HN Reader

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scope of such a dragnet, the economic impact, the societal damage, all seems rather broad. Yet why don't any major operators in the EU take a stance? Is it really so below the radar, or being kept so below the radar?

Just the network egress costs to whatever state sanctioned scanner gets built will in aggregate probably exceed a few hundred MEUR yearly.

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is.

The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!

it would be great if this article actually explained what Chat Control is somewhere at the top. it says it will, but I’m quite a few paragraphs in and have no idea what I’m supposed to be mad about yet

Of all the arguments presented I'm surprised to see absent the one that seems most obvious to me: encryption is just math, there's no way to actually ban it. If criminals think their conversations are going to be detected they aren't going to just say "oh well let's not crime now". They are going to simply spin up their own e2e encrypted channels. The software is nearly trivial, the technical barriers are very low - it's hard to think why it won't happen.

So then what? They start outlawing encryption altogether? knowledge of math? How would you claw back all the public and freely available software that people can already use to encrypt messages to each other?

The article gives some examples of scope creep but missed the biggest one IMO: copyright enforcement. I suspect if you follow the money, copyright is what keeps things like Chat Control coming back. Fully expect Sony, Disney and other IP to be added to the list of flagged content, keeping us safe from dangerous pirates.

As both an EU citizen and a computer programmer, I applaud this article, and I generally agree with its sentiment. But let's be realistic. Chat control is going to happen sooner or later. This is a Hacker News forum. The audience here is very knowledgeable about computer science and fully aware of how technologically impractical the idea of fighting CSAM in this way is. But the general public is somewhere else entirely. They genuinely believe that this will help, to whatever they think it will help. They have no idea that real CSAM distributors will simply adapt by encrypting files into ZIP (or whatever) with strong passwords or using different channels. I've tried explaining this to some of my non-IT friends and family members. I think they now think I'm a pedophile. It's kind of stupid for a father of two teenage daughters, but that's the general public. They want it; they'll get it.

This is 1984 installing a camera in your room to monitor your private conversations and criminalize them.

That's it.

It means that the government asserts the right to bug all your conversations. They've already assured the right to put you in prison for dissenting with the government on policy and you have little to no recourse. Now it's this.

You loved this during covid, you'll love this now, "or else". Signed, your local nanny state.

I emailed all MEPs for my country one month ago. Apart from out-of-office notices I didn't get anything back yet.

Don't worry people. If you are not a European let me tell you how it goes.

The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it.

Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.

They control the guns, so you can't fight back with bullets. They control the airwaves, so you can't fight back with ideas. You're running out of options.

The next step is to control your mind.

Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children.

Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?

I do not understand.

“We want to be able to look into all your private spaces to ensure you’re not a child rapist. If you’re not ok with that you must be a child rapist. Now. Do you support keeping our children safe?”.

This needs to be a South Park episode if it isn’t already.

I'm afraid the Chat Control will pass, sooner or later. The procedure is very simple: reintroduce the bill every other year until the public will not be bothered to hear anymore.

Now, you may think you are the smart one and can always revert to the good old days of OTR[1].

But no, the next thing I can see happening is the smartphone OS conveniently doing client-side scanning of everything on the screen for you. You know, for developers' convenience. And then it's game over: you will not be able to take a look at the Tiananmen Square picture in any installed app.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

For context, this refers to the proposed EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...

Would chat control also force open source software to put in backdoors? Like if users run their own little servers somewhere, and those load websites, or they sideload apps to the app store (thanks to EU hehe).

The people of europe need to stop pretending that whatever controls europe is interested in democoracy, free speech, justice or freedom.

The only long term solution for this is for people to use more different platforms. Communities should be seeking out new platforms, building their own chat platforms with their own protocols. There is no such thing as a single 'decentralized protocol' - There are incompatible protocols and then there are centralized protocols. When it comes to censorship resistance, incompatibility is a feature. Lack of adoption (unpopularity) is a feature.

If other people around you recognize the name of a chat platform you're using, then it's not decentralized and it's almost certainly monitored.

This is one of many laws the EU and member states are pushing in order to implement more online surveillance. I always wonder why individuals (representatives) would push for these kind of surveillance laws? I think politicians usually pass laws which help themselves or their lobbies gain power and influence on economical levels, but I wonder why anyone would push for these kind of legislation even before an authoritarian state is on place. What is there to gain on an individual level?

Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping.

You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

Questions for people who have used phones in China:

How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there?

Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

The Usual. Govt trying to harness private systems for the purpose of public surveillance.

They do this using warrants. And subpoena.

We need a personal declaration of rights that says private systems are not in anyway obligated to extend the reach of govt surveillance networks, without the consent of the private party.

It is a small protective measure. The next step will be for govt to bully everyone to give consent to their surveillance systems … or else.

But as of right now, the law is arbitrarily taking for granted that private surveillance systems belong to govt regulations.

Sometimes I think if this stuff ever got really bad, abandoning smart phones altogether wouldn’t be so bad.

I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my interaction with people is through comment sections. I have no interest in being in group chats, I’d rather meet up with people in person and socialize that way.

It’s not the end of the world if smartphones just become a convenient way for governments to track you, there is totally a different way to live without them, and maybe it’s simple and beautiful.

If you really have a serious use case for peer to peer end to end encryption, you should be using something like Meshtastic.

It seems like the golden age of freedom is behind us for now, and we’re going to descend for a while back into nationalism and authoritarianism

For those complaining the article doesn't explain at the very begining what it is:

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

EU's latest attempt to squash privacy rights.

I'm no expert but to me, what's particularly silly about "breaking encryption" is it does nothing to prevent using user agents from employing their own encryption layers over other messaging system like gpg/pgp or others. So this does nothing to stop someone who is intent on hiding illegal content and it decreases security and privacy for the average user.

Regarding all the chat control posts, I've not seen any comments regarding the potential use for homomorphic encryption to abide by this law: if chat control is only used for the detection of CSAM (which is another issue in itself; Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash), then could "allowing the government to snoop" be letting them have the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext?

Disclaimer that I actually don't know what the full extent this chat control law is asking for, except for the fact that it will deeply compromise encryption

Just read something on Reddit "Is WhatsApp lying about it's end-to-end encryption?" so no need to write down again here.

As long as you know when you're being used by their fake services.

I hate how people say things like "unquestionably well-intended law enforcement". This is being done for is to protect-the-children, as per usual.

So did anyone ask the question ... is law enforcement actually helping children, when they act? This of course often results in the state raising such children, so the real question is how well that works, compared to not acting at all. Turns out there's a huge study on this, and of course the answer is a big fat no. And that was before another 10+ years of funding cuts.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usato...

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc...

So no, this is not about law enforcement helping children, because they don't provide a solution for the damage they do when acting. The result is law enforcement, on average, makes things worse for children, not better. These institutions are also getting systematically defunded across the EU, it's not getting better.

It is not reasonably believable this is about protecting children. You want to protect children? FIRST, you restore the budget of the institutions caring for children after law enforcement "helps".

Events like this always remind me of President George W. Bush's timeless saying: "Freedom is on the march!"

This is a terrible article about what sounds like a legitimate problem. Even in the section, "What is Chat Control?", the answer to the question is buried in the middle of the seventh paragraph.

If the writer of this post wants people to oppose it, they really should do a better job of explaining at the very top what "it" is.

Sounds like JD Vance was right. Huh. This with respect is the EU's monster to worry about.

Samizdat:

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

As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground.

Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.

Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.

Patrick Breyer is doing god's work!

Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The level of incompetency and ignorance when it comes to privacy & security makes me deeply angry and frustrated to a level that brings me to nihilism and misanthropy

Weird the countries that are all in agreement with chat control all have migration/integration related problems now at odds with local european population that have grown fatigue to the excessive empathy and virtue signaling that have eroded their own identity and safety.

Could it be that this is a last ditched attempt to presumably stop a civil war that seems to be brewing by predominantly muslim vs european populations?

If this isn't a sign that the integration and the multicultural experiment has failed completely in Europe then I don't know what. A free democratic society that is peaceful would never need wide surveillance net like this.

It seems that non of the HN comments touch on the internal demographic tensions that has been going on for quite sometime. Western Europe and Scandinavia reminds me very much of Lebanon before civil war broke out between the Muslims and Christians.