HN Reader

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.

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.

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

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 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.

> "I find it extremely worrying that the German government is so shirking its responsibility to take a position on this," said Left Party MP Donata Vogtschmidt, who chairs her group's digital committee. "Because in the Council of the EU, the current blocking minority against chat control depends directly on Germany." If the German government does not stick to the position of its predecessor, "the dam could break and the largest surveillance package the EU has ever seen could become reality."

> Jeanne Dillschneider, Green Party spokesperson on the committee, wrote to netzpolitik.org about her impression of the meeting: "The CDU/CSU, in particular, has often shown in the past how little the protection of fundamental digital rights means to them. I fear the same thing will happen now, even more so, with the CDU/CSU-led Ministry of the Interior." She therefore considers it "all the more crucial whether the Ministry of Justice upholds our fundamental digital rights during this legislative period."

> "I'm cautiously hopeful that some colleagues from the coalition parties apparently share my criticism of chat control," Dillschneider continues. "The question now will be whether they can actually bring themselves to reject chat control. However, I'm not particularly optimistic here."

> Dillschneider's committee colleague, Vogtschmidt, wants to ensure that the Bundestag is forced to take a position on the issue beyond statements made in committee meetings. This is permitted by Article 23 of the Basic Law, which allows parliament to adopt European policy statements. The government must then consider these in negotiations. Vogtschmidt believes: "Now I think chat control will have to be brought back to the Bundestag plenary session to raise awareness of this monstrous danger among a wider public. I will work towards this in the coming days!"

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...

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

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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."

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

EU must go.