Denmark wants to push through Chat Control | Hacker News Reader

Denmark wants to push through Chat Control

netzpolitik.org

287 points_p2zi188 comments

>Now Paris “on the whole” agrees with the draft. France welcomes both mandatory chat control and client-side scanning.

A few months ago, a broad security law was passed by the National Assembly in France. Initially, this law contained provisions, including the scanning of private messages, which were removed from the main text by a large majority of lawmakers, as it was deemed too intrusive.

The few officials (including Macron) who now claim that "France is OK with chat control" represent a minority that currently holds power in a country whose government was ousted less than two weeks ago.

Crooks.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_European_Union, "legal acts include regulations, which are automatically enforceable in all member states": any move by national parliaments would be overruled.

Interesting that this national law was pushed by people in an alliance around Macron: the same team which might sign the opposite for the EU. Just a drop in an ocean of nonsense, from where such a dangerous bill might emerge.

It's not hard to imagine why. They want to spy on their subjects, and don't want to be told how to do it. Hence spying yes, EU no.

> Crooks.

There's a bunch of people organizing against those crooks on the OG Stop Killing Games discord. Just type "stopkillinggames" into Discord's invite box.

One interesting note: The group has even identified a suspected Russian spy network tied to the Russian telco MTS. MTS paid a close to $1B fine for unsavoury business in Uzbekistan [1] and is known to operate GFW and similar tech [2] in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Belarus [3] for example. The company is trying to get at people's biometrics, by posing as a KYC / Online Safety Act compliance company. [4] They probably do provide the services, but one can imagine where the data is also going.

As a parallel thread mentions, anything related to Chat Control and other Internet control things immediately becomes a target for state actors trying to undermine democracy. [5] In my opinion, it is also often initiated and pushed for by them.

[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-s-mts-to-pay-850-million-to-s...

[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/data-leak-reveals-how-russia-...

[3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mobile-telesystems-o...

[4] (link works after joining said discord) https://discord.com/channels/1281358651470381097/14006009921...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353056

> As a parallel thread mentions, anything related to Chat Control and other Internet control things immediately becomes a target for state actors trying to undermine democracy. [5] In my opinion, it is also often initiated and pushed for by them.

War is peace, isn't it ? /s I am not against chat control if they start making public the chats of politicians. I know, it's not gonna happen. National security.

France is all about big government

Trying to enact such complete and utter surveillance, as the whole country slowly slides into right-wing populism is an idea that is so utterly ridiculous I struggle to find the right words.

It is beyond stupid, beyond malicious. The closest I might come to describing this would be 'suicidal'.

What I don't understand is, why don't the authorities think the actual bad guys will avoid the surveillance?

It seems to me that organized crime will find their own solution, and the rest of us will occasionally have a snooping policeman checking our private messages. It's not unknown, even in Denmark, that people who are given access to private data will abuse it, eg snooping on ex girlfriends, that kind of thing.

Why do people think this chat control thing will be effective?

I think most people, if pressed, would share your evaluation. However, even though surveillance is always marketed and sold as a tool for law enforcement, I think the people proposing such bills are aware that it's primary use is for political control, power, and espionage.

Safety is the bait in the bait and switch. So the measure is not whether or not surveillance actually works for making people safer. But whether or not it actually works as bait.

While it's easy to start believing this is the only motive, the truth of the matter is that a lot of stupid people do crime. So even if you only catch the stupid criminals, you still catch a bunch of criminals.

And I mean _stupid_. You wouldn't believe how intensely stupid some of those people are, but read some court records and you will come away deeply surprised we are making it as a species.

But yes, there is no doubt that what you mention is a major motivator for at least some of the people pushing for it.

P.S. I'm not saying "stupid => does crime", please don't read that into what I said above - I'm just saying that `#("stupid and also does crime")` is a large number.

> While it's easy to start believing this is the only motive

No one said that. Files leaked by Snowden describe NSA's activities as durable, even against legal attack, thanks to layers upon layers of digital, procedural, legal, and other forms of defense in depth. Among them, plausible deniability and dual use technologies. You have pointed toward both. So their tactics worked on you.

> But yes, there is no doubt that what you mention is a major motivator for at least some of the people pushing for it.

Don't forget that ubiquitous surveillance is exactly the tool most useful for blackmailing or discrediting opponents as well.

> No one said that

that is not true. User lordnacho clearly expressed he thinks Chat Control will be ineffective, and from that one can easily take that ineffective initiatives should not be supported except in cases of wanting to abuse the infrastructure. It's a trope common enough that it comes implied and does not have to be spelled out.

> User lordnacho clearly expressed he thinks Chat Control will be ineffective

Feel free to respond to lordnacho directly. I don't accept communication for them. Nor can I speak for them. The only way to address the issue you have with what you feel they've implied is to talk to them about it.

> and from that one can easily take that ineffective initiatives should not be supported except in cases of wanting to abuse the infrastructure.

Your assumption.

I find the fact that mass surveillance is largely ineffective at improving safety to be incidental and ironic. It is highly effective at removing safety and liberty. That's the salient point.

Much like torture, mass surveillance corrupts those who practice it, which has led principled people to oppose it on grounds including human rights and an awareness of atrocities committed with the aid of surveillance in the past. As Benjamin Franklin said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Do you deserve liberty and safety?

> It's a trope common enough that it comes implied and does not have to be spelled out.

You'd do well to respond to what's been said, and not to what you think has been implied. Responding to perceived implication didn't serve you here.

https://www.etsy.com/market/don%27t_hear_what_i_didn%27t_say...

you don't need surveillance. there's one stupid fellon publishing in the open about persecuting political opposition and nothing happened. what reading their private communication gain?

It is additional tool. More tools -> better chance at catching the criminals.

Downsides are purely theoretical and only brought up by conspiracy theorists and academics.

(Technically correct, the best kind..)

When every tool is a hammer, even a screw gets hammered in

Better yet we can just put every single person not working for the government in prison. 100% success rate..

It is never about bad guys or protect the children. It is a political control.

This is a very complex question.

Part of the answer is that they think the surveillance will be magically omniscient, because it's technology they don't understand.

Part of the answer is that they think that if there's a tool they could possibly have to give law enforcement more power, they must have it.

Part of it is that they don't care so much about actual bad guys, but about exercising absolute control over the general populace.

Part of it is that they don't believe that crime can actually be eliminated, but they do believe that they have to continue to take all possible measures against it.

And part of it is just that they don't think it's politically safe for them to oppose a measure like this (similar to, but not quite the same as, the second point above).

Ask your local corporate IT guy how many people browse porn on work computers, even though they must know it's logged.

There is already a market for secure phones used by organized crime, this will only intensify the demand (plus another opportunity for to infiltrate them like has also happened before)

As a devil's advocate, there are also criminal groups, right now, that do actual crime, that operate on discord. 99% of criminals likely don't have enough knowledge to maintain proper opsec, so spying on chats could in principle help here.

On the other hand, there are also criminal groups, right now, that do actual crime, that operate on discord. Going after them would be trivial in comparison, and yet we introduce extreme spying laws instead.

I think a lot of those criminals use clear text channels because it works. If it no longer works, then they move.

Meaning, chat control might pressure criminals. For a bit. Until they wisen up and use more secure protocols and end points.

Which, not only exist, but are very easy to use and wide spread.

How hard would it be for law enforcement today, before chat control, to get chat logs out of discord?

Discord isn't exactly known for it's privacy features, still I imagine there's some challenge?

If the effort is low, and they're not doing it today, they're not going to do it after chat control either.

> How hard would it be for law enforcement today, before chat control, to get chat logs out of discord?

Not sure, speculating: somewhat hard.

Discord must comply with government subpoenas, so if you're the FBI it's easy. If you're law enforcement, I imagine they tell you to go kick rocks if you don't have a warrant.

Law enforcement is pretty bad and mostly lazy. They can't be bothered to pull people over going 20 over, let alone get a warrant for every wannabe punk.

If you're not in the US, then I imagine the effort is insurmountable.

> If the effort is low, and they're not doing it today, they're not going to do it after chat control either.

No - but it can be automated, which is the issue.

Sort of like how the US was wire tapping virtually all internet traffic at one point with PRISM.

Then I imagine the "law enforcement" is done using machine learning and heauristics.

Do you use black slang? Put him on the list. Is your name not that white sounding? That's right, the list. Are you on hacker news? You guessed it - the list.

I mean, that's pretty much how automated facial detection works now. And yeah, it sucks.

> If you're not in the US, then I imagine the effort is insurmountable.

Actually, in the EU, the police (and ...) have direct access to surveillance channels. Meaning, they have a website interface that they click around on, without anyone from the provider ever helping them at all. This allows for extracting call logs, listening in, finding location, lists of IPs they connected with, what DNS records they looked up (yes, that part is defeated by actually configuring DNS in your phone, but who does that?), ... I've seen these interfaces because I've designed their network installation and a bit of initial support. They are installed on cell towers. Oh and "support" meant getting calls from all sorts of local police stations who found out this was possible and essentially directing them to the person who could give them access.

Of course, the spying equipment itself does not log who access it and what they access. Clearly, the police do not need to be told what the value is of hiding what you're doing even if it's legal.

The only issue holding back mass-surveillance in the EU is "who pays for it?". Essentially a number of hours are tracked? Why so little? Then the local SSD is full. They want 6 months, minimum, but the state is unwilling to pay a single cent for that, and forcing providers to pay for it, that the executive (ie. ministers) haven't been willing to do.

Yes, they're supposed to get a "research judge" permission, which is more-or-less a subpoena, except much more informal, but do they actually do this? It's an honor system.

I've had an unexpected redirect from a hacked Wordpress site in the past. One of the reasons why I will never go without an abuse blocker + NoScript on work computers. I had been trialing going without at the start of that job and lasted a few months but that incident permanently removed any latent guilt.

Non-whitelisted extensions are blocked in Edge, and Edge is the default browser. Chrome/FF are less locked down, more due to incompetence than not trying to be heavy-handed.

…of course, Zscaler with “all Wordpress sites blocked” is also a thing, along with the majority/nearly all of European non-English countries, because god forbid you want to read the emmet docs or something.

While true, at least in my understanding of the world there is a massive difference in people involved in CSAM and people watching porn. The latter one is probably like 80% of humans with access to internet, the first one is hopefully a tiny bit smaller. Also, people are probably very aware that the latter is widely allowed and done by mostly everyone, and the first one is highly illegal, highly enforced and morally completely wrong.

I would not mind browsing porn on my work PC. I wouldn't do it, but I would not have a very bad feeling while or after it, because so be it. I don't think my employer can fire me for that.

I would mind about doing CSAM activities though.

It's not about bad guys. It's about wrongthink. It's about surveilling the political opposition.

They could not care less about children. Kids are just a political weapon they use to create a pretext for global warrantless mass surveillance.

Indeed. They just again further defunded both education and youth projects. So what you say is perfectly accurate: they could not care less about children.

They don’t understand the technology and think it will magically apply everywhere.

Most politicians have no idea how anything works. Electric lights are simply magic, let alone the Internet. Obviously you can pass a law to make the wizards make the magic do whatever you want, right?

Edward Snowden reported that some NSA officers were routinely watching and sharing people's private nudes.

It's more than just "snooping occationally". Government officials are at the end of the day strangers, and it's not their business spying on people's private lives. Not only do they intend to infringe upon our privacy in one of the most intrusive ways possible, but also at gunpoint. Think about that.

> What I don't understand is, why don't the authorities think the actual bad guys will avoid the surveillance?

Not only the bad guys, I will jump into any software that allow me to bypass this crap.

Because they know and intend to target this law against regular people, not against bad guys. They are learning from the best in this field. Targeted very harsh punishments of the random people at random times do A LOT to chill political activity in the country, make hesitant people (a majority) shut up "just in case they are next ones to be targeted". People already with history of activity which may be randomly selected for prosecution will emigrate and thus exclude themselves from political environment. And this useful for left/centrists/right, regardless of the ideology, since all of them plan on shutting down opposition as soon as they are in power.

I had a similar debate with a friend of mine over a age verification law recently passed in Brazil. It mandates age verification for social media in order to restrict teenagers and children access to adult content, for example, or any other content that violates teenagers rights.

The law in question (PL2628/2022) doesn't mention CSAM or sexualized/erotic content depicting children or teenager by name. It's broader than that, it mentions that any content deemed offensive to children/teenagers, or that violates their rights as defined in the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente, should be removed by social media.

My friend supports the law because he thinks it will stop 99.9% of the bad guys looking for CSAM on the internet because he believes they get their content from Instagram. I tried to explain to him the law won't do shit to stop the bad guys but instead just add more surveillance to people who aren't doing anything wrong, but he doesn't want to accept it, and even called me out saying I look like a defender of the bad guys, simply for the fact that I don't think mass surveillance and age verification of people is enough to stop wrongdoers on the internet, or to protect children.

Can somebody explain to me how backdooring every app does not lead to the real risk of an entire population's bank accounts being emptied, or similar more hidden but widespread attacks that absolutely cripple any country doing this? Almost immediately, enemy State actors will have almost as complete access as the government passing the law; blackmail will become trivial; they could just subtly weaken adversaries nonstop over the years for a more patient return, etc? It just seems ridiculously dangerous. How is having a single point of failure (or handful of points of failure) for an entire country or continent defensible simply from the perspective of opsec?

> Can somebody explain to me how backdooring every app does not lead to the real risk of an entire population's bank accounts being emptied, or similar more hidden but widespread attacks that absolutely cripple any country doing this?

We already had this debate once before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

The answer is that it is a bad idea.

This also recently came up when huntress exposed what it could do with its tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183589 and then failed to understand why this might be a bad thing.

Or you know crowdstrike getting rolled in a supply chain attack: https://www.ox.security/blog/npm-2-0-hack-40-npm-packages-hi...

The government wants a back door to spy on its citizens, not realizing that any back door you build is rife to be exploited by anyone.

Why haven't those things already happened? Many messaging apps including SMS and Telegram are centralized without E2E.

This was literally headline news last year for SMS https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-...

Maybe it's a good idea for the ones pushing this because that is the intended state.

Don't forget, Russia has trillions of dollars for bribes.

Russias GDP is on par with South Korea’s.

Hate to be that guy, but source?

But i.e. 3x Belgium GDP. Anyway, how's GDP is even relevant here?

I am saying it is ridiculous to say that Russia can pay trillions of dollars in bribes.

Trillions is a ridiculous claim. Billions $ easily, budgets of GRU and FSB during last 11 years of war against the west have ballooned.

The situation is, people don't need billion dollar bribes. In my backwardish central european country they caught one government official who was physically handing over state secret material to a russian spy, straight from their embassy, for 500 euros a pop. There is a a video record with good audio from that, the conversation is really absurd yet real. You just need to find one gambling or alcohol addict, or some other failures and press few buttons.

Also, for russia undermining literally whole western world is mission with priority #1 for last 20 years. Eastern european countries who intimately know how bad russian terror actually is were warning about this repeatedly whole western world, to be very effectively ignored and laughed at by western leaders till SHTF.

Sure, those were not plans for F-35 or new aircraft carrier but people take surprisingly little to get corrupted, some even do it for free for ideological purposes.

They willingly settled for $1B with the FCC over Uzbekistan. Over Uzbekistan. It has to be insignificant money for them, otherwise... they would have simply not paid.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-s-mts-to-pay-850-million-to-s...

> Russias GDP is on par with South Korea’s.

Doesn't that show you what a silly measure GDP (nominal ) is? Do you think south korea could carry out a multi-year war against US/NATO under international sanctions? South korea would collapse immediately under international sanctions. South korea wouldn't be able to feed its own population let alone fund a war under international sanctions. Also using GDP( PPP ), russia's economy is 2X+ larger than south korea.

> Hate to be that guy, but source?

There obviously isn't any. Nobody has trillions for bribes. Trillions is war money, not bribe money.

Contact your representatives and sign Mozilla Foundation’s petition: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/campaigns/tell-the-eu-d...

So this is the future? The government spies on all communications 24/7 like the stasi? Where does civilization go from here?

Eventually revolution.

That's going to be harder if the government spies on everything.

Maybe, but too harsh of crackdowns might also accelerate the revolution timeline. You don't need organization for a revolution to collapse a nation, or even any idea of what anyone wants to try and revolution towards, you just need a couple percentage of the population to be pissed off enough to start wanton destruction.

Worse than Stasi. Denmark spied on Swedish politicians for US.

I have zero confidence that "the Worlds least corrupt country" is actually the least corrupt.

If you have been watching the world in 2025 you know Tor is gradually becoming essential. Install the Tor Browser and search for free speech in the hidden service HTTP response dumps here: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Not censored, not safe for work, sorry.

It sounds like chat control will require Tor clients in Europe to scan traffic before it is encrypted and report material to (local?) governments. This could be enforced, on phones at least, with Android's new developer key signing requirements that are slated to be phased in one year from now (in 2026).

Tor on mobile devices (at least iOS, Android) is not recommended anyway. Guess true Linux phones might finally see their hour.

What if we went the other direction - push chat control but on government and rich folks? Make them fully transparent as the price of power/influence, and leave normies opaque?

Who is `we` in this context?

You would think the Danish are smarter than this.

The Danes are smart, but history have repeatedly proven that people are deceptive, even the seemingly trustworthy ones that hands out promises for votes.

They have used Palantir for years. There is that.

Denmark is the embassy of American NSA in Europe.

Europeans don't get to blame the US for this. Chat Control is being widely pushed. The Europeans get to take responsibility for their own authoritarianism.

The ruling elites on both sides of the Atlantic have been pushing for something like this for a long time now. It's not an either-or - they are mutually reinforcing.

They are, for themselves. They’re probably leveraging this juicy Palantir contract to get the US to lift their boot off Greenland.

Ursula von Der Leyen will go down history as the worse EU representative ever.

Do not say the name of You-Know-Who in the public!

She isn't mentioned in the article at all. What is the context for your statement here?

She is one of the politicians who's met Palantir and Thorn more.

Also, how she bent for the 15% tariff to US while we apply none was another disgusting moment of selling out EU.

Ironic how the people that should actually prove their transparency, the politicians working for us, are excluded.

Varoufakis had a very important take: that Europe needs to learn to survive post-EU.

From the Euroskeptics to the anti-imperialists, everyone wants the EU dead. Sadly, I tend to agree with them more and more.

> Varoufakis had a very important take: that Europe needs to learn to survive post-EU.

Wasn't he the Greek Minister of Finance that was supposed to be a game theory genius, but was completely incapable of understanding why his proposals were politically impossible?

Why politically impossible? You can argue economically impossible, but the referendum overwhelmingly voted to reject the bailout package

Politically, because he was trying to negotiate against austerity measures with zero leverage and no realistic alternatives. Given the consensus on the requirements between the countries footing the bailout and the general public (outside of Greece), it was clear from the start that his position was unworkable.

Greece already received something like 50% haircuts on the debt. Politically Greek people voting on something has no influence on the rest of the population of the EU. If Greece had more of its debt written off then other countries would want the same. Hence it wasn't politically possible for those on the other side of the negotiations to give this to Greece.

The only real hand Greece had was to simply refuse the bailouts and refuse to pay the debts. In that case they would have been cut off from international bond markets, they would have had to renounce the Euro and start using a different currency.

All that was possible, but the Greek government could see the obvious - it would have been far worse than what was on offer.

He was shutdown by the EU central bank with them basically saying they can not allow individual countries to control and make their own financial decisions. This is after the EU was asking for incredible high interest rates to bail them out, basically forcing Greece to do whatever their overlords in Germany said.

Including steep austerity and privatisation of Greek government assets…

> Varoufakis

Is a crackpot who shouldn't be taken seriously.

I didn't think Denmark was a pseudo-democracy but you learn new things every day.

Technically it's a Monarchy

What makes you believe this isn't an example of democracy in action, though?

Ill believe it when I see people directly vote to full surveillance of all their chat and speech. Just because politicians in a democracy want something that doesn't mean the voters want it too. The voters are voting for people, not on policy, and that holds true even if we were able to ignore all the manipulations and external influences upon choosing political representatives.

The problem is not Denmark. It is the lack of democracy in the EU itself. The European Commission has no democratic legitimacy.

And if you say that, you're far right wing lately.

That's what we have become.

Any protests planned?

Protests are forbidden too.

There was one this Sunday, but it wasn't even mentioned in the news.

So it has begun

By whom? Normies cannot even grasp what we're talking about here, a bunch of nerds. Think of the children!

As a European, I don't mind this getting passed anymore. I'll just go around it like I do for many other laws. Enforcing laws in the EU is a total joke, even if this passes, no one will care.

Signal will probably add an option to circumvent this like they have for other laws in countries that block signal itself.

So, Europe, if you really want this, go ahead and spy on the majority of the people, I'll just keep using signal or something else that respects my privacy, even if it's "illegal" by your standards (again, like I already do for many other laws).

If the story is different this time around and they double down on enforcing this, I'll just leave to Switzerland, if they do the same, I'll go somewhere else. Or I'll become an activist, I've actually been kinda bored of everyday life, maybe fighting the "system" will be fun for a change.

I don't care anymore, there'll always be a way to do what whatever me and those close want, as long as we are not hurting anyone.

Signal will stop sending confirmation SMSes to european phone numbers, unfortunately.

Source?

https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/112535616774247450

Sorry, I can't really find out where it says they'll stop sending confirmation SMSes in that post, in the blog post linked in that post and in that post's comments.

I can't wait to find out what politicians are sending!

The text, of course, excludes politicians and other important people(tm) from being monitored.

Exactly those that should be subject to scrutiny.

Just making sure everybody realises (because the comment sounds a tad sarcastic), but that comment is completely true - the politicians have quite seriously exempted themselves and certain types of people.

What other certain types of people?

The guys that get them things without asking questions

I don’t exactly recall all of them but I believe it was people doing things to do with “national security” so things like intelligence orgs, certain government orgs, military etc…

When all the commercial software is backdoored the criminals are going to use open source alternatives. Suddenly all my devices, my family and the tech community are in the cross-hairs of law enforcement. I don't want to be one of the new victims of another war on drugs mess. We have enough real criminals for the courts and law enforcement to handle without creating a whole new lot out of law abiding people.

I had a thought reading the comments here but isn't this a ploy to break the EU, there is no way individual population will abide by it, this will increase recentment against the EU and trigger exits. Too many actors would benefit from this to make clear accusations but the fact it is American companies proposing their technologies is a first indication.

I think the Swiss ought to be very scared as well. Lived there for many years and for some reason every website I visited was following EU rules when servicing Switzerland visitors. Maybe they can’t technically separate what’s what, or choose to do this, but if Chat Control passes then essentially all of Swiss messaging (and Liechtenstein’s) gets to be overseen too.

Client side scanning of the device, before messages are encrypted and sent on the wire. Think of the other implication to this - now these countries who adopt it have the means to spy on communications from every person in the world who communicates with an EU citizen.

It's just completely bonkers from start to finish.

Who would be allowed to configure the scanners and receive the reports, an EU security body, or the member states?

I would have to assume Palantir or Crowdstrike's new European divisions.

The EU and most conglomerates within the EU have been using Crowdstrike for almost a decade now. If they don't use CRWD they use Microsoft Defender, PANW Cortex, or SentinelOne.

I had no idea, I was just trying to be snarky and pick the worst possibilities on the planet.

am I understanding correctly that Chat Control will use AI to scan the text of every private message, and automatically report suspected "grooming attempts" to police? how the hell do they think that will work? does the AI know that the message recipient is a minor? that the message sender is an adult? that "want to meet up tonight?" is sent by a pedophile to a stranger's kid for an illicit rendezvous, and not by a dad to his son to work on a science fair project?

this is just bananas crazy. so many lives will be ruined by false positives. the chilling effect will be like an Arctic snowstorm. and any actual groomers will find ways to disable it.

lol, all the americans on this site giving their take our how our politics work or what motivates our politicians is always entertaining…

Guys, our Justice Minister is not trying to spy on citizens. He is not some cartoon villain.. He is just incompetent. He doesn’t understand the technical arguments. He wants to curb the distribution of child abuse material (who wouldn’t) and does not understand that you can’t make backdoors for the police only

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/teknologi/analyse-derfor-hol...

The online Stasi analogies are simplistic. This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:

- Palantir Technologies

- 'not-for-profit' Thorn

> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]

> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]

> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]

> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]

(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)

> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]

> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]

> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]

> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]

[0] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/176658

[1] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/recommendation/en/179395

[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-00016...

[3] https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-kept-no-records-on-...

[4] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/07/18/european-ombudsman-...

[5] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-eu-ombudsman-l...

If the technology is flawless why is there -by design- an exemption for the highest powers of the state, for security reasons?

Will Chat Control be retrospective? I.e. once it's implemented will governments have access to all previous communications or just those from that point onwards? Also how does it work geographically? Is it based on my location, where my phone was made/bought, something else...?

You know what, let it go through!

If the European people are too stupid to stop it and simply keep on voting for the parties who support this sort of law, then so be it.

The criminals will move on to other means of communication, the privacy minded folks will move to sideloaded Signal-like apps and take their friends and families with them if possible and the rest will just have to learn to live under the new EU-Stasi regime and watch their privacy being stripped a little more day by day.

It is worth noting, that there is pushback, protests et cetera in Denmark, so hopefully this does not result in anything.

Okay, but who prevents me to exchanging a private key irl and sending encrypted messages over Whatsapp?

Whatsapp would turn off that feature for EU countries the same day the law goes through

They mean doing their own encryption prior to sending the message to whatsapp with a one time pad - a one time pad is secure - but the answer would be "a boatload of inconvenience"

Is there some way to automate that via a third party app?

You can go to any number of sites (here's a nice one https://webencrypt.org/openpgpjs/), and encrypt a message. You can exchange public keys over any text channel. You can then send encrypted messages over that text channel. Anyone who really needs to send encrypted messages, trivially can. Of course, many criminals won't, but should we all sacrifice our privacy for such a pathetic measure of security?

ChatControl proposes "on device" scanning, meaning before/after encryption, thereby making encryption useless.

You could still have an airgapped computer where you encrypt your messages with GnuPG or similar, and then send those.

1984

Does anyone really think it won't pass?

It will, in one form or another. And after some time there are enough boiled frogs for further privacy invasive measures.

Of course it will pass. Think of the children

It might pass, but if it does, the courts will strike it down. Separation of powers still works in the EU.

In the legislative sense, it might eventually pass.

As has happened in every case so far (with increasing intensity and ease), the internet will route around it.

the internet will route around it

How will the internet route around client side scanning? Some here will not be affected but I suspect the masses would have a harder time assuming they are even aware that cell phones, Windows recall and Mac mediaanalysisd are performing scans. Most people do not install custom phone OS images.

> Mac mediaanalysisd are performing scans

Would this work? https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/u17hsa/please_help_m...

  sudo killall -STOP mediaanalysisd mediaanalysisd-access

If they start doing client side scanning under some law I assume they will put measures in place to fix anything the client does to break it so I think time will tell what will be effective.

> Most people do not install custom phone OS images.

They might start to do, if governments become so obnoxious with their surveillance, that it somehow makes life inconvenient for regular people. However, then governments will start to block the network access for "uncertified" devices and software, or even to restrict the access to general-purpose computers altogether. That's why it is better to defeat this politically, than to play eternal cat-mouse games.

why it is better to defeat this politically, than to play eternal cat-mouse games.

I agree but laws can take a long time to change so I prefer to do things in parallel but that's just me. I can be an ass at times.

It doesn't make life inconvenient for most people though. Even in places like Russia and China most people aren't running custom phone OS images.

Someone who needs to route around censorship in Russia today needs to be fairly technically proficient; I wouldn't say there's any "increasing intensity and ease", quite the opposite. The holes are getting narrower, and the effort needed to use them properly gets higher.

Every time Chat Control comes up, people do chime in and say talking about it like it's going to pass is 'alarmism', but every time it's raised again it gets closer.

The European people are being worn down, eventually those who want this will get it through - and unfortunately this kind of thing is extremely difficult to repeal (think of the children!)

Enjoy democracy, EU-style

its okay, they promise not to scan encrypted content.

Cui bono?

Time to dismantle the EU. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

I moved from a country that used to have strong privacy laws(Sweden) to another that still has them.

Although Switzerland is far from perfect, it is a stable democracy with protections for its citizens.

The problem is when you build these gigantic political organisations, like the EU or USA, there is nowhere to go when the political elite decides to ram down the ideology du jour down your throat.

The world should be moving towards decentralisation, direct democracy and voluntary cooperation, but unfortunately, the opposite is the case.

Peace

I think this is naive thinking.

Do that and you will be ass raped by stronger powers in record time... if we don't start a war in eu amongst ourselves.

The eu was established as an economic union trying to prevent war in Europe and it has been very successful in that. Going the other way would probably cause havoc. Look at Hungary and Slovakia even with war on our doorstep.

I am of the opinion that the EU needs to federalize. It needs to look as one country from the outside, while having independent countries on the inside. The goal here is not to be overwhelmed by the economic and military might of china. Build up resiliency and self sufficiency and keep democracy alive, which seems to be on the decline everywhere.

The question is how not to end up in a totalitarian regime, which chat control is about. It doesn't and it never will be about the children.

The EU is necessary.

I don't think these superpower dreams are very good for neither for the EU population or democracy.

Meanwhile the most prosperous nations in Europe are not part of the EU.

It is good you are asking how to avoid the EU turning into a totalitarian state, which is the way it is currently heading.

I don’t think it’s possible.

what are these "most prosperous nations" ?

Switzerland, Norway.

Poland is an example of rising economy in EU

I read somewhere that Italy is recovering and reducing its debt... But didn't really follow up on that.

You westerners are way too delusional about the world we’re living in.

I just had a conversation with American colleagues about life in Europe. And the things that stood out were “cookies policy,” trash recycling, and such trivialities.

Meanwhile, Europe is already at war. China openly wants to dismantle the good life Americans take for granted. Their news is full of militaristic propaganda, day after day.

This isn’t the 90s. It’s not the 1950s either. You didn’t “win” the war. You cant build, you can’t manufacture. And yet you talk about freedom?

Reality is going to catch up very soon. Many of you will lose not just your comfortable lives but your freedom too.

Take Denmark’s policy with LLM monitoring. What’s wrong with that? China and Russia do it already — and they benefit. That’s how you prevent both external and internal threats. That’s how you build a strong state.

If your adversary monitors and you don’t, you’re already in a losing position.

And don’t forget — the subject country is directly part of the brewing conflict in the Baltic Sea with Russia.

Manufacturing:

> The United States is the world's second-largest manufacturer after the People's Republic of China with a record high real output in 2024 of $2.913 trillion [0]

I believe the US' manufacturing capability is the core of your comment and I also believe it's incorrect. Sure we don't manufacture fast-fashion or junk products and we may have lost quite a bit of tribal knowledge[1] with respect to that. But it's nothing that can't be re-gained.

And the benefits China and the Russia get from their spying programs? Americans by-and-large simply do not care about them. Denmark can do whatever they want with their tech as long as their citizens approve. Like you said, they're in a different position given their geographic location - thus, they have different priorities. But Americans do not feel like they have such an existential threat so they are (generally) not willing to give up their privacy.

Whether "reality" catches up to your predictions remains to be seen.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

> If your adversary monitors and you don’t, you’re already in a losing position.

You can make this same argument about any authoritarian or totalitarian policy.

"your adversary"?

I think this post makes clear who our adversary really are.

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