I want cameras and microphones in every politicians house, in every room. These record 24/7 and will be live-streamed on twitch. Any politician against this proposal is obviously a child-abusing terrorist, or do they have something even worse to hide?
Zero privacy to world leaders and absolute privacy to citizen would be ideal.
Don't forget all their offices and vehicles.
Its really really great that in a time where fascists gain more and more influence in several EU states, we also make it possible to massively spy on citizens :)
I am sure they will only use it against Pedos and Terrorists! ;)
Europol already said it would use it to fight „illegal migration“ and „human traffickers“ and drug dealers
A french politian demanded to use it against „Drag Queens“ and museums
An italian politian proposed to use chat control against „human traficking“ (in this case a dogwhistle for people, that rescue migrants), organ traffickers, illegal trading of weapons and drug dealers.
Some important german polititians want to expand it against antisemitism, far right extremism and child pornography
A lobbyist and another german politian want to also use it against illegally downloaded movies and music.
https://netzpolitik.org/2023/ueberwachung-politiker-fordern-ausweitung-der-chatkontrolle-auf-andere-inhalte/ (article in german)
Where there's a through, the pigs will come.
Surprise surprise!
And they'll screech like banshees when you mention the same or higher standards of transparency should apply to the rich and politicians themselves.
They’re the same people.
Well, not the same people. The surveillance people are authoritarian fascists that have been in government parties a lot longer than the newer parties with similar views.
Facism is not the same thing as wanting mass surveillance. Or is your definition fascist = bad?
Fourthly, scanning for known, thus old material does not help identify and rescue victims, or prevent child sexual abuse. It will actually make safeguarding victims more difficult by pushing criminals to secure, decentralised communication channels which are impossible to intercept even with a warrant.
This point is huge, and on its own explains why half baked compromises are worthless.
The criminals will use banned chat apps, while innocent people get their messages read.
The reason they don't care about that is that the whole thing isn't about protecting children at all but about surveillance of the vast majority of people.
This. There are already plans on expanding what the surveillance is used for, as soon as it is possible to begin with.
"Think of the children" is just the trick they're using to get their foot in the door. It being utterly ineffective in doing what they claim it'll do, is irrelevant.
Your first mistake was assuming it's an attempt in good faith.
Well that's the point, catching CSAM is just a very convenient excuse. Once that's through, it will just be a matter of extending it to terrorism. Then you can declare anyone a terrorist and bam you have free reign to monitor anyone you want.
Or you could just accuse them of the really dangerous crimes, like copyright violations or insulting politicians.
That requires some kind of proof or bureaucratic fuckery. If you take any ecologist group for instance, you just have to pin a terrorist label on them, and bam, now you can spy on them legally. They're trying to do it in France right now.
Germany too. They are trying to label the climate change protests by the "Letzte Generation" (Last generation) group as organized crime and terrorism.
Are they proposing opening every letter that goes in the mail too? And checking every memory card that gets sent?
Reminds me of this: The Post Office Is Spying on the Mail. Senators Want to Stop It: The USPS carries out warrantless surveillance on thousands of parcels every year. Lawmakers are working to end it—right now by Dell Cameron in Wired.
To initiate this surveillance, the department or agency has at least one hurdle to climb. First, they must submit the request in writing. Then … well, nothing. That is the entire hurdle.
Edit. Note: this is just the exterior of the mail that's scanned.
Time to become a proud criminal. When law becomes tyranny, resistance becomes moral.
The law restricts providing a commercial service in the EU that provides end-to-end encryption without monitoring of the content of communications, not using end-to-end encryption. Unless you're planning to run some kind of underground messaging service, you probably won't be the one violating the law.
What is to stop a company from offering their services in the EU though? As long as they don't legally cooperate with the EU it should be fine. Like Telegram operating from Russia (if they weren't collaborators already).
Well, depends on the jurisdiction where they are operating from.
In the US, if you're intentionally offering commercial services in the EU (and while the US and EU definition of that may differ, I don't think that the difference is broad enough to matter much from the standpoint of services that are being affected), my understanding is that the US will honor EU jurisdiction, and will enforce rulings against companies. Now, you have to actually be doing business under the US standard of doing business in the EU for this to apply -- like, this can't just be some random non-commercial server that you set up and then let anyone on the Internet use, as the US doesn't consider that doing business in the EU. A US-based lemmy/kbin server isn't going to be considered by the US to be doing business in the EU, but if its operator, for example, says "hey Europeans, donate money here and avoid restrictions", then that's targeted advertising to the area and the US will consider that to be doing business in Europe. Someone like Whatsapp definitely can't just say "oh, my servers are in the US, ergo EU law doesn't count, and I'm going to go right on selling ads and services and such in the EU and whatever else I do".
For somewhere like, oh, Russia, Russia may not care about enforcing EU law. However, that isn't a blank check.
First, it may be a pain for the EU to act against Telegram itself, but if money is involved, so are payments. It's not hard for the EU to act against payment processors -- banks, Visa, stuff like that. If a service is getting payment either directly from people in the EU or from advertisers in the EU, the EU can tell the payment processor to cut them off. The payment processor isn't going to fight the EU on that; this sort of thing happens regularly.
Second, if you're using an illegal service, the EU might wind up having EU ISPs block it. Russia has been running around requiring ISPs to ban certain sites. The EU hasn't done that yet, but it could. I am not at all convinced that in the long term, it won't be the norm for countries to have a list of "banned" services that they require their ISPs to block. I am pretty sure that there are a number of parties who would like piracy sites to be blacklisted, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Russia
Third, from an individual standpoint, that means that someone in the EU is not going to be getting any EU legal protection, in the privacy sphere or elsewhere. Now, maybe the technical benefits of having end-to-end encryption outweigh that for the user, but stuff like traffic analysis on messages and the security of the client may be up for question.
Specifically for Telegram, I haven't used Telegram, so I don't know how it handles key distribution, which you need to do for end-to-end encryption -- OTR, for example, needs some pre-existing shared secret or secure sideband channel to bootstrap trust between two users. It looks like Telegram provides source, but for that to be useful, one needs to believe that someone trustworthy has validated the source, that the binary for the client is a legitimate build from that source, and that you have properly distributed keys with the other user using that client. Those can all be done with a lack of legality, but my guess is that a lack of legality likely makes it harder.
How to contact your MEP.
Thanks for the link, but I'm still not sure who to contact. Apparently I'm supposed to know who is "my MEP", but I don't. How to?
Might depend on your country, but for Germany there are no direct candidates that we votes for. Everybody hat one vote one could give to a party, which had presented a list of people for the election. At the end the party then send the first x people of that list, according to how many of the German representatives were to be send by that party.
So, effectively all MEP which are German are "my" MEP. Or just the party I voted for if I want to be exclusive.
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- enters the chat
Most people don't use PGP/GPG, despite it being generally available.
If the vast majority of people don't use something, it doesn't matter much whether it exists.
A service that makes end-to-end encryption easy for the vast bulk of the public is another story.
But you know who does use PGP/GPG to manually encrypt their messages?
Child traffickers.
Most people also do not care about privacy or understand anything about encryption.
If this shit was to happen, it would hit the news for a cycle, some people would get slightly upset and then it would go on with the next thing.
Most people here care a lot about these things and are technically inclined. But we are a minority.
The age of stenography has begun!
Did you mean steganography, ie concealing messages "in plain sight" in otherwise innocuous-looking things like images or audio?
Stenography is any abbreviated writing system, but not really "coded" in any meaningful way
Yes and yes
Okay tell me, a nerd who has never tried to use this, where to start learning how to use steganography.
Lol guess we can kiss post-quantum TLS goodbye.
This is going to have catastrophically negative effects for the internet in general. And, as others have said, actual bad actors will just keep using the most advanced encryption available anyways. This only makes the vast majority of internet users less secure and easier targets for exploitation.
So this is how liberty dies...
I can't see Signal operating in Europe if this is the case. Telegram has already handed over information, so they will likely adapt and continue doing their thing. Meta/WhatsApp will want to keep that money, so they will find a way to operate as well.
I suppose Signal could have a European server, but that might cut them off from the rest of the world.
Might end up using Briar or XMPP.
I haven't given the proposition more than a once-over, but I assume this will cover emails too?
Crazy how we had protests by right wing maniacs suspecting an evil dictatorship conspiracy behind everything, but when an actual aspect of dictatorship comes, nothing happens.
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore
Goodbye data security and privacy... I guess you were nice concepts whilst you lasted.
As long as it applies to the normalplebian things like WhatsApp, I'm not really concerned nor surprised.
It is up to us to protect themselves and it has been since the wake of malicious ads that track your every click. It's gotten so bad that you'd have to be insane to not use uBlock Origin.
Now it's time to find another means of communication. So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends.. such as SimpleX Chat and Session Messenger.
Don't sleep on your OPSEC, unless you have a reason to. :)
As long as it applies to the normalplebian things....I’m not really concerned nor surprised.
So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends…
If you don't want to interact with "normalplebians", I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
Great. That would probably mean a ban for Telegram would also be needed, as they're known to not bow to local surveillance-laws.
I'm all for doing everything to find effing pedos, but I'll doubt it will help catch one. Who would be so dumb to do illegal things on the surface-web?
not really, cos telegram is not end to end encrypted unless you do not use group chats, and deep dive into the menu to enable secret chat for every individual contact.
I have no idea why telegram got this secure reputation. it is literally the absolute worst of the bunch, security wise
Telegram is already not ~~encrypted~~ end-to-end encrypted by default. Signal is the interesting app - they don't even have the data to bow to data requests.
Typical Achsel Voss behavior... Fucking fascist.
He is 1 Hurensohn
Now I’ll go make coffee for the police raiding me later
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