One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill
politico.eu
Related: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
politico.eu
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
What is a dialog, then? A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?
Or, or, "normal people" sending emails only for the lawmakers to go "thanks for the feedback, we're doing it anyway"?
> One EU diplomat said some EU member countries are now more hesitant to support Denmark’s proposal, at least in part because of the campaign: “There is a clear link.”
> Ella Jakubowska, head of policy at digital rights group EDRi, said “This campaign seems to have raised the topic high up the agenda in member states where there was previously little to no public debate."
This is amazing, and makes me regain a bit of (much destroyed) faith in democracy.
> But Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, one of the loudest proponents of tough measures to get child abuse material off online platforms, said in a statement that his proposal is far more balanced than the Commission’s original version and would mean that scanning would only happen as a last resort.
If the option is there, it will be abused.
Good, this is the person that should be blamed loud and clear
The fact that he's actually saying this is incredible, and not in a good way.
I'd love to hear him explain the government exemptions in the bill with this in mind.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/danish-justice-min...
...which is the government's fault and they should be blamed.
If that somehow seams reasonable on its face to someone, then I don't know where to begin a reasonable discussion.
When they do intercept physical mail messages, if the sender has encoded the message, in most democracies, the government is not permitted to compel the sender to decode the message. And even if you come under suspicion today and they start intercepting your physical mail, they can't have an LLM read ALL the physical letters you've ever sent at the press of a key. With electronic communications they don't even need suspicion first. The LLMs are already actively searching everything hunting for anything the government labels sufficiently "suspicious." The "Five Eyes" intelligence agencies have been capturing all email, instant messages and phone call metadata for more than 15 years already.
> The cops can intercept physical mail
You didn't answer the question...
I am worried what happens when those people who would otherwise be in prison instead have children and those children don't get this kind of therapy.
I mean, he's kinda right. It just depends on if you feel you're a target or not. If you're not the target, you feel an increased sense of security from any threat caused by the people who are the target.
A really obvious example is a dictator like Kim Jong Un: there's a huge amount of surveillance in North Korea, but all of it serves him and none of it threatens him.
So, especially someone kind of unthoughtful and ignorant of the complexities might feel "an increased sense of security" from this surveillance, because they know they're not a pedophile so assume surveillance purportedly targeted at pedophiles will do them no harm. You might even feel "more freedom" to the degree you feel pedophiles are a threat to you or your family.
If promises about licenses meant a damn, we wouldn’t have speeding cameras.
(Technically correct is the best kind of correct)
[1] https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/no-charges-laid-on-bug...
In contrast, an expensive speedy car disguised as a cheap slow one would be much more suspicious.
There is a lot of mythology about gods walking among men, hiding their true nature, etc. And more recent examples include the TV show Lucifer.
Someone wanting to roleplay that sort of being is entirely plausible. Without knowing the person's personality (which you presumably did) it's hard to say whether they would have genuinely wanted to do that or if it was an excuse.
(That said, another approach is to have a conversation about "what are you trying to achieve", and find a way for everyone to have the fun they'd like to have without risking something game-breaking.)
To make it clearer, the players and the GM will be struggling against each - in a controlled way, yes, but also a meaningful way. I'm not a super deadly GM but players will be risking death in at least low-key way and so everyone will sooner or later be "using everything they have".
Edit: basically, saying "this rule/power/etc exists but won't have an impact" is more or less saying that the "rules aren't serious", in either the 'Chat Control' or the DM situation. But the very nature of rules is that we wouldn't have them if they weren't serious.
If you're playing an off-the-shelf campaign this is problematic. If the GM is creating the game as you go, then a good GM should be able work with the player to make this reasonable. The GM can always use GM-power to prevent a player from doing something, even if it involves a literal hand of God reaching down to stop them.
A conversation with the player beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about this sort of thing would go a long way. Let them know under what circumstances you're willing to allow them to use whatever the power is. Let them know the consequences if they don't follow those rules.
Unlike with ChatControl, a D&D game is a situation where the necessary trust is able to exist.
An example: agree the player character is some trickster djinn sent from another plane to learn to be a human and how to trick people. They have immense cosmic powers of life and death, but as part of being sent over, they can only use the power for immediate comedy. Violations result in the djinn getting yanked back to their plane and disincorporated.
Boom done. Now you have a massively OP character that can only use their power in humorous situations that don't affect the storyline, and if they try to abuse that then that's instant-death.
I've played in games with "the GM kills you" mechanics and it felt juvenile/arbitrary/abusive. Remember, this is a game where every players' character needs to "shine" and similarly needs to know they're being judged with fairness and compassion by the GM (compassion especially along the lines of "understand what I say my character does as something reasonable").
A player that in good faith wanted to role play such a character, would work with the DM in advance to structure rules well-understood by all parties about exactly what would happen if they abuse their situation.
All the DnD situations can be trivially resolved by good-faith and communication on all sides.
Unlike Chat Control, where good faith cannot be assumed.
D&D is intentionally a collaborative story, and it shouldn't be out of the question for players to collaborate with the DM. Focusing on "the balance between player and GM" is great for a dungeon-crawl style game (which I would argue is the only thing 5e is actually designed for, and is poor for what most people try to use it for, but that's a whole other rant), but putting too much focus on it in a more roleplay-centered campaign can lead to a very adversarial relationship between players and the DM. If you have great players, you should trust them to collaborate with you, not just opposed to you.
But I don't think this really relates to "my character has excess-or-god-like powers but I won't use them" situation. The point isn't the characters can't have more free-form powers that GM interprets sympathetically. The point is if the player has to say their character has special over-the-top-powers, they are creating a rule, not leaving things for free collaboration. I remember in a FATE game in which one player specified has character's aspect that "world's greatest thief" and this both abuse of the FATE system and actual harassment/psychological abuse of another players. I learned the lesson that aspects never should superlatives to them.
For starters the government is not in the habit of releasing these new powers, once it's established it will stay for a very, very long time.
And you can be sure the new powers will be used in unintended ways, which the citizens will have a hard time blocking.
So it's actually very simple: No to Chatcontrol, now and forever.
MSM today has no choice but to parrot or echo the opinions of those in power if they want to stay in business otherwise they get shut down for $REASON witch can be any of the following labels: hate speech, misinformation, fake news, woke left, radical right wing, Putin supporters, etc. Just spin the roulette and pick one.
>What is a dialog, then? A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?
Yes, that's precisely how it works:
What a load of crap! There is still tons of "mainstream media" outlets that don't do this. One of the biggest in the UK would be The Guardian, there are hundreds like it.
The decision to toe the line, like the WaPo, are purely because of money (Jeff's and his readership's), not because anyone is "shutting them down" for X or Y.
I used to like the Guardian in 2009-214 but now, I trust someone's "it came to me in a dream", before I trust The Guardian, given their recent flops and biases.
So much wisdom on comedy, even 80s comedy Who reads the papers? - Yes, Prime Minister - BBC comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
Your last point seems to be the parent's point as well -- if you want to keep your media business alive (to make money; that's what businesses are) in the US you have to be careful criticizing those currently in power. Unless I misunderstood you to and you meant that parroting the party line is a way to make more money but not doing it is also perfectly effective and not at all a risk.
Alternative voices are to be found on tight corners of the internet, like an individual on Twitter for example.
Why wouldn't they? It's a NATO aligned, pro-Israel rag under Axel Springer, of course they're helping to sell surveillance technology that can be abused by militaries and state agencies, one of the main israeli exports and generally appreciated industry by NATO.
It doesn't require analyzing of all text and sound. Everything else is still fair game.
Why, yes... that's exactly what the types of outfits like the European People's Party [1] expect on many things. But year after year these incompetent grouches get the majority of votes. And that's before one has to deal with the full-blown far right, fascists, and the like (e. g. ESN [2], PfE [3], et cetera).
1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People's_Party]
2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_of_Sovereign_Nations_Gr...]
Besides, your reading of the decidedly centrist Danish Socialdemokraterne as leftists is bizarre to me, especially since they moved more and more towards the right. Something they share with other classic social democrat, i. e. centrist (status quo), parties in the S&D, e. g. their German compatriots from the SPD.
Things that were anathema in my very Catholic country just 20 years ago (divorce, abortion, gay marriage, assisted dying, but also maximum work hours, minimum wage policies, equal pay policies, women's quotas, tax funded subsidies/pensions for people who never contributed to social security, etc) are now so mainstream that even “conservatives” (never mind “centrists”) have co-opted most of them.
But for certain leftists, “ideological purity” apparently trumps all of those advancements.
Now, we're starting to find out what “ideological purity” looks like when that gets co-opted by the right side of the spectrum. And it's not pretty.
Progressives, sans scare quotes, fought long and hard for lobbying access to get the parties in power push through what should be considered basic human rights in any civilized society.
> "Things that were anathema in my very Catholic country just 20 years ago [...] are now so mainstream that even “conservatives” (never mind “centrists”) have co-opted most of them."
In my reality, many conservatives, especially of the clerical variety, are very busy rolling back these basic human rights. And their centrist allies play ball. As usual.
> "Now, we're starting to find out what 'ideological purity' looks like when that gets co-opted by the right side of the spectrum."
Starting to find out? You sound like you labor under the absurd illusion that conservatives/right-wingers of any couleur never had some sort of ideological ideal they tried to pitch to hoi polloi. Well, there's enough libraries worth of works to cure someone of that misbelief.
> Still frustrating that Politico still implies that the bill has any power to stop CSAM, given that everyone who wants to trade it will obviously just use another layer of encryption.
Obviously, many people will not because many are already caught not using any, and many more are just using simple consumer options that this legislation would eliminate.
We can agree that the legislation is horrible without lying to ourselves and asserting that it would have zero impact
The services that deal with CSAM would be flooded with false positives from the automated scanning. They would, in turn, have to find methods of short-cutting the assessment of these false positives so that they can actually function.
The real CSAM would be drowned out by family snaps of kids in pools, of teenagers sexting each other, etc. The ability of the relevant services to actually detect and catch real abusers would be severely hampered. Actual abuse would be caught less and more kids would be harmed.
Five minutes of thought leads to this obvious conclusion. Which implies that this was never about protecting kids in the first place. It's about controlling what people say, as always.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/08/21/trial-begins-f...
Anyone remember OTR on Pidgin/gaim back in the day? That kind of system could work on any medium rendering this whole thing completely pointless.
Fun days those were.
Somehow I think in the eyes of the politicians the next step would be that you can only install government approved chat apps on your phones.
Desire for control knows no limits.
She's German, so probably a letter on approved paper in an approved envelope. And you will get a response via a certified letter. Or maybe a fax?
Or the dialog should be in the next election cycle when she is voted out and then it will be interpreted as "the people have spoken". I find it funny how politicians when they're cornered start claiming that this is not the right way to stall for time to pass whatever laws they want to pass anyway.
(Did you know it's a criminal offense in Germany to have your fax "participant ID" set incorrectly? The one transmitted in-band, that you configure on your fax device, not the network provided caller ID.)
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-EU-Ombudsman-criti...
Thorn hires Europol police officers to lobby their software.
Their framing it as "Spam campaign" is just as awful, rather than "Outreach campaign". Politico is just another capital interests establishment outfit despite occasionally pretending otherwise.
As a general rule, politicians don't actually have a strong opinion on, or much context on, most things which they are asked to vote on. This can make this sort of lobbying/campaigning quite effective; at a certain point you're forcing the politician to _think_ about it, and that's half the battle.
This is completely besides the point, and illustrates exactly what he doesn't want to understand: as long as that last-resort mechanism is available, it will be used and abused. The latest clear example of that exact same thing is the terrorism charges brought against the pro-Palestine campaigners in London: terrorism legislation was also brought in under the excuse that "it would only be used in the narrowest of circumstances".
This kind of legislation is a red line that democracies should never cross.
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
It is a dialog. Millions are against it, a few (powerful people) in favor. The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
On a meta level, it even gives them a taste of the millions of messages that‘d get flagged false positively monthly, overwhelming police and other systems.
Make it a radioactive career-ending move to try.
Search Gerhard Schroder for more info.
Current russian war in Ukraine is also her doing. Making german military a joke, sending tens if not hundreds of billions euros to russia. She still admits no mistakes at all, despite being very actively hated across whole eastern part of EU. When asked directly about any of this she just goes into her fairy tale mental space not anchored in reality.
Overall she did a lot of long term harm. I don't believe she is evil at the core, just severely delusional, easy to manipulate and overall a bad, very bad leader. Wake me up when regular germans realize what rest of EU grokked a decade ago.
Saying "it's not a dialog" is just evading the (uncomfortable) dialog. Maybe some MEPs are going to actually engage in the dialog.
It's as if, for her, only phone calls, speeches, or handwritten letters would be enough to start a dialog. She seems to be under the misapprehension that digital communication is something to which norms and laws and, fundamentally, rights don't apply. Which is a misguided and dangerous belief.
They have the additional duty of convening meetings to discover facts and information useful to the public and to the creation of new laws. In this they consult experts with specific questions relevant to current national interests. The experts are also not there to engage in "dialog" but to provide data.
In my entire life I've not seen "dialog" between a politician and a citizen produce anything useful other than tragic comedy.
It's as much of a dialog as they allow for people to express their views. If I write a politician a well reasoned, thorough explanation of why I support or oppose something, the best outcome I get, as a non-lobbyist, is having a "for" or "against" viewpoint tallied into a giant bucket.
So if elected reps are going to distill our "dialog" down to an aggregated tally of support or opposition, then a canned email covers the entire dialog that's allowed.
Compile collective thought by semantic meaning. Each person should be able to influence the whole proportional to total participants of the list.
It's 2025. That the citizens don't have a government run website which allows them to register their sentiment, if not outright direct democratic vote, on every issue put before them is baffling to me.
Representatives made sense when horses were the fastest way to send news. They're a vestige on an otherwise powerful ideal.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...
The EU is spending funds, given to it by member states, to further its own interests? This stinks.
Note that this technology complemented ongoing campaigns rather than standing alone; that’s important. It would be difficult to have an impact by building a tool in isolation.
> "The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM)"
Now that the casual reader has already drawn a conclusion, they're also primed to dismiss the group referenced in the next sentence as as outliers and crazies (probably with hidden motives regarding CSAM):
> — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.
So yeah, thanks to Joachim for making this. Of course, it won't actually work, these people don't give a damn about the children, they just want total control, and surveillance and there's no lower bounds for what they will argue to achieve it.
And when the wind turns, they'll quickly sweep these articles under the rug and pretend they were always on the right side of history, defending democracy and freedom on the front line.
> The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark.
That's a lot of knowledge about an unknown person.
> Joachim himself declined to provide his last name or workplace because his employer does not want to be associated with the campaign. POLITICO has verified his identity. Joachim said his employer has no commercial interest in the legislation, and he alone paid the costs associated with running the website.
But I don't blame him, the Danish minister of justice who is pushing for this bill is a complete nut job. So technically it go hurt him if he needs a security clearance with Danish police or military intelligence.
[0]: https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/emner/borgere/navne/navne-ti...
What’s not clear to me though is whether they’re deliberately tricking their source, or whether they genuinely don’t understand that their source is not anonymous when they give that many details.
There are 119 people born in 1995 with first name Joachim, and 123 in 1994. So probably somewhere around 120 30-year old Joachims in Denmark right now. About 3.75% of the population lives in Aalborg. So assuming an even distribution of 30-years old Joachims, we would expect 4-5 people in Aalborg. There seems to be a very good chance that there is only one possible software engineer named Joachim then.
- "spam campaign"
- "trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping CSAM"
- "a bill _seen by privacy activists_ as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance" (emphasis mine).
It's propaganda under the guise of journalism.
Why not call it: "a proposal to break encryption and enact mass surveillance, claimed to be used to fight CSAM"?
How did the author decide which part to present as plain fact, and which as mere activist opinion? The choice isn't arbitrary - the proposal definitely will break encryption and enact mass surveillance - that's what the text of the proposal directly commands governments to do!
I guess such subtleties fade compared to the two bald lies in the title alone - it is not "spam" to simplify EU citizens contacting their representatives, and since that "spam" was sent by those citizens themselves, it is not a "one-man" campaign either, but a mass movement.
That doesn't have the same ring to it to persuade clueless and weak politicians to support anything with the word "child" in it.
They have a very obvious bias, and the parts supporting their bias are presented as positive.
See also the "exonerative tense".
While of course we’re grateful to the person who setup the website, this isn’t the first time a campaign against a piece of policy has included a website. Politico makes it sounds like it’s a fight between the little man and the “big parliament” but emailing your MEPs (the ones you elect every couple of years) has always been an effective way to signal your views. And yes, for bigger issues there have been websites and flyer actions to remind people to voice their views.
It’s democracy and absolutely a form of debate.
Also, I think Politico should absolutely review how they try to protect the identity of people they’re writing about because naming the guy and providing so much information in this day and age is just plain doxing.
> one-man ... campaign
it's a website that drafts an email for you, and then you send it yourself. it's an organizational tool, yes, but broad involvement is sorta the point
> spam campaign
gross mischaracterization, citizens sending emails to their govt representative for legitimate purposes - making their political opinion known to the politician - is not spam under any sane definition
The whole point of it is that it enables a duckton of people to campaign against it in an easy way. And much more noticeable than a stupid change.org petition where you're just one of an easily-ignored number on a website.
This type of approach from the journalist always confuses me. Why would his employer matter? What does that have to do with anything?
The alternative would be ultra-dry, wire-style reporting, That does exist because there's some demand from the left and center for that kind of journalism. Though I see little demand on the rights for just-the-facts reporting.
A person speaking up is cool. A company speaking up is lobbying.
Fight Chat Control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44856426 - Aug 2025 (498 comments)
(As for Chat Control threads in general, there are too many to list.)
So, previously they could blow off people like Mieke personally, and now they're getting too many messages to be able to do that. That seems like a pretty clear win.
My favorite example was when a few people made Twitter accounts masquerading as large companies, bought a verified stamp, and then issued a couple tweets that single handedly wiped billions off the companies' stock prices.
If anyone else knows of similar interventions, I would love to learn of them. It makes me think about how individuals can force multiply their impact, and whether there's methods for personal empowerment to be learned from these examples.
You can have outsized impact by participating in democracy.
That's exactly my point, the normal mode of "participating" in democracy is usually called voting, which, individually, in most elections, does nothing. Only in aggregate does a vote matter, there's not been an election decided by a single vote in my lifetime, that I'm aware of anyway. So in reality, to effectively participate in democracy at minimum requires doing something as an individual that causes more than just your vote to happen for the candidate you want. Door knocking or calls for example.
So just saying "participating" isn't enough because many people just interpret that as voting, which is an act with no individual impact.
I'm interested in actions individuals can take that have actual impact, and are thus individually empowering. I believe liberal democracy has made nations of sleepwalkers and the result is becoming apparent in the 21st century as governments seem to act more and more against the will of the people.
But public debate, petitions, the press, demonstrations, etc. is also an important part of democracy.
But really, if you want impact, don't do it individually: join a group, a party, an NGO, etc.
As an individual you shouldn't have much impact in a democracy. The fact there are many individuals trying kind works to keep the barrier for impact high - which is good, without it no stability.
One that comes to mind is Keith Gill [1] of GameStop fame [2].
And the article itself describes the actual setup accurately in one of the opening paragraphs, so clearly the author knows the facts:
> The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it...
And most of the other headlines on their current front page are quite boring and descriptive.
I also feel uneasy about Politico putting the lights on the creator this way and stopping short of doxxing them when they clearly wish to have their identity unknown and could face threats from having their personals broadcasted.
It's also telling that the two opponents to the bill named in the article are Musk and WhatsApp - hardly the most sympathetic picks for the Politico audience.
The commission has no direct responsibility towards the citizens in EU. It is also the European Parliament that scrutinized and votes on the laws created by the commission. The commission job is only to write proposal for laws.
This is a bit like complaining that people have objections about a politician speech and send emails to the politician rather than the employed person who wrote it. Should citizens direct their messages and complaints to speech writes?
What do you expect them to answer, other than "thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind if and when I have to vote on it"? Why not wait and write to them when they actually have to vote on this proposal?
This is also politics. You don't wait until last second to file a complaint. Politics is a slow moving process, not a single event, and creating support takes work over time. MEP are not subject experts so they will usually seek input long before it comes down to voting, which occur in parallel with the work of the commission.
"thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind if and when I have to vote on it"? is basically all that an citizens can expect by talking to a politician which only job is to vote on things. The same goes the other way around. If a politician today speaks about a political subject, I as a citizen can only say "thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind when its time to vote".
I never understood this argument. The comission's job is to write the laws, the parliment's job is to make sure they acceptable to all member states and either pass them or send them back.
It's the same how say, UK government uses various comissions to write legislation which then goes in front of the parliment which then either passes it or don't - and I don't think we would call the British system undemocratic(well, other than the monarchy and the house of lords - but the way the parliment works is deeply democratic). I don't believe any EU member state directly elects their law writers and comissions that propose them - the democratic part is always at the top.
But by volume most of these bills are shit and so just quietly die in a vote nobody noticed, and so most law that we actually have was indeed drafted by a special commission and put forward by the executive before it was approved by parliament.
It doesn't send anything but assists visitors to send on their own.
It is not unsolicited communication.
Politico is not an unbiased publication.
At least it’s not a complete hit piece, if you ignore the title then it’s mostly balanced.
I wouldn’t call that neutral.
That's what the bill's intentions are.
If you think it won't work or not be effective that doesn't change the stated intention.
If you think one or more of the proponents are lying that doesn't change what the article should state unless there is evidence
They already said "aimed at" which implies that's the goal instead of writing "that will stop child..."
It's not an opinion piece they are simplifying conveying information from both sides. The article even details that there is an opposition to the bill.
It's always the stated intention, because it's hard to argue against "think of the children". From commentary on similar legislation in the UK:
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
I have every expectation that Chat Control is either similar or is a blatant cash-grab by people interested in peddling technical "solutions", or both.
They are doctoring at the symptoms than the real issue. But that would mean more personnel and more money needed and less side effects like mass surveillance
It's the closest to a Fox News-esque entity in Western Europe, I believe. They also own BILD, a tabloid, and Die Welt, a newspaper that constantly publishes climate-skeptic articles, and also infamously published an op-ed by Musk supporting the AfD.
I would guess that the author is to involved with writing the headline. An awful lot of journalists have been up in arms the last decade over the editors writing new headlines that imply the opposite stance of the article itself...
But now I've taken the time to send mails and at least feel like I have done _something_. See you next time, I guess! @ Politicians
318K signatures at the time of this posting, which means it gathered ~90K since yesterday. Please consider signing.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en
I signed an EU citizens initiative to keep EU citizenship for British citizens after brexit. I knew it was doomed to fail, as it made no real sense, but it wasn't a bother so I signed it anyway.
The preconditions are:
1. find at least 7 people who sign up for running this campaign with me 2. Plan and document how I want to run this campaign.
This will require some planning. I can get to it by the end of next week.
I really dislike this framing of the bill. It makes it seem like anyone crusading against the bill is against stopping the spread of CSAM, which is presumably the aim of the lawmakers who drafted this bill. But Politico played right into their hands.
This right here is the problem, a good leader leads by example, not exemption.
That is the whole problem isn't it?
Should government be able to scan your personal data without your permission to fight crime?
If people want to get child abuse material off online platforms, then there are other things that needs to be dealt with than installing back doors for government to scan your personal files. This comment is just seems like some kind of hand weaving of excuse on the politician side to create infrastructure of massive surveillance state.
No, what the actual fuck: it's a bill rolling out a CSAM scanner of unproven efficacy, but with severe side effects for privacy! See, one sentence, and immediately a reader sees that this is a nuanced, contested issue.
What kind of reporting is this, extremely one-sided. Politico, many such cases. Sad.
I also get a kick out of lobbyists complaining about it.
Sorry, but this is what democracy looks like.
It's sad how complex us humans think we are when our behaviours boil down to fairly predictable animal and tribal responses.
And what I love about the general suffix above is that you can pop it on anything to make someone oppose to it sound bad: "those trying to implement mandatory home camera systems aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from happening."
But that's not the point, if you want a society that's empowered by digital services, you need it to be safe and secure, 'chat control' (what a stupid name) is required
But huge thanks to Joachim for making it easy!
[1] - https://archive.is/jchny
[2] - https://archive.is/0Dqys
The current situation does not work.
Chat controls, government controls - are coming.
The underbelly of social and chat tech is filled with logic gremlins and impossible objects. They’re just constant metastasizing into monster.
And it’s absolutely natural that legal entities get legislated into existence to oppose them.
Go sit in a T&S Que. See the absurdity that has to be wrestled into workflows. See how individual voices and requests are reduced to KPIs.
Knowledge is power and so on - but knowledge must also be earned.
See what reality is for T&S or Ai safety or risk and compliance or what have you.
See the rift in reality as ideas, people and tech are mangled together.
At the very least you can know the absurdity of the reality we live with.
Not if the people continue to fight off each attempt. Looks like we may be winning this round. Each time we win this battle, the opposition becomes better organized/funded and citizens become more aware of what is going on. Each subsequent push will have less chance of success once we pass a key threshold; it seems to me that this may be the last big push, if we win here then the public won’t back future attempts. Then your only option to pass this will be removing democracy altogether.
Because I promise you there are people who would give up a great of deal to solve child sex abuse crimes.
They just don't understand the actual risks due to manipulation
But yeah moderators deal with shit. Not really a problem because they're already being replaced by AI.
In my town there was a meta moderation centre with thousands of people. They just fired them from one day to the next.
Thanks OP for adding it here!
After I made it, I came across something similar on another web site, but with some cool additional features:
- support for multiple 'campaigns'
- per-campaign questions (with drop down responses)
- AI to customize the email and subject, instead of just filling in a template
"I do not think that word means what [she] thinks it means"
And very poor article by Politico
If every time we found someone with CSAM on their hard drive, we swung them from a tree—folks would think twice before engaging in the production and distribution of CSAM.
We don’t need to break encryption. We need real, permanent, consequences that fit the crime.
Do they have to mention that Elon Musk owns X every time they mention a post? I don't see how Elon owning X has anything to do with the content of a random X post.
> trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.
Nice try on framing. No, you don’t stop the spread of the material that way. It will just change distribution channel for the price of creating a tool for mass surveillance.
Next sentence,
> The website was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark
? Is this what journalism has come to? On top of calling this a spam campaign?
describes an example sentence. I wasn't referring to Joachim :)
Yeah I feel so safe with hundreds of unknown people constantly looking over my shoulder /s