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Comment by Quekid5 | Hacker News Reader

> We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM.

I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...

ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.

EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).

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> IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...

The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.

>(12a) In the light of the more limited risk of their use for the purpose of child sexual abuse and the need to preserve confidential information, including classified information, information covered by professional secrecy and trade secrets, electronic communications services that are not publicly available, such as those used for national security purposes, should be excluded from the scope of this Regulation. Accordingly, this Regulation should not apply to interpersonal communications services that are not available to the general public and the use of which is instead restricted to persons involved in the activities of a particular company, organisation, body or authority.

From document 11277/24 [1]. Unless it has changed more recently, the exemption is actually considerably broader, and presents the unusual argument that the system will be secure enough for any private personal communications, yet too insecure for any company's trade secrets (which, apparently, have the same weight as national security).

[1]: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11277-2024-...

OK, so the risk were worried about here is internal communications platforms, only available inside an organization like the EU or a company, being used for sharing CSAM? So officials sharing CSAM exclusively with other officials on the company chat server?

I don't believe that's what people think of when they hear "law enforcement is excluded". Officials will still be subject to the law when interacting with anybody else. They will still be subject when interacting on public services. Crucially, everybody will be excluded from private messaging servers, also non law enforcement.

Do we have any reason to believe CSAM is being distributed on the internal EU communication networks?

Wow.

That's...

Wow.

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