This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?
zackmorris · 3h ago
This is the same problem in the US. Legislation (that protects the environment, minorities, the ability to compete in the market, etc) that took years, even decades to get signed into law, is getting repealed today by the current administration via executive order or simple majority vote. Because sabotage is much easier than building something.
Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.
I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:
I'm sure you just linked the first google result you found, and it's not like the internet wasn't full of crappy 'quote' websites in the halcyon days of 2021, but it's incredibly depressing to click that link and get drowned in paragraphs of worthless AI blathering.
After a quick search - and ignoring Google's helpful clanker who tries to point you to the _wrong_ Orwell text - it's not hard to find a clean source:
Vote them out and never vote for their parties in your general elections
If your Member of European Parliament supports chat control stop voting for their parties and politically support their opposition
kurthr · 4h ago
Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Asking your politicians to lie to you is not a substitute for changing their incentives.
The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the population as well. It's such a dumb political move, it seems like it could only come from extreme fear, greed, or manipulation. Switch it around and make them afraid of the alternative.
Levitz · 3h ago
>Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!?
Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here.
I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and opposing chatcontrol" I will 100% support them.
debugnik · 1h ago
Kicking kittens makes it sound simpler of a choice than it really is, because you're not a kitten and you could protect yours. Would you vote for "the party of beating people like Levitz and opposing chat control"?
okucu · 3h ago
Can only speak for Germany and the mass deportations here are done by liberals. They also let 40k+ people drown in the Mediterranean, support literally every single war, support multiple genocides and export weapons to all dictatorships known to man. At this point I'm not sure the actual Nazis would be worse than liberals.
Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather
Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war
FinnKuhn · 3h ago
I don't want to get too political, but calling the CDU/CSU liberal is pretty misleading in this context considering that they are part of the EVP (conservative) on a European level and not Renew Europe (liberal).
okucu · 3h ago
What has anything I said to do with the European parliament? I'm talking about the same parties in general. Greens are even further right than cdu/csu who have the same policies in 99% of cases as libs
>I don't want to get too political
Do you practice self censorship like the German media?
gotoeleven · 3h ago
What "mass" deportations in germany are you talking about? I can only find any news references to two flights, totaling ~100 people in the past year. Surely even a normal level of deportations, let alone "mass" deportations, would generate more deportations than this?
And you're really not sure this is less draconian than nazis?
namibj · 3h ago
Normal deportations get booked on commercial flights, not herded onto charters.
The vast majority of these deportations are just shuffling people around the EU in what seems like a game of hot potato over who is supposed to be responsible for a given migrant. Deportations that actually get people out of the EU seem to be extremely rare afaict.
gotoeleven · 3h ago
The surveillance state in europe is being created to make it illegal to oppose mass immigration policies, because apparently the powers that be have realized that not enough people like mass immigration so it needs to be forced down everyone's throat with a combination of censorship, surveillance and party-banning. From your comment, it seems like you support mass immigration policies but also do not support censorship and surveillance (maybe only for practical reasons because it might eventually be used against things you like?). The question for you is: what if you couldn't choose? What if you could only have both or neither? Because that's whats on offer.
wqaatwt · 3h ago
Problem is that very few “normal” people are even aware of this. Very few people particularly interested about most policies on the EU level. So they pretty much have free reign to do anything with minimal repercussions.
For better or for worse the EU itself is about as much of a democracy as some of the European empires were back in the in early 1900s with their sham parliaments which had very little real power.
progbits · 4h ago
Not good enough. They can get in again next election.
vaylian · 4h ago
I agree. But also: I've been doing that for a long time already. The problem is that these surveillance laws don't get enough attention by the general public until they come into effect. For example: The UK's online safety act.
Like when the Irish electorate rejected the Lisbon Treaty, and then was then harangued into accepting a reheated version. Opponents of the treaty reasonably asked if it could be best-of-three.
sunshine-o · 4h ago
The Dutch and French also massively rejected the first version of this in 2005. Strangely they didn't bothered to ask the citizens the second time.
Calling what would become the Lisbon treaty a "constitution" was always going to be a losing proposal.
messe · 4h ago
> and then was then harangued into accepting a reheated version
After receiving concessions.
rusk · 3h ago
Importantly around neutrality which was most people’s issue anyway.
The real problem was that the referendum commission (the state body in charge of informing the public on these matters) was deemed “too neutral” and was forever after hobbled and since then we have had to vote in a veritable information vacuum.
dylan604 · 4h ago
It's funny to me that in the cops vs robbers scenario, it is the bad guys that have to be perfect to avoid getting caught while the good guys only have to get lucky once to catch the bad guys.
Your use of this then would translate to the governments wanting to read all the mail to constantly stay informed would be the bad guys where the other actors only have to get lucky once by having a mission complete would be the good guys?
saltcured · 3h ago
Metaphors matter, but often bias us.
Cops vs robbers? Christians vs lions in Rome?
Or, we're merely fish in a barrel and trying to convince ourselves we have any control over whether we get shot?
chii · 3h ago
that analogy is drawing similarities when there is none. The "bad" guys in the cops vs robbers scenario is one where the bad guys have already done something worthy of needing to be caught.
AlecSchueler · 2h ago
No, it couldn't be done without amending the treaties. Currently each Commission has to govern with the same powers as their predecessors so there's no mechanism for them to bind the power of those who come after them.
nradov · 3h ago
Leave the EU.
ThrowawayTestr · 4h ago
Any kind of legislation to prevent it can be legislated away.
johndhi · 4h ago
Can someone explain how the same group of countries can simultaneously issue book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy to the nth degree, and run around the world trying to force others to do the same, yet also propose these kinds of things?
thmsths · 4h ago
This is government 101. We tend to see governments as one big singular entity, this is rarely the case (and this especially true for a supra national organization like the EU with no real head of state). Instead you have different institutions with different goals that sometimes contradict each other. Then you have to account for multiple factions in those some institutions and you end up with what we currently have. The idea is that on the long run, if you average out the decisions/rules/regulation it is somewhat cohesive and leads to "good" governance.
vaylian · 4h ago
Many politicians don't have a clue what the technical consequences will be. They just see that the law is meant to protect children and then they don't ask for clarification on the technical details.
WhyNotHugo · 2h ago
I don't think anyone realistically believes that this helps save any children. That's just an excuse used to make it sound like there's some good intention behind it.
fennecbutt · 1h ago
Nah they just see it as good ratings and votes. Most democratic politicians are in a popularity contest, doing objectively good things doesn't matter in the slightest in a democracy.
attila-lendvai · 4h ago
pretty simple: hypocrisy and lying from pathological personalities to gain more power, with a population fool enough to take them at face value.
domq · 3h ago
Simple. The former is economic warfare against the US, under pretense of the EU “parliament” giving a hoot about its constituents. The latter is plain old fascism.
SoftTalker · 4h ago
Same reason US Congress usually exempts itself from the laws it passes.
Rules for thee but not for me. You can bet the MPs private messages will not be included.
tene80i · 4h ago
Probably something like: Privacy is valuable, so corporations shouldn't be freely able to trade your data for advertising purposes. But CSAM leads to unimaginable harms carried out on vulnerable people, and so is worth giving up some privacy to stop/reduce.
domq · 3h ago
... You have no idea how the internet works do you. Why are you here?
tene80i · 2h ago
Well aren’t you a treat!
The question was what was their logic, how could they possibly believe these inconsistent things, so I’m offering what their logic might be. Not mine.
But even if it was what I think, your response is rude and thoughtless. I would like to imagine you can do better.
saithound · 4h ago
Sure. Most countries in the European Union have elections every 4-5 years. Thanks to these elections, the set of people composing the EU's main executive body, the European Commission, changed radically over 9 years.
The EC of yesteryear preferred issuing book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy.
The EC of today prefers burning those regulations [1] and writes legislation about how everybody should scan all private messages.
No more surprising than the In 1998 Conference of Anglican bishops rejecting any sort of homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, and the 2023 one approving the blessing of same-sex unions.
You mean the same people running around the world wagging their fingers and lecturing about yoomun wightz and libwal demokwafee while sending arms, money, and diplomatic support to east european reject childbutchers in west asia?
yea, no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jjani · 3h ago
Nowadays the biggest EU parties are ones that are effectively against the EU, so they're using the most effective way to kill it: make their citizens hate it by passing such laws. If you create a diagram of "pro-EU" and "pro-Chat scanning" EU parliament parties, 90% will be in the two quadrants: "pro-anti" and "anti-pro".
Yes, this proposal has been around since long before those parties got as big as they are now, but even back then the quadrants were roughly similar, and as such the level of support (including now looking to pass, unlike before) has also roughly been in step with the growth of those parties.
Gud · 1h ago
This is not just being championed by anti EU parties.
I don’t think this is a fair explanation of what’s going on.
olgeni · 5h ago
Every message will be scanned, except for von der Leyen's contract negotiations via SMS :D
derelicta · 4h ago
You are laughing, but last time they had added a built-in exception for politicians and members of law enforcement. Interesting, don't you think? :D
efitz · 4h ago
Do citizens in the EU actually want this?
If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?
In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.
amarcheschi · 4h ago
Most of the people I know - and I live in eu - are not knowledgeable about these topics. Furthermore, I've never heard about this in one of the main news channels, so I guess that most people don't even know about it
p0w3n3d · 4h ago
There's this "I have nothing to hide" sentiment followed by blind trusts into officials, their intentions and their alleged protection. I.e. people are scares of terrorism and would like it to stop, so they hope the terrorists will be found by spying.
At least in countries where the terrorism emerged recently, I'd say...
potato3732842 · 4h ago
Being "scared of terrorism" is perfectly legitimate even if not underpinned by statistics.
The conversion from that to "so therefore the .gov ought to have powers that amount turnkey ability to violate human rights on a whim" is the problem.
Any "well actually terrorists aren't that big a deal" discussion only serves to bog things down in the weeds and direct blame away from bad people who believe bad things.
Replace terrorism with whatever the cause of the day is, drugs, satanic cults, tax evasion, etc, etc all you want, doesn't change anything. There are people who believe (though they'll rarely admit it when you lay it so bare) that you can take something that is flagrantly bad in its base or default form (like for example letting the government just read everyone's personal communication by default) and think that the fact that because it can be applied toward noble ends then it is a power the .gov ought to have access to by default.
hintklb · 4h ago
You are right.
As a European that lived in the US for a long time, a big difference is that there is also a lot of "European Conformism". You don't want to be seen as the weird one protesting things if nobody else does it. It's just easier to go with the flow and accept things.
emptysongglass · 1h ago
Danish journalists refuse to inform the public about this.
The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.
lII1lIlI11ll · 15m ago
> The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.
Can you shed more light on situation in Denmark? Why is this happening?
hintklb · 4h ago
EU citizens have way too much trust in their government and elected officials. A lot of people here just assume officials act in the interest of the population and most people don't really check or care to understand in detail those type of proposals.
And unlike the US, very few people are going to push back based on "freedom" and "my rights" which is unfortunate in my opinion. This lack of pushback is why those types of proposal even come to be.
shafyy · 4h ago
That's not true. The issue with EU is that it's not really representative, and this is being critised for a long time and I hope should change in the near future. The EU parliament (the only directly elected body of the EU) does currently not have enough power.
hintklb · 3h ago
I'm a European citizen and I disagree.
Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.
shafyy · 3h ago
This probably differs from country to country though. I have worked and lived in Switzerland (I know, not EU), Germany and US, and it does not feel like people don't care here in EU. In fact, in terms of people going out on the streets and demonstrating, it takes a lot less in countries like Germany and France to so compared to the US, in my experience.
For example in Switzerland, there's the instrument of a "Volksinitiative". If you can collect 100k signatures, the government must hold a national election on this issue. And these are quite common and popular in Switzerland. In Germany, those unfortunately only exist on a state-level, not federal level, but are also common.
So, in my experience, people are very much involved in government here. This might be different in different EU countries of course. Or maybe you have a vastly different bubble you live in than I do.
hintklb · 3h ago
I think you make good points.
The main difference that struck me between the EU and living in the US is that by default EU citizens will assume good intent. I see European protests as interest groups that need to show that they are still important once in a while.
In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
shafyy · 2h ago
> In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
Maybe... Again, this might differ from country to country. I currently live in Germany, and here scrutiny of the current federal government (and also the state government in my state) is pretty decent.
Also, some of the decisions that were made (mostly related to working with the far-right party AfD and on immigration law) led to nation-wide protests where over months and months millions of people went on the streets.
wqaatwt · 2h ago
> The issue with EU is that it's not really representative
Well yes, because most European citizens couldn’t care less about this fact.
hedora · 4h ago
The US government has almost completely diverged from the will of the people at this point.
Most actions taken by this administration have > 65% disapproval ratings, and according to historical norms, if the size of current protests double,
the people will overthrow the government.
The last time I checked, the ongoing ICE raids against civilians were one of the more popular policies.
johannes1234321 · 4h ago
A notable amount of people vote for parties suggesting such ideas.
Demonstrations against are small.
Only few people write to their government and their MEPs.
This is probably sourced in not understanding it and not having enough information, but for as long as those three factors remain those are the results of democracy.
(Democracy in the EU is complex topic in itself, as EU isn't a state, but a union of independent states where states are primarily represented by their government and the directly elected parliament plays a smaller role ... but given the little protest that's the smaller issue in this case)
wqaatwt · 2h ago
Simple. The EU is hardly a democracy. It’s run almost entirely by appointed bureaucrats with delusions of grandeur. The European parliament is there but it’s very weak relative to actual national parliaments and most people unfortunately don’t really care that much about politics on the EU level..
izacus · 2h ago
Please stop spreding this bullshit.
mirko22 · 1h ago
How is this BS? Where is democracy in Von der Leyen making deal with USA for example, who voted for that?
Most of the representatives there are local tokens that are there to pull EU money in the pockets of their parties.
EU is artificial state made only out of interest of political elites.
wqaatwt · 1h ago
In what way exactly is it bullshit?
For better or for worse the core institution or decision making processes were never designed to be democratic in any meaningful way.
deafpolygon · 4h ago
no, many of the citizens are just like any other country: some of them aren’t aware this is happening.
rc_mob · 3h ago
The USA elected a fascist and will be lucky to have fair voting ever again. So we're not really qualified to comment on any other country doing anything.
vixen99 · 3h ago
Maybe but I don't follow your 'So ...'. Just who decides the qualification?
I assume this is just a police state overreach rather than genuine intent to stop crime. They must know that anyone actually engaging in criminal activity is going to not be caught by this because they use other forms of encrypted communication.
philipallstar · 4h ago
Continent-wide police overreach.
bccdee · 4h ago
It'd be extremely easy to circumvent, too. Since the scanning runs client-side on images uploaded into the messenger, you just need an app to mangle and unmangle images. XOR the pixels in your payload with a picture of static, then do it again on the other side.
It does not need to be particularly secure—the messages are still E2E encrypted so long as nothing trips the client-side scanner.
k7sune · 34m ago
I suppose by XOR the payload the image size will multiply many times because no compression, whether lossy or lossless, will be possible.
myrmidon · 4h ago
I'm not saying that this is NOT police state overreach, but the assumption that all (or even most) criminals practice good operational security still seems laughable to me.
I think you are letting your ideological alignment (against surveillance state) push you into irrational standpoints ("more surveillance would not catch additional criminals").
I'm 100% with you on opposing legislation like this, but it is very important to not delude oneself about its likely effects, and to pick the right hills to die on, figuratively speaking.
p0w3n3d · 4h ago
They meant, I assume, that it's the same as gun control laws. You have to prove your permission, you have to show your id, you gave to have a gun that is registered, however unidentified gangsters are running right now with unregistered guns and shooting people.
potato3732842 · 4h ago
And then they go and catch the people who didn't do that stupid process and act as though they caught "real criminals" when they only really caught "fake criminals" that they just minted.
You see this all the time with all sorts of areas of law, not just guns. The real evil-doers are the enablers cheering it on. "Well they didn't have a permit so they deserved it" and the like.
tolmasky · 4h ago
I think the slightly more sophisticated position is that, regardless of the operational security that is currently employed, if you were to implement something like this, then criminals would quickly adapt to improve their operational security accordingly. Especially because "operational security" in this case is doing a lot of heavy lifting to obscure how easy it would be: just use a good E2E messenger.
This is not some wild hypothetical, the recent explosion in VPN use by every country that has implemented an age restriction law should be sufficient to display this effect in place. In a world without weird country restrictions (whether that be intellectual property restrictions or content restrictions), VPNs would be a niche technology for business. Instead unbelievably large amounts of the general population are now not only using it, but paying for it.
I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
loeg · 4h ago
Criminals aren't very smart and don't think about their actions or the consequences very much.
izzydata · 29m ago
I hear this a lot, but I wonder if that is just because the only criminals you hear about are the not very smart ones doing crime on unencrypted monitored services. This sounds like a survivor bias situation. How can we know how many criminals there are if we only know about the ones we know about?
IshKebab · 4h ago
> you were to implement something like this, then criminals would quickly adapt to improve their operational security accordingly
This just isn't the case. Many criminals use non-encrypted phone calls, leave voice mails, etc. all the time. For example this recent theft of a gold toilet:
> A photograph found by police on his phone showed a carrier bag stuffed with cash, which was sent on WhatsApp with the message "520,000 ha ha ha".
The only reason that was E2E encrypted is because everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp and they enable E2E encryption by default.
> I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
It absolutely isn't. Some would, but the vast majority of criminals are not security experts.
It's still a dumb law. Also the criminals that it claims to target (paedophiles) are probably the least likely to get caught because they're already used to lots of electronic scanning things. Though even there it's not like they're all criminal masterminds. I can't find it now but there was recently a story about a someone who tried to hide child porn just in a deep folder structure like .../secret/do_not_open/i_warned_you/...
Dumb law, but lets use real reasons to argue that.
IncreasePosts · 4h ago
I've always thought we're actually very lucky that terrorists tend to be idiots.
shadowgovt · 4h ago
I'm reminded of the story of the bombing attempt that failed because two cells miscommunicated on timezone.
The bomb was handed off across a political boundary and detonated at some arbitrary point on the way to its target, an hour earlier than expected.
(And then there was the one in France, where a cellphone-triggered bomb detonated prematurely and eliminated its builders because the mobile carrier they were using sent a "HAPPY NEW YEAR" SMS to every customer).
shadowgovt · 4h ago
We in infosec are often trained to imagine the ideal "adverse actor" who could do the most possible damage to our systems to test their vulnerability.
It's a good model for identifying and closing gaps (especially if one is not, oneself, prone to think like a criminal), but like all other human population groups, half of all criminals are below average.
sunshine-o · 3h ago
> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted.
That sounds worst to me.
That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself?
In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation:
- We know since at least Snowden the US listen to whatever they want
- China and Russia probably have advanced capabilities like this but maybe more limited geographically
- The EU is so incompetent they haven't figured it out. So now they are gonna force us to have some back channeling malware that is gonna slow and crash my phone every hour?
How low can we go?
k7sune · 29m ago
I think the appeal is much higher than we think. Apple tried to do the same thing with on-device child porn image recognition. The company that markets itself as the privacy advocate.
WhyNotHugo · 2h ago
> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted.
And there's really no way to enforce this unless you mandate locked-down devices with attestation.
Then again, that's likely the long-term plan here.
koonsolo · 37m ago
You think this is some genius scheme? These politicians have no clue what encryption, client-side scanning, embedded software, and how these would all work together to scan messages means.
Havoc · 4h ago
Thank god AI never makes mistakes…
I pity whoever is going to be the first false positive guinea pig for this csam process. Functionally a guilty (as decided by algo) until proven innocent logic
> The man... took pictures of his son’s groin to send to a doctor after realizing it was inflamed. The doctor used that image to diagnose Mark’s son and prescribe antibiotics. When the photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud, Google’s system identified them as CSAM. Two days later, Mark’s Gmail and other Google accounts, including Google Fi, which provides his phone service, were disabled over “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal”... He later found out that Google had flagged another video he had on his phone and that the San Francisco police department opened an investigation into him.
> Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.
Less "guilty until" and more "guilty despite innocence."
Cartoxy · 5h ago
This seam like a hopeless endeavor. If circumvention takes little to no effort the people that are already committed to CSAM are going to CSAM.
And everyone else will just hate the burdensome bloat, etc.
If you know your not a theif having your bags checked after paying is an annoyance
JimDabell · 4h ago
> If circumvention takes little to no effort the people that are already committed to CSAM are going to CSAM.
Meta made 1.8M CSAM reports to authorities in 2024 Q4 alone. An awful lot of these people aren’t taking any steps at all to avoid detection – they are posting it to social media.
You can argue the ethics of this scanning all you want, but if you’re arguing that it won’t be effective then you’re wrong.
potato3732842 · 4h ago
You're acting like those 1.8m reports are actually legit. I'd wager it's 99% baby pictures, gore, normal porn and dank memes, in that order and that the other 1% was parties a) already on the radar of law enforcement b) hacked accounts being utilized for that purpose by parties unknown.
If it were of real value they'd be touting arrests, not reports.
Faark · 3h ago
You forgot c) real but won't be looked at by understaffed police agencies
No comments yet
9rx · 4h ago
> people that are already committed to CSAM are going to CSAM.
Does its prevention even help anyway? The adult porn industry is regularly criticized for seeing people choose it over real sexual relationships. Conceivably the same could hold true for CSAM. As in, if you can't access it, you're going to go get the real thing instead.
The narrative that it prevents child abuse sounds good in theory, but what does the data actually tell us?
Cartoxy · 4h ago
I think that actually access does beget creep and indulge.
Not always but often.
You think the amount of Pea Dough would go up with abolition. Doubts from me.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 4h ago
Even if it were true (and it might be) that these people would commit less-or-none abuse if they can continue to have access to the csam, the existence of the csam itself necessitates abuse. It seems akin to child sacrifice. Whose kid must be tormented so that other kids can go unmolested?
That said, not sure that draconian, ubiquitous surveillance is the correct (or even effective) solution to the problem.
9rx · 4h ago
> the existence of the csam itself necessitates abuse.
Just as the existence of America as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes. But we're not going to watch over your shoulder to make sure you don't participate in American society and send you to jail if you do. As unfortunate as past damage is, life moves on.
Of course, that it incentivizes production of more CSAM is the logic behind the laws, and that is a pretty compelling reason. However, according to the continuous stream of news reports, a tremendous amount of content has already been produced. How much more content would need to be produced? If the adult porn industry stopped producing new content, nobody would ever really notice. Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
10298373 · 4h ago
> Just as the existence of America as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes. But we're not going to watch over your shoulder to make sure you don't participate in American society and send you to jail if you do. As unfortunate as past damage is, life moves on.
There is a significant difference in that you can choose not to consume CSAM. Most Americans don't get to choose not to participate in American society.
> Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even—and keep letting adults make consensual porn with other adults if they so desire.
9rx · 4h ago
> Most Americans don't get to choose not to participate in American society.
Most Americans don't participate in American society, other than maybe voting, and even then a significant number of them still don't.
> I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even
And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
10298373 · 4h ago
> Most Americans don't participate in American society, other than maybe voting, and even then a significant number of them still don't.
Paying taxes doesn't count as participating in "American society"? The same taxes that, say, have funded America's controversial military operations in the past?
> And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo. I'm not the one trying to demolish Chesterton's Fence here.
9rx · 4h ago
> Paying taxes doesn't count as participating in "American society"?
In the same way a child participates in CSAM production, sure. You haven't made yourself clear, but are you struggling to suggest that the children featured in CSAM should also be prosecuted? Is that the harsher law argument you keep telling us about? I mean, I suppose you are right that if they weren't involved it wouldn't be able to be created. You may not have completely thought that through, though.
> I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo.
And you are welcome to your arbitrary feelings. But we are talking about your supposed argument.
gjsman-1000 · 4h ago
> as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes
Believe me, any historian will tell you, that tribes pillaging and raping other tribes was completely common before the European settlement. While this does not justify the European settlement by itself, we were the winners who beat the previous winners. Our atrocities are just better documented.
gjsman-1000 · 4h ago
> what does the data actually tell us?
The anecdotal evidence is that most child abusers started with CSAM and continued escalation from there; not that they would have been abusers except for CSAM.
While it has never been proven to be a casual link, Ted Bundy, Brian Mitchell, Mark Bridger, Jeffrey Dahmer, and now Bryan Kohberger all accessed violent pornography before taking their actions. Dahmer stated it was his ritual - consume violent pornography before finding the next victim. Bundy meanwhile stated it was the tipping point for him psychologically, more than any other known factor, even describing it as his "fuel."
Cartoxy · 4h ago
Some promote the honeypot web to catch the tech illiterate perps. Given your position Would you condone?.
I think I would, if your at the point of seeking. But some would say it's causatory.
9rx · 4h ago
However, the anecdotal evidence around the regular adult porn industry is that users go in the opposite direction. The data is abundantly clear that people, especially young people, are having less sex, all while porn consumption has increased substantially. Likewise, causality hasn't been proven, but it is likely the most compelling answer.
Why it is it different?
At what rate have child abuses declined?
10298373 · 4h ago
> Likewise, causality hasn't been proven, but it is likely the most compelling answer.
That's a massive stretch—there are many things that have been declining along with the rate at which people have been having sex. Porn is in no way "the most compelling answer". It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
9rx · 2h ago
> Porn is in no way "the most compelling answer".
What are you seeing people finding more compelling? There was that whole "the chemicals are turning frogs gay and now you too" or whatever it was, but that wasn't compelling. Tell that to the average Joe and he will simply wonder what kind of drugs you are on. Tell the average Joe that "increased porn consumption is diminishing partnered sexual activity" and you'll at least get, "Huh. Maybe."
> It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
Case in point. But it seems you're confusing a compelling explanation with a scientific explanation. Whether or not porn is actually a factor is entirely immaterial. It might have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can still be compelling even if that is the case.
gjsman-1000 · 4h ago
It's hard to know because while less sex is occurring; anecdotally (look around on TikTok), people are bringing violent and dangerous behaviors into the bedroom like never before.
Sexual choking has gone from a fringe behavior, into something that a study (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y) found over 50% of young Australians had tried; even though almost anyone with a medical background finds that extremely dangerous. This is a behavior that compounds, with women who went through it four times "safely" having brain damage markers in their blood (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c6zbv_v1). This is also why the UK (not sure if they did it yet) was even talking about banning all depictions, after an independent study said it was popularly perceived as "safe and common" among Gen Z.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
The anti-porn lobby has been going crazy with this study since its release.
I guess when you are desperate for any grain of data backing your totally failed "porn is bad" hypothesis (porn has been a click away for hundred of millions going on 30 years now), you'll latch on to anything.
Ironically if you read the study, it's basically "People enjoyed the act and consented to it, but it's bad because not breathing can be fatal and it's also illegal in Australia". It's also a singular study (rather than a long term trend meta-study) with an online survey data collection method, so about as low of a rigor as you can get.
Of course though, it's gone around heavily marketed as "Record levels of boys are watching porn and going around violently choking out young women because of it".
10298373 · 4h ago
The data tells us that many child abusers are caught with CSAM as well, so it does jack shit to keep them from abusing kids,
Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
9rx · 4h ago
> The data tells us that many child abusers are caught with CSAM as well
How much CSAM? A PornHub's worth of content, or a couple of pictures? The data suggests that in the adult porn world, people aren't satisfied by a single Playboy magazine. Which, too, is the logic behind CSAM laws — that the insatiable search for more content incentives production of more content. But at some point there will be more content that can be consumed, and given how often CSAM producers are caught (not even counting those who never are) we've no doubt far exceeded that threshold. And with the way AI is going...
> Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
10298373 · 4h ago
> But at some point there will be more content that can be consumed, and given how often CSAM producers are caught (not even counting those who never are) we've no doubt far exceeded that threshold
No, we haven't "no doubt far exceeded that threshold". Some CSAM producers getting caught does not make it so. I could say it's unlikely that CSAM production even approaches 1% of the magnitude of adult pornography production—but I too would be pulling numbers out of my ass. Without hard data on this, all we have is meaningless assumptions—and I'm not sure this sort of data is available to anyone.
> Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
9rx · 4h ago
> No, we haven't "no doubt far exceeded that threshold". Some CSAM producers getting caught does not make it so.
Okay. Exactly how much CSAM data has been produced over the years? And what is the threshold where there is enough?
> Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
Logical fallacies are most commonly associated with arguments, but are not limited to them. However, "Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.", as poorly thought out as it is, would be considered an argument if you stay within the bounds of how the term is normally used, of course, so what you say here doesn't even hold anyway.
philipallstar · 4h ago
Having your shoes checked before a flight is also an annoyance!
Cartoxy · 4h ago
Well. It is if you don't have a bomb isn't it? You trade it for your safety but since you don't die in a firey crash if the person 3 streets over is CSAMing its kinda unfair comparison
Bender · 4h ago
The first mitigation steps that come to mind:
- Keep casual conversations on mainstream crap to be reachable by the masses and give the appearance of being monitored.
- Send friends to a tiny URL that redirects to a tiny ephemeral private anonymous chat instance running entirely in RAM with an IP certificate [0] once available to remove domain name ownership from the picture. When done with that chat edit redirect to be something benign and wipe the chat instance. Block most crawlers using Anubis [1] and some other tricks. Chat crawlers that validate URL's are usually very obvious.
I would wager HN could come up with 1000% more clever ideas.
I've done an essay as my exam for an ethics course in uni, and choose to talk about chat control. I came up with very funny ways to circumvent scanning images. The easiest one would be to just encrypt an image and send the key and the encrypted message on different platforms to the recipient, I highly doubt they will be tied to the single user.
Another - funnier way - would be to send the image as a file, and the recipient should convert it back to an image. Of course this could be automated as well on the scanning side, but if the regulation only talks about images, it should be safe. Not that I would do this if chat control happened and I would need some way to secure the content
potato3732842 · 4h ago
They'll just declare circumventing the law a crime too, rubber hoses and all that.
ivanjermakov · 4h ago
Technology has been there for decades. The real problem is convincing people you want to chat with that this it's important and worth all inconveniences (no chat history, no multi-device sync, no group chats, etc.) and the network effect is working against it.
Would be great if regulators understood that serious criminals will have a way of communication that is not traceable with this regulations.
Bender · 3h ago
The real problem is convincing people you want to chat with that this it's important and worth all inconveniences
During peace time I would agree but when the screws are tightened enough and one makes a zero-friction anonymous chat instance it might just get some use. Zero friction or near zero meaning click a URL, enter a temporary name and hit the "Start" button. [1] Channels do not really matter in this example as private chats would be the primary use case.
Set up a simple IRCD on the backend that cloaks IP addresses. ngIRCD [2] takes 5 minutes to set up and one second to mask all IP's. There are many web front-ends [3] to make it happy-clicky. All of this can run from a ram-disk and deployed with automation and/or containers to low memory and low CPU servers.
Neat idea, a link that the first two people to open it get websockets and a chat, every subsequent connection gets a redirect. If pages are being crawled preemptively, the chat will be broken and if they're crawled afterwards there's nothing to see.
p0w3n3d · 4h ago
The first two people would open this link would be you and the police's LLM
dev0p · 4h ago
Just add "@LLM nothing to see here bro" at the top of the page, problem solved
philipallstar · 5h ago
Thank goodness the EU is regulating dangerous communication.
baal80spam · 4h ago
Ditto, I feel safer already!
betaby · 3h ago
The same EU which says what you Airtag/Findmy is not a valid reason to suspect your stolen IPhone is at the location the tracking shows.
ajb · 3h ago
This is at least partly because the people opposing it don't know how to make a mainstream political case.
The case for is "catch child abusers".
People opposing it are talking in abstractions like privacy and right to use encryption. Which are important but you need to identify concrete harms that ordinary people identify with. You can't oppose a harm people can visualise and feel emotional about with an abstraction.
Opponents need to say "if this passes your kids might be taken away because of a bot looking at your photos" . "Even if you send a picture of your own kid to your own mum, you will have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by some minimum wage worker at G4S from a completely different culture, who has to process 20 pictures a minute"
The opposition mostly sounds butthurt that politicians are making tech decisions. And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks chat control is a terrible idea.
pmg101 · 3h ago
Something the HN discussion on this topic just like the UK online safety act seems to ignore is that this kind of legislation has broad support among voters.
I'd say in general people are more concerned about The Bad People than about privacy. Probably because they mostly trust their governments, certainly more than they trust Big Tech.
lII1lIlI11ll · 10m ago
> Probably because they mostly trust their governments, certainly more than they trust Big Tech.
Then why would they want big-tech employees to look at their nudes flagged by automated dumb scanning and unbeknown to them sent for human verification?
wqaatwt · 2h ago
Most voters (in EU’s case anyway) are neither aware nor understand what is this all about. If you told are random person that the government will be able to freely access and read all of your private comment I bet they wouldn’t be too excited about it. Unfortunately only a tiny minority are even aware this is happening..
orwin · 4h ago
If this pass: the EUCJ will likely kill most of the proposal, once again we will hear 'judges are against democracy and for pedocriminals', once again the EUCJ will have to justify itself and spend political power and allow a sliver of the law to pass (my bet on age verification).
The issue is that the EU courts are easy to predict. I'm not afraid of this law for itself because I know how the EU works and this will be challenged. I'm afraid of this because once again the 'center right' (i.e liberals) and the traditional right manage to move power away from courts.
'Les irresponsables' should be translated asap in German, English and any other language in the EU, and hopefully politicians will find a mirror in this book and stop worsening everything.
captain_coffee · 4h ago
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how tech-savvy people will go out of their way to make sure they communicate with as many people as possible exclusively using End-to-End-Encrypted services exclusively. (that do not scan your messages even locally / on device before sending / after receiving them)
In the UK a massive surge in using VPNs happened in the last 2 weeks and the adoption only keeps rising.
Call me Nostradamus but if this legislation gets passed I can see how a lot of people will become familiar with the Privacy and Security aspects of the tech world (comms in particular).
p0w3n3d · 4h ago
The problem is it will be to late. We must not allow politicians pass laws that will be irrevocable and later find our workarounds, because (1) of complications (making our lives hell) and (2) allowing politicians to go further, e.g. forbid us from using phones where you can install arbitrary software, or another example - putting people to jail for encrypting their messages
koonsolo · 32m ago
I remember a unix command back in the 90's that would list random words that NSA would intercept. You could then feed it to email footers.
ChatGPT thinks it was 'spook', but can't find any references.
Anyway, it seems we need such things again for messages, to overload any system the EU would have.
Copenjin · 2h ago
Is this a reputable source guys? Why this stuff is not getting flagged instantly anymore?
andrepd · 4h ago
The ridiculously _opaque_ and un-democratic EU wants your messages to be _transparent_. It's almost too on the nose to be satire.
superkuh · 5h ago
Seems like all regions of the world all falling into their own particular flavors of authoritarian fascism. EU's better than most but this is absolutely draconian. We all know this won't actually be feasible to implement but the end result of of this infeasibility will be a status quo where everyone is guilty of a crime by default when needed.
echelon_musk · 4h ago
> won't actually be feasible to implement
Why wouldn't it be feasible to implement? Sadly, I don't share your optimism.
integralid · 4h ago
As an EU citizen I don't believe chat control will ever happen. We already had mass protests in my country during the last 20 years against internet and population control, and we will again if this becomes close to reality.
Maybe I'm delusional and I'll be severely disappointed I'm my country and the EU, but I don't think so. Who knows, time will tell.
addandsubtract · 4h ago
I think it's at least time to write your representative. I know I will.
evoseven · 4h ago
Fascism is an ideology very different from the controlled liberal-capitalism of the EU. There is absolutely no push to reduce individualism so it's very wrong to use "fascism".
formerly_proven · 4h ago
The overall policymaking direction of the EU can be summarized aptly: Pride cometh before the fall.
domq · 3h ago
The US being the one that showeth us the way of the fall that cometh huh?
wqaatwt · 2h ago
Seems entirely tangential? It shouldn’t be a race to the bottom…
hsuduebc2 · 4h ago
Even though it goes against all my beliefs and values, I still see it primarily as a desperate attempt to gain at least some means of control over encrypted tools — which are, in fact, constantly used for criminal activity. The endlessly recycled “think of the children” argument is laughably pathetic. I don't understand why they don't present the real and much more reasonable justifications — such as terrorism in Europe or the spread of propaganda, which is a genuine issue here. But those reasons likely don’t sell as well with populists.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned into a European version of the Patriot Act — where the state takes advantage of the fact that people have become desensitized, and everyone ends up being monitored 24/7. In the end, every citizen would be under surveillance, while criminals would simply download an app that doesn’t comply with this absurd requirement.
wqaatwt · 2h ago
Not incompetent criminals will just workaround, there is no way to avoid that besides 1984 style universal surveillance.
integralid · 4h ago
I'm against any kind of censorship, chat scanning and privacy violations. Nevertheless:
>Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that France risks societal collapse if it continues down a path of political censorship and regulatory overreach. Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 after being accused of failing to moderate his app to reduce criminality
Telegram is the messenger of choice for cybercriminals (not signal, interestingly). Most stealers and many other malware families use telegram to exfiltrate data and stolen credentials. It's also used as public announcement channels for criminal groups. Telegram ignores all reports about known malicious chats, despite it being easily provable, not to mention it's not e2e encrypted.
At this point this is not resisting censorship but knowingly profiting from crime. Continuing the analogy, it's like post office was sending mails for terrorists, despite police staying in the hallway and begging them to stop that.
(my job is related to anti-malware and cybercrime prevention)
snarf21 · 4h ago
So there was no crime before Telegram? These kinds of things won't be used to stop malware or cybercrime anyway. They'll be used even more by those in power to subvert. The criminals will just move to another operating scheme.
W3zzy · 4h ago
It is a flex that will result in great pushbacks. If my government feels the need to monitor all my communication without proper reason I know they're only a step away from using my words against me.
I will oppose any government that outlaws encryption and privacy.
There are numerous accounts of peoples personal info being misused for crime. More than there are proven cases of encryption being used by criminals.
nemomarx · 4h ago
I think the post office screening letters to be sure terrorists aren't sending them would also be pretty bad
CJefferson · 3h ago
While the post office didn't screen all letters, it was possible to get a warrant to read all the mail going to a certain address, and police often did that.
graemep · 4h ago
The UK recently introduced machine readable codes on postage stamps so they can now collect metadata on letters.
rendaw · 4h ago
If it's really illegal stuff, why can't the groups be taken down via legal channels? Providers shouldn't be in charge of doing extra-due-process punishment.
Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.
I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:
https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...
After a quick search - and ignoring Google's helpful clanker who tries to point you to the _wrong_ Orwell text - it's not hard to find a clean source:
https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToW...
If your Member of European Parliament supports chat control stop voting for their parties and politically support their opposition
The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the population as well. It's such a dumb political move, it seems like it could only come from extreme fear, greed, or manipulation. Switch it around and make them afraid of the alternative.
Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here.
I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and opposing chatcontrol" I will 100% support them.
Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather
Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war
>I don't want to get too political
Do you practice self censorship like the German media?
And you're really not sure this is less draconian than nazis?
The vast majority of these deportations are just shuffling people around the EU in what seems like a game of hot potato over who is supposed to be responsible for a given migrant. Deportations that actually get people out of the EU seem to be extremely rare afaict.
For better or for worse the EU itself is about as much of a democracy as some of the European empires were back in the in early 1900s with their sham parliaments which had very little real power.
Like when the Irish electorate rejected the Lisbon Treaty, and then was then harangued into accepting a reheated version. Opponents of the treaty reasonably asked if it could be best-of-three.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Dutch_European_Constituti...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitut...
After receiving concessions.
The real problem was that the referendum commission (the state body in charge of informing the public on these matters) was deemed “too neutral” and was forever after hobbled and since then we have had to vote in a veritable information vacuum.
Your use of this then would translate to the governments wanting to read all the mail to constantly stay informed would be the bad guys where the other actors only have to get lucky once by having a mission complete would be the good guys?
Cops vs robbers? Christians vs lions in Rome?
Or, we're merely fish in a barrel and trying to convince ourselves we have any control over whether we get shot?
Rules for thee but not for me. You can bet the MPs private messages will not be included.
The question was what was their logic, how could they possibly believe these inconsistent things, so I’m offering what their logic might be. Not mine.
But even if it was what I think, your response is rude and thoughtless. I would like to imagine you can do better.
The EC of yesteryear preferred issuing book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy.
The EC of today prefers burning those regulations [1] and writes legislation about how everybody should scan all private messages.
No more surprising than the In 1998 Conference of Anglican bishops rejecting any sort of homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, and the 2023 one approving the blessing of same-sex unions.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-gdpr-privacy-law-europe-p...
yea, no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, this proposal has been around since long before those parties got as big as they are now, but even back then the quadrants were roughly similar, and as such the level of support (including now looking to pass, unlike before) has also roughly been in step with the growth of those parties.
I don’t think this is a fair explanation of what’s going on.
If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?
In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.
At least in countries where the terrorism emerged recently, I'd say...
The conversion from that to "so therefore the .gov ought to have powers that amount turnkey ability to violate human rights on a whim" is the problem.
Any "well actually terrorists aren't that big a deal" discussion only serves to bog things down in the weeds and direct blame away from bad people who believe bad things.
Replace terrorism with whatever the cause of the day is, drugs, satanic cults, tax evasion, etc, etc all you want, doesn't change anything. There are people who believe (though they'll rarely admit it when you lay it so bare) that you can take something that is flagrantly bad in its base or default form (like for example letting the government just read everyone's personal communication by default) and think that the fact that because it can be applied toward noble ends then it is a power the .gov ought to have access to by default.
As a European that lived in the US for a long time, a big difference is that there is also a lot of "European Conformism". You don't want to be seen as the weird one protesting things if nobody else does it. It's just easier to go with the flow and accept things.
The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.
Can you shed more light on situation in Denmark? Why is this happening?
And unlike the US, very few people are going to push back based on "freedom" and "my rights" which is unfortunate in my opinion. This lack of pushback is why those types of proposal even come to be.
Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.
For example in Switzerland, there's the instrument of a "Volksinitiative". If you can collect 100k signatures, the government must hold a national election on this issue. And these are quite common and popular in Switzerland. In Germany, those unfortunately only exist on a state-level, not federal level, but are also common.
So, in my experience, people are very much involved in government here. This might be different in different EU countries of course. Or maybe you have a vastly different bubble you live in than I do.
The main difference that struck me between the EU and living in the US is that by default EU citizens will assume good intent. I see European protests as interest groups that need to show that they are still important once in a while.
In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
Maybe... Again, this might differ from country to country. I currently live in Germany, and here scrutiny of the current federal government (and also the state government in my state) is pretty decent.
Also, some of the decisions that were made (mostly related to working with the far-right party AfD and on immigration law) led to nation-wide protests where over months and months millions of people went on the streets.
Well yes, because most European citizens couldn’t care less about this fact.
Most actions taken by this administration have > 65% disapproval ratings, and according to historical norms, if the size of current protests double, the people will overthrow the government.
The last time I checked, the ongoing ICE raids against civilians were one of the more popular policies.
Demonstrations against are small.
Only few people write to their government and their MEPs.
This is probably sourced in not understanding it and not having enough information, but for as long as those three factors remain those are the results of democracy.
(Democracy in the EU is complex topic in itself, as EU isn't a state, but a union of independent states where states are primarily represented by their government and the directly elected parliament plays a smaller role ... but given the little protest that's the smaller issue in this case)
Most of the representatives there are local tokens that are there to pull EU money in the pockets of their parties.
EU is artificial state made only out of interest of political elites.
For better or for worse the core institution or decision making processes were never designed to be democratic in any meaningful way.
I suspect that most here will agree with you. However in the interests of encouraging a sober analysis: https://www.villagenews.com/story/2025/06/20/opinion/is-trum...
It does not need to be particularly secure—the messages are still E2E encrypted so long as nothing trips the client-side scanner.
I think you are letting your ideological alignment (against surveillance state) push you into irrational standpoints ("more surveillance would not catch additional criminals").
I'm 100% with you on opposing legislation like this, but it is very important to not delude oneself about its likely effects, and to pick the right hills to die on, figuratively speaking.
You see this all the time with all sorts of areas of law, not just guns. The real evil-doers are the enablers cheering it on. "Well they didn't have a permit so they deserved it" and the like.
This is not some wild hypothetical, the recent explosion in VPN use by every country that has implemented an age restriction law should be sufficient to display this effect in place. In a world without weird country restrictions (whether that be intellectual property restrictions or content restrictions), VPNs would be a niche technology for business. Instead unbelievably large amounts of the general population are now not only using it, but paying for it.
I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
This just isn't the case. Many criminals use non-encrypted phone calls, leave voice mails, etc. all the time. For example this recent theft of a gold toilet:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgeg39vr3j3o
> A photograph found by police on his phone showed a carrier bag stuffed with cash, which was sent on WhatsApp with the message "520,000 ha ha ha".
The only reason that was E2E encrypted is because everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp and they enable E2E encryption by default.
> I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
It absolutely isn't. Some would, but the vast majority of criminals are not security experts.
It's still a dumb law. Also the criminals that it claims to target (paedophiles) are probably the least likely to get caught because they're already used to lots of electronic scanning things. Though even there it's not like they're all criminal masterminds. I can't find it now but there was recently a story about a someone who tried to hide child porn just in a deep folder structure like .../secret/do_not_open/i_warned_you/...
Dumb law, but lets use real reasons to argue that.
The bomb was handed off across a political boundary and detonated at some arbitrary point on the way to its target, an hour earlier than expected.
(And then there was the one in France, where a cellphone-triggered bomb detonated prematurely and eliminated its builders because the mobile carrier they were using sent a "HAPPY NEW YEAR" SMS to every customer).
It's a good model for identifying and closing gaps (especially if one is not, oneself, prone to think like a criminal), but like all other human population groups, half of all criminals are below average.
That sounds worst to me.
That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself?
In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation:
- We know since at least Snowden the US listen to whatever they want
- China and Russia probably have advanced capabilities like this but maybe more limited geographically
- The EU is so incompetent they haven't figured it out. So now they are gonna force us to have some back channeling malware that is gonna slow and crash my phone every hour?
How low can we go?
And there's really no way to enforce this unless you mandate locked-down devices with attestation.
Then again, that's likely the long-term plan here.
I pity whoever is going to be the first false positive guinea pig for this csam process. Functionally a guilty (as decided by algo) until proven innocent logic
> The man... took pictures of his son’s groin to send to a doctor after realizing it was inflamed. The doctor used that image to diagnose Mark’s son and prescribe antibiotics. When the photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud, Google’s system identified them as CSAM. Two days later, Mark’s Gmail and other Google accounts, including Google Fi, which provides his phone service, were disabled over “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal”... He later found out that Google had flagged another video he had on his phone and that the San Francisco police department opened an investigation into him.
> Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.
Less "guilty until" and more "guilty despite innocence."
If you know your not a theif having your bags checked after paying is an annoyance
Meta made 1.8M CSAM reports to authorities in 2024 Q4 alone. An awful lot of these people aren’t taking any steps at all to avoid detection – they are posting it to social media.
You can argue the ethics of this scanning all you want, but if you’re arguing that it won’t be effective then you’re wrong.
If it were of real value they'd be touting arrests, not reports.
No comments yet
Does its prevention even help anyway? The adult porn industry is regularly criticized for seeing people choose it over real sexual relationships. Conceivably the same could hold true for CSAM. As in, if you can't access it, you're going to go get the real thing instead.
The narrative that it prevents child abuse sounds good in theory, but what does the data actually tell us?
Not always but often. You think the amount of Pea Dough would go up with abolition. Doubts from me.
That said, not sure that draconian, ubiquitous surveillance is the correct (or even effective) solution to the problem.
Just as the existence of America as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes. But we're not going to watch over your shoulder to make sure you don't participate in American society and send you to jail if you do. As unfortunate as past damage is, life moves on.
Of course, that it incentivizes production of more CSAM is the logic behind the laws, and that is a pretty compelling reason. However, according to the continuous stream of news reports, a tremendous amount of content has already been produced. How much more content would need to be produced? If the adult porn industry stopped producing new content, nobody would ever really notice. Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
There is a significant difference in that you can choose not to consume CSAM. Most Americans don't get to choose not to participate in American society.
> Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even—and keep letting adults make consensual porn with other adults if they so desire.
Most Americans don't participate in American society, other than maybe voting, and even then a significant number of them still don't.
> I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even
And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
Paying taxes doesn't count as participating in "American society"? The same taxes that, say, have funded America's controversial military operations in the past?
> And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo. I'm not the one trying to demolish Chesterton's Fence here.
In the same way a child participates in CSAM production, sure. You haven't made yourself clear, but are you struggling to suggest that the children featured in CSAM should also be prosecuted? Is that the harsher law argument you keep telling us about? I mean, I suppose you are right that if they weren't involved it wouldn't be able to be created. You may not have completely thought that through, though.
> I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo.
And you are welcome to your arbitrary feelings. But we are talking about your supposed argument.
Believe me, any historian will tell you, that tribes pillaging and raping other tribes was completely common before the European settlement. While this does not justify the European settlement by itself, we were the winners who beat the previous winners. Our atrocities are just better documented.
The anecdotal evidence is that most child abusers started with CSAM and continued escalation from there; not that they would have been abusers except for CSAM.
While it has never been proven to be a casual link, Ted Bundy, Brian Mitchell, Mark Bridger, Jeffrey Dahmer, and now Bryan Kohberger all accessed violent pornography before taking their actions. Dahmer stated it was his ritual - consume violent pornography before finding the next victim. Bundy meanwhile stated it was the tipping point for him psychologically, more than any other known factor, even describing it as his "fuel."
I think I would, if your at the point of seeking. But some would say it's causatory.
Why it is it different?
At what rate have child abuses declined?
That's a massive stretch—there are many things that have been declining along with the rate at which people have been having sex. Porn is in no way "the most compelling answer". It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
What are you seeing people finding more compelling? There was that whole "the chemicals are turning frogs gay and now you too" or whatever it was, but that wasn't compelling. Tell that to the average Joe and he will simply wonder what kind of drugs you are on. Tell the average Joe that "increased porn consumption is diminishing partnered sexual activity" and you'll at least get, "Huh. Maybe."
> It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
Case in point. But it seems you're confusing a compelling explanation with a scientific explanation. Whether or not porn is actually a factor is entirely immaterial. It might have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can still be compelling even if that is the case.
Sexual choking has gone from a fringe behavior, into something that a study (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y) found over 50% of young Australians had tried; even though almost anyone with a medical background finds that extremely dangerous. This is a behavior that compounds, with women who went through it four times "safely" having brain damage markers in their blood (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c6zbv_v1). This is also why the UK (not sure if they did it yet) was even talking about banning all depictions, after an independent study said it was popularly perceived as "safe and common" among Gen Z.
I guess when you are desperate for any grain of data backing your totally failed "porn is bad" hypothesis (porn has been a click away for hundred of millions going on 30 years now), you'll latch on to anything.
Ironically if you read the study, it's basically "People enjoyed the act and consented to it, but it's bad because not breathing can be fatal and it's also illegal in Australia". It's also a singular study (rather than a long term trend meta-study) with an online survey data collection method, so about as low of a rigor as you can get.
Of course though, it's gone around heavily marketed as "Record levels of boys are watching porn and going around violently choking out young women because of it".
Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
How much CSAM? A PornHub's worth of content, or a couple of pictures? The data suggests that in the adult porn world, people aren't satisfied by a single Playboy magazine. Which, too, is the logic behind CSAM laws — that the insatiable search for more content incentives production of more content. But at some point there will be more content that can be consumed, and given how often CSAM producers are caught (not even counting those who never are) we've no doubt far exceeded that threshold. And with the way AI is going...
> Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
No, we haven't "no doubt far exceeded that threshold". Some CSAM producers getting caught does not make it so. I could say it's unlikely that CSAM production even approaches 1% of the magnitude of adult pornography production—but I too would be pulling numbers out of my ass. Without hard data on this, all we have is meaningless assumptions—and I'm not sure this sort of data is available to anyone.
> Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
Okay. Exactly how much CSAM data has been produced over the years? And what is the threshold where there is enough?
> Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
Logical fallacies are most commonly associated with arguments, but are not limited to them. However, "Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.", as poorly thought out as it is, would be considered an argument if you stay within the bounds of how the term is normally used, of course, so what you say here doesn't even hold anyway.
- Keep casual conversations on mainstream crap to be reachable by the masses and give the appearance of being monitored.
- Send friends to a tiny URL that redirects to a tiny ephemeral private anonymous chat instance running entirely in RAM with an IP certificate [0] once available to remove domain name ownership from the picture. When done with that chat edit redirect to be something benign and wipe the chat instance. Block most crawlers using Anubis [1] and some other tricks. Chat crawlers that validate URL's are usually very obvious.
I would wager HN could come up with 1000% more clever ideas.
[0] - https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...
[1] - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
Another - funnier way - would be to send the image as a file, and the recipient should convert it back to an image. Of course this could be automated as well on the scanning side, but if the regulation only talks about images, it should be safe. Not that I would do this if chat control happened and I would need some way to secure the content
Would be great if regulators understood that serious criminals will have a way of communication that is not traceable with this regulations.
During peace time I would agree but when the screws are tightened enough and one makes a zero-friction anonymous chat instance it might just get some use. Zero friction or near zero meaning click a URL, enter a temporary name and hit the "Start" button. [1] Channels do not really matter in this example as private chats would be the primary use case.
Set up a simple IRCD on the backend that cloaks IP addresses. ngIRCD [2] takes 5 minutes to set up and one second to mask all IP's. There are many web front-ends [3] to make it happy-clicky. All of this can run from a ram-disk and deployed with automation and/or containers to low memory and low CPU servers.
[1] - https://web.libera.chat/#hackernews [this instance does not cloak IP addresses, use a VPN][2] - https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/
[3] - https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients
The case for is "catch child abusers".
People opposing it are talking in abstractions like privacy and right to use encryption. Which are important but you need to identify concrete harms that ordinary people identify with. You can't oppose a harm people can visualise and feel emotional about with an abstraction.
Opponents need to say "if this passes your kids might be taken away because of a bot looking at your photos" . "Even if you send a picture of your own kid to your own mum, you will have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by some minimum wage worker at G4S from a completely different culture, who has to process 20 pictures a minute"
The opposition mostly sounds butthurt that politicians are making tech decisions. And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks chat control is a terrible idea.
I'd say in general people are more concerned about The Bad People than about privacy. Probably because they mostly trust their governments, certainly more than they trust Big Tech.
Then why would they want big-tech employees to look at their nudes flagged by automated dumb scanning and unbeknown to them sent for human verification?
The issue is that the EU courts are easy to predict. I'm not afraid of this law for itself because I know how the EU works and this will be challenged. I'm afraid of this because once again the 'center right' (i.e liberals) and the traditional right manage to move power away from courts.
'Les irresponsables' should be translated asap in German, English and any other language in the EU, and hopefully politicians will find a mirror in this book and stop worsening everything.
In the UK a massive surge in using VPNs happened in the last 2 weeks and the adoption only keeps rising.
Call me Nostradamus but if this legislation gets passed I can see how a lot of people will become familiar with the Privacy and Security aspects of the tech world (comms in particular).
ChatGPT thinks it was 'spook', but can't find any references.
Anyway, it seems we need such things again for messages, to overload any system the EU would have.
Why wouldn't it be feasible to implement? Sadly, I don't share your optimism.
Maybe I'm delusional and I'll be severely disappointed I'm my country and the EU, but I don't think so. Who knows, time will tell.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned into a European version of the Patriot Act — where the state takes advantage of the fact that people have become desensitized, and everyone ends up being monitored 24/7. In the end, every citizen would be under surveillance, while criminals would simply download an app that doesn’t comply with this absurd requirement.
>Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that France risks societal collapse if it continues down a path of political censorship and regulatory overreach. Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 after being accused of failing to moderate his app to reduce criminality
Telegram is the messenger of choice for cybercriminals (not signal, interestingly). Most stealers and many other malware families use telegram to exfiltrate data and stolen credentials. It's also used as public announcement channels for criminal groups. Telegram ignores all reports about known malicious chats, despite it being easily provable, not to mention it's not e2e encrypted.
At this point this is not resisting censorship but knowingly profiting from crime. Continuing the analogy, it's like post office was sending mails for terrorists, despite police staying in the hallway and begging them to stop that.
(my job is related to anti-malware and cybercrime prevention)
I will oppose any government that outlaws encryption and privacy. There are numerous accounts of peoples personal info being misused for crime. More than there are proven cases of encryption being used by criminals.