I wonder what the chances are that the ECJ could look at employing actions for annulment against chat control, if it is passed. It is possible for private individuals to ask the court to annul an EU act that directly concerns them. So even if governmental structures across EU does not want it challenged, the issue could still be brought to the court.
ekianjo · 2h ago
has the ECJ ever done anything like that before?
tokai · 1h ago
Yes all the time. Seems like there is a handful cases a year. Poland, as an example, has won 19 annulments between 2004–2023.
ljlolel · 2h ago
Isn’t EU’s justification that they protect you from companies / private industry but they want full government/police control because that’s trusted / socialist?
wmf · 1h ago
Yes, privacy has worked that way for a long time. There's no gotcha here.
globalnode · 2h ago
Nudge the door open with child abuse "concern" and then expand to your hearts content later. The analogy of it being like a police officer standing next to you while you chat online to a friend was great. He was joking when he said "lets cancel cars" but it might happen in the distant future. Letting people control heavy projectiles doesnt seem like such a great idea.
latentsea · 1h ago
When you put "concern" in scare quotes like that... are you saying that there isn't actually anything to be concerned about regarding the safety of children using the internet?
globalnode · 31m ago
of course its concerning, but i doubt its the ultimate objective and it also seems contrived given the other dangers to children that abound.
II2II · 1h ago
I'm just going to point a few things out here, because law enforcement is in a difficult situation.
Until about 20 years ago, very little civilian communications were encrypted. Ten years before that, virtually no civilian communications were encrypted. Police could, and did, pursue legal avenues for surveillance. There was relatively little outcry over it. Now they are facing a situation where not just virtually all communications are encrypted, but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted. Not only does this make their job harder, but some crimes are impossible to prove.
Now I am not saying that the legislative response is appropriate. The flip side of the argument is that surveillance used to be hard. One would only pursue it if there was a reasonable case against a person, and even then the request would have to satisfy a judge. Today, the opposite is true. It is easy to monitor entire populations from a technical perspective. Law enforcement and governments have also spent the better part of the last twenty-five years eroding public trust (ranging from secret warrants to finding legal loopholes).
My take is: at the end of the day, such laws hand over too much power to governments. On the other hand, doing nothing hands over too much power to criminals. What we need to find is some means for law enforcement to do their job without sacrificing civil liberties. I don't know where to start on that front, but I sure know that complaining about these short sighted legislative attempts or stirring up paranoia is not going to solve the problem.
Arubis · 51m ago
Up until about 100 years ago, most civilian communication was either totally ephemeral (in-person speech) or transmitted on physical artifacts. Surveillance required either physical mail piece interception, physical presence, or individual communications with knowing parties. That the Powers That Be are even capable of reliable remote surveillance—-let alone that they’re _entitled to do so_—-is very much a recent occurrence.
jimmar · 59m ago
> Until about 20 years ago, very little civilian communications were encrypted. Ten years before that, virtually no civilian communications were encrypted.
It does not feel like the world is a more dangerous place than 30 years ago. I need to see evidence that crime is increasing because of encryption before taking arguments against encryption seriously.
wkat4242 · 45m ago
If it were really that disruptive we'd see crime rise and police effectiveness reduce drastically. This isn't the case. Society is just as safe as 20 years ago if not safer.
I'm sure sometimes this has an effect but most criminals are still caught. Because they make mistakes too. Communication is only a small part of the chain.
K0balt · 46m ago
Zero day compromises of most devices are available to state actors. If they get a warrant to compromise your device they get everything on the screen, no need to break encryption.
Yes, it’s hard. Surveillance should be hard. Just because it -could- be trivially easy does not mean it is in the public’s interest that it -should- be.
The privacy exposure is so huge with chat control et al that there is effectively no expectation of privacy anywhere ever, from a practical point of view. That is not conducive to a functioning democracy, which only works when there is a delicate and deliberate balance of power between the individual and the state.
6r17 · 59m ago
> stirring up paranoia is not going to solve the problem
There are reasonable tools that have been deployed and are existing for police enforcement ; notably with the coordination of ISP providers. The fact that encryption has been democratized does indeed change the situation for enforcement but this does not mean everybody should be spied on by default.
Here's the thing, more appropriate tools for criminal activity encompass not only encryption but stenography technics, maybe even just signaling.
It's so easy to bypass that it only steer up the problem an order of magnitude further, makes the life harder for everybody, and creates a situation where everybody's data is basically on some server.
Now, knowing how capable institutions are able to protect data ; well i'm telling you there is 0 way I envision continuing my journey on the internet if it means that everything i look at, say or have an opinion on can be used against me eventually.
em-bee · 1h ago
doing nothing hands over too much power to criminals
you either have encryption, or you don't. there is no middle ground. any measure to force access to encrypted messages would effectively disable encryption entirely.
guitarbill · 33m ago
> law enforcement is in a difficult situation
Are they? More so than usual? This rhetorical device or similar seems to be always used, no matter the situation or time.
"Criminals are so sophisticated, our jobs are so hard, we need more power" - every police force ever.
"We actually need fewer capabilities and more checks and balances" - no police force ever.
> Now they are facing a situation where not just virtually all communications are encrypted
No, they aren't. Phone is unencrypted. Email is unencrypted. SMS is unencrypted. Some messengers are unencrypted.
Communications can be encrypted; I guess only criminals do that. Or banks. Or businesses. Or the government.
> but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted.
No, they aren't. Etc
alfiedotwtf · 1h ago
> On the other hand, doing nothing hands over too much power to criminals
What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Any form of blanket surveillance flips this into “maybe guilty so capture and archive surveillance data, and if ever (even years after) are possibly suspicious, comb through archived data to find some form of proof and then build up your pre-text for a warrant… in other words - “maybe guilty until proven guilty’
msgodel · 21m ago
Law enforcement needs to do their job instead of trying to outsource it to service providers.
gedy · 15m ago
> but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted
These are good points, though I'm wondering if the burden of proof has just increased? E.g. in the past there was little permanent evidence, so do we really need to break encryption to prove beyond a reasonable doubt?
It's like lack of DNA evidence making cases seem "unprovable", but then what did we do before DNA was available?
wmf · 1h ago
We've had end-to-end encryption for a few years now and there seem to be very few cases that have been thwarted by it. Criminals are actually dumb. (Yes, the FBI has 10,000 locked iPhones that they would love to unlock but it's not clear that it would make a difference.)
I_am_tiberius · 2h ago
It's good to see there are still rational Americans.
ekianjo · 2h ago
Louis makes it sound that its actually for protecting the children but we all know its just an excuse for surveillance, control, and ultimately jailing people for wrong opinions (a real threat in the EU since there is no protection of Freedom of Speech anywhere)
Maken · 1h ago
The European Convention of Human Rights explicitly protects freedom of expression.
jailing people for wrong opinions (a real threat in the EU since there is no protection of Freedom of Speech anywhere)
how do you figure that? the freedom of opinion is explicitly enshrined in the german constitution for example. there are limitations, but these are very specific and not arbitrary.
gemany is in fact one of the countries the provides the most protection for your opinion world wide, as long as that opinion is not based on obvious falsehoods (like holocaust denial), or stirs up hatred against a group of people. you can however criticize others and at this point germany provides even more protection than the US.
wmf · 1h ago
"Hatred against a group of people" has been stretched to the breaking point in recent years.
em-bee · 1h ago
in germany? examples please.
wmf · 56m ago
After a minute of searching... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern... I admit that these cases are arguable but by the same token the police don't have to respond to every mistake with a dawn raid. Even the US Secret Service has more discretion than this.
em-bee · 41m ago
i agree with the overuse of raids, but i didn't see anything mentioned that didn't warrant at least some investigation.
achierius · 55m ago
The continual harassment of socialist parties by the government, including declarations that any group following Marxist philosophy is necessarily acting towards an unconstitutional goal.
em-bee · 31m ago
because they are calling for a revolution, not reforms. revolution is an unconstitutional goal. if they believe that marxist philosophy can be achieved without a revolution they better ought to make that very clear. and to my knowledge the treatment of communists in the US was way worse.
SanjayMehta · 2h ago
European governments are all for free speech whilst imposing sanctions and invading other countries to export “democracy and human rights.”
Fascinating to watch.
(Downvoted, as expected. The hypocrisy on this site is absolutely adorable.)
SilverElfin · 1h ago
Start with protecting children. Then something about misinformation. Then about defending democracy. Then about stopping terrorism. And soon you can escalate your authoritarian policy to just about anything.
This is why having the structure of fundamental civil rights, like in the US constitution, is important. I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance.
tokai · 1h ago
Between FISC, the Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act, and such it doesn't seem like the US constitution is doing a good job at protecting anyone. There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.
owenversteeg · 1m ago
I have long campaigned against Fourth Amendment violations in the US, but to compare the US and the EU is laughable. The difference is night and day in every aspect, from constitutional rights to privacy (virtually worthless in most EU constitutions vs quite broad in the US) to practical surveillance (far deeper and broader in the EU) to court requirements for access for typical requests (commonplace in the US, rare in the EU.)
As an example of one of those points, the US right to privacy was long considered so broad that it served as the _foundation of the right to abortion_ in the US for decades! By contrast, to pick an EU example, the Dutch right to privacy is so weak that it is quite literally written into the Dutch constitution as “except as limited by law”; in other words, nearly worthless.
To compare them by presence of a Wikipedia page is beyond ridiculous.
dmix · 56m ago
FISA and patriot act are very controversial, the EU doing the same thing but far worse isn’t a good argument to stand on merely because the US gets talked about more on Wikipedia and therefore the press (which is one of the primary acceptable sources for a wiki article). Not to mention places like Germany and France did much of what NSA was doing back in the 2000s, often with even more leeway.
If anything censorship and extensive government oversight of peoples lives in EU and UK is far less controversial so there isn’t much of a push back. As you can see every time this comes up on HN where people in the EU defend it.
aspenmayer · 9m ago
> There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.
I agree with your other points. There is this though:
I don’t disagree. But there is still far more protection for free speech in the US than in the EU, where wrongthink is not acceptable to the powers that be. It is a huge regression and for some reason, culturally Europe seems to be modeling itself more after China than the US, with whom it shares more history and values.
em-bee · 9m ago
i have lived in all three places (15 years in china) and i have to respond with an empathic no.
what we are seeing is that thanks to social media, more discourse is public. which leads to more prosecutions. that is not a regression. that stuff has always been prosecuted. and they go against hate speech, not wrong think.
em-bee · 1h ago
* I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance*
individual countries, such as germany do have these protections.
sniff encrypted chats, hahaha. Some law makers are completely clueless. I like Louis Rossmann. He looks like he’s been up stressed for weeks, yet his arguments are pretty level headed.
Until about 20 years ago, very little civilian communications were encrypted. Ten years before that, virtually no civilian communications were encrypted. Police could, and did, pursue legal avenues for surveillance. There was relatively little outcry over it. Now they are facing a situation where not just virtually all communications are encrypted, but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted. Not only does this make their job harder, but some crimes are impossible to prove.
Now I am not saying that the legislative response is appropriate. The flip side of the argument is that surveillance used to be hard. One would only pursue it if there was a reasonable case against a person, and even then the request would have to satisfy a judge. Today, the opposite is true. It is easy to monitor entire populations from a technical perspective. Law enforcement and governments have also spent the better part of the last twenty-five years eroding public trust (ranging from secret warrants to finding legal loopholes).
My take is: at the end of the day, such laws hand over too much power to governments. On the other hand, doing nothing hands over too much power to criminals. What we need to find is some means for law enforcement to do their job without sacrificing civil liberties. I don't know where to start on that front, but I sure know that complaining about these short sighted legislative attempts or stirring up paranoia is not going to solve the problem.
It does not feel like the world is a more dangerous place than 30 years ago. I need to see evidence that crime is increasing because of encryption before taking arguments against encryption seriously.
I'm sure sometimes this has an effect but most criminals are still caught. Because they make mistakes too. Communication is only a small part of the chain.
Yes, it’s hard. Surveillance should be hard. Just because it -could- be trivially easy does not mean it is in the public’s interest that it -should- be.
The privacy exposure is so huge with chat control et al that there is effectively no expectation of privacy anywhere ever, from a practical point of view. That is not conducive to a functioning democracy, which only works when there is a delicate and deliberate balance of power between the individual and the state.
There are reasonable tools that have been deployed and are existing for police enforcement ; notably with the coordination of ISP providers. The fact that encryption has been democratized does indeed change the situation for enforcement but this does not mean everybody should be spied on by default.
Here's the thing, more appropriate tools for criminal activity encompass not only encryption but stenography technics, maybe even just signaling.
It's so easy to bypass that it only steer up the problem an order of magnitude further, makes the life harder for everybody, and creates a situation where everybody's data is basically on some server.
Now, knowing how capable institutions are able to protect data ; well i'm telling you there is 0 way I envision continuing my journey on the internet if it means that everything i look at, say or have an opinion on can be used against me eventually.
you either have encryption, or you don't. there is no middle ground. any measure to force access to encrypted messages would effectively disable encryption entirely.
Are they? More so than usual? This rhetorical device or similar seems to be always used, no matter the situation or time.
"Criminals are so sophisticated, our jobs are so hard, we need more power" - every police force ever.
"We actually need fewer capabilities and more checks and balances" - no police force ever.
> Now they are facing a situation where not just virtually all communications are encrypted
No, they aren't. Phone is unencrypted. Email is unencrypted. SMS is unencrypted. Some messengers are unencrypted.
Communications can be encrypted; I guess only criminals do that. Or banks. Or businesses. Or the government.
> but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted.
No, they aren't. Etc
What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Any form of blanket surveillance flips this into “maybe guilty so capture and archive surveillance data, and if ever (even years after) are possibly suspicious, comb through archived data to find some form of proof and then build up your pre-text for a warrant… in other words - “maybe guilty until proven guilty’
These are good points, though I'm wondering if the burden of proof has just increased? E.g. in the past there was little permanent evidence, so do we really need to break encryption to prove beyond a reasonable doubt?
It's like lack of DNA evidence making cases seem "unprovable", but then what did we do before DNA was available?
how do you figure that? the freedom of opinion is explicitly enshrined in the german constitution for example. there are limitations, but these are very specific and not arbitrary.
gemany is in fact one of the countries the provides the most protection for your opinion world wide, as long as that opinion is not based on obvious falsehoods (like holocaust denial), or stirs up hatred against a group of people. you can however criticize others and at this point germany provides even more protection than the US.
Fascinating to watch.
(Downvoted, as expected. The hypocrisy on this site is absolutely adorable.)
This is why having the structure of fundamental civil rights, like in the US constitution, is important. I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance.
As an example of one of those points, the US right to privacy was long considered so broad that it served as the _foundation of the right to abortion_ in the US for decades! By contrast, to pick an EU example, the Dutch right to privacy is so weak that it is quite literally written into the Dutch constitution as “except as limited by law”; in other words, nearly worthless.
To compare them by presence of a Wikipedia page is beyond ridiculous.
If anything censorship and extensive government oversight of peoples lives in EU and UK is far less controversial so there isn’t much of a push back. As you can see every time this comes up on HN where people in the EU defend it.
I agree with your other points. There is this though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#European_Uni...
what we are seeing is that thanks to social media, more discourse is public. which leads to more prosecutions. that is not a regression. that stuff has always been prosecuted. and they go against hate speech, not wrong think.
individual countries, such as germany do have these protections.
This is exactly what I think about it: https://youtu.be/J07wReeRF7Y?si=_VfrNiGRnG-_7dHX