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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”. It doesn’t make sense. They can be gullible. Non-Technical. Owned by lobbyists. Under pressure to deliver on the apparent problem of the day (csam, terror, whatever). But I don’t think there is a general crusade against privacy. That’s why I think it’s so infuriating: I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy. They’re doing it blindly.

This is pushed by parties that have a good track record of preserving integrity. That’s why it’s so surprising.

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If they are "just doing their job" why are they asking for an exemption that would apply only to them? No, they firmly believe that safety should be gained at the cost of privacy.

I could imagine that war orders may be interpreted as "illegal" and therefore reported. Which may not be desirable?

So it's ok if the database containing my nudes leaks, but not if it contains state secrets? I feel really protected!

Not saying that I agree, just saying that I can imagine it's not done in bad faith.

It's totally done in bad faith, corruption is a real thing in EU politics.

It may cause corruption, because despite lawmaker's attempts to carve out security*- and governance-critical communications, it's almost impossible for this tech to fail to open doors to blackmailers.

But existing corruption is neither necessary nor sufficient for what we see here. Wrong axis.

EU is (mostly, and relatively speaking) un-corrupt as governments go; more corrupt places (and also authoritarian places) will write fantastic laws that they just straight-up ignore.

* Which won't work anyway: consider that the US military had to issue statements and bans because fitbit was revealing too much about military bases.

State secrets are to governments as private keys are to software engineers, except it's much slower to change meatspace things like (to make up a fictional example) the gaps your military found in their CIWS naval defence system, which if leaked means your enemies now know know how to exploit in order to wipe out your navy.

With very few exceptions, politicians do know perfectly fine what they are doing.

Each of them has a large budget to hire several staffers presenting every issue to them in ways they understand best, each government has a huge apparatus of various departments with domain experts analyzing every situation from every reasonable perspective and if all of that fails, barely and university or institute would fail to respond to a request for input from an elected official.

Any and all ignorance of any significant politician is by choice. You can't push the oppression a decision causes to the maximum you'll get away with at that point in time without understanding the issue first.

> But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”.

As someone coming from authoritarian state, this is such an alien line of reasoning to me. By definition, those in power want more power. The more control over the people you have, the more power you get. Ergo, you always want more control.

It's easy to overlook this if you've spent your entire life in a democratic country, as democracies have power dynamics that obscure this goal, making it less of a priority for politicians. For instance, attempting to seize too much power can backfire, giving political opponents leverage against you. However, the closer a system drifts toward autocracy and the fewer constraints on power there are, the more achievable this goal becomes and the more likely politicians are to pursue it.

Oh, and also politics selects for psychopaths who are known for their desire for control.

> By definition, those in power want more power.

This is not what 'by definition' means.

>But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”.

Neither of these statements is as axiomatic as you think they are

> I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy. They’re doing it blindly.

That is often a variant of Hanlor's razor brought up on questions like this. How do certain actors turn reliably to a course of action that is so damaging - but to any expert or even rational mind seems stupid! That can't be what they want?!

I do not think that this reasoning holds.

Hannah Arendt, when writing about totalitarism, came to the conclusion that there is a kind of complicity between evil and thoughtlessness. (I am still trying to find her exact words on this.)

I know this is 4 days past, but wanted to let you know I recently stumbled upon Hanna Arendt's work while working on a video Essay for the TV series andor and man what a eye opener it is about these subjects. I havent read the book yet, but I listed to the youtube writing group talk on it from https://hac.bard.edu/

> I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy.

But it is not even dismantling privacy. ChatControl would run client-side and only report what's deemed illegal. Almost all communications are legal, and almost all of the legal communications wouldn't be reported to anyone at all. They would stay private.

The problem I see is that the "client-side scanner" has to be opaque to some extent: it's fundamentally impossible to have an open source list of illegal material without sharing the illegal material itself. Meaning that whoever controls that list can abuse it. E.g. by making the scanner report political opponents.

This is a real risk, and the reason I am against ChatControl.

But it isn't dismantling privacy per se.

EDIT: I find it amazing how much I can be downvoted for saying that I am against ChatControl, but that argument X or Y against it is invalid. Do we want an echo chamber to complain about the principle, or do we want to talk about what is actually wrong with ChatControl?

It's nice to say "those politicians are morons who don't understand how it works", but one should be careful to understand it themselves.

It's a mechanism where the Governments give lists of un-auditable hashes to chat operators and force them to send the content of messages to them when they match.

You can't for a second imagine how that could possibly go wrong?

The hashes are "only for what's deemed illegal" because just trust me bro. There won't be any false-positives because just trust me bro. Even if you do believe the Governments are fully trustworthy and don't care about false positives of your own personal images or messages being passed around law enforcement, most systems like this have usually also eventually been compromised by other parties (like CALEA which was used by China and other adversaries for years). Even if you fully trust the Government, we can't actually be sure the un-auditable list of hashes are only from them, or whether adversaries have compromised the system to add their own hashes. And we don't know that the mechanism that sends our private messages (from a real match, or a false-positive, or an adversarial added hash) are only going to authorised parties or if somebody else has managed to add themselves in (like has happened with "lawful intercept" systems in the past).

So even when claiming it's only for combating the most heinous crimes, the system is too dangerous.

> You can't for a second imagine how that could possibly go wrong?

I can, and that is why I am against ChatControl. But many many comments here say stuff like "it breaks encryption", and that's not actually what it does.

The debate should focus on what ChatControl cannot solve, not on details it could solve. If you spend your day complaining about something that can be solved, politicians will (rightfully) say "I hear you, don't worry we will solve that".

> There won't be any false-positives because just trust me bro.

"There will be false-positives, but they won't have any impact on you". You find it invasive? 99% of people don't care, they already give all their data to private companies like TooBigTech.

> whether adversaries have compromised the system to add their own hashes.

So what? Legal material gets reported to the authorities, they see it's legal, and they realise that the list has been tampered with.

> And we don't know that the mechanism that sends our private messages

"Don't worry, we will make the code open source, you'll be able to audit it!"

> The hashes are "only for what's deemed illegal" because just trust me bro.

YES. That's my problem with it. It can be abused because fundamentally we cannot audit those hashes. We don't want to create a system that gives that power to whoever controls it.

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