EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption
patrick-breyer.de
patrick-breyer.de
the European Parliament’s position removes indiscriminate chat control and allows only for a targeted surveillance of specific individuals and groups reasonably suspicious of being linked to child sexual abuse material, with a judicial warrant. End-to-end encrypted messengers are exempted. In detail, our position will protect young people and victims of abuse much more effectively than the EU Commission’s extreme proposal:
At the same time, we are pulling the following poisonous teeth out of the EU Commission’s extreme bill:Regulations are complete laws applicable immediately across the EU as they stand, the states are required to amend any conflicting law but the regulations already automatically prevail on any conflicting local law.
Directives instead need to be transposed into local law by each state individually, and can leave many details to the individual implementations.
What makes this story special is how blatantly bribable the commission must be to make them spit out this proposal.
Here's an article in German about the sketchy dealings of the commissioner in question. Apparently, Ashton Kutcher (who's the main lobbying force behind this - how did that happen???), got a meeting with her confirmed 37 minutes after requesting it, while emails from privacy advocates continue being ignored.
It's relatively common for lobby groups to hire known public faces to front for their interests .. a celebrity face can open a door to a meeting that might not otherwise happen.
It works both ways, celebrities will often hit a point in their careers where they start to look for a good noble cause to front for in order to keep their name and face in the public eye and aligned with <insert feel good values>.
For the historians that like to trace the roots of things the test would be whether this is a lobby and cause that was bought into being by its star face, or did it kick around for a few years before being bought to the attention of a star by their PR people and agents.
I think that it is a good example of why voting for Pirate party representative might make a difference with law changes designed to help citizens.
The "publicly addressable" part is feasible and already implemented by many messengers.
Asking for "confirmation before sending contact details" is feasible but easily circumvented as is my mail is joe at example dot com.
Asking for "confirmation before sending [...] nude pictures" is where it gets interesting. How without scanning every file one is about to share?
I’m pretty confident this is a task where LLMs will shine.
About circumvention, one could think about a way to detect contact details in messages. There are several problems with that.
1. If it warns the sender, the sender will try another way until the obfuscated contact passes unnoticed (text, image, vocal, link, whatever.)
2. If it automatically reports the sender there will be many false positives, some due to copy and paste, keyboard autocompletion, etc.
3. We're back to automatic spying of people.
It seems like a lot of money went into making this get to the vote. My impression is that lobbyists have worked for this through the European commission - which is distasteful as it should never have been proposed. But it never stood a chance in the parliament. There seems to be checks and balances.
I have to credit the great work of people like Patrick Breyer and everyone who has demonstrated and organized across the EU these last months. Passivity leads to the worst outcomes.
And perhaps the lower public mindshare might help insulate against people with ambitions but not people's best interest at heart. Or this is crazy talk, not sure which one it is :)
The EU shifted power from voters to larger groups with particular interests. Those groups have the resources to address people in Brussels, while voters have more or less no voice or impact.
This is a structural problem.
This is a typical strategy and people fall for it every time because they have not reflected on their own position.
This isn't a win for democracy at all, it is still pushed top down by the EU. They still push for unique internet IDs, even if they say they protect anonymous access for now.
EU Chat Control Bill Postponed
The post linked is about the Council (think US senate or Bundesrat) not having enough votes to pass the text (they're still looking for internal compromises)
This post is about the European Parliament's committee examining the draft (well, one of the 5, but LIBE is the lead one)
From the bottom of the article:
> The EU Parliament’s civil liberties committee is due to confirm the agreement on 13 November.
> 20 November 2023: Announcement in plenary (likely no vote on substance)
> 4 December 2023: Envisaged Adoption of Partial General Approach by EU Council (tbc)
> after 2024 EU elections: Envisaged trilogue negotiations of the final text of the legislation between Commission, Parliament and Council, as well as adoption of the result
What does "exclude" mean in this context? Should client-side scanning be allowed or not?
That's up to you if it "should" (personally, no, horrible most likely illegal idea)
Patrick has been a pretty vocal opponent of the draft so if he's content that's good