There is an awful lot of lobbying going on and given history of EU regulation this can only end up passing in the worst possible way at one point.
I remember that Google StreetView faced significant regulatory challenges in simply photographing people’s homes, and today, many buildings are blurred out. This is only one example. But you can see that everyone takes privacy very seriously in the country. A lot of social engineering-type phishing for personal data does not work because people understand which boundaries cannot be crossed intuitively.
More privacy does not mean more terrorism. There may be situations where reducing privacy does reduce terrorism, but privacy is not the cause. I wish governments would rather address the cause.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_i...
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/12/lithuania-pr...
Oppressive state surveillance in the USSR (commonly verging on persecution of undesirable groups) was a strong reason for countries breaking away from it between 1990 and 1991, when the union collapsed. Lithuania was arguably the first one.
The privacy protections we see today are a reaction to some extent, but Lithuanians enjoy them. It was not an over-reaction.
It would be wise to use the examples of heavy-handed state surveillance in history in arguments for privacy laws. The US did this to argue for their economic model quite effectively. Whether that ultimately is good — I mean that some people have become so afraid of communism that they can’t agree on some fundamental social welfare systems and duty of care for each other as people — I don’t know. But contrasting liberal capitalism with planned-economy communism was effective in galvanising people towards the former. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that.
- Two months ago there were major arson attacks and failed attempts linked to Russians in multiple states like Poland and Germany.
- Russian linked agents at the beginning of school year dissiminated false information about bombs being planted at schools in Lithuania which disrupted the process in general and undermined trust of parents and children.
- They are also constantly creating false narratives about ongoing social events with ant-lithuanian anti-european spin and spreading them online.
- Lets also not forget that Russia is constantly using migrants to attack borders of European states.
Russians are trying to wage war in every gray area they can find. Why this paragon of free speech (kekw) constantly engages in anti-lithuanian policies?
Even more interesting recently they started mapping out locations of optic fibers scattered across the ocean. Lets hope they wont use this information.
All of these are real threats. Even the CSAM arguments have a grain of truth to it. What changes overtime is people’s relationship to these threats and their perception of what mitigating factors are actually going to be effective
The person was saying that you can use a “Russia” line to get the population to agree to a measure or chat control.
You just went in and basically proved their point.
You may think that Im pedantic or whatever but Russia has history of subtly playing with words and thus dictating the discourse. For example term eastern europe was hijacked by soviets to enshrine and justify their sphere of influence which was a completely made up term which descends from germans and their ostsiedlung--the settling of lands to the east of germans states by germans.
You do realize that Lithuania is supporting chat control?
Firstly, it is a working document that someone obtained through a FOI request. So it is important to understand that this was not meant for the public, and therefore the opinion Lithuanian representatives provided there was not scrutinized as such prior to release. This is not a comprehensive position of Lithuania's government or any of its branches.
Secondly, the document follows positions expressed in and around a police (LEWP) meeting. It is difficult to imagine that law enforcement would support E2EE or stand against Chat Control in principle, because it makes their daily work more difficult. This context should be kept in mind and is also pointed out by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society article I linked.
Thirdly, the opinion of a limited group of Lithuania's law enforcement workers does not impact Lithuania's constitution, nor culture. I also believe that it is not an opinion shared by many Lithuanians who have some distrust of authority following years of state surveillance, persecution, and the trauma this entailed. So it is important to understand that the culture, the constitution, and the opinion of law enforcement workers contributed to this working document are three distinct things.
Finally, this "let's sacrifice anything and everything to protect the children" narrative unfortunately exists in Lithuania as well. It's a polarizing political issue where people have very strong opinions on each side. It seems likely to me, as I read the document, that there was a strong bias towards one of the sides in the working group.
Overall, this consultation is not the overall opinion of Lithuanian people nor their government; law enforcement working groups will generally be biased towards access to encrypted information rather than privacy; and that no country can escape today's polarizing political debates, so individual people will sometimes have strong opinions without having ever thought them through.
This is not to say that Lithuanian representatives could not have acted more responsibly. They could have. Frankly, as the Stanford article illustrates, Lithuanian reps' opinion is naive to the point of incompetence. Many other countries did better. That is evident. But does this say Lithuania is against privacy? No. It is still one of the most privacy-respecting countries I have ever been to and done business in.
[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23819681-law-enforce...
[1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/eu-member-states-...
it's always the terrorists and the children. It turns off the logical, rational thought centers in the brain, and convinces ordinarily rational people to accept these poorly thoughtout security measures.
As a civid duty, you must fight against measures like these that erode security and privacy. It sucks, because the reward is "nothing", and you must forever maintain vigilence against constant reproposals.
Criminals tend to not care about the law even making e2e illegal would do very little to stop anything.
End to end encrypted chat for the general public has only been available for ~15 years. On the web, SSL is ~30 years old. PGP is ~35 years old.
As far as I can tell people's way of living now is largely the same as it was back before any of those were around, so I don't see how it would destroy our way of living if much of that went away.
A transparent CSAM checking process would be funny..
Imagine a 18, 19 yo., relatively skinny girl with small breasts (or a guy with a small dick) sending such a picture to her long-term boyfriend (...), and then getting messages from the system:
- "hello, our AI thinks your boobs are underage, we sent the photo to police station in Cityville for a manual checkup"
- "hello, the photo has been transferred to inspection team of Bobby Robertson, Johnny Walkerson and Jane Jameson to inspect"
- "hello, by a careful inspection of your boobs, with a 2-to-1 vote, the team has decided that your boobs are most probably old enough to be photographed and sent around. The photo was sent to your desired destination and just in case, arhchived in the police arhives for possible further inspections".
"Google’s Scans of Private Photos Led to False Accusations of Child Abuse" (2022)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...
If you are interacting with those circles you will find folks who made it their life’s mission to protect children and who are lobbying for this. You donut need a large number of people to sway legislation, you only need determined people.