What you can do: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-control/#WhatYouCanDo
Contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home
Edit: Article linked is from 2002 (overview of why this legislation is bad), but it is coming up for a vote on the 19th see https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-control-take-action-now/
My point being, what are they going to achieve with this? Ask WhatsApp to pass over their encryption keys?
It should be pretty obvious that you shouldn’t be sharing sensitive stuff on chat apps controlled by the NSA. Use element with encryption or something, maybe Briar etc. What are they going to do if you insist on using apps which use asymmetric client-side encryption, break TOR? Force you to use symmetric encryption and give the government your decryption keys?
I don’t see how they are going to spy on sensitive details of Europeans with this. They might as well ban phones completely if they want to limit communication.
These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.
Well I get that they are stupid, but unless it’s their fetish to catch 14 year olds trying to spread rubbish propaganda, I doubt they’re going to get much. Any reporter, activist and consumer knows that anything they put on these apps goes straight to the NSA’s and MI6’s AI algorithms at the very least, and now they’re going to go to the rest of Europe.
Yes, we should be protesting against this. Does Europe have an equivalents of the EFF to fight for such rights?
I have to strongly disagree, you overestimate what people know/can/want to do. Some, sure, but not the majority. They either stay ignorant or are too lazy. Just look at add blocker usage. I can not even imagine to live without them, but here we are, I am the tiny minority! Most either do not care or are too stupid or somehow happen to not know about them.
It’s literally in the article: They want to use client-side scanning. The client already has the data decrypted. This is much like what Apple wanted to introduce with CSAM scanning a while back. It’s a backdoor in each client and it’s a matter of time until it will be abused by malicious entities.
Yea, it is clear if there is just one closed-source app. But if we’re talking XMPP/Matrix - they have multiple open-source clients, even if some of them does introduce scanning, no way it wouldn’t be forked to remove it.
If a messaging service is non-compliant, the government could theoretically take action with court orders against domain owners, server owners or pursue anyone hosting a node in case of a distributed setup. In a worse case scenario, they might instruct ISPs via court orders to block these services (e.g. The Pirate Bay in some countries)
Where I live, a lot of popular services, including major foreign social media and torrents everyone uses, are blocked - yet they still have a massive userbase.
And since the scanning is supposed to be client-side, how would a server check if the scanning was really performed? What if the server does receive and log the needed responses, just to be safe, but the client actually just sends them automatically while lacking such functionality?
Yeah let’s have them block github. I kind of want to see a federated git hosting platform integrated with the fediverse
They literally will do that. GDPR shows that they will go after big American companies (That’s the point, a huge chunk of this is protectionism to build a tech industry in the EU that they control)
As far as I know, Prism is able to read encrypted messages.
Prism has broken AES-256???
It is more likely that Prism can use android exploits to read data before it is encrypted by the client
So first it’s client-side scanning for CSAM. Not without some nobility. But the problem is once you wedge open that door it’s technically possible to do it for other things and so you become compelled to.
It’ll move from just CSAM to stopping and tracking “propaganda” as deemed by them which will be narrow-ish at first (anything pro-Russia, RT links, etc) but gradually expand over time to anything outside the mainstream branded as extremist (and guess what, privacy advocates will definitely fall within that label). And once that’s in place the private stake-holders, copyright holders will come knocking, they’ll say rightly so “hey you have the capability right now, we demand you implement client-side scanning to detect copyright violations” and then that will be ordered by a court, further enshrined by a law and oh look now you can no longer send political thought that the ruling regime disagrees with, can no longer surf the high seas, and so on and so forth. Congratulations and please enjoy living in the “garden” of Europe.
The US uses the Patriot Act to spy on innocent people under the guise of terrorism. Once you open the door, they knock the wall down.
Keep me updated Europe friends. If they implement this, for sure other countries will implement this as well.
Tomorrow liberty probably dies :(
Removed by mod
Taxes aren’t a bad thing. They help grow public infrastructure.
Removed by mod
Well yes, we should tax the fuck out of the rich. Taxes should be proportionate to wealth.
Yet, that’s not what’s happening in practice.
Well. Now seems to be a good time to be ashamed to be Belgian.
Shameful politicians :(
Reading it, it looks like it doesn’t require invasive oversight as long as the chat apps and app stores have sufficient detection and such.
really, that’s what such places already should have, considering how much profit they make off of our data
It does require invasive oversight. If I send a picture of my kid to my wife, I don’t want some AI algorithm to have a brainfart and instead upload the picture to Europol for strangers to see and to put me on some list I don’t belong.
People sharing CSAM are unlikely to use apps that force these scans anyway.
The proposal only does so under specific circumstances, which makes sense. Try to read more than three words before your respond
The point is is that it should never, under no circumstances monitor and eavesdrop private chats. It’s an unacceptable breach of privacy.
Also, please explain what “specific circumstances” you are referring to. The current proposal doesn’t limit the scanning of messages in any way whatsoever.
No, I actually read the current proposal. Maybe try that before regurgitating random stuff that matches your opinion
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=COM:2022:209:FIN
Here’s the text. There are no limits on which messages should be scanned anywhere in this text. Even worse: to address false positives, point 28 specifies that each provider should have human oversight to check if what the system finds is indeed CSAM/grooming. So it’s not only the authorities reading your messages, but Meta/Google/etc… as well.
You might be referring to when the EU can issue a detection order. This is not what is meant with the continued scanning of messages, which providers are always required to do, as outlined by the text. So either you are confused, or you’re a liar.
Cite directly from the text where it imposes limits on the automated scanning of messages. I’ll wait.
ey there you go, you bothered to actually read. Your chats remain with your provider!
It’s not like you were expecting privacy while sending your content through other people’s platform, were you?
It’s somewhat amusing how western liberals once touted freedom of speech as a defining characteristic separating them from states like China, which impose stricter limitations on freedom of expression. The argument was made that the pursuit of personal liberties is what sets western liberal culture apart and makes it superior to others.
However, this narrative succeeded primarily due to broad public agreement within mainstream Western society. When economic conditions were favorable and people generally content with their system, there was little reason to suppress dissenting views. In fact, allowing such opinions on the fringe even served to reinforce the narrative. But now that growing discontent is causing this illusion of freedom they once believed in to unravel.
