HN Reader

Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.

someone has to prove illicit connections to private companies and potentially black markets. the data is guaranteed to end up in the wrong hands which will have a worse impact on the lives of citizens, workers as much as educated ones, and definitely officials; how to better gain dirt on someone if the law supports breaking encryption and they falsely believe their state of the art messaging app is worth more than the skeletons in their closets?

at the least the basic human rights and privacy laws should be on everyones' side ... except rapists, the many kinds of violent abusers, murderers, especially the genocidal kind, drug punchers, and these fuckers roofying kids in clubs and bars just to have sex ... I probably forgot some ... sorry I didn't stay on topic.

As Freud wanted to let us know, the ageing rich are perverts with enough means to hide any crime ... then they made him bend over and invent the Oedipus complex, ffs

the only way for them to create an argument for ChatControl is more terrorism or some fucked up crimes against children so this damn thing is a sure-fire shitstorm with recursive, bad yields.

The real question to me is, why is Europe and Europeans okay with America and American software companies having access to their logs (encryption can be bypassed take whatsapp for example, do you honestly bellieve that Facebook does not have access to whatever is typed on whatsapp and/or can give it to authorities if necessary?) or discord, which if you are on mobile tells you via a title what the conversation you're having is about, is automatic message scanning not involved there? but the EU and or European countries cannot?

If we go by the idea that America should not either, then go ahead and do something about it, all this seems to me is just some weirdly motivated "activism" that may or may not be originated from the source that actually has access to said data at the moment. I am going to go with the belief that people are not naive and instead they are acting maliciously about this knowing very well that this already occurs, but only for a specific side.

With a warrant from a judge people should be compelled to provide access to their encrypted files or be in contempt of court with all that entails. Anything else is overreach.

Even if they did, I am sure this would have been toppled by our constitutional court. You have to know that our police is not allowed to scan number plates of cars entering or leaving the country due to privacy concerns. How on earth would anyone think that lifting our dearly held fundamental right of "mail privacy" is ok?

Excellent win!

See you next time.

Proud to be a German today, for sure :)

IIRC It's Denmark that keeps pushing for this. Is there anyone here to give more background on that?

Maybe, just maybe, (probably not) they learned something from the NSA/FBI (I don't remember) tricking the BSI into helping them with industry espionage against a large Germany company[^1]. and pretty much any technology widely used in chat control would be under tight US control, or Israel which in recent times also isn't exactly know to be a peace seeking reasonable acting country.

[^1]: Which I think was about car companies and pre-trump, pre-disel-gate. Also not the only time where it's known that the US engaged on industry espionage against close allies or Germany specifically.

Just replace politicians with AI. As soon as the systems are reliable.

Austria opposing, meanwhile planning their own version of it nationally lol.

Maybe an ECI (european citizens' initiative) that would burry the thing for good? :)

The fascists will continue to bring it back again and again, just like Microsoft TCPA and TPM different name same shit

Happy to see the NL here in opposition to ChatControl! The political climate here is slowly pushing to the right, which I'm not happy about. But there seems to be voices getting louder from the left. So that leaves me with hope!

It's not the end of the fight, but it's great to see that the efforts are working! I sent a handwritten letter to my MPs a few weeks ago about this issue but no answer so far...

Apparently Italy will support it. This is absolutely infuriating and it will fail miserably. Encryption can't he stopped no matter what law gets out there and any politician voting in favor shows how ignorants they are.

Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.

Why doesn't the EU put effort in paving the way for a more open and free tech world when we rely 100% on propietary technology that comes from the other side of the Atlantic?

Yesss.

It seems that public pressure pays off.

During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.

The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.

I dont get it, what problem are they trying to solve ? This kind of regulation stirs up a lot of shit and just wastes everyones time.

How is the blocking minority counted?

8/27=0.296 (29.6%), and I thought it has to be 35% (65% supporters to pass)

Why would you really need something like that in a non-totalitarian state? Basically, it follows the russian playbook (essentially the same 'language' - safety concerns), but instead of the FSB, who is the beneficiary actor in this case?

This is good, but we do need some sort of progress somehow. As that case with the fake drug dealer "privacy-focussed" mobile phone company was crazy, when they had all the messages from Swedish death squads, etc. - https://www.404media.co/watch-inside-the-fbis-secret-phone-c...

Obviously monitoring everyone's messages is making things way too easy for authoritarian dictatorships later on, but there does need to be some progress so these groups can't keep acting with complete impunity.

Instead of playing defense, I think we need to take positive steps.

Secrecy of Correspondence[1] is something that desperately needs to be extended fully to mobile devices.

Compare how many letters you get vs how many chat messages you send.

Secrecy of (mobile) communications should be recognized as a (natural?) right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

(edit: unbreak formatting)

Funny how the map shows a clear north/south divide (modulo some nordics).

Looks like latin cultures don't really care about being spied on by they governments.

Unless there is a law that says that the fundamental right to privacy is protected then we're bound to repeat this ordeal every couple of years.

Honestly, this whole ChatControl proposal reeks of the "think of the children" excuse being used to push through mass surveillance

As long as I remember there has been these initiatives in EU. They have been all blocked so far, or turned into something reasonable, but there will always be a new try.

"Think of the children" will never die.

Between this and Google locking down Android, one day the only way to get secure communications will be to buy Huawei etc. Thank God for China, bastion of free speech.

I'd support this if and only if we ran a trial where all public officials had all their messages and emails publicly readable by citizens. Surely the good people adamant on spying on their constituents en-masse has nothing to hide, right?

What should actually happen is that adversaries of this policy should challenge those backing chat control to a test. Those backing it get to attempt to make it work for a year in a control environment, and if at the end of that year, they still can't read every message that actors within that control environment send to each-other (which they won't), we abandon the whole thing for good.

"Bad guys" will always find a way around any attempt to stop them communicating privately. And the rest of the population will be left with governments spying on all of our interactions. The fact that this is even getting this far is absurd.

Glad that my country (Finland) is also on the correct side of this. Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though. Would've expected more, especially from Estonia.

Just think for a moment how broken the EU model is. You don't want something to pass. Other citizens of your country don't want the thing to pass. Your politicians don't want that thing to pass. Your euro politicians don't want that thing to pass. Yet in the current model that doesn't matter one bit because your SOVEREIGN country may still be overruled by foreign countries and politicians.

It's unbelievable that we have allowed EU to spread into this all encompassing monster that deals with anything but economic cooperation among member countries.

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> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself

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