Comment by wewewedxfgdf
7 months ago
Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
7 months ago
Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
Swedes and Danes are at the forefront.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Lol, I have a different interpretation: Scandinavians have much more trust in their state. And I’d add: For good reason.
Doesn’t mean the state should be trusted to a naive degree of course
Sweden has also had an explosion of organized gang violence; carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...
I live in sweden. Police here is extremely incompetent and unwilling to do their jobs.
They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished.
They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed.
Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare.
> carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.
This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption.
Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it?
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> “Socioeconomic factors are what mostly constitute the risks of ending up in crime,” not ethnicity, says Felipe Estrada Dörner, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University
This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well.
I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing :
- increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts
- a youth unemployment problem
- housing price crunch
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Thank you.
For others this is the last para of the first link:
> The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC.
So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing.
Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh.
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They’ve had to become like that due to their bizarre choices. They really got the worst of all worlds. Net tax beneficiaries, fear, crime and now judicial over reach. How do you do this to yourself?
Very small sample group, but from my talks with Danes, they actually enjoy their lives quite a bit. I disagree with the chat control, but who are we to say what they want or need, if they have been enjoying their lives with the government of their choosing?
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Scandinavia and in particular Sweden has historically been very oppressive, bordering on theocracy. The state ideology has changed and priests have been exchanged for social democrat ideologues, but the spirit of the people is still very much subjugated.
I think this is a fundamental difference between the countries that have fought for freedom (like England, France, USA), and the countries where the powers that be saw what happened and made minimal concessions to try to avoid unrest.
Dane checking in. You know when you read a newspaper article on something you happen to know about and it's just hilariously wrong? Like, to the point of making you wonder if they're confusing your thing with something else entirely. That's your comment.
Not surprising that it's from the same place that told us we should be happy with owning nothing.
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Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> the government decides what is allowed and what is not.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
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What is extraordinary is that the idea that there shouldn't be a word exchanged between two individuals that the state cannot listen to was a Stasi wet dream. It is just shocking that western democracies that have held totalitarian regimes at bay for so long at great expense, are now going full big brother.
> western democracies that have held totalitarian regimes at bay for so long
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
Follow the money. AI surveillance companies like Thorn are shaking in excitement.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
The state itself.
Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
This is a meme I see and don't fully understand. It seems to assume that the state isn't a democracy, yet the statement is usually applied to democracies like the US. Such statements don't make sense to me when it's the people who are the state, not some "other".
The public have no effect on public policy in the US: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595
This is a classic principal-agent problem. The people are not the state in electoral/representative democracies, they merely elect agents that have their own beliefs and motivations.
The individual needs and the “needs of the state” are two very distinct things.
The state is a lecher.
It's surveillance companies, i.e. follow the money. Imagine if you can force every IM app to include your nonsense? BILLIONS of instant installs and subscription fees.
The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.
> follow the money. Imagine if
Following the money requires actually following money. Not imagined money.
Do we have evidence of these companies lobbying for CharControl?
Stasi wasn't doing it for the money anyway.
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It was redacted ... and very obviously so. Did you read my post?
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Lobbyists from surveillance product companies.
And law enforcement agencies.
> Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.
We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.
> We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM.
I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.
EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).
> IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
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Danish dude here.
We had a number of cases in Denmark over the recent years which pushes this agenda:
In addition to the obvious child abuse, there have been a case where video of a high-school girls private sexual activities where spread wildly on asocial media, fake-porn of various public figures and several cases of organized crime using various end-to-end encrypted services.
None of the Danish politicians I have communicated with like the ChatControl proposal very much, but there is nothing else on the table, which isn't much worse in terms of privacy invasion, so their only choice is ChatControl or doing nothing.
My personal opinion:
No human right is absolute, not even the right to life itself.
The demands of upholding the civilized society limit all human rights, and this limitation has always included intrusions of privacy in order to solve crimes.
I far prefer Dan Geer's proposal (See his black-hat keynote):
Companies on the Internet get to choose one of these two business models:
A) Common-carrier. Handles all content as opaque data, makes no decisions about what users see. No responsibility for the legality of the content. (= how telephone companies and postal carriers are regulated)
B) Information provider: 100% responsible for all content, no matter where they got it from. (= how newspapers are regulated)
The current "the algorithm did it" excuse for making illegal material go viral, to maximize profits, is incompatible with a civilized society.
I've asked the politicians whey they do not do that and the answers is "We do not want to piss off USA", in recent months that concern seems to be fading.
> intrusions of privacy in order to solve crimes
ChatControl is about non-criminal activity.
> Danish dude here.
> phkamp
Hey! A lot of my views are heavily informed by your writings. I tend to agree a lot with your view of these things.
I personally extend it further by positing that the current democratic crisis, most readily seen in America, is caused by the inability of democracy to solve certain important problems, which I then again posit is at least partially caused by cyberlibertarian obstructionism. That's all just conjecture though.
It's nice to see you around here :)
Ah yes, "protecting the children". Meme driven politics.
> Meme driven politics.
It's very much NOT meme driven. We're generally very sensitive to child abuse in Denmark, and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
Originally, she launched the "branding" push when they were talking about schools and daycare, but like all branding it spills out into other avenues. I have no doubt she weighs her job around children particularly important.
It's not at all a stretch to me to say that she probably genuinely wanted her party colleague, and CSAM enjoyer, caught faster, and I don't doubt that she believes this is the best way to do that.
That's not a "meme". That's policy driven by observation and factual cases.
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For some reason names are sensored because of the ”privacy and security requirements.”
It is corruption, paranoia and addiction to power. The problem is agencies that are supposed to crack down on these things do nothing or are corrupt themselves.
Our "minister of Justices" is a scared little boy, deeply traumatised by a childhood characterised by the lack of a basic sense of safety. This trauma has never been addressed and with age he has unfortunately become a politician and earned a law degree. His rational faculties and academic degree are of course a faint echo compared to his childhood trauma, so he has no reservations destroying any personal liberty in the name of safety. I feel deeply for the boy, but fear the man.
To whom are you referring? A quick Google didn't reveal which minister from which country you're talking about but I'm curious to learn more.
Refers to the minister of justice in Denmark, Peter Hummelgaard. I don't know his childhood though.
It might seem alien to the regular HN commenter, but for most politicians/bureaucrats/law enforcement folk, the last ten years or so of widespread encrypted comms are an anomaly, and a bad one. The idea that the state is mathematically blocked from reading certain communications, even with a court order, really pushes back against the very concept of a supremely sovereign national state.