Petition against EU chat control
stopscanningme.eu
stopscanningme.eu
This will never stop with “protecting the children”. Very shortly they’ll start asking why we wouldn’t use the same technology against terrorism. don’t you want to be safe are you supporting terrorists that will say.
The problem with terrorism is that it’s very easy for everyone to be categorized as a terrorist(notice how much many terrorists there is than terror attacks), and this needs very very wide access and total control over the public.
Having at least some experience with international police orgs, I can say that significant resources are dedicated to online crime (including CSAM) and their 'lived reality' is very much expending significant resources because e2e prevents low-cost surveillance.
So the attack line that 'none of this is sincere' is actively unhelpful -- since so much of it is sincere, it comes across at best naïve.
A better line, imv, is this: assume present goverments are entirely sincere. It doesnt matter. We cannot know the intentions of future governments. And we have good reasons to suppose that governments, in general, require extraordinary systems of checks-and-balances to be prevented from abuse of power.
So I'd advise not attacking people who are, very often, actually thinking of the children -- you're just antagonising the people in power. Rather, invite them to help you defend the liberal order of individual human rights that prevent state abuse of power. As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.
Enabling state abuse of power has a far far higher negative outcome than marginal increases to the difficulty of policing some crimes. In many cases, police agencies can find ways into criminal networks and can access messages using traditional policing.
A better rhetorical strategy here is supporting policing, providing significant additional tech expert resources to police, significant funding for 'online detectives' -- whilst at the same time explaining the high risk against mass state incursion into all aspects of our lives.
I think it's fairly well-evidenced by history that there are many mechanisms by which states 'backslide' into abuse (indeed, that's the term used today).
Human rights are an invention of liberal states, hard won, against state power -- why have any at all?
In the case of encryption, when you design it broken, it is broken for everyone.
So when you assume to spy on “criminals” (which could be some gay guy you want to put to death), you need to assume that they can spy on you as well (North Korea looking at Interpol).
They simply don't understand the implications of what they are doing. They should involve more technologically savvy privacy experts.
Those people are basically never acting on incompetence, or on competence for that matter. And stop trying to make excuses for people caught in malicious acts again and again.
There is such thing as wilful ignorance, as Aristotle condemned it millennia ago, and it is morally reprehensible.
Those involved with CSAM et al are competent as well in their field, but don’t realize they are the pawn they are.
The politicians though, sure, incompetent. No politician in the United States has an engineering degree, for example. So they are stupid enough to follow what someone tells them. Stupidity and fear and wonderful in others if you have an agenda.
Snowden's "turnkey tyranny"-argument is okay but requires specific knowledge and imagines things that haven't happened which therefor is open to interpretation.
I think the only real way to prevent something like this is to provide an alternative but that is also unlikely since it implies responsibility which the tech industry doesn't like.
There will always be other platforms that provide secure communication for sharing illegal files. Massive collection of child porn sounds perfect for potential consumers.
Also, most of child abuser's are among people that are not strangers to victims, so they don't even need IM for communication.
Look up this guy Snowden and the secret surveillance and rubber-stamping courts he exposed. So much for checks and balances lol.
Yes, good police work costs money. Considering the importance of child sex abuse this shouldn't be an issue. And how effective do they think this is going to be? Obviously once a few people are caught the pedos are going to find another way of sharing their filth. Either offline or more obscure apps. Meaning the old police work like infiltration will be necessary again. Meanwhile us citizens end up with surveillance forever.
It's not going to help the children, it's only going to make life worse for everyone.
> So I'd advise not attacking people who are, very often, actually thinking of the children -- you're just antagonising the people in power. Rather, invite them to help you defend the liberal order of individual human rights that prevent state abuse of power. As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.
I doubt that. The US has done exactly that already since 2001. It's pretty clear to me that Europe just wants to follow suit. The boys want their toys.
And they are antagonising us obviously. What I don't understand is how they themselves want to live in a society where their every word is being monitored.
The first duty of a government is to preserve the existence of the state (incl. society, etc.) -- when faced with apparent existential threats, they often severely overreact.
Very few people's intentions here are to 'monitor' every word of every citizen -- this is really a strange, i think quite naive, misreading of the situation. That might be the net consequence, to some degree, but basically no one involved intends it.
And if you go around thinking this, and accusing people of it, I don't think you're going to be very effective.
Rather each person involved is just laser focused on preventing existential threats to the state. Secret police, and so on, even arent a real attempt to monitor citizens -- theyre just to prevent a rebellion, ie., an existential threat.
Large scale online crime is a threat to the state -- mass organised crime, new digital mafias etc. present a rival to the state's monopoly on violence, and it has a duty to prevent this from happening. Almost 'at all costs'.
If it were ever to be that online life became sufficiently unmonitorable that mass organisation of criminal networks were made possible, we'd really not be talking about 'privacy' at all -- see, for example, developing nations where this is status quo.
I suspect the reality is that we're rich enough to support a basically effecitve police force, and most importantly, not to have large pools of desperate young people with no jobs. This is really what enables us to make these demands for rights.
The logic of state action is basically well-motivated, even if it has to be prevented for the high negative concequences it may have.
None of those options make me think informing them of the the error of their ways will yield any fruit.
I've signed petitions like these in the past, accomplished nothing other than getting harrassed with endless mail on other NGO "causes" to support.
Then why aren't they working in the caring for kids who've been abused? THAT's the infastructure that need more resources, and they bloody hell know it. Finding CSAM is not what needs more resources.
Her name is Ylva Johansson, a swedish politician, and she seems to have rather questionable morals and ethics.
[1]: https://twitter.com/YlvaJohansson/status/1712840885870698945
You mean https://geti2p.net?
It's a cat and mouse attempt to identify who is doing what and to "stop the terroists".. it ends up that bad people just end up getting sim mules to register sims.
Edit: I know that's a pretty harsh and aggressive thing to say, but it's a protest against an police action that was forced upon people without consent.
The fact that we treat groups with 10.000 people on chat with the same level of privacy as 1:1 or 100 people seems like an unreasonable thing from a harm prevention alternative.
There’s enough nuance in hanging out with your closest friends and acquaintances in private manners but not applying the same to 10.000 people.
From a harm prevention perspective that would slow down the proliferation of material and distribution vectors a lot while maintaining practical privacy for 90% of usecases.
Not just sign this petition, electorally punish every party and politician pushing this.
However I doubt this will help. The relevant politicians have already been paid off.