Discussion
This is our Independence Moment.
From defence to clean tech, we choose independence over dependence.
We invest in security, democracy, and dignity – from housing and jobs to AI and energy.
We defend democracy. We protect media freedom. Because truth and trust are Europe's strongest shields.
Europe must fight for its freedom, unity, and future.
Leading, protecting, and delivering.
These are just some of the key battles Europe is fighting 👉 https://europa.eu/!NNWdhF
You know that independence also means not to rely too much on AI, no mass surveillance, and also not to turn Germany and every other european country on this very earth into the modernized version of the Sovietunion. It also means to respect basic privacy rights, autonomy and free thoughts because this is also what defines a democracy, everything else would be a total authoritarian state at this point.
Ever since you called admins pedophiles for knowing how networking works you have lost any credibility.
You still fold to Trump, fossils, surveillance, Israel, fascists.
You gave away moral high ground for money.
At least _try_ to aim for the good things.
Written by specialists, by people who truly cares about freedom, democracy, privacy and all the great values.
Values that you EU politicians have turned into a rag to wipe your asses with.
Values that today only serve to line your own pockets.
Values that our ancestors valued and died for and which you today don't give a damn about.
Change your name.
"EU Hypocrisy commission" better suits what you're doing.
Hello @ranx!
Let us be clear: under this proposal, there is no general monitoring of online communications. There will be no such thing as “chat control”.
Only material that is clearly child sexual abuse will be searched for and can be detected.
Detection orders can only be issued by judicial or independent administrative authorities at the end of a thorough process to assess necessity and proportionality, balancing all the fundamental rights at stake.
@EUCommission @ranx
And what happens if detection order issued?
Operating system owned by suspected person gets a remote command to enable local detection mechanism?!
So, all mobile devices used/sold in EU must have some official software installed? Does it affect desktop devices and software?
Does it mean OSes should implement some law-enforcement-agents features on devices?
Will usage of software that does not call OSes API for "compliant encryption" be banned?
Inform the public on details.
@EUCommission @ranx
The proposals are mistakenly labeled as "chatControl", meanwhile scope of changes necessary to implement this is much broader - it require updates of OS to implement "compliant encryption" to hash all data being encrypted, enforcement of some API to be used by apps (likely to be done via pressure on app stores owners to allow only compliant software to be listed), disabling sideloading for all OSes, including Windows, MacOSX, and even Linux (by enforcing Ubuntu App Center).
If the proposed surveillance measures are safe, we should have a trial period of 5 years, where only and all professional and private communication of *all* members of the EU and all member states' executive, legislative and judicial branches of government and known lobbyists to them should be subject to them, with no exception.
In the end: We're supposed to trust you. You show us your trust in yourselves first.
There's nothing that could go wrong. Or is there?
Furthermore nobody, not one damn person of note believes for a solitary second that it'll be cabined to the vile stuff once you have the framework in place.
The fact that government and military communication would be exempt is, in itself, an admission that there's no such thing as a backdoor only for the good guys.
If that wasn't bad enough, any access that allows you to search for CSAM in communications can also be used for surveillance.
Creating a system with immense surveillance capabilities without intending to use it for surveillance is, at best, naive. Even if you don't plan on using it, you can't know who's going to be in power in the future.
It is psychologically stressing and citizens of the EU do not want this policy. I believe that is overwhelmingly clear.
It also makes tech-business harder. Foreign countries do not want to do business with an encryption backdoor mandating EU. As the proposal stands, that is their perception and that won't change by adding a few nice words of reassurance next to the already given details regarding the implementation.
When such policies are introduced it erodes trust in the EU. Without trust, this proposal is just a general mandate to scan all private messages for personal benefit.
I would like to remind you of the fact that officials are exempt from this proposal. This alone already erodes trust.
I can also already tell you that criminals will and do bypass any implementations. With PGP/GPG, private keys are kept locally and signed messages ensure authenticity. The keys never leave your device. There’s no server backdoor to bypass encryption. Not only will criminals opt for this, the general public will too.
The end effect is just stressing EU citizens into opposing the EU that they otherwise would be proud to be part of.
> Only material that is clearly child sexual abuse will be searched for and can be detected.
LOL, how can you tell it's CSAM without scanning everything?
Its a blatant oxymoron. "We can determine what XYZ contains, but we dont know what XYZ contains, because we dont scan XYZ. But if XYZ has CSAM, then we know, because, we scan XYZ"
It is a terrible legislation to push, but at least have the spine to be up front of what it actually entails, instead of this white washing incorrect information
So you don't monitor chat, but somehow you know when it contains something illegal, sure....
There is so much more nuance than people realise when it comes to CSAM. It’s already a challenge for human reviewers, especially at scale. As an (over simplified) example, how do you plan for an LLM to tell the difference between an innocent photo of a naked toddler sent by a parent vs a similar photo but only slightly modified with the intent to sexualise the minor?
You also have the issue of accurately identifying the age of a potential victim. A baby is easy enough to identify as a minor, but as you get closer to 18 that becomes a lot more challenging.
This is all over simplified and skips over other issues, but, the point stands. You CANNOT detect “only material that is clearly child sexual abuse”. You WILL end up looking at false positives, and it WILL be far more common than you think/plan.
What ChatControl does is like opening and reading every single letter being sent. Yes, maybe you only take photo copies of naked kids, but you do read all the letters. That's the opposite of freedom and every dictator's wet dream.
This is also highly related to this discussion:
https://axbom.me/objects/046a5394-7d92-450c-80ac-eda1b2b3b611
There will be an extreme amount of false positives, meaning random people will be looking at my private photos for no reason at all.
This will absolutely not help with CSAM, but it will give police a legal framework to watch people.
Sure, current intended detection will be for a specific type of content, but that only works if you can see all types of content in the first place. You can't pick and choose here. This also leaves the door open for future scope creep. There hasn't been a single privacy invasive technology or method invented that wasn't abused later on down the line.
Even if this isn't abused in any way, any false positive or dubious accusation will ruin someone's life. At this scale, Chat Control has the potential to ruin thousands of lives, if not millions worldwide. Even 99.9% accuracy simply will not do!
Hello @EUCommission!
Let me be clear: under this proposal, there is absolute general monitoring of online communications. There will totally be such a thing as “chat control”.
Not only material that is clearly child sexual abuse will be searched for and can be detected, but every single media!
Thanks for being in the fediverse and even answering to questions here, though.
How exactly will you "search" and "detect" without scanning everything? Technically this is not possible and everyone knows that.
As an American I am begging you to PLEASE not set this precedent and make yet another place a surveillance state.
This response actually makes me more anxious in that it shows either the issue is not understood or is being deliberately misrepresented.
Thats a lie and either you are fully aware of it, or you actually believe in unicorn technology that don’t exist. Both options scare me equally…
I do not usually shout, but now I feel I must. Sorry
Of course not! Like at the airport, everything is scanned, mistakes happen, agents confusing normal things for dangerous things. People are being pulled apart, sometimes for no reason (random control).
Carrying too much liquid is criminalized.
People are blamed for criticizing the system that "makes everyone safer".
The proposal to leaf through people's chats is *stupid* on top of being inherently incompatible with human rights in the digital sphere and a general weakening of every EU citizen's digital resilience.
That is such a blatant and clumsy lie! What do you take us for? What have you been smoking?
How do you suppose to find such materials if not by searching through everything?
If you already know that some material is abuse, what need is there to search? You already have it.
Sorry to be blunt, but that answer is ridiculous.
In order to be able to identify illegal material, you WILL have to search EVERYTHING on the phone (or computer) of every citizen in the EU.
How else would you know which picture, movie or document is illegal and which isn't?
That is mass surveillance the way Russia, China and other totalitarian states behave.
As you do this without any probably cause, this violates the most basic principle of a proper jurisdiction.
Wow. Watching as an outside observer, I'm still struck how none of the @EUCommission words above are true, nor defensible. Why the hollow talking points absent good faith engagement with the real issues?
The current proposal is in practice just the old "chat control" proposal wrapped into a new wrapping. It carries the same flaws as all the other proposals.
The common denominator is that there is a belief in technology to provide the tools to enforce a policy for the good of the people.
But technology is just that - a tool. It is can and will be abused. There is no technology available which will only protect us. In the wrong hands, it will be used to do bad things.
Just as a hammer can be used to build wonderful buildings - but it can also hurt people. And it will hurt people, even if there are laws forbidding such use.
Replace "hammer", with "weapons", "cars" ... even "computers". It will always be possible to abuse it to do unintended things.
Technology cannot solve issues related to how we as citizens relate to laws.
Further, technology cannot differentiate between "good" or "bad". Just as a hammer cannot differentiate how it is being used. Only the moral of the person using the tool can differentiate if the tool is being used as intended.
Please try to understand the analysis from Patric Breyer.
oh sure. because secure, accessible only to good guy backdoors work great and we're totally on point and accurate in not looking at any files that aren't "bad".
let's get the starship enterprise food replicator to whip up a nice chamagne we can toast this with, since that technology is fully as possible as the above.
And in case of e2ee if you want to find anything you need to scan everything.
Hey there @EUCommission , you politicians can disclose for us, the people, your communications first? After that we can start talking.
You do work for us, no?
@ranx
Here's a document about cryptography and backdoors written round about the time of the clipper chip. TLDR:
A backdoor is a backdoor.
Let us be clear: you are aiming exaclty for #ChatControl.
You know exactly that encryption cannot be "selectively" broken.
You know exactly that you want to establish technological infrastructure that can search for anything - CSAM is merely one of a myriad of use cases you're already drooling about.
You know exactly that your blahblah on due process does not convince even a fly on a window pane.
Just keep your lies and propaganda to yourself – nobody believes you.
Also, we all know for sure that AI's have a tendency to be severly trigger happy. In other words, it's doing more harm than good.
What you need to build up is easy reporting like the USA has, and fund sufficient staff to actually deal with the reports.
Hey! A massive thank you for engaging here. That is wonderful, and everybody involved is beautiful :)
On the chatcontrol topic, unfortunately the messaging is not correct. The whole IT industry is very concerned (as we know, that is the highest level of concern) about chatcontrol for a good reason. We know it is impossible to implement it in a secure way that is not abused.
How could this message best be relayed to the commission that does not involve harassing them in person?
What you describe is technologically impossible.
Source: Me, cybersecurity professional.
> under this proposal, there is no general monitoring of online communications
There will be a monitoring of every single picture and every single link in every single piece of online communication. Every message will need to be scanned for the presence of links and images. That's very different to "no general monitoring".
I have a question about: "Only material that is clearly child sexual abuse will be searched for and can be detected."
How? How will one determine when it's "sexual abuse" on all media? One has to scan each and every single media file to find these, I do not see any other way
Don't get me wrong, I would love a better way to deal with CSAM content but scanning all to find the few is not the way
If you want to detect whether a given message contains CSAM you obviously *have* to let it be scanned by some detection algorithm / machine learning. Otherwise you simply can't know...
In other words *each and every* message would have to be exposed to the threat of false positives. It is completely outrageous that you try to pretend otherwise!
I want a strong Europe which protects freedom of people, improves prosperity of all Europeans, protests our environment, and protects our democracy.
However if Europe goes the way of this proposal, I'll become a strong and vocal opponent of the EU. And I won't be the only one.
You have no spine. Grow one.
Whoever is responsible for this “response” deserves a raise for their outstanding achievements in bullshitting Europeans. The above quote sounds benign and harmless, but in reality it means the following:
Every message *may* contain child abuse content, therefore every message will be scanned.
Whoever is responsible for this “response” deserves a raise for their outstanding achievements in bullshitting Europeans.
Here's what the above quote really means:
every message could potentially contain content related to child abuse, so every message must be scanned by us.
That might work on evenint news, but not around here.
Phony shit. Just what we‘re used from your fine president.
as a little privacy advocate let us break it down one by one
"Let us be clear: under this proposal, there is no general monitoring of online communications. There will be no such thing as “chat control”."
wanna know what the definition of insanity is? Step aside far cry 3 character, we got a new champ on the block
The carve out for politicians makes it obvious.
You can't detect illegal materials inside a message without accessing the message contents. Whether you AI-scan the message contents before they are sent or break the encryption afterwards, it will have very negative consequences.
There are many govt and non-govt organisations protecting children and they tend to be woefully underfunded. Please consider funding them instead of focusing on broken ideas.
What about the "AI" scanning of all messages on the client-side, whose security impications are so bad that all politicians and all military personnel are exempt?
This is mass surveillance. Firstly, it's an enormous treasure-trove of data, that will inevitably be breached.
Secondly, abuse of it by those controlling it is inevitable. And even in the unlikely even that it isn't actively used for identifying and suppressing dissent, the prospect will cause people to self-censor.
The Stasi would have wet themselves at the possibilities.
Every subject-matter expert on every aspect of this has called it out as horrifying, and pointed out comprehensively that it cannot and will not accomplish its stated goals.
Its supporters are AI and surveillance enterprises who stand to gain financially.
So let me be clear: there is nothing necessary or proportionate about this. The only fair resolution is to scrap the whole proposal.
You know what?
Stop making idiots from the people.
If you are idiots by yourself, that's fine. But don't make idiots from the other, unaware of your shady plans people!
That's not democracy, that's not freedom!
That is not "for our" good nor security and such.
Keep this bullshit for yourself please! 🤮
No thanks.
The EC's silent support for Israel, the insistence on the awful CSAM proposal, the weakening of the Green Deal...
Hello @truls46!
It’s time to get rid of dirty Russian fossil fuels, and focus on clean homegrown energy. We need to generate more homegrown renewables – with nuclear as a baseload.
But we also need to urgently modernise and invest in our infrastructure and our interconnectors.
This is why we will propose a new Grids Package to strengthen our grid infrastructure and speed up permitting.
Would be a long appreciated turn of events. But I currently don't really believe your words. Considering esp. current political decisions like buying Palantir from Peter Thiel or increasing outsourcing to Microsoft and Google in regards to Governmental data.
Currently all of this appears to be empty promises and nothing more.
It's time to do as you say. Like e.g. start by getting all political parties and govs off of US clouds and control...
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