HN Reader

One interesting line in the proposal:

> Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes;

If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?

If they have it all figured out, this exception should not be necessary. The reality is that it isn't secure as they are creating backdoors in the encryption, and they will flag many communications incorrectly. That means a lot of legal private communications will leak, and/or will be reviewed by the EU that they have absolutely no business looking into.

It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.

I also wonder about the business implications. I don't think we can pass compliance if we communicate over channels that are not encrypted. We might not be able to do business internationally anymore as our communications will be scanned and reviewed by the EU.

This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

A few comments about the state of security and privacy in the UK so let me reply with a top level comment instead:

People forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.

> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66028773

As a Dutch citizen Chat Control is the first time I genuinely wish the Netherlands was not part of the EU.

This insane push for surveillance and privacy infringements could be the catalyst needed for the next state exit from the EU

It's sad to see Germans have not learned the lessons of the past. If you are in Berlin I highly recommend the Stasi Museum to understand how dystopic mass surveillance can get.

Wish we the public could read all the private chat logs of all the people who decided to be undecided.

I can't believe with our history involving the Third Reich and the Stasi that we aren't staunchly opposed. Especially with the impending political upheaval when AfD finally gets enough votes to form a ruling government. Our politicians are insanely shortsighted and somehow don't understand the danger they're enabling.

> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union.

I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.

What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.

Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...

Since it's politically incorrect to write nazi germany, ill just write Soviet Germany. This type of bullshit is rooted in their culture.

EU must go.

This dystopian direction of the European Commission coincided with a lot of interaction between Thorn, the European Commission, and Europol. [0][1][2]

Thorn is coincidently is also the vendor of Spotlight, software which solves exactly the problem they are lobbying against.

Thiel's Palantir also has overlapping software capabilities and is also raising questions in their work with Europol. [3]

Connecting these dots was the only thing that made sense to me in order to explain why these repeated repackaged proposals keep steam rolling everything despite all the security concerns, unconstitutionality, and general lack of common sense.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/07/18/european-ombudsman-...

[1] https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...

[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/200017

[3] https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/dutch-group-calls-f...

Whatever happens, at least Signal will not be complicit in this shit show. Will WhatsApp and IMessage bend the knee? I guess we will see.

It should be implemented for politicians:

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

"Von der Leyen previously used her phone to award contracts worth several hundred million euros while acting as defense minister of Germany, effectively bypassing public procurement processes. She subsequently deleted all messages from her phone when investigators probed her. While awarding the COVID-19 vaccine contracts worth billions of euros as head of EU commission, she similarly bypassed procurement processes via her phone and withheld messages on it."

People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial.

It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology.

silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

The politicians are lay people, and only have one tool in their toolbox: laws. So every solution is a legal one.

"Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN." Solution? Create a law requiring VPNs to be registered to a user with their address. There's no conspiracy here - it's simple cause and effect. This is a contrived worst case example because this level of accountability? is not currently proposed.

I would prefer other solutions, but these solutions are firstly much easier for the politicians to understand and also much cheaper to implement and see results.

Why cant they just record meta data and hand it out on courts order. Why must it be a backdoor

I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly.

Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.

Source: I write dystopias on the subject. https://w.ouzu.im

I like to think I wrote a good analogy of what ChatControl/client-side scanning really is. They say "it's not a backdoor, it doesn't break E2E encryption", and they're right.

> It's like asking to an alcoholic schizo with a history of corruption, who only speaks Russian, and that you are forced by law to feed and host at your place at your own expense, to check your private letters before you're allowed to put them in an envelope.

https://gagliardoni.net/#20250916_clientside

https://infosec.exchange/@tomgag/115213723470901734

So, does it make sense for citizens of other countries to call Denmark? Buy advertising on Denmark billboards? And can one do something in Germany?