kind of arrangment hasn't been particularily safe or stable, because such a leader doesn't care about people doing a good job, he cares about having loyal people around him. And that means all the lower ranking people will be left to fight among themselves, as police is no longer doing the job of keeping people safe, but the job of keeping governments safe.
Our democratic systems are brittle and every power you give to the state or other actors needs to be considered in its consequences.
> The EU Council did not make a decision on chat control today, as the agenda item was removed due to the lack of a majority, confirmed by Council and member state spokespersons
Wait so does it mean they will only propose when they have chance to pass? Is it just me or here is something really wrong with this? It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?
That's how EU politics works. There is no sense of officially voting on something if it is clear from previous negotiations that it will not pass. With only 27 members, the counting usually is done well in advance and the final vote is showing that agreement has been reached. If someone votes against, it is for pr purposes, because if they are really against it, they have a veto right.
No, it means that those who want it did not manage to trade enough compromises on other topics to those who don't want it or do not oppose it at least. If let's say a french economy sector benefits from policy A while a polish sector might lose from it, and Romania is neutral. In such a situation France might promise Poland their support for policy B which is beneficial for the pols, and they might promise a smaller favor to Romania to make them form the majority. If the pols are unhappy with the trade, they will bid for Romania's support against policy A. The show is funnier with 27 participants and fields that span through dozens of policies and over decades.
That's why we cannot have nice things. The stuff that worked with a dozen members didn't work as well with twice the participants (some of them with little respect for compromise - which is effectively the founding value the whole Union apparatus is based on). Removing veto powers in the Council was the only way to ensure things could keep getting done.
Note this was done through treaty amendments, which were agreed by all participants.
It's how any sovereign body must work. Putting something to a vote and failing demonstrates weakness, so it's avoided. And the body cannot be bound in deliberation. (Else it's not sovereign, but a vassal of whoever sets the agenda.)
Mostly agree, but often parliaments are a place to make a point to the observing voters and some things are proposed with the full knowledge that they will be rejected. The proposer though turns to the public and says: "I made a promise and I deliver, but the other side is stopping us from implementing it. So, please, vote for me next time in grater numbers to give me the ability to pass it the second time." Also, when you have a bigger assembly, last minute twists happen for unexpected reasons like a coalition partner deciding to screw their partners and ruin their agenda.
> It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?
Not really. Besides, how would that work? Wouldn’t a new law proposal be just that, a new proposal to be debated and voted on, even if its intent or wording is similar to a previous rejected proposal? Is there any country with the equivalent of dismissal with prejudice for new laws?
A constitution kinda is that - limits on what laws the country can make. Maybe there should be another softer but automatic mechanism though. For example you could increase the required consensus for passing laws with similar goals to those that that have failed recently.
> A constitution kinda is that - limits on what laws the country can make.
Right, but constitutional changes can be unmade or superseded. Even in a notoriously conservative country like the US, constitutional amendments are repealed on occasion. And a lot of other countries’ constitutions get complete overhauls every now and then, at which point the details of the previous constitution cease to matter. So the fact that something gets to the constitution does not mean that nobody can discuss it, ever, it just changes the process of doing it.
I don’t know if any country where a draft law is rejected because it was too similar to another failed proposal. Although I wouldn’t put past the English having something like that in a dusty corner of their constitutional hodgepodge.
> does it mean they will only propose when they have chance to pass?
This is typically how legislative bodies work--it's why vote counting is an essential component of whipping. (Sorry, American political terminology.)
> It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?
I have never seen a way to do this proposed that doesn't have horrific side effects. (One, who decides which issues are too similar to previously-mooted ones. Two, how do you avoid one side deliberately "spoiling" an issue to prevent the other from taking action on it in the future.)
The best you can do is require a total process re-start each time. That doesn't prevent reintroduction, but it adds significant cost and delay.
> I have never seen a way to do this proposed that doesn't have horrific side effects
There's some sort of fetishism of systems and technology on the internet and especially in technical forums like HN where people have this idea that technical solutions can fix social issues
Governance systems have mostly been unchanged at their core for the past 100-200 years and people are under the impression that makes them somewhat antiquated so we definitely can fix this with some good code and automated judging.
It helps that that's much easier than having to accept the responsibility of being involved and proactively interested in the work of institutions which most people find boring and not worth the effort to learn about
> Governance systems have mostly been unchanged at their core for the past 100-200 years
I actually disagree with this notion. We had three big spurts of new-country formation in the last 100 years: after WWI, after WWII/decolonisation and after the collapse of the USSR. I'd argue we've been better each time around at creating a larger fraction of resilient governments.
> easier than having to accept the responsibility of being involved
> I'd argue we've been better each time around at creating a larger fraction of resilient governments.
Looking at the state of a lot of ex-USSR countries, I'd say this is not correct. Quite a few of them ended up as dictatorships. If anything, I would argue the immediate post-WWII was an apex of democratic creation that we are unlikely to match any time soon.
I'm definitely with you on your first statement, but
> The best you can do is require a total process re-start each time. That doesn't prevent reintroduction, but it adds significant cost and delay.
Democracy is not all about efficiency. In fact it is important that these costs are added, especially for passing new laws.
As it is in IT Security, there is always DoS Potential if the defender has to do more work than the attacker. As such the one proposing a new law must be seen as the attacker and it is important that he must do a significant more amount of work than the defender.
An example where this fails, also for the EU legislative, are the various Safe Harbor Agreements with the US and their corresponding Schrems judgements. They all passed more than easily and Schrems needed years to fight against their unjustice. As a result the EU had many years under an unsound law.
I think there is much potential to improve the democratic institutions of the EU and not being able to withdraw a proposal (or maybe only in extraordinary circumstances) would be one of them.
Thanks for the clarification. Misread that it's something unwanted.
In my opinion filibustering would only be a problem, if there are no speech limits. As far as I'm aware of the internal workings of the EU institutions there are tight schedules and every member has limited speech time and the vote is set on a fixed date.
And as I stated, there should also be exceptions which allow for a withdrawal. It just shouldn't be as easy as: Let's withdraw until I got a stable majority.
Stable and flexible legislative sure is an important thing in democracy, but there must also be some kind of disruptive process to correct and the MPs should only be bound to their own conscience at the end of the process.
Could you maybe elaborate a bit further how this would enable filibustering?
The best way to do this is via constitutional protection that can't be overridden by ordinary law. The EU has a de-facto a constitution in the form of the ECHR and the various treaties, which do protect fundamental rights, but there are so many caveats on those rights that a carefully worded law always risks slipping through.
"... The proposal will return to the drawing board, as the European Commission and the European Parliament continue to deliberate on the best way forward."
I am always fascinated by the hubris bureaucrats have.
Ah, so I won't just have all of private conversations monitored for no reason at birth, oh wait, but what about those 40 cameras that are on every residential street owned by Amazon and Google?
I'd rather have a public camera in my bedroom than a recording of every conversation I've ever had with anyone stored and searchable by governments, police, and the inevitable dark scammer for all eternity.
That is not to say that cameras everywhere aren't dystopian. But their existence doesn't undermine the added danger of chat control.
This will be very unpopular with the HN crowd, please please bear with me.
I really like e2e-encrypted communication. I also think that in the past decades, in general, most policies have erred too far on surveillance and too little on privacy
BUT
I also think that CSAM material on e2ee channels is a real problem.
If we, as the pro-privacy tech community don't come up with solutions, we'll lose the battle, eventually.
There'll come up a case of child exploitation or trafficing, somehow related to encrypted chats, and it'll be so horrific that the public will be swayed to action, and then what are the options? Is there any option besides client-side scanning or the end of e2ee?
Maybe you should stop thinking that this is a technical problem to be solved. It is a problem with society, that these people can exist.
You could just as well ban sharp knives, so that no one can be stabbed anymore. After that you would still live in a world where people get killed and we all use butterknives to cut our bread.
Hungary is next in line for presidency and wants Chat Control pretty bad. Who says that these Scanners can only be used to look for CSAM? I’m pretty sure the Hungarian government is also interested in people sending pride flags. Let’s see how that works out…
CSAM material existed long before the internet existed and it will continue to exist no matter what laws or "technical solutions" you come up with. E2EE simply is another way sick people try to avoid detection.
Just like most people on this site would be outraged if the police or other government authorities decided they the right to search your home or person at any time without cause, so should they be outraged at the idea that governments should have the right to go through any of your communications whenever they want.
If you want to solve the problem the focus should be on figuring out why people make and share CSAM and how to get them the treatment they need and to ensure that they're not put in a position where they have the opportunity to produce this type of material.
What happened to “the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer”? For the very minority of criminals, should literally everyone suffer? When it comes to private information at the hands of power, the suffering occurs as "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes."[0]
My main concern is that the actual criminals will always find a way around those measures. They're more motivated than anyone to gain the technical expertise to do so. And I use the term expertise loosely here.
For example, from what I've read this proposal was about scanning images and URL's, not text (for now). But it's not hard to split up an URL in several pieces so that the regex doesn't recognise the set of strings as an URL anymore, it'll just be plaintext which won't get scanned. And it's also not hard to send pictures as base64 encoded text, which again would fall outside of the scanning scope.
In my opinion, as with many of these measures, you end up hurting the innocent, the criminals will be fine with (semi) technical workarounds, and we end up on that way too slipperty slope of mass-deployed surveillance for nothing.
Technical measures can and will be circumvented, always, by those motivated to do so. And if you're a CSAM criminal and your prospect is going to prison tagged as a child molester, I imagine your motivation is as high as it gets.
I don't think there's a technical solution to this.
Ever more child porn is generated mechanically, without any real child suffering. It is much safer for the producers to use AI instead.
Most countries in the world consider AI-generated child porn illicit, but some don't, and it would be worth rethinking the difference. Once there is no human victim whose rights were violated, a major reason for banning such images disappears, and only vague reasons remain: either that it could stimulate consumers to act in reality (which is a wobbly theory), or that it is disgusting.
And it will always crash against the financial interests that want online commerce and banking to work. And so it will always fail in the end, because we can't kill our economy in order to catch more criminals.
We will keep repeating this cycle. Around and around the merry go round we go.