I would but be surprised that US is pressured some people there.
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
And law enforcement agencies.
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.
We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.
It's very much NOT meme driven. We're generally very sensitive to child abuse in Denmark, and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
Originally, she launched the "branding" push when they were talking about schools and daycare, but like all branding it spills out into other avenues. I have no doubt she weighs her job around children particularly important.
It's not at all a stretch to me to say that she probably genuinely wanted her party colleague, and CSAM enjoyer, caught faster, and I don't doubt that she believes this is the best way to do that.
That's not a "meme". That's policy driven by observation and factual cases.
This is what the parent commenter meant by “meme-driven”: When singular cases can be turned into an idea that is shared and occupies a disproportionate amount of attention because it gets packaged into a simple idea that is easily shared and repeated.
Real life is not a meme.
If that's not a meme("bUt tHiNK oF THe cHilDRen!!11") I don't know what is.
I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.
EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).
The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
From document 11277/24 [1]. Unless it has changed more recently, the exemption is actually considerably broader, and presents the unusual argument that the system will be secure enough for any private personal communications, yet too insecure for any company's trade secrets (which, apparently, have the same weight as national security).
[1]: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11277-2024-...
I don't believe that's what people think of when they hear "law enforcement is excluded". Officials will still be subject to the law when interacting with anybody else. They will still be subject when interacting on public services. Crucially, everybody will be excluded from private messaging servers, also non law enforcement.
Do we have any reason to believe CSAM is being distributed on the internal EU communication networks?
That's...
Wow.
We had a number of cases in Denmark over the recent years which pushes this agenda:
In addition to the obvious child abuse, there have been a case where video of a high-school girls private sexual activities where spread wildly on asocial media, fake-porn of various public figures and several cases of organized crime using various end-to-end encrypted services.
None of the Danish politicians I have communicated with like the ChatControl proposal very much, but there is nothing else on the table, which isn't much worse in terms of privacy invasion, so their only choice is ChatControl or doing nothing.
My personal opinion:
No human right is absolute, not even the right to life itself.
The demands of upholding the civilized society limit all human rights, and this limitation has always included intrusions of privacy in order to solve crimes.
I far prefer Dan Geer's proposal (See his black-hat keynote):
Companies on the Internet get to choose one of these two business models:
A) Common-carrier. Handles all content as opaque data, makes no decisions about what users see. No responsibility for the legality of the content. (= how telephone companies and postal carriers are regulated)
B) Information provider: 100% responsible for all content, no matter where they got it from. (= how newspapers are regulated)
The current "the algorithm did it" excuse for making illegal material go viral, to maximize profits, is incompatible with a civilized society.
I've asked the politicians whey they do not do that and the answers is "We do not want to piss off USA", in recent months that concern seems to be fading.
ChatControl is about non-criminal activity.
> phkamp
Hey! A lot of my views are heavily informed by your writings. I tend to agree a lot with your view of these things.
I personally extend it further by positing that the current democratic crisis, most readily seen in America, is caused by the inability of democracy to solve certain important problems, which I then again posit is at least partially caused by cyberlibertarian obstructionism. That's all just conjecture though.
It's nice to see you around here :)
The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.
Following the money requires actually following money. Not imagined money.
Do we have evidence of these companies lobbying for CharControl?
The biggest issue is the lack of transparency about the people/groups involved in those meetings and why this ineffectual privacy-destroying idiocy gets pushed so hard.
Your comment makes 0 sense.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Canada has a more important socialist component than the US, and it serves them well.
I wonder if you really did not understand my first post, or if it is just your take at flameware.
Have you watched the news lately? EU is a shitshow right now. France is going downhill really fast, Germany - I don’t even about them. And the rest is scrambling with their own issues.
Oh yes, Canadian free healthcare, right? Where a doctor might see you in 6-12 months. If you die in the meantime, tough luck.
No, socialism doesn’t work.
You know, everyone is a lefty until they start their own company, and then they quickly realize what a bunch of crap that ideology is.
So, here you are, people are pretty much happy with socialism, they are angry when you try to take it from them.
Also, I've read a lot a different version than yours: "ppl are righties up until they fell ill". Which happpens a lot more than creating a corporation. Ah and the result is quite life-and-death, which failing a startup is not (is common).
Ah and NO you won't have to wait in Canada if you have an emergency. And even an advanced cancer will be treated quickly, you won't have to wait months of course (or ppl would die of waiting, which the system avoids effectively).
Nice try, but no. They want the government to fix the deficit by not increasing their taxes or lowering their benefits. Which means the government needs to shrink.
Your take of it is, at best, delusioned.
French people, the ones shouting in the streets, don't care directly about that deficit. They care about being able to have decent lives with social welfare.
Fyi, the main hard points are currently: not wanting to push the retirement age, and not wanting to eliminate bank holidays.
One of the biggest components of the recent protests' organisers was LFI. If you do your homework, you'll understand easily that LFI does not push towards less social wellfare.
what the heck you place socialism as something towards <the overall happiness of the society, and not focusing on increasing material wealth>? first that socialism is a temporary state towards communism, that despite, it doesn't need to pursue communism. see China. second; WHY DO YOU WANT TO CENTRALIZE POWER TOWARDS A SELECTED GROUP OF PEOPLE? Karl Marx is fine, but it's a european guy who lived in 1800s. socialism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of the hope of donation of power coming from the public vs. the private... you need to be quite naive to believe the goverment will do the good without corruption. much more people with power allowing their goods to be taken. see our history before capitalism
Have you heard of SocDem, or "social democracy"?
It is everywhere. Even in ones of the most successful democracies on this planet.
They might have historically believed in gradual transition away from capitalism, but today they seem entirely happy with capitalism with a little corporatism in labor markets. Socialism is mostly branding.
This use of the word "socialist" (the use that is NOT meaning "communist dictatorship") is quite equivalent to "politically left".
For example, it correlates with free healthcare, free education.
This is not in opposition to "capitalism".
It is more, like, "maybe profit (financially) less, but care more"?
Seriously though, I realize that the American right calls welfare socialism, but that's just rhetorical slight of hand. There's also some actual American socialists who cynically label such things socialism to get more members, believing they'll be able to just slip in abolition of capitalism later in a bait and switch strategy - similar to the one attempted during the early American labor movement.
But welfare isn't socialism. If it was, that would mean that a fair chunk of the world has been socialist centuries before the term was coined - including American colonies where free public education was first instituted in the 17th century. It would render the entire socialist movement, for most of its existence, nonsensical.
And this is the other way around, "socialism" had the softer meaning of "welfare" way before the communist dictatorship even happened in History.
Here, in the "etymology" section of this WP page, you will read that all definitions (Émile Littré, Paul Janet, Émile Laveleye, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Adolf Held, Thomas Kirkup, Émile Durheim, August Bebel, and Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition of 1911), i.e. all definitions given before 1911 except one by Pierre Leroux, point to the general meaning of "improving society by better distributing wealth and caring more":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism
And that's why new terms were used for the subsequent authoritarian events: marxism, communism, etc. They exist because "socialist" was too ambiguous as it was already taken for the meaning of "with caring for society welfare".
Paul Janet stated socialism is generally used to refer to a doctrine which undermines the principle of individual property.
Émile de Laveleye stated socialism demanded a laborer reap the whole fruits of his labor and if other factors like land and capital contributed, then they must be unified with the labor. In other words, worker ownership of the means of production.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of course, believed property was theft and most certainly did not believe the continuation of property rights was an aspiration towards the amelioration of society, his definition of socialism.
Thomas Kirkup, who actually contributed the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on socialism in 1887, stated that "Socialism means: 1) That the working people aim at gaining, by combination or association, the control of land and capital which they lost in the individual struggle. (2) That order, economy, and prevision should remedy the confusion, waste, and demoralisation caused by competition. (3) That industry should be carried on not for private gain, but for the common good."
Émile Durheim was describing Saint-Simon who called for centralized state regulation of production and distribution.
And the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "Socialists believe that the present economic order, in which industry is carried on by private competitive capital, must and ought to pass away, and that the normal economic order of the future will be one with collective means of production and associated labour working for the general good. This principle of socialism is cardinal and fundamental."
Never mind that these are but a handful of definitions for socialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- to US guys: when speaking with people of European education or culture, the words socialist and communist have very different meanings. Mixing those will anger your interlocutor. You can avoid it easily by using common "synonyms" (in US) such as communist or marxist.
- advice to EU people: be aware that in US they only think of "socialist" as meaning "communist" and are very obtuse about it. Danger zone!
But the whole point, on my side, is to emphasize that in some cases "socialist" means "authoritarian communist" (that's been only when the word is used by some Americans) and in some cases (the most of the time e.g. if you are dialoguing with somebody from Europe) it means something else. See my other comments for more.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...
For others this is the last para of the first link:
> The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC.
So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing.
Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures youth crime across the country by collecting and aggregating police statistics from every state and territory.
Its data shows the number of youth offenders are lower for every state and territory compared with 2008-09.
The same thing can be seen when comparing the number of youth offenders per 100,000 people — the rate has gone down, although there has been a slight uptick in some states and territories since COVID pandemic.
But some states, like Victoria, have recorded a significant rise in youth crime, with its agencies also highlighting the number of incidents involving young offenders — not just the number of youth offenders.
How Australia's states and territories are grappling with youth crime
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-31/australian-state-and-...
Also: 'They've always been scapegoats': Behind Australia's crackdown on youth crime
Are states like Queensland and Victoria really facing a youth crime "crisis"? Here's what criminologists, political experts and Indigenous advocates say.
It's a dire state of affairs. Sweden is currently one of the most (if not the most?) violent country in Europe if you count gun shootings per capita [1]. The police is unprepared, has few legal means and resources. There are also few officers in general [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-...
No that is not ChatControl, that is just some Swedish thing. Chat Control would make it mandatory for servive providers to scan every single message in the EU for offending material and notify the authorities if anything is detected. It's blatant mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children.
They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished.
They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed.
Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare.
This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well.
I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing :
- increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts
- a youth unemployment problem
- housing price crunch
This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption.
Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it?
Why does this seem unlikely to you?
Surely that is obvious?
All it will take is someone to make a fediverse chat that can be simply stuck on a Pi from a premade image, and automatically runs a script to update the DNS with their IP and the kids will do it.
It kinda is but I didn't want to make that assumption. That is what I had assumed, for what it's worth. (Actually, I figured it was either knowledge or resources.) It also helps for the reason to be given explicitly so others can weigh in with relevant arguments rather than one that refutes something you didn't mean.
For reference of discussion in Sweden see https://chatcontrol.se/ (in Swedish). Social democrats and Christian democrats are the ones who seem to be more supportive of this law.
People there have had their freedom since the viking ages and probably earlier, it was never taken from them and therefore never scarred the culture. In other countries where peasants had to fight for their freedom their culture reflects that, but Swedes never had to do that.
So after millennia of governments letting its people be free why start distrusting the government today?
I think that trust in government comes from a mix of things, oppression was probably not a necessity, and centralised control was beneficial to most classes, but I see that there is also a very strong cultural element. Trust in authorities is taught in schools in very early ages, I see this with my children and I can compare to other systems (contrary to most Swedes). The folkhemmet ideology is still very strong in this country, it's almost a matter of national pride. To this add the tendency to conformism (jantelagen) and the avoidance of conflicts at all costs, which makes criticising others very badly seen.
Regardless where it comes from, I find that the uncritic, often blind trust in authorities in Sweden problematic because it hinders plurality and a sane discussion in society, like in the case of the Chatcontrol law. But individualism is also on the rise, very much so in fact, and the society is changing fast, and with it also trust.
If I were to ask what my relatives think of Chat Control I'm certain that an overwhelming majority would not have even heard about it. Hard to oppose something if you don't know about it. But even if they did oppose it - does the average European even know how to figure out how their chosen politician voted on the issue? Probably not.
Maybe it's a lack of journalism, I'm unsure, but I don't see any other reason for it. I also think that this is the factor in euroskepticism.
I think this is a fundamental difference between the countries that have fought for freedom (like England, France, USA), and the countries where the powers that be saw what happened and made minimal concessions to try to avoid unrest.
Doesn’t mean the state should be trusted to a naive degree of course
How is it possible that after years of discussing plans like this, they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety?
Makes me really worried about the future. There is a lot going on in the world, and somehow they feel the need to focus on making our communications unsafe and basically getting rid of online privacy.
The goal they are trying to achieve is good, but the execution is just stupid and will make everyone, including and maybe especially the people they want to protect, less safe online.
The age verification thing is another example. All it does is send a lot of sensitive traffic over cheap or free VPN's (that might be controlled by foreign states). Great job, great win for safety!
For example, let's say I implemented a CSAM-scanning AI model in my chat app, which runs locally against your message, before communicating the message over an encrypted HTTPS channel. If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities, on a secondary separate connection. At no point, did it leave the device, in unencrypted form.
Is that message encrypted? Yes.
The way that you want? No.
Governments have recognized this distinction, and have figured out they can have their cake and eat it too; the security of encryption with none of the privacy.
From Wikipedia. They can’t have their cake. You are breaking the concept of information into smaller steps (e.g. message) when that is against the definition.
There's a significant difference there between a government's definition and Wikipedia's idealism. Or, even if they subscribed to the Wikipedia definition, they would say they have the legal right to be an authorized party.
It works, because you already tried to argue with that. And it is not the Wikipedia. The whole existence of encryption is evolved around the concept of information. And even the government's definition can be argued, because the adversary is defined by the sender and the receiver, not by anyone else.
When there is law, then the definition matters and there is legal stand, but before that, it is just an initiative which tries to mislead.
Governments have never cared about the encryption philosophy; only the math aspects and international risk - which, in this example, are technically satisfied.
okay, but how do you prevent me from intercepting that communication.
Or even running my own copy of the local model and determing ahead of time whether it will trip the alarm. If the attacker has access to the model, they can effectively make a GAN to modify images to get past the filter.
When was the last time you heard someone praise someone else's competency?
Sycophancy, however, will always gain.
wait until they start all using "AI", that'll agree with everything they say
I don't understand where this desire to be led comes from. Other people do not have your best interest in mind. I want others to get out of my way, unless we have a conflict of interest and then we _might_ need a third party to resolve it. But I certainly don't need or want to be led.
To amass enough violence to control large numbers of people, you need to incentivize other people to apply violence for you. Dictatorships are more honest in this regard - they reward such subservients with the opportunity to abuse others for pleasure and material benefit.
Democracies OTOH tell people that we're all better off if the system works and anyone upsetting it hurts everyone so it's everyone's best interest to "pacify" them.
You're right that many people are very submissive though and just do what they are told even it it harms them long term. Usually the forcing mechanism is other people would punish you if you didn't punish the person you are supposed to. I mean, most of the cops who hunted down Luigi benefited from the CEOs death, yet they still did it. Because the benefit is too indirect and delayed and the punishment for getting caught not doing your job on purpose is immediate and direct.
I still object to the term leader because they don't lead, they tell people what to do. Not all leadership has to be be example but it implies some participation in the activity, its benefits and its dangers. Modern politicians are too well-shielded from the reality of working people.
1) Some CEOs stopped posting their photos and other information online, clearly understanding they too could become targets and somewhat lowering the social prestige of that position.
2) One insurance company backed down from its attempt to decide how long anaesthesia should last instead of the doctors.
A long term effect is that many podle feel empowered to talk about how big companies and abusing the system and what they think should happen to people controlling those companies.
Look how many doctors and nurses started taking about the abusive practices of insurance companies. Hopefully it leads to change, otherwise it's likely events like this will keep happening, especially when the abused are people who have little to lose.
Science is not one way of thinking, it's a methodology, it's seeking truth. There might be bad actors and idiots, there is likely lots wrong, but the beautiful thing about science is that facts matter. If someone publishes bullshit you can repeat the study and proof them wrong.
That science is (wrongfully) taken as justification for stupid things, is not on "the science" as a whole.
If anything makes me hopeful, it is science and the remarkable developments happening.
They only need to succeed with it once, so they'll keep trying again and again.
That's exactly why it's very important to raise awareness about it everywhere.
So your chat app encrypts your message with the recipient's public key and the state's public key.
Hey presto, you have a message which cannot be read by someone who casually intercepts it. If the state seizes your message - or records it for later analysis - they do not need to break encryption. There's no plain-text version laying around for anyone to sniff.
Is this a good idea? No. Even ignoring the civil liberties aspect, we know that key management is extremely difficult. A leak of the state's private key(s) could be devastating.
But let's not pretend that this is somehow technologically impossible.
Preventing this leak is what's technologically impossible. A leak includes when the government that's keeping the keys decides to start abusing their access to the data.
I'm not aware of, for example, Google's private signing keys for Android being leaked. Sure, plenty of CAs have been breached - but not all. That suggests it is possible to key these keys secure.
A better analogy would be the keys used by Microsoft to secure Outlook inboxes.
The famous case is what happened to government birth records when the Netherlands were overrun by Germany in WWII. They weren't even encrypted, but mere transfer of access led to tragedy.
"Sure, plenty of people lose at the casino - but not all. That suggests it is possible to find a winning strategy."
Is it? Put the key in a TPM module in a well guarded server in a well guarded datacenter. Have the prosecution send the encrypted blob to the server and then receive the messages in clear from the server.
That way, there is absolutely no way the private keys can be leaked.
Take a look at the number of people who lose their crypto keys and watch their money vanish.
All encryption is broken by the virtue that key management is impossible for most people.
In contrast, a person's key can decrypt only that person's messages, is used only in one place (usermset of machines), and is a generally low-value target.
Insanely huge difference between losing a person's key vs the key to an entire nation's communications, even if it is the key of the nation's president -- still far lower value & consequences (start with: if you have the nation's key you can decrypt the president's comms anyway).
Not really, any more than it's possible to write a message that says the same thing whether you read it in English or Swahili. You might be able to do it once as a novelty, but the approach won't generalize.
There are multiple-recipient schemes, but they don't rely on using two different keys to decrypt the same message. Instead, you encrypt the message (once) using a (single) symmetric key, and you prepend a bunch of different messages saying "the symmetric key is xxxxxxxxxxx", one for each intended recipient. Those are encrypted with keys specific to each recipient, and each recipient has to attempt to decrypt them all and select the one that decrypted successfully.
The paper you link appears to be discussing an entirely different problem: its definition of a "multi-recipient encryption scheme" does not contemplate sending the same message to several different recipients:
> There are n receivers, numbered 1, ..., n. Each receiver i has generated for itself a secret decryption key sk_i and corresponding public encryption key pk_i. The sender now applies a multi-recipient encryption algorithm to pk_1, ..., pk_n and messages M_1, ..., M_n to obtain ciphertexts C_1, ..., C_n.
> Each receiver i can apply to sk_i and C_i a decryption algorithm that recovers M_i.
> We refer to the primitive enabling this type of encryption as a multi-recipient encryption scheme (MRES).
Note that there is no requirement for anyone other than recipient i to be able to understand message M_i. As described, all encryption schemes are multi-recipient encryption schemes, because you can just consider each message M_k individually and encrypt it to recipient k using a single-recipient scheme.
Look at Australia’s “hacking” bill. It was about letting the government hack (take over) your account and post as you. The “hacking” referred to ahat THEY would do — to YOUR accounts:
https://www.accessnow.org/surveillance-state-incoming-with-a...
Australians even made a movie about a dystopian future:
"Chat Control" is not an official term, but a name chosen by critics of the law.
Why are they idiots? Because western Europe is not yet authoritarian and thus there is little personal benefit to hasten a slide towards it, there are so many other ways to gain power in a free society. (I wouldn't bet money that Europe will remain free in 25 years.)
There is a secondary problem here -- anything that decreases the information security of European countries hands more power to the US and China (and to a lesser degree other nations with advanced infosec capabilities like Russia and Israel.) If you are European (I'm not) the first thing that should be done is investigate the people pushing this stuff.
I think it is fair to give the opponent's position (which both you and I believe is in the wrong) a steel-man argument treatment, by assuming the best possible interpretation of their argument (even if they don't imo deserve it, and you don't believe in their stated intent).
The approach makes sense to me, as attacking and debating genuineness of someone's intentions is an endless rabbithole. So if you have an option to decimate their case, all while assuming their stated intent to be truthful and genuine, that's a pretty solid way to actually move the needle on the argument in a desired direction.
People need to understand that some people are abusers by nature and mentality, some from birth, some by upbringing. And they crave power.
The sayings like "those who want power rarely deserve it" exist for a reason, except until the last few decades we didn't have a good enough understanding of psychology to explain why. Now we do. Some people have anti-social traits and they should never be allowed in positions of power because they are mentally ill.
Difference is "normal" mental illness like psychosis is harmful to the individual who has it. Anti-social mental illness is harmful to those around them, especially those under them in hierarchical power structures.
I agree with you though, they know what they are doing and about some implications at least.
I hope most services will just block Denmark though. Any investment in such technologies is a waste and should come to a great cost to developers. In this case Google products in general should be shunned. Not that they were famous for steady support of products instead of quickly killing them.
Is there any evidence for this other than vibes?
Why do you assume something like that? Do you actually know the arguments that the parties in favor of this kind of regulation are presenting? And can you dismiss them based on objective facts?
> The goal they are trying to achieve is good
That is what should be, in my opinion, the basis of this discussion. Assume good intentions and try to work out with the parties involved to achieve the goal in a reasonable way. This is the way, I believe.
Hand-wavingly dismissing other party's arguments would be in my opinion disingenuous.
This is very easy to answer. Just look up what all the responses were, for all the times this kind of stuff was proposed.
The moment anyone brings up the whole "just put a backdoor in that only we can access" despite years of people who actually know better saying that's not possible, is the moment when any further arguments become moot and not worth any further engagement or assumptions of good intention.
That's the single argument all these stupid "chat control" like proposals are based on.
Who is arguing for a backdoor? Do you actually know what are the proposed technical approaches or are you making assumptions?
> people who actually know better saying that's not possible
What is not possible?
> all these stupid "chat control" like proposals
For example here, you make your argument by stating that these proposal are "stupid". There is no effort that I can see to even try to understand where the other party is coming from.
And that is an issue, in my opinion. I think that a productive and honest conversation about a complex issue like this one requires empathy with the other party's position.
The 14 EU countries pushing for this policy to become law. Do you actually know the proposed technical approaches or are you just making assumptions?
>>What is not possible?
See my previous comments. I made it quite clear.
>>For example here, you make your argument by stating that these proposal are "stupid". There is no effort that I can see to even try to understand where the other party is coming from. And that is an issue, in my opinion. I think that a productive and honest conversation about a complex issue like this one requires empathy with the other party's position.
In situations such as this your empathy is misplaced. It should not be with the bureaucrat seeking access to your private conversations under the false pretense of "keeping you safe" from w/e today's boogeyman is. It should be with the people who's safety is bolstered by the ability to have private conversations.
If you don't understand why this sort of stupid chat control policy is bad then there is no productive or honest conversation to be had.
The only things being handwavingly dismissed are the collateral damage, side effects, very real risks, and concerns about the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.
We shouldn't have shrugged off the weird feeling of shackles on our wrist when iOS(iPhoneOS) was first released. We should not have relied on geohot stopping by and dropping a jailbreak he found. We should have voted to force it open by law.
The data might get leaked, but not to relevant authorities.
It's important to remember that government is not your friend, isn't meant to be, and never has been. It's a machine of control that needs to be held in constant restrain by the population. Obtaining more control is the expected behavior of those who come into power, shown through all of history.
If governments are leery of LLMs for the wrong or right reason and the industry and technology lacks any kind of grasp of what it is and what the inputs are, then BOTH are wrong and the tech needs dismantling.
If the decontextualizing of communication is epidemic, as it appears to be in Chat, then the industry has failed not grasping the first thing about the technology.
Add in the fact that both China and the US already have practically near omniscient digital oversight of everything their citizens do through server and OS level backdoors, the uninformed politicians in the EU/UK are easier to tempt by lobby groups crying in the name of the children.
The buck stops with the politicians signing this into law.
No better way to quench your thirst for power than to choose to go into Danish politics and move up to EU politics to herd 500 cats to be in favor of some legislative surveillance scheme that, if implemented, you'll immediately lose all control over to different technocrats.
I'm sure you'll find somebody who fits that bill, but since it's a democracy, we're more interested in why the other 45% went along with it because they can be reasoned with.
The "good news" for now is that the systems deployed in this model won't classify text, only images and URLs. The bad news is that the current draft explicitly allows that question to be reviewed in the future. And of course, once you've re-architected every E2EE system to make image scanning possible, most of the damage to cybersecurity is likely already done; a year or two down the road, text scanning will probably be viewed as a modest and common-sense upgrade. I expect that folks who object to text scanning on cybersecurity grounds will be informed that the risks are already "baked in" to the image-scanning model, and so there's no real harm in adding text scanning.
Leaving aside the privacy issues, this is basically an existential national security risk for Europe. It's amazing to me that they're walking right into it.
Fixed that for you.
I suspect the primary reason that people in this position fail to understand anything about encryption is that it is their job to do so.
You are the people who make this kind of repeated attack on freedom possible.
If so, the best way to stop that is to sugest a good way to achieve the good goal.
How would solve these good goals?
And we elect their parties and these people over and over again, instead of making them utterly fail the next election. Too many of us do not see through these thinly veiled attempts and too many of us are too comfortable to vote them out.
> "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."
> Share your thoughts via https://fightchatcontrol.eu/, or to jm@jm.dk directly.
Politicians like Peter Hummelgaard are ghouls. They want their eyes in your home, watching you at all moments. And then they want to control what you do and see and think.
Defending our liberties and privacy is a never-ending battle.
More about Palantir in Denmark:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2...
People in the orbit of Thiel are in favor of getting Greenland, one way or the other. Good luck Denmark with your software.
At what level would you need to do that? E.g. for iOS and then iOS need to comply with every app store app having it or else they can't operate in the EU? Is that the plan?
I swear those Thursday bilderberg meetings are a thing.
Any political party of any member state that even thinks about being critical of the EU will instantly be completely destroyed by "independent" national (state sponsored) media.
But even if you think UK is some kind of weird one-off example - it's not. Look at Poland - PiS has been openly critical of EU for years now and held power for years, will most likely win it again in the next elections. Konfederacja straight up calls EU facist on a daily basis and they have like 20% support for some insane reason.
>>by "independent" national (state sponsored) media.
You have to explain what you mean by this - you can't be independent and state sponsored. Or do you mean unbiasased(like what the BBC or TVP are meant to be, which they are obviously not but they are not "independent")
https://media.ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CSI-B...
I think something that is under estimated is how much it was a matter of identity - do people feel British or European? The areas that voted remain most strongly were the nationalist areas of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
We can see how Trump treated Switzerland.
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
>Under the directive, the police and security agencies would have been able to request access to details such as IP addresses and time of use of every email, phone call and text message sent or received. There was no provision in the directive that permission to access the data must be confirmed by a court. On 8 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Directive invalid in response to a case brought by Digital Rights Ireland against the Irish authorities and others because blanket data collection violated the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in particular the right of privacy enshrined in Article 8(1).
It's easy to dismiss as hypocritical, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong. Their "solution" to leave rather than fix was simply because they wanted it but in their control. Honestly they are nutters who make stuff up about "bendy bananas" etc, which dilutes the complaint.
Yep completely agree, as mentioned.
> Their "solution" to leave rather than fix was simply because they wanted it but in their control.
There are a few nutters and poor people notice these trends first. The media tend to zoom in on those people and of course that taints all their concerns because normal people don't want to say anything that people might see as poor or nutty; they want to be seen as successful and smart. Only poor people would complain about immigration and only extremists and pedos would complain about censorship and you are not one of them right?
Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.
And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.
Perhaps targeted reform of these bodies is in order so they don't keep producing this legislation over and over. The blocking minority shouldn't just oppose the legislation itself, but make sure that their representation at those bodies is stopping those recommendations from moving forward. The legislating infrastructure needs to be challenged as much as any particular bill.
It doesn't have to be in secret, they can and do plan and coordinate these efforts in the open. When we hear about it, it was already planned for many years.
What are the odds
Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
the reasonable alternative being... ?
Unfortunately, "reasonable" generally means "can do the things typically done with smartphones these days", which include things like banking, media streaming, and civic stuff - things mediated by the very systems whose vendors aren't just embracing remote attestation, but actually driving its proliferation.
For better or worse[0], this is not a technical problem - it's a social/political one. Technology created it, by making remote attestation possible - but the actual problem is with why companies want to use it.
--
[0] - Definitely worse. Technical problems are easy.
I didn't learn to program computers so I could use it to shitpost more privately. I learned it so I can make machines deal with things for me the way I want them to.
Openmoko, Pinephone, Librem 5
I do wish ubports + waydroid would be a reasonable alternative -- but it's wishful thinking.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-work...
[0] https://jolla-devices.com/sailfish_devices/
[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/de/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operatin...
It's really not that hard to do, just antithetical to the purpose of the OS.
Just don't "upgrade" and ignore all the propaganda telling you bad things about that. Keep building apps that work on older, less-hostile devices and spread the word to oppose this very deliberate planned obsolescence.
Also easily remotely ownable, so you can be spied on without even having to install any software at all. And any that aren't now will be a couple of years after they fall out of support. Which, by the way, is very hard for the community to step in and do, since they're full of undocumented proprietary binary blobs.
> Just don't "upgrade" and ignore all the propaganda telling you bad things about that.
... and when your fully owned device finally breaks completely?
There's a whole community keeping these devices alive, I trust them far more than Big G.
via a crafted HTML page
Don't forget that the majority if not all exploits will use something like JS to obfuscate their existence and frustrate analysis.
Also remember the famous sayings "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither" and "Live free or die". Accepting the insecurity, because freedom cannot exist without it, is also important.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
The extra words are important
Also the background context of arguing for taxing the rich instead of making them aristocrats.
The Google change means that every APK has to be signed and linked to a developer with a verified identity.
Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that? The Signal clients are open source with a permissive license so there's nothing unauthorized about building and distributing a modified version yourself.
They only break the law when it earns them bundles of money.
In this context it isn't EU laws. The upcoming Android change in 2026 will stop anyone installing a non-verified app on their Android devices. This seems to be something Google arrived at "independently". But I would bet the US and EU and whoever else have put pressure on them.
They have no obligation to sign anything, and they aren’t in the business of fighting city hall. Quite the opposite.
The Signal CEO aid that they would pull out entirely from the EU if Chat Control comes to pass.
> Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that?
In this scenario, Signal will still be allowed to be distributed outside of the EU so you could get it from the Play store hosted out of the EU.
Android as it is fails as an operating system and the same idiots ruining perfectly good software in other companies now work for Google. Not that iOS is in any way better, it has the exact same and even more deficiencies.
If you expect hostile action by Google you should also expect the rootkit that is google play services to also do that. Which means in both cases the solution would be to use a actual open source mobile OS based on AOSP.
But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved.
In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss.
Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all.
On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals.
Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.
Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.
You can get it up and running in one week on a cheap server.
So instead of breaking the privacy of everyone, this should only impact the manufacturers.
Just my 0.02
This is a really hard problem. If there's an easy solution in mind, feel free to suggest it.
Verify 1 container out of 20. When you catch a stolen car, fine the shipping company for not doing their job. Find employees who performed the forgery of documents and put them in prison. If the company doesn't keep records of which employee prepares which document, fine the company. And so on. Unfortunately police and customs would have to do their job in this case, I can see how they're upset.
In summary, without stupid jokes about German politics, the actual stated goal is unachievable but the real world consequences in a Europe that is sprinting to the far right are incredibly dangerous.
Another example is the recent nepal protests.
More abstractly I think that a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society at scale is not able to handle anonymous and private communication without collapsing. If we dont go in the direction of benevolent censorship like China and Singapore I think the west is going to see some dark times.
Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither and will lose both.
Each of them thrived because they embraced diversity and freedom, etc. giving themselves access to a much larger pool of skilled talent.
Venice offers the clearest example. At its height, they could appoint someone as unconventional as a sub-Saharan Muslim to command their fleet (think of Othello). But the moment they shifted to a locals-only approach for key positions, their dominance began to crumble.
The problem is that usually locals feel cast aside. And while they too get the benefits, they rarely see them as such… They feel entitled and screwed. Don’t care about the big picture.
Ps. Of course this is very high level as each of these cities / states / etc collapsed under slightly different circumstances.
I am sympathetic to whatever made you believe that, but if you advocate for such evil, inhumane, reckless systems, you are not a good ally to anyone, including yourself or your community.
It's interesting that a member of a minority would not see that this is exactly how minorities get oppressed. Sure, let's make trans hate speech illegal (and completely fuck privacy online in order to make it so)... then we block criticism of Israel... then we block criticism of The Party... now let's block anything that might "corrupt our children"... Actually we don't need that narrative anymore; we just block whatever The Party says to block. I hope being trans stays socially acceptable!
To say nothing of the fact that one country fucking over privacy for its citizens means fucking over citizens of many other countries too, who didn't agree to it.
Some political forces tried to sell this as a solution to "hatred", but they had educational shortcomings and didn't think it through.
Both your examples aren't really invested in minorities. Minorities need to conform like everybody else.
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far right party, is against Chat Control.
I understand your point, but I fail to see how this law will change that.
Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.
I think these laws are simply to catch everyday people chatting about illegal stuff on a phone without any preparation.
we all pay the price, yes, but we also all enjoy the prosperity it brings us.
at best these are arguments for finally making cars harder to steal. (and for people to own fewer of them and just rent them when they need it. and the renter company can then store them in a big fucking lot with security if they want to.)
...
as other commenters pointed it out, the technology is out there.
sure, it might not convince enough voters, we'll see. but it's sure as shit that these networks are not going back to pen and paper.
If you've got nothing to hide, then you shouldn't object to having a sphincter implant to track your every movement. And if you happen to be in an area during a crime, you'll certainly be vindicated, so just a little inconvenience in order to ensure that no car will ever be stolen again.
And just think how environmentally friendly that'll be. Maybe people will stop having so many babies to protect their sphincters from being implanted. That'll be super good for the environment.
Not some kind of fancy sci-fi grain-of-sand sized microchips that are completely impossible to track. Not even drugs! Cars! Those huge metal objects that weigh over a metric ton each! Those cars!
If the police can't stop criminals from shipping CARS out of an ISLAND COUNTRY, the issue isn't that they don't have a way to breach privacy of every citizen. The issue is that they should be all fired and never allowed to do any government work ever again.
Where is this confidence that you can do their job coming from?
I have confidence that the organization is completely dysfunctional. In which case it's probably more productive to raze it to the ground and build it anew than to try to fix it. Especially if your idea of "fix it" involves "give them power to breach chat privacy of every citizen".
A randomly initialized police force would outperform the baseline of "sorry, we somehow can't stop criminals from stealing those huge, serialized cars, and shipping them out of our extremely isolated island country - now give us more privacy breaching powers!"
Even if you gave them those privacy breaching powers? They'll just use them to jail more people for things they said on Twitter.
I never said it was though.
I don't think the actual accusation is that the police are incompetent, but rather that this can't possibly be the real goal of such a law, because there are approaches to stopping such crimes which are not only far less invasive, but also easier and more practical. So this is at best an excuse, and at worst a justification that the commenter came up with that the actual policy makers never even mentioned (I have seen the latter far too often).
Stolen cars aren’t the only criminal activity. They engage in other activities as well. I just used it as an example.
I'm fine with increased costs if it means saving our privacy in communication.
And you wouldn't need to scan every container, some sampling % would be sufficient.
From what I understand, this what happens currently and allows stolen cars to pass through
If not, begin a proper investigation and start collecting that information. I'm generally against KYC regulations, but a limited and targeted investigation seems appropriate here.
I find it hard to believe that it's easier to force surveillance on all these innocent citizens than it is to fine a few shipping companies that haven't done their due diligence.
If they're trying to save money on boots-on-the-ground I think they might be in for a surprise with how much manual effort it takes to find the needles in the massive haystack they want to build, and then to actually put all those needles together enough to build a case worthy of prosecution.
They think they understand step 1 and don't seem to be aware of the fact that there are quite a few more (expensive and complicated) steps that must follow to make this _actually_ useful.
I'm a little bit biased, however, as I've been on the wrong end of law enforcement's complete ineptitude as it relates to interpreting metadata into suspicion of crime. The size of the haystack they're trying to create is of such a size that the number of needles they find would become a haystack on its own.
In one way this would mean that Chat Control would be ineffective. But in the same way it would mean that a whole lot more innocent folks would have their lives turned upside down due to false positives. That is not a good solution.
It's reasonably hard to catch bike thieves if they've just stolen a random bike. It's completely trivial if they stole a bait bike that you've loaded with hidden GPS trackers.
The next step will surely be to make use of communication programs that law enforcement cannot read illegal, right? The police find some person who has committed a crime, caught in the ways that criminals are usually caught, such as with forensics, or simply with the guns and drugs in the boot of their car. Then they can see what forms of communication this person was using, and who was using it with them. At that point, it doesn't matter what those other people were doing: The use of banned encryption technology is the crime. You can roll them up for that, or use evidence of this crime to justify further intrusion into their meatspace lives. And so it goes, on up the chain of a criminal organization. Theoretically, at least.
I don't like this, I don't support this, but as has been said elsewhere in this thread: Let's not pretend this is some insurmountable problem for a government who has already shown an appetite for surveillance.
You can't make laws that govern how criminals behave. All chat control will really accomplish is maybe a momentary string of arrests(which is meaningless in the long term; there's always someone to take over), and longer term, worse privacy and security for everyone except the criminals.
Another principle is that when someone is destroying evidence, you can presume it contained incriminating evidence.
I think you could make the punishment proportional to the presumed crime.
Especially if they can claim they "presume the evidence was destroyed."
Yes, criminal gangs are bad.
And, for me, and probably many others here too, enabling governments to look at private encrypted messages of everyone is way worse.
Let’s find other ways to prevent these gangs from stealing cars.
Could you watch The Wire and point out exactly what you'd do differently. I'm picking this example, because the whole point of the show is that they're unable to do anything without a wiretap when faced with a sophisticated criminal gang.
Get a warrant, put hidden microphones and cameras into their light switches and ceiling lights.
Turn one of their members into a double agent and get them to spy for you.
Of course that's not as easy as total surveillance. Because it's not supposed to be. The extra effort isn't that hard if you're going against a criminal gang, but it's enough to prevent the state from going "fishing" by surveilling everyone.
But all this assuming you found probable cause to surveil a citizen in the first place. Where's the probable cause coming from?
And that's assuming that they can even figure out who the higher level bosses are in the first place.
There's a basic right to privacy, which can only be restricted with probable cause. Your argument sounds like you disagree with this very basic premise?
No, I don’t disagree with the need for probable cause. I was asking, how do you build the case for probable cause against someone you’ve never seen and whose communication is completely encrypted? You can’t. I don’t have a solution for that, and I don’t think anyone does. I am merely pointing out that it’s a problem, and that the police’s suggested solution is surveillance.
If you backdoor E2EE crypto for one user, you've got to weaken it for everyone. There's no way around that.
What he's arguing for would require wiretapping every citizen, just in case you need to listen to the logs from any one citizen.
Even worse, the criminals will just compile the open source E2EE apps themselves without the backdoor, so the only people you'll be able to wiretap will be law-abiding citizens.
The "best" option (if there even is such a thing) would be to surveil endpoint devices, but the governments have failed to strongarm Apple into complying, so now they're going after the service providers.
Additionally, even with E2EE protocols, you can already tell from the metadata who is talking to whom, which is everything a government needs to get warrants, seize devices, and install surveillance devices.
So in the end, this proposal won't affect criminals, will reduce the security for every law-abiding citizen, and isn't even going to do anything useful against crime.
The standard for probable cause has sharply declined in this scenario you’ve constructed.
And you’re assuming that the government will seize the device, install surveillance software and the criminals will continue to use those devices? I don’t see how.
Even if the government has access to remote takeovers using unpatched zero days, those are not used on local investigations.
The Wire is not a documentary. It is, above all designed to be entertaining. If they thought having a character reveal themselves to be a reptilian alien with bananas for hands made for a more entertaining show people would like, they would’ve done that. The Wire is not a proxy for reality.
But the literal name of the show should be a clue that Wire taps are important. See how they evolve for one. Gangs are always learning, getting more secure with their communication and making it harder to build a case against them. What worked in Season 1 (pagers) doesn't work in Season 3 (burners). Once Season 3 is over everything about how burners were surveilled is then public record, so criminal gangs switch up once more, making it even harder.
Now if you made a show with all the criminals using encrypted, disappearing messages - that would be basically unbreakable. Which was my point.
A few of the pieces were taken off the board, soon to be replaced by new pieces. But the kings stayed the kings, and the game remained the same.
That wiretaps allowed them to build a meaningful case against the entire drug organisation, with nearly all the drug dealers in jail or dead or out of the game. That’s not nothing. Without wiretaps they would just have been harassing easily replaced corner pawns.
But what you’re saying is partly true as well. Even after taking whole drug organisations down, it is possible to replace them. As long as the demand existed, and the wholesaler existed, new drug organisations would be formed.
I’m surprised that people came out of it thinking that there was no point to any of the police work. Do you really think it would have been better to not touch the drug organisations in any way?
The whole point of the Wire is how meaningless those wiretaps ended up being.
On either side of the board, the kings stayed the kings, most of the other pieces were chewed up and spit out, a new crop of pieces would come along to replace them, and the game stayed the same.
One would think we'd have learned that lesson a century ago, yet here we are. Until anyone over the legal drinking age can go buy a bottle of Bayer Heroin at CVS, I don't want to hear about how the government is struggling so badly with crime that it thinks my privacy should be on the chopping block.
Also, they caught the drug kingpin at the end of the show by physically following his lieutenants to a warehouse full of drugs and arresting them all on the way out. The only thing the wiretaps were used for was to build a conspiracy charge against the leader, who had been standing outside for months/years doing face to face meetings with everyone that was arrested, clearly being the one in control of every conversation. If somehow that's not enough to charge someone with conspiracy then it seems removing a small amount of freedom to change that would be far preferable to reading everyone's messages and banning encryption.
"The Wire proves the need for mass surveillance" is the dumbest take I've ever heard. It literally shows the complete opposite.
Whether its car thieves or drug dealers, these exist in the West today by explicit choice, not because it is impossible to stop.
The previous Prime Minister suffered a bout of unemployment because he was unable to get a handle on the cost of living crisis. Would have been great if he could have gotten car insurance premium downs before the election. Ditto with the current Prime Minister.
There are official explanations
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit...
and reddit can show some 'conspiracy'. Conspiracy ones sound more plausible.
Because they have no interest in preventing this? It's not that they want this to happen (which would be a conspiracy), it's just that they don't care. The surveillance is built to protect the state, not the citizens.
People who break the law for money have existed forever and forever will. You don't need encrypted messages to smuggle drugs across borders.
- Criminals will still use encryption even if its against the law, given they are criminals
- Denmark is one of the safest countries on earth and every year crime has been declining for decades. Even your property theft example is a declining occurrence in Denmark: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178977/number-of-report...
Given property theft is down and encryption has been available for the entire time period of that chart -- do you have any actual steelman for why Denmark would need this, absent a thirst for power/control, especially now?
If that is really such a big problem, then why don't the politicians say so instead of saying that this law is for protection children?
For what it's worth, they're not making up the CSAM thing. It has never been easier to disseminate/acquire CSAM in a way that you're never caught. That wasn't really possible before, which means there's a larger market for the production of such material.
I didn't bring up CSAM here because HN is militantly against think-of-the-children arguments.
It turned out this week that they knowingly hired the "best friend" of famous pedophile as ambassador to the US.
>I didn't bring up CSAM here because HN is militantly against think-of-the-children arguments.
All consent manufacturing arguments promoting mass surveillance and backdoors are disingenuous to the very core.
Im surprised you dont see it.
I don't see the problem. Being well-connected in the proper networks is a major benefit for embassy work.
Are you telling me that you genuinely believe that they won't be able to download an open source, actually end-to-end encrypted app?
The stupid ones already use Telegram, which is not E2EE. There is no need to change anything for them. Those who are smart enough to choose a secure messenging app today will still be able to do it, even if that app is made illegal.
In fact, freedom to break the law, revolt and even kill people is necessary for a functioning democracy. The fourth box of freedom is the final check and balance. If enough people (over half the population) determine that the government is corrupt, they need to be able to overthrow it.
And that required and armed population and the ability to organize. Yes, this also helps criminals. Yes, sometimes innocent people will die because the wrong people also have access to guns. That's all the more reason to be able to fight back, both against bad people and against the government.
History repeats itself (with minor variations). People don't value their freedoms, let them be eroded by those who are attracted to power for power's sake, they get abused, and finally either they get fed up and start a revolution or the state functions so poorly it gets invaded.
We're at the stage where freedoms are getting eroded more and more noticeably. I would very much prefer to break the cycle before it comes to rifles and drones.
This does not happen almost anywhere else - car theft. This is UK issue with local law enforcement / insurance companies.
Phones - just fix your streets, elect politicians that are tough on crime. Simple.
>To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.
no
The vast majority of crime is very dumb. Like the three guys who broke into my garage and tried to take my bicycle. The police however is not interested in that: not interested in CCTV recordings, not interested the license plate of the van they were driving.
If the police isn't doing even the simplest things, there's no way in hell they would bother decrypting their whatsapp messages. That's reserved for people targeted by the government, not to fight street crime.
I'm bit more sympathetic to this type of argument than most of HN. Looking at what happens in The Wire, you need a judge to allow the wiretap, right? It's not just a willy-nilly cops-can-see-anything system, right? Though it has happened from time to time that since stuff is digital, people have taken a peek when they weren't supposed to. For instance, there was a case over the summer where someone was looking up people in the Danish CPR database, unauthorized.
But I also think this won't be the same as wiretapping. That was based on an old telephone system that was very much tied to the technology of that time. In particular, it wasn't encrypted, being just a straight up analog circuit. The bad guys couldn't do much other than use code words, or security by obscurity.
With digital, anyone can encrypt, and the cost of decryption is super high. I'm not sure what Snowden said about it, but I think it's fair to say that very few messages could be decrypted.
So what will happen? We will all send our decrypted chat messages to the man, and the bad guys will just write their own chat app, which will be encrypted. Nothing illegal will ever happen on the public channels, which from time to time will have some idiot looking at his ex-girlfriend's messages, while the drug lords just write encrypted messages that probably aren't even recognized as chat text.
Is it possible for this to be abused? Almost certainly.
Do I think this is a good idea? No I do not.
Despite me mentioning it 10 times, I can mention it once more. I'd prefer communications to remain private. I'm only pointing out ways it hurts society, and why police would like to return to the status quo ante where they could obtain a warrant to surveil criminals.
Oh, also the breaking of cryptography which, I just cannot believe these morons are still trying to fighr for...
If police forces wanted to do a better job here, they would.
Don't presume stopping this sort of crime is the purpose, that theory doesn't hold water.
The drama of that show was principally derived from the fact that the gangsters never so much as spoke near a telephone. The idea that you're going to force a backdoor into whatsapp and the gangsters are going to throw their hands into the air and turn themselves into the police is frankly idiotic. Criminals already use special apps and hardware to communicate more securely. They will continue regardless of what the law says they can do, because they are criminals. The idea that the rest of us should give up secure communication in order that gangsters can still find ways to communicate securely reaches the level of insulting. The cat is firmly and safely out of the bag on wiretapping gangsters.
The real problem is that we've given up on going after the low-level guys, whether they're stealing cars or selling drugs or pickpocketing the tourists. If we catch them at all, we just release them.
The following is supposed to happen in undetectable manner: - stolen car drives from A to B (on roads that can be policed), - at location B let’s assume it’s chopped (finite locations/people that can chop cars) - a container is loaded with heavy, metal car parts, undetected by metal detectors (weight scan, x-ray, visual inspection) - container paperwork is signed by someone (literal government ID is presented here) - customs officers are approving the outbound container that weighs over a metric tonne
You don’t think there is immense amount of incompetency or corruption here?
And what happened to police posing as a buyer, undercover cops, physical surveillance?
We recently shipped our furniture to US, and customs x-rayed it and charged us.
These are literally non-issues.
Disgusting pigs.
I am in a group of high civil servants for digital services in France and strangely no one seems to have heard about the project despite these people drafting most of France's position on numeric policies.
My view is it is probably more about mass control (avoiding a movement like Gilets Jaunes and the like) than anything else.
Tic, tac, tic, tac, tic, tac...
Mark my words.
https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov
They could just ask Meta, most europeans use WhatsApp anyway. Or we know where WhatsApp sends back ups to, totally unencrypted.
So what do we have. TG chats not encrypted by default, Signal works fine to the best of my knowledge. But with physical access to devices MAC with file vault off and most windows machines, its lights out right away.
hsbauauvhabzb•4mo ago
nickslaughter02•4mo ago
whatevaa•4mo ago
gjsman-1000•4mo ago
There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials.
https://digitalcredentials.dev/
https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
koolala•4mo ago
isaacremuant•4mo ago
It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse
The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next.
Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
phba•4mo ago
> The privacy considerations for digital credentials are not static. They will evolve over time as the ecosystem matures, and may be informed by the behavior of other actors in the ecosystem, improvements in other layers of the stack, new threats to user privacy, as well as changing societal norms and regulations.
Boil the frog slowly and carefully, and look out for opportune moments that could help to speed up the process.
MarcelOlsz•4mo ago
therein•4mo ago
MarcelOlsz•4mo ago
bogantech•4mo ago
MarcelOlsz•4mo ago
bastawhiz•4mo ago
That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.
layer8•4mo ago
Note how Apple is already a bit like that, banning certain torrenting apps even from alternative app stores [0]. I’m just mentioning that as a demonstration of the feasibility of such closed and controlled ecosystems. Now restrict ISP network traffic to packets signed by approved hardware, and there aren’t that many practical loopholes left.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411
bitwize•4mo ago
The days where you could run whatever OS you want on hardware you own will soon be over. And you know what? There's not a damn thing any of us can do, so may as well just buy Apple gear.
Traubenfuchs•4mo ago
Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
meindnoch•4mo ago
fifteen1506•4mo ago
That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
Taek•4mo ago
And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive
nickslaughter02•4mo ago
First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cr...)
ndriscoll•4mo ago
Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18.
The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
cm2187•4mo ago
robin_reala•4mo ago
cm2187•4mo ago
uzerfcwn•4mo ago
[1] https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/6c9a65fe-f706-449e-b0d9-1...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Suomi/comments/1mv9usq
9dev•4mo ago
Bender•4mo ago
[1] - https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
[2] - https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
9dev•4mo ago
I personally also think this should mostly not be a matter for the police to take care of, but then again do (should) dick picks and harassment really constitute the free speech you want to protect? I cannot speak for the UK, but Germany for example has had laws against gross insults since decades that have not threatened democracy; I would expect police to enforce laws, whether in real or virtual life just the same.
On the other hand, it gets murky with unwanted political opinions. Due to historic reasons, there are some things very specific things you're forbidden from voicing publicly here, because they're incompatible with our constitution, and thus don't enjoy the protection of that constitution. But in recent years, things unrelated to our fascist past have also seen litigation, which I find problematic, regardless of my personal opinions.
But given that Germany is probably the most strict European country when it comes to freedom of speech restrictions, I'm really opposed to announcing any kind of "free speech crisis in Europe".
9dev•4mo ago
martin-t•4mo ago
They always say stuff like "violence doesn't belong in politics", "violence is always wrong". But look at the French revolution, they had to cut the dictator's ("king's") head off to stop him from trying to get back into power. Look at the US for for independence, how many redcoats had to get shot before the UK decided it's not longer economical to keep oppressing the colony. Look at the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a public execution of a mass murderer.
And for now we're allowed to celebrate those events. Some are even national holidays. But we can not publicly discuss current events in the same manner. Those supporting recent assassinations or attempts usually get banned and many don't even dare voice their support. But there is some line where the fourth box of liberty _should_ come out. And I don't think we have enough freedom of speech currently to discuss where exactly the line lies. (Note to mods, I don't have an opinion on the recent shooting and this message is not related to it. I would have posted the exact same thing even if it didn't happen and have posted similar messages in the past.)
BTW this is funny: Brandon Herrera posted a video reconstructing the headshot by Gary Plauché where it's obvious both him and the commenters support the killing. He also reconstructed the, well, earshot by Thomas Matthew Crooks and denounced it. I wonder if he would support an assassination if it turned out Trump got, say, a massage with a happy ending from an underage girl trafficked by his friend. That would imply being a pedophile is worse than being a fascist[0] in his mind.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
---
Anyway, violence should be used carefully as a last resort but people in power are afraid of it because ultimately, no matter how much power they have, they still need a continuous supply of oxygen to their brain, which can be interrupted in a number of ways and the probability of such an event increases proportionally to the number of people they exploit.
logicchains•4mo ago
nicce•4mo ago
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
logicchains•4mo ago
salawat•4mo ago
oytis•4mo ago
lm28469•4mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution
logicchains•4mo ago
martin-t•4mo ago
A historian called Sarah Paine explained this nicely with examples of how the occupation of Afghanistan failed to create democracy but the occupation of post-WW2 Germany succeeded because Germany used to have a democracy whereas Afghanistan never did.
WorldPeas•4mo ago
J_Shelby_J•4mo ago
So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible.
Boot stomping on a human face forever.
jMyles•4mo ago
quesera•4mo ago
But I wish you were right.
jMyles•4mo ago
Proven?! It's been 30 years. That's an almost unfathomably small speck in evolutionary scales.
quesera•4mo ago
Why would you expect different in the future?
The Internet met human nature, and human nature won. We hoped for better, but we didn't get it.
akomtu•4mo ago
isaacremuant•4mo ago
It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control.
Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
bapak•4mo ago
China is every wannabe dictator's digital wet dream.
holoduke•4mo ago