If the cost of the proposal is "let's throw democracy under the bus" as it is in this case, it better be damn close to 100% effective to be worth it!
I have a hard time imagining this will be more than 10% effective.
This proposal is a joke
I have a hard time imagining this will be more than 10% effective.
This proposal is a joke
And then you'll get into a scenario that the government will punish you for wrong-speak, like when people had their bank accounts frozen for donating to the trucker protests. Or they will turn off your access to social media the way the Biden Administration did during the Pandemic.
It is now only recently possible to dragnet in mass many communications, store, and analyze them. The past decades have brought new threats to privacy democracy through breaking encryption at the state scale.
Were most people encrypting their handwritten letters? Were most people encrypting their messages before sending them by SMS or with WhatsApp? Really?
But ChatControl won't prevent the encryption for anyone who is not the receiver of the reports. And the receiver is the equivalent of "law enforcement", right?
Not without legal proceedings. The population would have been absolutely outraged if the government just decided to read all of their mail one random day in the 90s.
There's a reason the whole idea was supposed to be a conspiracy theory, the population literally didn't believe something like that could happen.
Nobody would want to carry a microphone recording them 24/7 and storing everything on a server, but everybody is fine with TooBigTech simply promising that they don't store the data.
We have to accept that people are fine with the idea. The problem (both with the connected mic and ChatControl, btw) is that it can be abused. That's the problem. Again: we have to convince people that it is at risk of being abused. Not that they should be outraged. They just are not.
Instead they notify you that you gave them perpetual license to reuse your data.
Today nobody uses snail mail. This proposal is the equivalent of proposing to read everyone's private letters back in the day.
Technical details are technical details
It's a tool that could be abused, but I wouldn't say that it is enough to kill a democracy all by itself.
Chat control takes away one liberty from democracy.
Ask any half decent go player what will happen to that stone if we just ignore the attack upon it?
You don't have the liberty to avoid that, today. By design.
My point being that if one could prove that the ChatControl detection is only running locally and that it is only reporting what's acceptable to report, then it wouldn't hurt your freedom (except for your freedom to do illegal stuff, but that's the whole point).
The problem is that it is not possible to prove this. Fundamentally. We need to talk about that. Not throw some "it will kill democracy because you should trust me when I say it".
That key will leak eventually, it's too juicy a target.
You describe chat control as if it's just an AI csam scanner that runs locally on your phone, like what apple did recently-ish.
Chat control is so much more than that, and so much worse
That's not my understanding. My understanding is that ChatControl will run client-side scanning and report what is deemed illegal.
This is not a master key to all communications.
On the contrary, it is an argument in favour of extending ChatControl to using machine learning for detecting such cases.
The problem, again, is that we don't want to have an opaque system that can be extended to surveilling new things, because it's very difficult to audit and make sure it is not abused.
Chat Control amounts to routine, warrantless interception of private communication. Something you see in states like the USSR.
[1] https://www.westernstandard.news/news/liberals-push-bill-to-...