EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
stackdiary.com
stackdiary.com
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.
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.
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
*If the criminals would stop using encryption now that it's banned. Alas, criminals sometimes break laws
It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively in the Belgian elections about two weeks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.
[1] https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/fel-privacyprotes...
[2] https://www.demorgen.be/snelnieuws/verlinden-buigt-voor-luid...
> 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.-
Yeah this is the main thing
I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think it's more that most people don't care about the value of privacy.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_theory_of_voting
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.
(And, sadly, it might serve to combat "semantic satiation" and reinvigorate now oft-bandied-about terms that are losing meaning)
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.
They Don't Know vs. They Don't Care.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, like much of everything, only once you lose it ...
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.
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.
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.
The solution is to remove guns/lobbyists, not attempting to beat them at their own game because you will absolutely lose.
If you do not, then the best you can do is to learn to play the game as best you can, so that at least you won't lose quite so badly.
It's like asking what can you do about parliamentarians elected in other districts.
For example, US policy has quite a lot of influence on me, but I can't vote for US politicians. Or Russian policy, for that matter.
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.
In practise, that means she's supported by all except one of the relevant Swedish parties.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.dn.se/sverige/interna-chattar-motbevisar-mps-utt... (swedish news article about it).
Isn't it kinda late to act?
I'll give you that it's not a terribly strong signal.
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.
This is the site where we can see who voted what in the parlement: https://howtheyvote.eu/
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.
Half of politics is who shows up.
This is how they voted last time, voting against is voting for privacy
There's nobody to vote for.
I looked at how Parliament voted on the AI act.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/166051
Basically everyone voted for it.
You linked to the European Parliament vote, and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
>and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
The one I linked is the AI act.
Member countries are represented in the council by representative of their government and EU citizens in the parliament by MEPs they voted for.
You can get quite a bit of data, what are you looking for?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the Commission pushes, it's because the Council told it to push.
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.
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
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
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.
There may be more than one reason, but yesterday Germany said they'd vote against the proposal so it was DOA.
But there are too many interests to make it in, sadly.
Not that they didn't pass any shitty laws, but that the question "how can this be misused?" always was present.
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.
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".
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.
I can’t remember a single lesson which didn’t cover one of those themes.
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.
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.
Yeah. When I think of the US and freedom, the first thing that comes to mind is "The country where you're not even allowed to cross the road."
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.
https://www.bmuv.de/themen/verbraucherschutz/digitaler-verbr...
https://www.impressum-generator.de/2016/11/impressumspflicht...
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.
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.
We'll see how it goes but it's hard to say what the result will be purely based on the elections results.
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.
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.
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.
It was a sneaky try anyways, right after the election.
If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?
I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074
> 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.
Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.
(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).-
The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages.
I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.
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 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.
Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Her tenure as minister had been pretty underwhelming, notable only for her ineptitude.
Orban and his government spent a huge amount of time and effort, making private communications LESS liberal and more difficult to speak freely.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/02/13/i-cant-do-my-job-journ...
Also, I will leave here some recommended reading on the topic:
> Hungarian journalists and critics of Orbán were targeted with Pegasus, a powerful Israeli cyberweapon
https://telex.hu/direkt36/2021/07/19/pegasus-nso-hungary-vik...
https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-da...
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.
The more authority you take on, the LESS privacy you should receive. That is how you balance authority.
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/leak-eu-interior-ministers-...
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.
(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.)
At least I can contact my local legislators to campaign against it here.
Does American law apply globally if it says it does, absent any treaty making it so?
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.
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.
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.
Except when the one running and renting out the server is Microsoft, Amazon, or some other US entity and the Patriot Act exists.
I’d have a different opinion about my service if I were hosting my server on Hetzner in Helsinki. Since I’m not, I don’t.
I'd say that is rather very relevant.
The Patriot Act is the foremost frontier in the ongoing dispute about the so-called Privacy Shield.
The GDPR explicitly permits "processing [as] necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject" in Article 6.
Right to be forgotten still applies, there is just some limited data that will still be kept.
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.
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.)
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.
Out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of incompatibilities?
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.
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.
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....?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...
Hypotheticals in tech pretty much always come true in the end. And especially fast these days.
The world is gearing up for something, and personally I smell a global war and a reshuffling of world powers in my lifetime.
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.
[1] https://www.thorn.org/solutions/for-platforms/
Their website lists oracle, slack, ancestry.com and others
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.
The chat scanning stuff isn't a realistic proposal either for its intended purpose or for spying, it's just grifting.
As indicated in that article, the UK kinda sucks, so, like, don’t go there. Whatever, they don’t have any good beaches anyway.
Sadly outside summer the weather is usually to bad for them to be worth enjoying, but in summer they're pretty nice.
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.
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.
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.
I’d simply delete them, no problem.
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.
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.)
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.
Foreign national hackers are arrested all over the western world for offenses in other countries, for instance.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/17/navalny-g...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-india-sikh-activist-kil...
If you descentralize, you democratize.-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it is called "war".
And the worst part is most of the internet have been cheering it on
Believing that all legislative issues can be solved that way is a fallacies. But some issues can totally be solved (or routed around) this way.
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.
I really really wish Mastodon had E2E messaging. Non-techies are using it today. I’d much rather get my sibling set up on that.
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.
> 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
Anecdotally, ever since they dropped this feature, I have seen a significant reduction in Signal use among my own contacts.
Only the US and some dictatorships seem to do that.
If google don’t want to be subject to the gdpr they don’t have to do business in europe.
Howver their business is abusing the data of eu citizens, while getting other eu citizens to pay them for it.
> 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?
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?
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.
¹ https://itif.org/publications/2022/09/19/how-the-eu-is-using...
² https://www.ft.com/content/9edea4f5-5f34-4e17-89cd-f9b9ba698...
³ https://www.politico.eu/article/european-protectionism-trade...
Also, it is better than pro-business govt, that only acts if their lobbyists like it.
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.
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.
Or if someone slips up.
Or if it gets bundled with something everyone is really afraid of just right (see also the patriot act)
You're talking about a legislative process. In the EU. This would require months if not years of repeated slipping up.
To the Commission passing it. More steps before it’s law.
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).
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Let's keep doing that.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
There are pardons by the German president, but I'd guess they don't happen on that scale.
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.
That does not make me very hopeful.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/18/europe/hungary-make-europ...
Ironic considering that "Let's Make America Great Again" was Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980.
> 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."
He kinda succeeded…
And Make Britain Great Again is so much better than America/Europe/literally anything that doesn't have great in its name
I see no joy
I see only sorrow
I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow
So stand down Margaret
Stand down pleaseIt’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.
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.
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”.
Belgium proposed the damn thing.
A lot of Germans still remember the Stazi, so its pretty unlikely that this shit is going to pass.
Both the far left and right in Germany are against this, correct?
There are obvious historical reasons why they shouldn't try far-right, race-based politics, yet here we are [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/rise-germanys-most-succ...
We never learn (long-term) from the past.
they are neither far left/right
Are Linke and AfD are for chat control? They're by whom the coalition is being threatened.
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.
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.
That does not apply to the afd.
We're not sending our best!
/Swede in the US
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!
How does that work if I'm using an E2E encrypted messaging app?
"Every time a message goes from X to Y, suddenly Y does (thing) a day later"
And then investigate from there.
Such as? Does it have anything to do with what "Chat Control" is about? What does Hungary have anything to do with it?
And as post soviet country, they are very strict about privacy laws, and protecting civil rights!
Hungary is going after the catholic church?
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.
Check out this:
But at the same time Hungary loathes the EU. If anything, they are doing it for the money, no?
Presidency over the EU council rotates every half year. The presidency sets the agenda. In July Hungary will take over.
Hungary, with a less democratic government is interested in control infrastructure, thus likely to push such an initiative.
We must win every time...
The same dynamics govern passage as reversal. You keep trying until they slip up.
Why? It's normal legislation, it can be repealed the same way it's passed.
The EU doesn't pass legislation trough it's supreme court.
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.
So what do we do for 8 years while the courts decide which side is right?
Abortion got reversed recently.
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.
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.
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.
[1]I realize that's a strange statement - I elaborate on my reasoning here https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/an-optimistic-loo...
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.
Simple.
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 from Federalist Papers #47 [1].
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.
Makes sense given the Presidency of the Council of the EU "rotates among the member states of the EU every six months" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_the_Council_of_t...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 "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.
I think the number of false positives would be in the millions after a few weeks if not a few days.
That is why such a system is simply not workable.
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?
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.
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
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
Correct. Strongmen are convenient.
Yes, but they didn't really introduce new ideas and philosophies of government, at most slightly different ways of implement old ideas
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.
> 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.
In that context, I meant cost and delay as a benefit.
> not being able to withdraw a proposal
This empowers anyone who can introduce proposals with fillibustering the forum.
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?
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.)
Sure, these are messaging bills [1]. If you're clearly out of power, they're an effective tactic.
If you're in power, a good way to lose it is by embracing messaging bills.
[1] https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article2...
This means that it was implicitly voted upon and rejected by the people, therefore it should not be put up for a vote again.
The veto right was effectively removed once certain countries started abusing it.
Note this was done through treaty amendments, which were agreed by all participants.
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?
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.
"... 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.
Streets are public spaces, with all the possibility of observation by an observer that entails.
The two are not at all similar, at least under US law. It seems the EU is taking a similar stance.
That is not to say that cameras everywhere aren't dystopian. But their existence doesn't undermine the added danger of chat control.
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?
No, this would be losing the battle. There is no other solution that doesn't compromise encryption.
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.
Edit: also everytime a politician talks about children you should think about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
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…
i imagine that the demand for problematic imagery is bound by similar dynamics as the demand for murdering ppl with kitchen knifes.
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.
That's not to say all concerns are unwarranted, but not all ends justify all means either
I don't know. For this reason I think our communities and fears trend too large
Sure, diabetes is awful.
But the remedy can't be worse than the disease.
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.
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.