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Comment by yoan9224 | Hacker News Reader

The cycle of proposing the same surveillance legislation under different names is exhausting. Chat Control, ProtectEU, Going Dark - same invasive proposals, different branding.

What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services. This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.

The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.

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"Going Dark" is perhaps the most honest and realistic branding yet, on multiple levels.

We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.

Pretty sure Google and meta are the ones that normalised mass surveillance...

Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.

They can't put you in jail, but they will often happily sell your data to the government so that they can put you in jail [1], and by holding the data they are now open to subpoenas anyway.

Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.

IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...

> The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.

Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.

Chat Control was never the name of the legislation, it’s the name critics successfully gave to the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control

The other way would be to ruin the career prospects of any politicians that put their name behind this.

Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.

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