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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal.

> The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section).

>The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

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ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is:

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

thanks!

> including end-to-end encrypted ones

How the hang are they planning to do that?

I mean, if someone has an end to end encrypted conversation, it's encrypted when it gets to the carrier, and the carrier shouldn't (technically, not anything related about whether they are allowed to or not) be able to decrypt the conversation.

If the carrier is terminating the connection, then it's either not end to end encrypted, or it's broken.

edit: sorted the grammar/punctuation at the end to improve clarity

I imagine they'll push for apps to do the scanning prior to encryption and directly after decryption.

I shared your comment with the author and we're going to reorder some of the sentences in a little bit to highlight the fact it's a backdoor earlier. We've talked about Chat Control so much over so many years (because it keeps reappearing) that it's easy to forget many haven't heard of it lol

I think one source of confusion is that many probably see "Chat Control", expecting it to be a reference to one specific proposal or legislation (a la "GDPR" or "DMA"), while it's an umbrella term you use to group different proposals pushing the same agenda and end-results. Readers look for one face to point at but it's a hydra and they just leave confused.

Clearly defining the term and its intended meaning would do well, I think.

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