Chat Control Must Be Stopped

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/09/08/chat-control-must-be-stopped/

by _p2zi • 11 months ago

788 259 11 months ago

dkdcio3• 11 months ago

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

warkdarrior2• 11 months ago

If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it.

From that section:

"In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Although this first derogation was not mandatory, some policymakers kept pushing with new propositions.
A year later, a new regulation (CSAR) was proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs to make scanning messages for CSAM mandatory for all EU countries, and also allow them to break end-to-end encryption. In 2023, the UK passed a similar legislation called the Online Safety Act. These types of messaging mass scanning regulations have been called by critics Chat Control."

dkdcio3• 11 months ago

right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is?

the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is

dwedge• 11 months ago

People who know about it are generally already annoyed. The trouble is most people don't know what it is, and those are the people who should be targeted

SV_BubbleTime• 11 months ago

A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal.

The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section).
The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. 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."

dkdcio3• 11 months ago

ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is:

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."

thanks!

closewith• 11 months ago

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...

77pt773• 11 months ago

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.

fbhabbed4• 11 months ago

Even the title of that Wikipedia page is misleading and choosen in a way that almost forces your opinion on this (you can't be against a regulation made for such a noble intent, can you?)

Why not just call the page Chat Control 2.0?

77pt773• 11 months ago

It's not the official name.

I'm surprised nazi is not part of the title like it has in the past at the national level.

Humorist22904• 11 months ago

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.

mr_toad• 11 months ago

Having the service provider handle the encryption is very convenient for the users. And, it turns out, the government.

Humorist22904• 11 months ago

Sure, but the way this was written it also includes everything from Gmail to root access servers hosted by Hetzner. Gmail has been doing this for years, but (I assume) not Hetzner. If even hosting providers are dragged into this the scale grows dramatically. Can Hetzner really not even be bothered about having to comply with such ridiculous requirements?

To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.

api2• 11 months ago

Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out.

Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.

ortusdux• 11 months ago

I hadn't thought of the regulatory capture implications. As if this could not get worse.

Humorist22904• 11 months ago

That's exactly my point though. Google, AWS, Meta etc all stand to gain from this. But plenty of middle tier providers are entirely silent even if it poses a potentially existential threat. Some people are going to get rich from this of course, but many will be ruined.

And that's before even accounting for the lives to be destroyed by a blurry photo of a tree being classified as abuse material.

marcus_holmes• 11 months ago

Except that it creates a market for circumvention tech that would also cut Big Tech out from understanding what its users are saying to each other.

Age restriction laws don't stop underage folks from doing anything, they just increase the market demand for VPNs, and improve VPNs so they get less easily detected. The net result is that platforms can't use IP addresses to meaningfully infer anything about their users.

Same with this. This legislation will create a demand for private encryption tech that isn't part of the platform. Someone is going to provide that and make money, and in the process may remove the demand for the platform in the first place.

I get the logic you're talking about, and agree that they must be thinking this, but it's very short-sighted.

blitzar• 11 months ago

Big tech would be for this - because they already do it

moffkalast• 11 months ago

We've been mostly deplatformed for any kind of organized action against it, there's just writing an email to your MEP or... a change.org petition. Yes really. Nothing official one could sign their name under.

But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal, it's up to the parliament and the courts to something about it afterwards. And they should given that it's unconstitutional in many EU countries and incompatible with GDPR as it currently exists.

api2• 11 months ago

Would it be correct to compare the EU's autocratic pronouncements to Presidential executive orders in the US? In the sense that they can pass whatever they want with little feedback but then the courts can tear them apart?

gmueckl• 11 months ago

Any EU citizen also has the right to petition the EU parliament directly.

munksbeer4• 11 months ago

But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal

For anyone reading this drivel, this is a complete misrepresentation of how the EU works. The commission changes and is appointed by the elected heads of the member nations to do their bidding. The push for chat control is coming from the member nations, not some "evil mysterious third party" that appeared out of nowhere to control us all.

People who don't understand the EU and resort to blaming it for these sort of problems are actually causing more harm, because they're directing people's anger at the wrong targets. Target your own elected officials, because they are the ones pushing for this and the ones who steer the commission.

BoredPositron• 11 months ago

Fatigue? We are fighting this with different names since 2002. I guess normal people just can't hear about it anymore and that's probably on purpose.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

It's hard to reach normal people, too. At least here in America the right wing has consolidated a lot of propaganda power into cable news like Fox

jonaharagon7• 11 months ago

Totally. This is exactly the problem with things like Chat Control in the EU and KOSA in the US. They will just introduce the same bill over and over and over again until they get the desired result.

What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.

allenrb• 11 months ago

It’s this. Even when an effort fails, there are no consequences for the politicians behind it. Nobody gets voted out of office. Nobody loses power. All they need to do is wait a year or two or five and try again. Eventual success is almost guaranteed.

Trust only software and systems you control and even then, approach with a hefty amount of side-eye.

nullc2• 11 months ago

the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance

CGMthrowaway• 11 months ago

I wonder why there has been such silence on this

Yes, I would think that if there were any real journalism left, they would be all over this. For the sake of their profession, and the protection of their sources.

HPsquared• 11 months ago

Maybe it's safer not to say anything.

m4632• 11 months ago

Cory Doctorow points out a lot of things: https://pluralistic.net/

But I don't think mainstream journalism points out computer nonsense because they're so intertwined with it all.

I mean, "we have a surveillance state" first points to "advertising" which is their revenue stream.

varispeed3• 11 months ago

This is coming from WEF and major operators are members of that organisation.

In the end, these organisations want to slice and dice private conversations. It will be a goldmine for AI training and hence the push and silence.

This is all corrupt.

chairmansteve3• 11 months ago

Anybody who thinks they have online privacy is deluded. Regardless of Chat Control.

freddyym• 11 months ago

It would appear that you suffer from acute privacy nihilism [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/the-a...

petertodd5• 11 months ago

Nonsense.

If online privacy was that impossible Ukraine couldn't successfully organize sabotage operations in Russia. They do it all the time.

beeflet5• 11 months ago

Wowee! Good point sir, might as well hand all of my rights away because they are sometimes infringed already.

If you give away something for nothing, that usually means you're a sucker. But it takes a real genius to justify giving everything away for nothing.

bigfishrunning• 11 months ago

"including end-to-end encrypted ones"

How? If they're end-to-end encrypted, they really can't be monitored unless there's a flaw in the encryption system. Don't trust messages to systems that aren't auditable.

Terr_• 11 months ago

Most likely the service-provided will have simply a copy of the key. Encryption without protection.

shiandow• 11 months ago

You will be forced to run surveillance on yourself on your own device.

No you will not have freedom to choose how to use your own property.

petertodd5• 11 months ago

Chat control will require client-side AI scanning of all messages, bypassing end-to-end encryption. Since the AI will be an unauditable blackbox, it will make it effectively illegal to have secure end-to-end encryption.

Yes, it is that fascist.

fleischhauf• 11 months ago

as far as I understand they want the software on your device, at one point you need to decrypt if you want to read the message content

m4632• 11 months ago

The thing is although your exact message text is end-to-end encrypted, the messages are scanned locally on the device and information about your messages is sent out-of-band to whereever it needs to go.

this is happening now on most* services.

* ok, not every single one.

rhizome• 11 months ago

I wonder why there has been such silence on this

Some combination of cowardice, conflict of interest, and fear of ICE.

atty• 11 months ago

Which ICE are you referring to? This is an EU law.

JoshTriplett2• 11 months ago

Among many other reasons: because the proponents are using the usual "think of the children" tactics to impugn and libel the opposition.

port113• 11 months ago

I agree with most reasons others have pointed out (fatigue, lack of good journalism, deplatforming, alienation…).

Another one: it's holiday season, a clever time to get things through.

Another one: most EU parties stand for it, even my usual go-tos, namely Greens, S&D, and The Left.

mbrochh• 11 months ago

Time consider your party affiliation then.

Tixx7• 11 months ago

Its obviously not broadly announced, they're silently trying to push it through. But its also fatigue, Chat Control or the same thing under a different name is a thing the EU has been trying to push for a couple years. Every time the internet complains, somtimes on a larger scale, sometimes just the privacy niche and until now it luckily has always failed because not enough member states agreed on it. They will try until it goes through.

munksbeer4• 11 months ago

Chat Control or the same thing under a different name is a thing the EU

Correction, not the EU, the member nations.

egorfine2• 11 months ago

why there has been such silence on this

Government trying to break your privacy is routine at this point.

riazrizvi2• 11 months ago

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.

dingnuts• 11 months ago

Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption.

fuck this attitude with a rake

kypro2• 11 months ago

In the UK we take this a step further – if you're by an abortion clinic and the police believe you could be praying in your head for those getting an abortion they can charge you.

There are also examples where the people have been charged for retweeting opinions or sharing lyrics which are considered grossly offensive. Although I suppose in these cases you could at least argue something is being expressed.

port113• 11 months ago

In other words, the people in power get to dictate which thoughts you're allowed to have/express? Even in the privacy of your own house? And if the people in power decide acts of kindness or expressing love for your children are illegal…?

riazrizvi2• 11 months ago

Rather, the expansion of surveillance legislation in 1986, and 2001, introduced the idea that private material on your computer can be criminal, which opened the door to government installed malware to monitor you, whereas before that, criminal activity involving information was restricted to communication or social organization. Then later in 2003 with the introduction of private contractors to implement this tech, there was a further expansion in the people who had access to this information. An example of what happens when people have this power is captured in this Bloomberg article [1] and this New Yorker article [2]. And we know that some Silicon Valley leaders do not believe in market fairness/competition.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa....

bapak2• 11 months ago

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.

77pt773• 11 months ago

I do.

Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators?

I know it's diseingenuous but these laws are crafted with that in mind.

People that might take a real chance in challenging this are weeded out long before they get to these positions.

Bender• 11 months ago

I expect moms sharing bathtime pictures and videos with each other to get caught up in this as the censors get aroused by the content and project their own feelings of arousal and cognitive dissonance onto the parents sending bobbies and armed police to kick down doors. The legal costs and permenant damage to reputation will undoubtedly destroy many people.

jasonlotito• 11 months ago

Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators? [sic]

This is already happening. This is not about that.

Humorist22904• 11 months ago

From Patrick Brewer's analysis [0] it seems like written into the proposal is to enable members of the government to have access to excepted systems, if applied for things like law enforcement or "national security." If I had to guess, at least a few MEPs expect they will be able to use such an exemption for their personal communications.

[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

b112• 11 months ago

But won't they hqve to email people @gmail, for their personal communications?

jonaharagon7• 11 months ago

Do they think they're above it?

Yes, the lawmakers literally exempt themselves from this law in this law.

bapak2• 11 months ago

You can't exempt yourself from the backdoor you carry in your pocket.

PhantomHour• 11 months ago

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

They're somewhat out of touch with tech, and caught up in police narratives around encrypted apps blocking their attempts to find pedos. Tech firm lobbyists sell them some lies about the capabilities of these systems.

Ultimately these are politicians stuck in the notion of "but the police can open your [physical] letters, this isn't any different" completely unaware of how times have moved on.

Matters like how people are already being harassed by CSAM being sent to their DMs, how people raid discord servers and try to have them taking down by spamming CSAM, etc, are completely lost on these politicians.

On top of that it's just cowardice. Not daring to be seen as "aiding pedos".

giveita4• 11 months ago

WhatsApp is the new living room for families. Living rooms are part of an English house. A castle, if you like.

noduerme2• 11 months ago

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?

betaby• 11 months ago

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

Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?

svachalek• 11 months ago

As someone who's only visited, a foreign phone with foreign SIM will get you out. But I think using VPN on a Chinese SIM is somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.

oefrha• 11 months ago

somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.

It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).

anikom152• 11 months ago

The Chinese SIM is the key. If you are a foreigner and want to use a phone, either use a burner phone with a Chinese SIM or use international roaming with a non-Chinese SIM. You should not use a Chinese SIM.

Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.

alisonatwork2• 11 months ago

You're not thinking about it the right way.

Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc.

When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.

Nursie6• 11 months ago

Add to that - most normal, everyday people are entirely in favour of invasive government monitoring if it can be painted as being 'for the children' or 'to catch terrorists'.

So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.

noduerme2• 11 months ago

> You're not thinking about it the right way.

I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon.

You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws.

More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree.

So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.

coldblues• 11 months ago

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

Marsymars• 11 months ago

"People showing disregard for your privacy" is a matter of scale when going from analog to digital, it's at least not inconsistent.

e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.

OkayPhysicist• 11 months ago

You need better friends. Most people I chat with regularly absolutely would not volunteer anything to law enforcement.

nullc2• 11 months ago

Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities.

Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation.

The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)

petertodd5• 11 months ago

making it impossible to reliably delete material

That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).

If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.

gjsman-1000• 11 months ago

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.

jonaharagon7• 11 months ago

Realistically the EU only cares about protecting their citizens from private companies, and especially American ones. When it comes to government overreach they know virtually no bounds.

Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all.

Two approaches with the same outcome, absolutely.

didibus2• 11 months ago

I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government.

The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so.

Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you.

Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc.

And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well.

In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc.

In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime.

Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.

stephen_g• 11 months ago

The problem with that framework is that even if you believe the EU Governments are the "good guys", it's not going to be just them who get access to the data.

It opens it up potentially to anyone with the means to infiltrate these systems - rogue employees of the companies running the messaging and cloud services, cyber criminals who will be able to hack into them, foreign states who will be able to hack it (we very recently saw this how China had infiltrated CALEA backdoors into telephone systems around the world for many years).

Which of course is part of the reason that companies are so on-board with end to end encryption in the first place - being able to ensure that rogue employees can't access customer's private messages and files, and that if cyber criminals hack in and infiltrate data that there are no encryption keys accessible is a huge benefit to them - but the moment you try to open it up to "lawful intercept" you open it up to all the unlawful intercept too...

kylemaxwell• 11 months ago

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.

ryanisnan• 11 months ago

I think you're being hyperbolic. It wasn't terrible, but I do agree, I had to dig for "What is Chat Control". It read to me like a panicked person, repeatedly saying, "You've gotta hear this..." over and over, before getting to the point.

0x008• 11 months ago

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?

pas3• 11 months ago

individuals mostly have a few things they care about, but most people don't understand shit

especially technology

especially information technology

politicians are selected for being people-oriented therefore most are hopelessly underinformed

and it's very very very easy to get caught up in ideologies

and then means to an end seems like business as usual

dchftcs• 11 months ago

Even if a system doesn't look authoritarian, corruption happens all the time. Those involved in corruption naturally want more power for themselves. Additionally some people actively thirst for more power for whatever reasons, and most people don't want to be constrained in their jobs, and they are all aligned in expanding governmental power. You need some discipline to commit to the idea that "I don't want the ability to see encrypted chats, even if that makes my job 90% easier to do", and I don't trust most people to have it.

roscas• 11 months ago

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.

nashashmi• 11 months ago

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.

MaKey• 11 months ago

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

fbhabbed4• 11 months ago

You will eventually get a canned AI made reply (just like all the canned AI mails they have received these days due to websites creating templates for them).

73737373732• 11 months ago

Patrick Breyer is doing god's work!

zmmmmm• 11 months ago

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?

jonaharagon7• 11 months ago

They start outlawing encryption altogether?

This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.

Tade04• 11 months ago

Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.

Nursie6• 11 months ago

I mean, not just the UK - it eventually changed in the US, but anything deemed too strong to crack was classified as a munition for a while in the 90s and 00s, and some things are still banned from being shipped to some places -

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

"It's just math, you can't ban it" has never been true.

jihadjihad• 11 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

dlivingston• 11 months ago

Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number.

This had never occurred to me before but is totally obvious in hindsight. An interesting corollary is that, given an infinite natural number space, all programs that have ever and will ever exist can be found as a single point on this natural number plane. The larger the number, the more complex the program. What else is emergent from this property?

zamadatix2• 11 months ago

I'm sure many core proponents of Chat Control would like to also make it illegal to "hide" from scanning by applying your own encryption (and, even if not caught directly, it would add to the list of crimes someone might be charged with) but that large of a change probably puts it too far outside the Overton Window of today in a single push.

Nursie6• 11 months ago

People have been selectively "banning math" for decades -

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

const_cast• 11 months ago

They don't even need to spin up their own channels, they can just continue to use existing channels and encrypt their messages.

I mean, if youre in the business of CSAM surely you don't mind encrypting a zip and emailing it or putting it on Google drive or whatever. Its trivial, requires next to zero technology knowledge.

Its inconvenient, sure, which is why we don't currently do that. But I'm sure the CSAM distributors don't care. Why would they?

chairmansteve3• 11 months ago

Samizdat:

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

BLKNSLVR• 11 months ago

Self-host may be the new Samizdat.

EGreg• 11 months ago

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).

sterlind3• 11 months ago

I'd personally like to have a FOSS, privacy-aware CSAM (or even generic gore/porn) detector I could plug into Matrix/Lemmy/Mastodon servers. something self-hostable, so I could run those services without worrying about pedos and trolls ruining my platform.

I'm not sure if something like it exists. I'm not sure if it could exist. PhotoDNA (the old CSAM detector) ended up being somewhat reversible, so that you could actually turn signatures back into obscene material. because of this, the signature databases were shared under strict NDA, only to large players.

probably the most realistic solution is a generic porn classifier convnet. if it blocks adult porn, it should block CSAM too (hopefully?)

they are not reliant on image hashes, and reversibility concerns apply less because the dataset used to train it was presumably legal (if distasteful.)

beeflet5• 11 months ago

I am working on something like this using multimodal models

piker2• 11 months ago

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

seneca• 11 months ago

While I agree with you about rising authoritarianism, I'm confused what this has to do with nationalism. Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization. If anything, this sort of transnational authoritarianism is a bigger threat, and likely to promote nationalist backlash.

piker2• 11 months ago

I meant them as independent threats.

munksbeer4• 11 months ago

Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization

It is not. It is being pushed by certain politicians from certain member nations onto the commission.

gobdovan• 11 months ago

Funniest part is, current EU politicians are setting these systems up just as nationalist and authoritarian politicians (their adversaries) start to dominate the scene. Introducing this now seems like self-sabotage.

getcrunk• 11 months ago

Or … part of the plan

octo8883• 11 months ago

WW2 was the immense shock that gave us that golden age of the 1960s-1990s. But WW2 is now a distant memory for most.

morkalork• 11 months ago

It's eerie how immediate the regression is right around when the last eyewitnesses are dying. Did their children not listen to their parents at all?

isaacremuant• 11 months ago

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.

hackinthebochs• 11 months ago

You're right. I've been comparing it to 1984 all this time, when in fact it literally is 1984 just with modern technology. It's interesting how the story 1984 strikes a chord in many people, but something like Chat Control just seems normal. I guess having a camera in your house feels more invasive on a visceral level, despite the fact that we're now putting our whole lives on our phones and online services.

jongjong2• 11 months ago

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.

0xc0ff3382• 11 months ago

I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved than that, 99% of people aren't going to do it.

jongjong2• 11 months ago

What about web-based apps which users can access in the browser without download? They can be very user-friendly. Big companies which do surveillance make their browser-based web apps crappy on purpose in order to coerce people into using their app-store app; precisely because it gives them more surveillance capabilities (e.g. location, file access, camera access, ...). A well-intentioned chat app does not need such permissions so a web app is a good medium.

sterlind3• 11 months ago

those platforms will be banned. this will doom Signal, the fediverse, and countless smaller platforms. anything that isn't compatible will become illegal.

jjangkke• 11 months ago

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.

zamadatix2• 11 months ago

Can you expand more on how many of the key seeming counterexamples to this in the map support this conclusion (e.g. DE should be the most red of them all, no?) or how the desire for CSAM surveillance is a proxy for the mixing rate of different religions in the regions? It feels unlikely we will agree about it, but I'm curious what you're seeing in this data that makes it seem so clearly the causal reason to you.

deadbabe2• 11 months ago

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.

bojo• 11 months ago

This was my thought as well. Back to dumb devices and call it a day.

deadbabe2• 11 months ago

Yup. Everything a smartphone does can be done by other things way better.

poly2it• 11 months ago

Enlightening, I'm already looking forward to the next ten years of civilisation!

thw_9a83c5• 11 months ago

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.

eigenspace• 11 months ago

I dont think it should be taken as a given that it'll happen. While this may be something the public is generally in favour of or ambivalent towards, there's a LOT of EU countries and MEPs that are not at all in favour of this, and already a few EU countries whose courts have ruled that this would violate their constitutions.

While its certainly possible it'll happen, it's far from certain. It can be stopped. Of all the currently 'undecided' countries, if just Germany came out against it, that'd be enough to sink it. Germans are pretty pro-privacy people, and the government would win no popularity by supporting it. Even if the German government supported it though, the German MEPs would likely still end up mostly voting no

thw_9a83c5• 11 months ago

I know there are some countries that are surprisingly sane in this respect, and Germany is one of them. Also, the EU parliament is probably still mostly against it, too. So it will certainly be some time before this happens. However, we should never underestimate the "salami" method, this matter will certainly go through.

asdff4• 11 months ago

Of course the elephant in the room is all of this content and bad behavior predates the internet entirely. The internet is used because it is more convenient than mailing polaroids to a dead drop address. Not because it enables anything that wasn't happening previously. Makes it a little easier perhaps, but even that is arguable given the oversight today.

thw_9a83c5• 11 months ago

This "bad behavior" could easily regress into encrypted files stored on CD-R discs and distributed via the postal service at any time. However, we will all suffer from an invasion of privacy due to constant, non-transparent online monitoring. The real criminals won't notice anything, and the rest of us will simply accept that we are being constantly watched by mega-corporations, the police, and the government.

latexr3• 11 months ago

Chat control is going to happen sooner or later.

Even if that is true—which you don’t know, because you cannot predict the future—later is definitely better than sooner. Later is worth fighting for.

Your defeatist attitude is exactly what these bad actors want, you’re playing right into their hands. Thankfully not everyone thinks like you, or Chat Control would have passed first time and no positive change would have been enacted ever about anything.

thw_9a83c5• 11 months ago

I beg your pardon. :) I already explained that I did my part and the result was hopeless. Perhaps you should do your part, too. Don't bother arguing on Hacker News, because it has no material effect on the EU population outside the narrow IT crowd. Besides, I'm not a defeatist at all, because I know GnuPG! However, the non-IT EU civilians who also coincidentally agreed with this, are unfortunately lost.

tpm2• 11 months ago

I don't really understand this attitude because clearly if this passes, it will create a (black) market of new communication tools to bypass this and so on and will end up locking down every connected device so we can't run anything that is not government approved. It does not matter there will be ways around this - what matters is they will be illegal. So no, this can't be allowed to happen.

gck1• 11 months ago

Ehh, the great firewall of China has been in place for a long time now, it's also illegal to evade it, and yet, it has sprouted many great tools that make it so simple to evade, that enforcement becomes impossible.

If anything, technology will always win over the legislation if it happens at scale. It may even lead to some new breakthroughs.

ozgrakkurt• 11 months ago

Why be so hopeless? Especially when the people that push these things are so brazen

munksbeer4• 11 months ago

If someone states their opinion on something, it shouldn't be turned around as them being hopeless.

When we know that a particular political party will win an election, stating that fact isn't being hopeless. It just is what it is.

moltopoco2• 11 months ago

that's the general public. They want it; they'll get it.

Citation needed?

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...

That's only one survey, but I'd say it still beats anecdotal evidence.

mnls• 11 months ago

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.

dv_dt• 11 months ago

europeans should still use the opportunity to organize against it and future attempts

giveita4• 11 months ago

Would this have been UK/Germany back in the day?

octo8883• 11 months ago

UK-Germany-France collectively I think

enlyth• 11 months ago

Probably better for you guys that UK is out now, our government would have been salivating at the thought of spying on every citizen without repercussions

wsc981• 11 months ago

... The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. ...

I disagree with this sentence. The unofficial bosses are both Germany and France. Which is also the reason why the people in the richer EU countries will suffer economically when the upcoming bailout for France /will/ happen.

73737373732• 11 months ago

The new German government has not spoken out or acted against this (despite similar efforts having been ruled unconstitutional by its highest court)

moltopoco2• 11 months ago

Sadly, the new German government is comprised of two parties that have consistently voted for more surveillance. I'm afraid this time it's up to the courts to stop this.

on_the_train• 11 months ago

Germany isn't the boss of anything. When it comes to yielding power, France always gets the upper hand. Always

causal• 11 months ago

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.

mmaunder• 11 months ago

“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.

thatxliner• 11 months ago

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

sterlind3• 11 months ago

so you encrypt your image, send it to the government, the government runs its CSAM detector on the encrypted image and gets... an encrypted result.

then what? you decrypt the answer and send it back to them? promise that you totally didn't change the answer?

FHE is the wrong tool for the job. you'd want verifiable computation (e.g. ni-ZKP) instead. both are too complex and faaar too computationally expensive for actual use.

beeflet5• 11 months ago

It would be useless because predators won't run the homomorphic encryption.

Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash

"Solved"

g42gregory• 11 months ago

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

txrx0000• 11 months ago

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.

petermcneeley4• 11 months ago

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

Nursie6• 11 months ago

Why?

Democracy is being served. People want this stuff. HN people maybe not, but let's not pretend we represent anything but a noisy minority. It's entirely democratic AFAICT, "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" won the argument some time ago.

Free speech is not held as an absolute in many countries as it is in the US, and never has been. It is in a bad state in some places (the UK seems to be performing poorly on this measure) but a lot of places feel the right to spew whatever toxic lies spring to mind without consequences might not be entirely healthy either.

Justice? I think justice is performed better in many European nations than most of the rest of the world.

And freedom... lots of people like to claim the US is the most free place on earth, but it's really not clear that's true. There are freedoms in other countries not enjoyed in the US. Here in Australia for example, I am free to collect the rainwater and filter it for my drinking-water supply, something that's not true in every state.

petermcneeley4• 11 months ago

If you've seen nothing and if the crimes of the government remain unknown to you then ... well enough said. Enjoy your water.

Waterluvian• 11 months ago

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!

sirmike_• 11 months ago

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

spwa42• 11 months ago

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".

egorfine2• 11 months ago

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

cphoover• 11 months ago

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.

Chat Control Must Be Stopped

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