6mo ago

The EU are voting on Chat Control this Wednesday 19th June

Something terrible is happening in the EU and we need help to stop it

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/

64 comments

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.
  
  A more cynical take is that they understand very well, but are being compensated by big tech for looking the other way.
  Good people often can't comprehend how evil people work, and they say "everyone makes mistakes", or "they don't understand fully". Because we want to think that everyone is mostly good.
  It's not like that. :/
  
  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?
- 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.
- You are 100% right.
  They can't ban encryption, yet they can make it difficult. If all noobs don't use encryption, only the pros are left. That means they only have to spy on 10 instead of 100 people. Those that don't use encryption aren't interesting.
  The problem is that they can't spy on the 10 and hence they spy on the 90 and wait for the 1 guy making a mistake and becoming one of the 90.
  
  Fairly sure my good Eastern Europeans don't give a fuck about what France and Germany think and will pirate and TOR and I2P their merry life away (or so I'd like to think - you tell me)
- When the endpoint is controlled the keys are published
  
  I'm wondering, what are EU politicians doing dirty jobs using?
- 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

Tomorrow liberty probably dies :(
- If this is what's scaring you about the death of liberty, then boy do I have a dumptruck full of passed acts and legislation that dwarfs this in comparison. Liberty died a long time ago.
  
  Do post some!

I just did my part and wrote an email.
- 🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

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.

The article is from May 19, 2022. I can find very little information about the vote of this Wednesday. While I don't doubt its authenticity, I find it unlikely that it would pass. Last time they tried, doing it much more loudly and going as far as spreading disinformation campaigns on TV and in social media, they still completely failed at having the legislation passed. To me it looks like someone is finishing their mandate, so they are scrambling to show that they are doing the work they have been paid to do (by lobbist, obviously not by the people).
I hope I will not be proven wrong.
- Good point about the article date, but it is coming up for a vote this week https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-control-take-action-now/

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.

Keep me updated Europe friends. If they implement this, for sure other countries will implement this as well.

It is already law in the UK, they are just waiting for the right moment to activate it.
Maybe this move by the EU will embolden other countries to follow suite. the best thing to do is to move to a corner of the internet they can't control. like Tor , I2P and similar projects
- Yah, but the UK has been an Orwellian nightmare since Maggie's day. Everyone expects laws that completely negate privacy there and just roll over for it.

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.

May 19, 2022 ...
- yes, then it got rejected, and now another iteration is about to be voted on on June 20, 2024 https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/112637908478562409

Regarding email which provider would be best suited if this goes true? Because Tuta is hosted in Germany it seems less optimal then say Proton?
- If I cared about the contents of email staying safe, would rather not depend on a provider and just use provider-independent PGP. If safety is more important than universality - then I'd use something outside of email in general, like XMPP+OMEMO or maybe Simplex.
- Before privacy guides changed there was a spreadsheet with all providers, security details and wether or not they have ever complied to government requesting access.
  If i recall correctly proton did not score very great. Disroot did very well on paper but was considered new and had yet to proof itself
  Anyone know if this (updated) information still exists?
  
  Proton pretty much always complies with government access requests, and they never claimed otherwise. They, however, don't have access to the content of your emails due to their encryption, meaning the data they give to governments is restricted to what you give them. They can at most give out your name, payment information, and backup mail if you voluntarily gave that info to them.
- I honestly don't see how they can regulate pgp encryption. How would that work?
- It doesn't make a big difference. You are going to send emails to Gmail most of the time anyway.

64 comments