I lost count how many times the "lets get rid of encryption" plans have been tried and failed. It's truly ridiculous how these people don't understand anything about encryption and somehow still think this is a good idea.
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!
rehitman · 48m ago
I do not agree with you that they have good intention or have good goals. They know what they are doing, and they are doing it to gain control. I think by saying they have good goals, but they don't know better, we are down playing the danger. They know what they are doing, and they are doing it to have more power over people.
filoleg · 3m ago
I agree with you (i.e., I share your belief that the whole "safety" argument is a bold-faced excuse to just gain more control and surveillance power over the population), but I believe that the parent comment was just trying to be extra charitable to those pushing for the bill.
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.
AJ007 · 9m ago
They have evil intentions, but they are also idiots. The nature of an authoritarian government is one that requires maximizing control for survival. As a particular country shifts to a more authoritarian government, and those people who enabled dumb ideas fall out of power (right, left, or whatever) those same tools will be used by their political adversaries to control, imprison, or kill them.
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.
EGreg · 29m ago
It’s right there in the name: Chat Control. Take them at their word!
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:
The name is "Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".
"Chat Control" is not an official term, but a name chosen by critics of the law.
1oooqooq · 16m ago
wonder if opposition should first fight for an addendum to correct the title in all those double speak laws, and then fight to curb it.
matthewdgreen · 4m ago
The proximate goal they're trying to achieve is mostly irrelevant when compared to the broader technical goal. That goal is to force all messaging systems to re-architect so they include a "bump on the wire" that hosts a scanning mechanism sophisticated enough to recognize novel (unknown) image content. This implicitly requires re-architecting these systems to contain neural-network image classifiers that operate over a model that's kept secret (to the user/client.) Everything else is sort of irrelevant compared to the implications of this new architecture.
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.
nomel · 12m ago
> Makes me really worried about the future.
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.
numpad0 · 25m ago
Key enablers that ensured those plans fall apart were PC platform and default code freedom on it. It doesn't work because anyone can just compile the clean versions of apps using gcc, on PC. Same cannot be guaranteed on Android and is not even happening on iOS.
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.
zaphar · 1h ago
The seeming trend that worries me the most these days is the lack of competence at multiple levels of society. Our leaders, their supposed subject matter experts, the people doing "the science" all seem to be demonstrably incompetent at their jobs. I don't know if this is an actual trend or just the perception of one but it's concerning either way.
blibble · 27m ago
you think it's bad now
wait until they start all using "AI", that'll agree with everything they say
choeger · 53m ago
You're absolutely right. Competency has lost its value.
When was the last time you heard someone praise someone else's competency?
Ylpertnodi · 43m ago
>Competency has lost its value.
Sycophancy, however, will always gain.
StrLght · 51m ago
> I lost count how many times the "lets get rid of encryption" plans have been tried and failed.
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.
athrowaway3z · 7m ago
My guess has been an unholy alliance between 'IP holders' like Hollywood (and increasingly games), and the surveillance industrial complex.
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.
pembrook · 5m ago
No, this is not corporate lobbying responsible. Stop giving your beloved politicians an out and acknowledge they do not have your best interests at heart, only a thirst for power.
clarkmoody · 59m ago
This is about power of the state over the individual. Full stop.
edent · 51m ago
It is perfectly possible to encrypt a message such that two different keys can decrypt it. There is nothing in modern encryption that makes that impossible. See https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~aboldyre/papers/bbks.pdf and many others.
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.
analog31 · 47m ago
>>> A leak of the state's private key(s) could be devastating.
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.
edent · 27m ago
It's really hard to say whether something like that is impossible.
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.
analog31 · 5m ago
That's fair. But it turns "possible" into a statement about a company's or government's expected degree of restraint, rather than a mathematical statement about the robustness of an encryption scheme.
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.
wizzwizz4 · 5m ago
Why would someone want to breach Google's private signing keys? It's easy enough to get malware signed just by submitting it through their ordinary processes.
A better analogy would be the keys used by Microsoft to secure Outlook inboxes.
dmitrygr · 40m ago
When people say it is impossible, they clearly mean it is impossible to do in a way that isn’t entirely broken by losing one key. You know this and please don’t pretend that you don’t. When competent cryptographers say the word impossible it has a very clear definition.
edent · 33m ago
But how is that any different from the intended recipient losing control their key?
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.
Akronymus · 11s ago
One person losing control of their keys only really affects them and people they talk directly to. The government having some super key(s) that access everyones messages affects everyone.
amarant · 13m ago
The intended recipient does not hold a master key to an entire nations communication. That's the difference.
taminka · 55m ago
all of this is basically irrelevant, given that the type of ppl who this legislation claims to target can always just resort to email + pgp or some such, over which governments don't really have any meaningful control...
g-b-r · 19m ago
The fact that it instead applies to 99.999% of the population is not exactly irrelevant
beezlewax · 23m ago
Are vpns controlled by private companies safe?
croes · 20m ago
Isn’t the point of Chat Control to scan on the device so that they can say encryption isn’t affected?
thomastjeffery · 2m ago
> these people don't understand anything about encryption and therefore still think this is a good idea.
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.
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
I think you're confusing technical encryption with the privacy of encryption.
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.
fruitworks · 30m ago
>If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities
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.
nicce · 54m ago
> In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode.
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.
gjsman-1000 · 53m ago
Governments don't define encryption that way - they define encryption as the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, an adversary cannot decode. Messages are unreadable if Russia hacked Vodafone, or China hacked Verizon, that kind of thing.
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.
nicce · 43m ago
Creating new words and definitions doesn't justify any initiatives. The point is that they try to mislead the common people. So we can't really say that "someone is confusing the terms", when the entity in question just created the new definition?
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.
zappb · 41m ago
People usually mean "end to end encryption" in these situations, and by adding a third "end" to the system, you bypass the whole point of end to end encryption.
gjsman-1000 · 36m ago
My above example is end to end encryption compatible, it's just that you don't get to pick the end it might go to. However, the connections between ends are still encrypted. As such, it passes the technical mathematical definition (one end having a direct pipe to the second end, with nothing possibly in between), but not the philosophical one.
Governments have never cared about the encryption philosophy; only the math aspects and international risk - which, in this example, are technically satisfied.
Terr_ · 59m ago
Another example of such degenerate-encryption would be having messages "end-to-end" encrypted, but a copy of the key is kept by a service-provider or even sent in advance to a government agency.
pbasista · 36m ago
> they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety
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.
rstat1 · 24m ago
>>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 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.
mvanbaak · 29m ago
> Why do you assume something like that?
This is very easy to answer. Just look up what all the responses were, for all the times this kind of stuff was proposed.
hobs · 30m ago
After the 10th time you assume good intentions and they still try to do the wrong thing, are you a fool or a helpful patsy?
nickslaughter02 · 50m ago
> Danish Minister of Justice and chief architect of the current Chat Control proposal, Peter Hummelgaard:
> "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."
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.
akomtu · 32m ago
The reptile-brained politicians really hate that we can think our thoughts in secret and communicate with each other in secret.
jcarrano · 46m ago
In the past, we could have made a version of Signal without this spyware, to be installed as an APK (as I would expect the EU to force Google to ban the non-spying version from the app store). With the upcoming Android developer verification, this will no longer be a possibility.
jofla_net · 32m ago
Pretty neat how, out of the blue, two seemingly unrelated efforts manage to tighten together to create the perfect unavoidable storm.
I swear those Thursday bilderberg meetings are a thing.
cherryteastain · 7m ago
Molly (signal fork) on GrapheneOS will still be there
fifteen1506 · 19m ago
Slow heating boils the frog.
Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
testdelacc1 · 36m ago
This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that.
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.
asyx · 24m ago
This is true of course but the counter argument is that running your own infrastructure is probably not a problem for international criminal gangs but your group chat with the boys is not gunna go through some AI garbage filter and in the end we are still going to get our cars stolen but now the police is knocking because I called Merz a fascist bastard and once the actual fascist win an election they are going to knock on everybody’s door who called Weidel a pick me girl in Turkish.
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.
nickslaughter02 · 4m ago
> Europe that is sprinting to the far right are incredibly dangerous
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far right party, is against Chat Control.
I used to be on your side but now that I live as a minority where the locals are increasingly becoming hostile and their very abusive rhetoric is accepted on social media and forums like reddit I actually want them to face the consequences of such speech and be deterred from uttering anything like that with their devices. (They can do so privately at the bar I have no problem with that.)
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.
ACCount37 · 10m ago
They ship entire CARS.
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.
draebek · 5m ago
The replies to this thread cannot be serious, on a web forum populated—I thought—primarily by technologists. Surely you all remember the variations on, "If you make encryption illegal then only criminals will have encryption"?
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.
AJ007 · 16s ago
That's all bullshit because we already live in a panopticon. Everyone's physical movements are tracked, facial recognition works even on partials, there are HD cameras everywhere, continuous uploads of videos to TikTok and Instagram mean fugitives can no longer hide in the public world. Phones, Alexas/Homepods, vehicles etc can be remotely converted in to bugs with a court order (and a bunch of other devices probably are without.)
Whether its car thieves or drug dealers, these exist in the West today by explicit choice, not because it is impossible to stop.
baxtr · 4m ago
What is absent from your comment (and also from many arguing against you) is the discussion of trade-offs.
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.
alde · 28m ago
I don’t follow what prevents criminals of such scale from using another encrypted channel or application after this ban?
nzeid · 6m ago
This isn't a dilemma unique to encrypted comms or privacy. You have to weigh the net benefits to society as a whole. How much has the lack of secure communication and encryption at rest cost society? How much have the criminals you mentioned benefited from the lack of encryption? How much more difficult would it be for criminals to locate targets and victims with encryption protecting the latter?
mvanbaak · 24m ago
if anything should come out of this is that car manufacturers need to come up with a way so it's not this dead simple to steal cars.
And it is not that hard. They already have all the tech ready with good security systems. but you know what? those are expensive. and that is something they dont want. so they go with the cheap alternative, which has been cracked 1000+ times already.
So instead of breaking the privacy of everyone, this should only impact the manufacturers.
Just my 0.02
JimBlackwood · 24m ago
What about this law will prevent criminals from using encrypted chat applications?
I understand your point, but I fail to see how this law will change that.
I don't understand how you can ship a car without proper papers out of the country so easily. Maybe focus on that first?
testdelacc1 · 10m ago
What papers? You think we verify that the contents of every outbound container matches what it says on the manifest? We don't. It would be prohibitively expensive to scan every container. Even if we did, and found a car in a container, how would we know the documents provided aren't valid?
This is a really hard problem. If there's an easy solution in mind, feel free to suggest it.
hleszek · 4m ago
AI and blockchain?
JumpCrisscross · 34m ago
> there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces
Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.
throwaway-0001 · 25m ago
How hard is to pay a dev and make a custom chat just for them?
You can get it up and running in one week on a cheap server.
pas · 18m ago
track cars then and shipping containers and whatnot, not people's conversations.
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.
jay_kyburz · 18m ago
I don't think this will stop these people. I'm fairly sure I could write some web app, or in an extreme case, provide my team of car thieves with dedicated hardware that just illegally encrypts messages.
I think these laws are simply to catch everyday people chatting about illegal stuff on a phone without any preparation.
wewewedxfgdf · 1h ago
Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
dariosalvi78 · 49m ago
Swedes and Danes are at the forefront.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
miohtama · 39m ago
Finland opposes.
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.
lm28469 · 6m ago
> the government decides what is allowed and what is not.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
henearkr · 28m ago
Yuck your use of "socialist".
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.
ExoticPearTree · 16m ago
As somebody who lived its early years in a socialist country, all I can tell you is that socialism does not work. Never did, never will.
luqtas · 8m ago
capitalism can also be interpreted as something which "serves the modern, specialised multifunctional community by
doing your job." to "profit then use the sum to upgrade society"
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. communism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of power centralized in private hands vs. public. 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.
gjsman-1000 · 39m ago
Sweden has also had an explosion of organized gang violence; carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.
What is extraordinary is that the idea that there shouldn't be a word exchanged between two individuals that the state cannot listen to was a Stasi wet dream. It is just shocking that western democracies that have held totalitarian regimes at bay for so long at great expense, are now going full big brother.
pessimizer · 10m ago
> western democracies that have held totalitarian regimes at bay for so long
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
The state itself.
Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
spit2wind · 41m ago
This is a meme I see and don't fully understand. It seems to assume that the state isn't a democracy, yet the statement is usually applied to democracies like the US. Such statements don't make sense to me when it's the people who are the state, not some "other".
sunshowers · 35m ago
This is a classic principal-agent problem. The people are not the state in electoral/representative democracies, they merely elect agents that have their own beliefs and motivations.
hungmung · 1h ago
The state is a lecher.
fmbb · 1h ago
Lobbyists from surveillance product companies.
And law enforcement agencies.
nicce · 1h ago
For some reason names are sensored because of the ”privacy and security requirements.”
Quekid5 · 59m ago
It's surveillance companies, i.e. follow the money. Imagine if you can force every IM app to include your nonsense? BILLIONS of instant installs and subscription fees.
The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.
JumpCrisscross · 57m ago
> follow the money. Imagine if
Following the money requires actually following money. Not imagined money.
Do we have evidence of these companies lobbying for CharControl?
vasac · 44m ago
Stasi wasn't doing it for the money anyway.
JumpCrisscross · 32m ago
That’s what I mean. This honestly looks more like right-wing elements more than commercial lobbying. Doubly suspicious when the unsubstantiated claim is the bogeyman du jour.
Quekid5 · 47m ago
It was redacted ... and very obviously so. Did you read my post?
JumpCrisscross · 44m ago
Attendees can hint at money. But it isn’t money. The lack of transparency is problematic per se. But it doesn’t advance your argument that the redacted groups are the ones you suspect.
delusional · 1h ago
> Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.
We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.
Quekid5 · 51m ago
> We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM.
I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.
EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).
delusional · 40m ago
> IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
wewewedxfgdf · 58m ago
Ah yes, "protecting the children". Meme driven politics.
delusional · 52m ago
> Meme driven politics.
It's very much NOT meme driven. We're generally very sensitive to child abuse in Denmark, and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
Originally, she launched the "branding" push when they were talking about schools and daycare, but like all branding it spills out into other avenues. I have no doubt she weighs her job around children particularly important.
It's not at all a stretch to me to say that she probably genuinely wanted her party colleague, and CSAM enjoyer, caught faster, and I don't doubt that she believes this is the best way to do that.
That's not a "meme". That's policy driven by observation and factual cases.
Aurornis · 10m ago
> and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
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.
owisd · 35s ago
If a building collapses or a plane crashes that’s a singular case, but the ensuing investigation will be used to enact policy changes based on what went wrong to prevent it happening again. It only becomes ‘meme-driven’ when it deviates from what should be a mundane bureaucratic process, which can include blocking the process as much as putting fingers on the scales.
shaky-carrousel · 42m ago
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
devjab · 1h ago
What they should be doing is giving us the ability to use public apps without the apple store or google play. What they are doing is letting Palantir get our data, despite it being from a country that thas repeatedly threantened Greenland.
alkonaut · 47m ago
What exactly is the plan? To mandate some client side checking so that transfer encryption backdoors won't be needed?
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?
miohtama · 35m ago
Every chat application must comply by law and companies which make them without government permission will be made criminals. It's similar as the UK Online Safety Act: 4chan staff will be arrested if they ever touch the UK soil.
BoardsOfCanada · 1h ago
Can we see the exact votes somewhere?
nickslaughter02 · 1h ago
Notes are usually leaked by netzpolitik.org a few days after.
richwater · 1h ago
Why does Denmark hate citizens privacy so much?
zarzavat · 47m ago
The Nordic countries have always been into social control but Denmark adds a side of paranoid ethnonationalism into the mix which leads to some very strange values.
nickslaughter02 · 51m ago
...and Hungary, Belgium, Sweden before Denmark. All tried to pass it. The next in line for EU presidency is Cyprus, a supporter.
miohtama · 35m ago
Viktor Orban likes this for obvious political reasons, as this can be used to spy opposition.
delusional · 1h ago
How come pigs fly so gracefully?
The comment is such nonsense it's impossible to even begin correcting it.
meindnoch · 1h ago
The nordic mindset is closer to the Chinese mindset than you think.
E.g. you've probably heard how people in the Netherlands have no curtains on their street-facing windows.
impossiblefork · 1m ago
Nordic cultures are actually substantially different.
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish culture is vastly different. If we include the Dutch or the Estonians the differences become even bigger.
As a Swede I'm not afraid of my neighbours seeing into my apartment, because I have order there and I don't see any harm in them seeing into it, and you can of course interpret this as some kind of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear', but it's more that I don't see a need for physical privacy. Letters are completely different matter and in others I am intensely secretive, but you can't learn anything I want to keep from you from looking at my houseplants.
If I had disorder in my kitchen and people could see into it I would be very unhappy.
CalRobert · 46m ago
NL isn't nordic.
We definitely have curtains. They've gotten much more common.
If you take a look on Google Street view you can see that's generally untrue.
Hamuko · 1h ago
What I have not heard of is the Netherlands joining the Nordic countries.
jansan · 1h ago
It took me a minute to understand your comment. Well put.
delusional · 1h ago
You're absolutely insane.
isaacremuant · 22m ago
Name and shame the clearly corrupt politicians that are being paid by someone who wants to benefit from all the compliance bullshit that will come from it.
Disgusting pigs.
hsbauauvhabzb · 1h ago
What’s the endgame here, with porn, chat control and age verification occurring globally, when will this end and where will we end up? What are the realistic outcomes?
Taek · 1h ago
The end game is politically controlled speech. First you can't share porn, then you can't share violence, then you can't share police abuse, until it starts to creep into the world of anything unflattering to those in power.
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
cm2187 · 1h ago
We are way beyond that. In certain european countries you cannot legally share privately a sentence that would offend someone else.
robin_reala · 40m ago
Which certain ones would those be then? And which laws would it be breaking?
cm2187 · 37m ago
The hate crime bill in Scotland for instance.
9dev · 23m ago
Do you have any source for that?
Bender · 7m ago
Not the person you are asking but it is getting worse by the day [1][2]. Speech policing is becoming a higher priority than dealing with violent crime.
I'm not seeing the connection to censorship at all with the skincare and diet products. It's illegal to sell certain things to children because they've been deemed harmful. Same with legal (for adults) drugs. If you don't check ID before giving it to a child, that's a crime, and I expect you to be prosecuted, yes.
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.
9dev · 23m ago
Or, say… posting condemning comments about Charlie Kirk online..?
J_Shelby_J · 1h ago
Without the ability for people to have private conversations and organize politically in private, democracy is impossible. It wasn’t as much of a problem in the times when everything happened IRL, but now online is the default.
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.
MarcelOlsz · 1h ago
Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
therein · 1h ago
Or a small set of supranational entities that are responsible for creating the illusion of national entities are taking advantage of the headless blunder that are nation-states to execute their master plan in lockstep.
MarcelOlsz · 1h ago
I mean yes, obviously. I just wanted an opportunity to use my favourite quote from The Cube (1997).
meindnoch · 1h ago
Residential ISPs will only transmit packets that have a valid device attestation signature from one of the well-known device vendors. "Unsafe" software won't get access to the devices' secure enclave to sign their packets, so their packets will either have to be transmitted in plaintext, or they'll be dropped by the ISP.
fifteen1506 · 15m ago
Probably.
That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
nickslaughter02 · 1h ago
Do you have a license for this TCP packet?
whatevaa · 1h ago
Drink verification can to send a packet.
isaacremuant · 2m ago
The goal is always to suppress the ability to dissent political.
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".
bogantech · 1h ago
The endgame is to kill independent media
MarcelOlsz · 1h ago
If we're going to go this route can we at least re-introduce the fairness doctrine?
bastawhiz · 1h ago
I think that decentralized solutions to the Web mostly suck because they're worse to use for the majority of people. But if the Web becomes useless for things people actually care about, decentralized solutions will creep in. People won't simply give up, the things that work will become better in the ways that serve prospective users.
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 · 29m ago
The worst case is when only approved hardware and software will be legal, and every level of infrastructure will be enforcing that. You can say good bye to decentralized solutions then.
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.
IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.
logicchains · 1h ago
What happened in Nepal earlier this month proves that a brighter future is possible, if people get fed up enough.
nicce · 1h ago
Since this is EU level legistlation and blocking minority is already ignored (e.g. going in to the streets does not matter in there), it is much more difficult.
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
logicchains · 55m ago
If an equivalent % of the population got in their cars, drove to Brussels and started setting EU government buildings on fire like in Nepal, things would change pretty quickly. The EU can only do soft totalitarianism because it doesn't have the kind of police force that a full-blown totalitarian state has.
oytis · 39m ago
And if you have enough young people, which Europe does not.
Traubenfuchs · 1h ago
Full government control of all digital media and digital communication.
Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
jMyles · 59m ago
On sufficiently long time scales, there is only one realistic outcome: the internet will not tolerate censorship and will not abide state control. It is bigger than people and computers; it's an evolutionary force.
quesera · 11m ago
This goes even beyond the delusions that we believed in the 1990s which have been proven embarrassingly naive.
But I wish you were right.
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
The realistic outcome, most likely, is mDL (mobile driver's license) automatically being passed through from your OS, to your browser, to the website. This will make compliance with age verification requirements easy, in addition to making ban enforcement and blocking crawlers/robots/spam much easier.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8
"Chat Control" is not an official term, but a name chosen by critics of the law.
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.
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.
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.
wait until they start all using "AI", that'll agree with everything they say
When was the last time you heard someone praise someone else's competency?
Sycophancy, however, will always gain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A better analogy would be the keys used by Microsoft to secure Outlook inboxes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is very easy to answer. Just look up what all the responses were, for all the times this kind of stuff was proposed.
> "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.
https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498
More about Palantir in Denmark:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2...
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.
I swear those Thursday bilderberg meetings are a thing.
Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
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.
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.
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far right party, is against Chat Control.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates
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.
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.
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.
Whether its car thieves or drug dealers, these exist in the West today by explicit choice, not because it is impossible to stop.
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.
So instead of breaking the privacy of everyone, this should only impact the manufacturers.
Just my 0.02
I understand your point, but I fail to see how this law will change that.
This is a really hard problem. If there's an easy solution in mind, feel free to suggest it.
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.
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.
I think these laws are simply to catch everyday people chatting about illegal stuff on a phone without any preparation.
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
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.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
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.
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. communism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of power centralized in private hands vs. public. 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.
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-...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
The comment is such nonsense it's impossible to even begin correcting it.
E.g. you've probably heard how people in the Netherlands have no curtains on their street-facing windows.
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish culture is vastly different. If we include the Dutch or the Estonians the differences become even bigger.
As a Swede I'm not afraid of my neighbours seeing into my apartment, because I have order there and I don't see any harm in them seeing into it, and you can of course interpret this as some kind of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear', but it's more that I don't see a need for physical privacy. Letters are completely different matter and in others I am intensely secretive, but you can't learn anything I want to keep from you from looking at my houseplants.
If I had disorder in my kitchen and people could see into it I would be very unhappy.
We definitely have curtains. They've gotten much more common.
NL is also opposing this per https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Disgusting pigs.
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
[1] - https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
[2] - https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cr...)
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.
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.
That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
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".
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.
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
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
But I wish you were right.
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.