Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
Google have already caused significant hardship to a father for such kinds of photos. What's particularly galling is how they've continued to maintain they were in the right, despite the police saying no crime had been committed.
> even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most classifications will be correct.
Mencken just has the best quotes. Here's a few of my favorites:
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
Yeah, and also how many such crimes are actually prosecuted because you know, there is certain island with certain high-ranked people.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.
Because of the excessive growing corruption in the EU, their politicians have decided to restrict all opposition. This corruption is hidden behind double-speak, demonization and censorship. Even putting people in prison who talk about the crimes that they endured.
Instead of using the criticism to improve the system, the corrupt system starts to attack and forbid the criticism.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
You need open hardware and open software at that point and you won't be able to use government identification as they depend on closed source parts of the Android ecosystem. Also you need identification for side loading apps at some point.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.
I don't understand. How does it affect encrypted messages? It seems like either you need:
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
Haha, we do have those Instax Mini cameras. They make for a nice dose of nostalgia. We have a big frame full of photos of our friends and family on the wall and it's nice to walk by.
Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
No. iCloud Photos and Files are and have always been non-e2ee and they already scan everything in it.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
This is of course a massive privacy violation, since the code that scans for CSAM can be switched out to scan for anything else at any time. (It's even easier to do now than when Apple first proposed it, as language models since have gotten good at reading images.)
I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.
That is a much more simple prediction. I do use Telegram with our family claw-like and it does not do E2EE by default. You need to do a secret chat or whatever. I think you're probably right. We'll just lose E2EE.
You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.
The proposed Apple system was at least more restrained in that it was looking to identify known abuse images. Which is better than the Google one which aims to identify new unseen content which constantly flags parents acting legally sharing photos to medical professionals.
There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.
So the average person is having to set up an air gapped system to store normal family photos while while Epstein's clients and co conspirators communicate over plain text Gmail and for some reason we can't do anything about it.
The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.
What i found the most fascinating, is that they say its to protect children. But when you look at real child abuse cases, there are huge gaps in sentencing, policing and protecting kids in all countries. Where i live child abuser will get lower sentence than someone who sold weed.
There is a lot of real police work that can be done, honey trap pedos on roblox, infiltrate public whatsapp groups to check and monitor for soliciting. Actually listening and responding to child abuse. Work with schools. But this just requires real work. They don't want to do real work. And at the end, it will get thrown out by some senile corrupted judge.
It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.
Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.
Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.
Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.
Be more worried about governments. Read more history.
At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
>They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
The party that they want to ban is a consistent and loud opponent of chat control.
It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values. As a justification for blocking democracy it's universal and ever present.
Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
> a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country
As a white guy living in the middle east in a country that will never give me their citizenship, I do ask seriously, what's wrong with that? I don't know a single country in Africa, middle east and Asia that gives citizenships to foreigners. Ones that do, do under very very limited circumstances. Why does Europe and north America have to open their doors to everyone?
I mean, yeah. They push some things that would help - to sell its ideas to peole, but in the end if they got to power they would tripple down and do horrible things.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
This appears to be blatant misinformation. They want to expel various noncitizens and remove or restrict various pathways to citizenship. It's important not to misrepresent others even when you vehemently disagree with them.
AFD is reactonary party, russian trojan horse, that just feeds on the Germanys government total failure to listen to its peoples needs.
Russia has of course a stake in using E2E, to communicate with their paid actors. But that does not diminish peoples right for privacy. We have a lot of info about russias mingeling but we still do nothing about it. No private chat needed.
> Political groups are factions of the Parliament, while parties are alliances of national parties at EU level, funded through the EU budget. Neither the group in the Parliament nor the lawmakers will face any consequence if ESN loses its status as a European party.
It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.
Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.
This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To say this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an
opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands
and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry:
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And
many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want
to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge
simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with?
I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered
cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees
this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the
AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here,
no good ones.
I think the groups pushing for these laws are largely right neoliberals. Historically, while being nominally in competition with both far-right and left, they have found it much easier to compromise with the right or mobilize against the left.
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.
I’m not familiar with the political landscape in Europe so it may well be mostly people on the right pushing this, but man I wish we could stop framing everything as left vs right.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
Sadly does not really seems tied to left or right directly.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
This again, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ for Germany, Chat Contol is generally supported by de-facto left-wing(support immigration, social security, LGBT movement, positive discrimination, progressive tax, worker rights) CDU and CSU (29 of 34 "Yes" votes with 97 votes in total)
So, ChatControl 1.0 (the volontary, limited one that expired and is being revived) has been active for about 2 years now.
Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.
But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?
That's down to how the EU works. These kind of decisions are made in multiple governing bodies. There's the council, which is made up of representatives from member states governments and the parliament, which is made up of directly elected MEPs.
The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.
> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
The US is now getting money from every ship passing the street. How people not see that for the US the world is a game of command and conquer. They rule everything and if it's not ruled it gets bombed.
>but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
When it comes to online actions people ask for way more than reasonable. You dont get to be an invisible, impossible to track, unaccountable hacker man free to roam the internet on equal footing to the rest of the users.
This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.
i think a good general rule is anyone with ultimate power over some area (president, lawmakers, supreme court judges) should be elected. thats anyone whos decisions cant be reversed by someone else above them. those who make final but reversible decisions (pm, ministers, heads of military and intelligence) should be directly appointed by someone who was elected. if you allow indirect appointments to important positions you get a corrupt undemocratic government.
As a EU citizen I’m at a loss for what to do about this. I feel that they’re going against any average citizen’s interest. What can we do to make them stop?
Short-term, follow the steps on the website and contact your political representative to explain to them why it's such a bad idea.
Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.
That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.
The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.
Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.
Would these measures have prevented, for instance, the generalized Rape Gangs they had in the UK and that were hidden by the authorities to keep some weird idea of social peace?
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side and fascists
The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house
I'm not an expert, but isn't "your own house" should rather be your country in this analogy? It ought to be still there without some bureaucratic institution on top of it.
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
Funny you bring this up.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
edit: and what do you know, I just saw this as I scrolled down on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959
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I thought this was known as Bonferonni'a principle? Or am I getting mixed up?
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Google have already caused significant hardship to a father for such kinds of photos. What's particularly galling is how they've continued to maintain they were in the right, despite the police saying no crime had been committed.
https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
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> even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most classifications will be correct.
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I’ve shared this before, I really like this quote:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
H.L. Mencken
Mencken just has the best quotes. Here's a few of my favorites:
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
> Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
By the parents. Install parental controls that only allow to message you and closest relatives. Problem solved.
In the list of people that are worried about children.... the government is at the very end.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
Yeah, and also how many such crimes are actually prosecuted because you know, there is certain island with certain high-ranked people.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.
> Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law
Because narrow law is easier to avoid or find the loophole and a single case is enough to induce panic and anger.
At some point we just have to accept the kids as collateral.
What, like with guns? Never!
CSA makes ppl lose all logic, so is used to justify illogical things.
Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.
I feel like the world cares more about stopping the spread of CSAM than it does the actual abusive actions against children.
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so much for the principle of least privilege..
especially that the guard applying to protect the henhouse seems to have a suspiciously furry tail...
Technology is, furthermore, the wrong place to address child abuse of any kind, sexual or otherwise.
This is like trying to prevent burglary by working with the factory that manufactures pry bars.
> stopping child sexual abuse
> suddenly touches everyone
..............I see what you did there.
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Hot take !== unsubstantiated, xenophobic take
That's not a hot take, it's just boring old racism.
Because of the excessive growing corruption in the EU, their politicians have decided to restrict all opposition. This corruption is hidden behind double-speak, demonization and censorship. Even putting people in prison who talk about the crimes that they endured.
Instead of using the criticism to improve the system, the corrupt system starts to attack and forbid the criticism.
This just says Facebook is allowed to scan for child porn though?
> Is scanning mandatory? - No — voluntary.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
> How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
They do not.
You need open hardware and open software at that point and you won't be able to use government identification as they depend on closed source parts of the Android ecosystem. Also you need identification for side loading apps at some point.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.
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I don't understand. How does it affect encrypted messages? It seems like either you need:
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
> It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
Polaroid coming back in business! I would not complain at all if we started reverting some of our lifestyle behaviors back to analog.
Haha, we do have those Instax Mini cameras. They make for a nice dose of nostalgia. We have a big frame full of photos of our friends and family on the wall and it's nice to walk by.
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Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
What does "scanning" mean though?
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
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E2EE on iCloud with advanced data protectiob still keeps metadata not encrypted likely exactly for this purpose.
No. iCloud Photos and Files are and have always been non-e2ee and they already scan everything in it.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
This is of course a massive privacy violation, since the code that scans for CSAM can be switched out to scan for anything else at any time. (It's even easier to do now than when Apple first proposed it, as language models since have gotten good at reading images.)
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I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.
This is their actual objective.
Platforms will stop offering E2EE . Didn't Instagram abandon E2EE ?
That is a much more simple prediction. I do use Telegram with our family claw-like and it does not do E2EE by default. You need to do a secret chat or whatever. I think you're probably right. We'll just lose E2EE.
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You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.
The proposed Apple system was at least more restrained in that it was looking to identify known abuse images. Which is better than the Google one which aims to identify new unseen content which constantly flags parents acting legally sharing photos to medical professionals.
There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.
So the average person is having to set up an air gapped system to store normal family photos while while Epstein's clients and co conspirators communicate over plain text Gmail and for some reason we can't do anything about it.
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So many messages about child safety in the press and even here... Who cares about chat control when they already have mind control.
The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.
It was never about children. They're just using children as political weapons to justify their 1984 panopticon dictatorships.
What i found the most fascinating, is that they say its to protect children. But when you look at real child abuse cases, there are huge gaps in sentencing, policing and protecting kids in all countries. Where i live child abuser will get lower sentence than someone who sold weed. There is a lot of real police work that can be done, honey trap pedos on roblox, infiltrate public whatsapp groups to check and monitor for soliciting. Actually listening and responding to child abuse. Work with schools. But this just requires real work. They don't want to do real work. And at the end, it will get thrown out by some senile corrupted judge.
They just want total control.
It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.
Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.
Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.
They claim to protect consumers and privacy and then push this creepy surveillance state.
Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.
Be more worried about governments. Read more history.
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I really hope this was /s.
>everyone else is doing it so why miss out the opportunity
You are now finally realizing what a trojan horse is.
You think USA is the Trojan Horse? Barak Obama said, in no uncertain terms, that Europe needed to mobilize and arm itself.
But of course Europe just ignored that warning. Like it anyways has.
At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
EU has quite successfully decoupled from Russia already, we aren't heavily dependent on Russian energy or other natural resources anymore.
Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
The situation is less than ideal but not hopeless.
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>They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
Whoa, where do you get your news from - Fox?
Tell me you don’t know about a topic without telling me you don’t know.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
To be fair, this is even worse.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/european-parli...
The party that they want to ban is a consistent and loud opponent of chat control.
It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values. As a justification for blocking democracy it's universal and ever present.
Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
> a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country
As a white guy living in the middle east in a country that will never give me their citizenship, I do ask seriously, what's wrong with that? I don't know a single country in Africa, middle east and Asia that gives citizenships to foreigners. Ones that do, do under very very limited circumstances. Why does Europe and north America have to open their doors to everyone?
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Belgium can revoke citizenship of dual nationals on certain ground. What off it?
Democracy, as long as everyone votes for what you want, right?
I mean, yeah. They push some things that would help - to sell its ideas to peole, but in the end if they got to power they would tripple down and do horrible things.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
This appears to be blatant misinformation. They want to expel various noncitizens and remove or restrict various pathways to citizenship. It's important not to misrepresent others even when you vehemently disagree with them.
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That is a lie
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AFD is reactonary party, russian trojan horse, that just feeds on the Germanys government total failure to listen to its peoples needs. Russia has of course a stake in using E2E, to communicate with their paid actors. But that does not diminish peoples right for privacy. We have a lot of info about russias mingeling but we still do nothing about it. No private chat needed.
> Political groups are factions of the Parliament, while parties are alliances of national parties at EU level, funded through the EU budget. Neither the group in the Parliament nor the lawmakers will face any consequence if ESN loses its status as a European party.
It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.
Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.
Unless they are doing something criminal their values are their and their voters business, regardless of how reprehensible they might be.
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Saying that AfD "is an opponent of chat control" is like saying its more-or-less direct predecessor advocated for vegetarianism.
This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/11/l...
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To say this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with? I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here, no good ones.
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>All people are equal as far as the law is concerned, no matter their skin color, religion or origin
This is kinda vague, i.e. afaik German laws discriminate lonely people by taxing them more then married.
You do not need to be perfect to call out flaws in others
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The party they want to ban are neo-Nazis.
I think the groups pushing for these laws are largely right neoliberals. Historically, while being nominally in competition with both far-right and left, they have found it much easier to compromise with the right or mobilize against the left.
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Chat control 1.0
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
Yes, the derogation expired on 4 April 2026.
They just voted to reinstate it, and it passed by a narrow majority.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
They did id sneakily.
https://www.politico.eu/article/president-vs-parliament-robe...
As I understand it, there will still be another related vote on Thursday, so call your representatives!
> Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
Not for the last few months, no; Chat Control 1 expired.
This should not be put in the same category as Chat Control 2.0. Doing so severely dilutes the brand Chat Control.
How do they scan e2e encrypted messages? Will they force apps/OSes to have master keys/institutional backdoors to have access to the private keys?
They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
I'd be willing to accept this:
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
Good thinking. Didn't think of that approach. Gonna start sending huge walls of text to DOS them then if this thing lands
> Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
So then the user can "just" install their own client.
They either just ban E2EE messaging or add a client-side scan of the content before "encrypting" it.
What european parties or people are pushing for chat controls?
People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
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Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.
I’m not familiar with the political landscape in Europe so it may well be mostly people on the right pushing this, but man I wish we could stop framing everything as left vs right.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
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Sadly does not really seems tied to left or right directly.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
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This again, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ for Germany, Chat Contol is generally supported by de-facto left-wing(support immigration, social security, LGBT movement, positive discrimination, progressive tax, worker rights) CDU and CSU (29 of 34 "Yes" votes with 97 votes in total)
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So, ChatControl 1.0 (the volontary, limited one that expired and is being revived) has been active for about 2 years now.
Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.
But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?
Things like this is why I no longer support the EU at all.
I don't understand how Bulgaria supports the idea while most of its representatives are allegedly against it. How does that work?
That's down to how the EU works. These kind of decisions are made in multiple governing bodies. There's the council, which is made up of representatives from member states governments and the parliament, which is made up of directly elected MEPs.
The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.
Age verification for 'appstores' (debian repos?) is inside ChatControl v2.
> Supreme Court allows Texas to require age verification for mobile apps
So, I blinked and forgot to check for updates on this and they voted a few hours ago to reinstate this... https://www.heise.de/en/news/Showdown-in-Strasbourg-The-unex...
This website is gold, thanks for all the work.
EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz or EU energy security. It is a complete joke.
> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
> US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
We aren't done yet. Game on after the midterms.
The US is now getting money from every ship passing the street. How people not see that for the US the world is a game of command and conquer. They rule everything and if it's not ruled it gets bombed.
>but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
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What shows up in your news feed and what the politicians are spending time on are wildly different things.
Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
They do have us in their power. They don't have Iran under the same power.
When it comes to online actions people ask for way more than reasonable. You dont get to be an invisible, impossible to track, unaccountable hacker man free to roam the internet on equal footing to the rest of the users.
Who's arguing for that? And why is it not "reasonable" to ask for basic privacy?
This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022...
Lobbyists control the EU. So much is clear to everyone now.
I think there is no way to fix this system from the inside - it is designed to be abused like that. We need an alternative system.
Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.
i think a good general rule is anyone with ultimate power over some area (president, lawmakers, supreme court judges) should be elected. thats anyone whos decisions cant be reversed by someone else above them. those who make final but reversible decisions (pm, ministers, heads of military and intelligence) should be directly appointed by someone who was elected. if you allow indirect appointments to important positions you get a corrupt undemocratic government.
As a EU citizen I’m at a loss for what to do about this. I feel that they’re going against any average citizen’s interest. What can we do to make them stop?
Short-term, follow the steps on the website and contact your political representative to explain to them why it's such a bad idea.
Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.
That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.
The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.
Use the submission form on the site to email your representatives.
Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.
The irony is that those questions can only be legally questioned when they're approved (and sometimes have a defined implementation)
Then there's the whole kerfuffle about how to actually implement this
So the thing that comforts me is that it's a dumpster fire all the way down and I'm sure there will be plenty of legal complaints about it
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Anyone know how Signal is responding to this? They ARE E2EE.
Their stance is of non-compliance and leaving EU market if Chat Control 2 get into law.
https://aboutsignal.com/news/the-end-of-private-conversation...
Related today:
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008
It's funny they thing criminals are using those platforms for discussion
Funny you think they think that. They just want control.
Would these measures have prevented, for instance, the generalized Rape Gangs they had in the UK and that were hidden by the authorities to keep some weird idea of social peace?
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
Look at this other piece in the frontpage:
> Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera (allaboutcookies.org)
the eu should never have been born. The above are its results - and just an example. How do we fix that disaster?
And the US wanted to install a breathalyzer in every car a few years back. How is this supposed to prove anything?
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by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side and fascists
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The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
Of course Americans want us to dismantle the EU, we are even weaker against US influence without it.
Isn't the EU rather like a single point of failure?
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I was a big EU federalist but now it seems just a tool for liberal authoritarianism pushed by the established parties.
>Europe is our home.
At the same time parts of my country feel less and less like home if at all and those politicians really hate adressing it.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
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I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
But this is the hatred you are talking about?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-embrace-eu-gloom-w...
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Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
you seem to be from Russia. You do realize it's not in the EU right?
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I'm not an expert, but isn't "your own house" should rather be your country in this analogy? It ought to be still there without some bureaucratic institution on top of it.
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
-- Canadian
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Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
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Charlatans and demagogues.
How many child abusers are liable to be detected using platforms that are known to report you when you can google (or chatGPT) how to avoid detection?
Wake me up in 100 years and ask me what EU politicians are doing.
My answer: regulating something:)
Why do these Epsteinist Occupied Governments think they'll get away with this unscathed. These demons are addicted to destroying freedom.
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