The comment is such nonsense it's impossible to even begin correcting it.
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.
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?
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 truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Sweden and Denmark social democrats are the driving force. They want to have socialist society where the government decides what is allowed and what is not. Currently these social democrats think that private messages are too dangerous to be allowed.
Yes I know that in English-speaking countries, especially the USA, it is often a shortcut for communist tyranny.
But for f*ck's sake, that obliterates anything political that is driven towards increasing the overall happiness of the society, and not focusing on increasing the material wealth, acknowledging the disconnect between the two.
And yes the above uses the adjective "socialist", so that would be totally lost in your usage of the word.
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.
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.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
The Nazis entire philosophy was oddly aligned with modern Social Democratic Parties in Europe if you take away the Jewish conspiracy stuff (which...uhh...is also making a return among modern socialists...).
The Nazis were all about government healthcare, paid holidays, public pensions, paid unemployement, strong labor laws, job security, big infrastructure investment, anti-"rich people" messaging, strong regulation of industry, central authroity (I bet they would have loved chat control!), etc. etc.
Also they had wealth exit taxes just like modern Socialists in Europe are fighting for right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Flight_Tax
I've now listed about 10 different major similarities, but if you'd like I can go on with more similarities.
Modern social democracies in Europe are also starting to turn against immigration and toward ethnic nationalism as well.
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-...
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 lead 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 lead.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
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 do wish ubports + waydroid would be a reasonable alternative -- but it's wishful thinking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 whole of AI lacks awareness of the dark matter of language seamlessly and hidden within it: it can't be trained out, we use it for these dark matter purposes everyday, and little or any idea we are using words for subversion, and the tech has no ability to filter the out and worse, it spirals into "hallucinations" (a terrible metaphor) from the dark matter, not from the apparent words. Words are not what they seem and the industry did nothing to notice this.
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.
Disgusting pigs.
hsbauauvhabzb•2h ago
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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•1h ago
isaacremuant•50m 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•6m 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•2h ago
therein•2h ago
MarcelOlsz•2h ago
bogantech•2h ago
MarcelOlsz•2h ago
bastawhiz•2h 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•1h 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
Traubenfuchs•2h ago
Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
meindnoch•2h ago
fifteen1506•1h ago
That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
Taek•2h 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•2h 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•1h 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•1h ago
robin_reala•1h ago
cm2187•1h ago
9dev•1h ago
Bender•58m 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•1h ago
martin-t•3m 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.
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Anyway, violence should be used carefully as a last resort but people in power are afraid of it because ultimately, not 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•2h ago
nicce•1h ago
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
logicchains•1h ago
salawat•29m ago
oytis•1h ago
lm28469•47m ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution
logicchains•31m ago
J_Shelby_J•2h 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•1h ago
quesera•1h ago
But I wish you were right.
akomtu•1h ago
isaacremuant•53m 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•48m ago
China is every wannabe dictator's digital wet dream.
holoduke•28m ago