I can see a valid use for a version of chat control where the communications of all elected officials are retained forever and audited on a regular basis for doing anything illegal, proposing anything illegal, actions not in the public interest, cronyism etc. All data should be released when they die, 10 years after they leave office or upon conviction of a crime related to political appointment.
WinstonSmith84 · 6h ago
For what it's worth, politicians are excluded from this law (it's not a joke)
fbhabbed · 5h ago
This alone should have made the law incoherent and impossible to pass
potato3732842 · 5h ago
To who? The politicians who will vote on it?
LeifCarrotson · 5h ago
Not impossible for politicians!
prox · 4h ago
Lets all register as politicians then.
close04 · 6h ago
Logically it follows that anyone who "has something to hide" will seek the safe harbor of a political position. How many election cycles until all politicians are terrorists and pedophiles?
bilekas · 5h ago
> Logically it follows that anyone who "has something to hide" will seek the safe harbor of a political position
Politicians are the new clergy then. You're not wrong.
ffsm8 · 3h ago
Possibly 0 if it passes.
Bombthecat · 4h ago
Or they just delete the chats
ciupicri · 6h ago
Like the messages exchanged between EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla?
tehwebguy · 6h ago
Yes, why would this one be exempt?
rvnx · 6h ago
National security. Period.
dekken_ · 6h ago
The EU is not a nation.
Now, consider, why should this one be excempt.
ExoticPearTree · 5h ago
Considering that they destroyed those messages, I guess that most likely the EU paid way too much for the vaccines or Pfizer paid so much in kickbacks that if it ever got out it will lead to a lot of people being prosecuted.
dekken_ · 5h ago
Oh yeah, lack of transparency is essentially evidence of criminal activity when it comes to governments.
rvnx · 5h ago
Now it's defense procurements that are kept secret. Wouldn't be surprised if in year 2035 we discover that a lot of corruption happened there.
Foreign intelligence knows what's there, but local people don't.
belter · 6h ago
They should have used S3 Object Lock for her...Since she had already a previous track record of deleting data. When she was the German Defence Minister during the Bundestag “consultants affair” inquiry, data/SMS on her official phones were wiped after they were requested as evidence.
And of course the fact that her husband was working for a Pfizer supplier, while she was sending private SMS to the Pfizer CEO, is of course an incredible coincidence.
> On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
No one - the EU gets its money from force: taxes on citizens and fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
disgruntledphd2 · 3h ago
> taxes on citizens
1% of VAT goes to the EU, yes.
> fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
Mostly the ones that have actually been imposed (on GDPR) go to the national governments.
philipallstar · 2h ago
Seems like we agree: you don't need to advertise when you can force money out of people through VAT and rent-seek your citizens as customers.
graemep · 5h ago
> On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
The EU, countries governed by pro-EU governments.
> Certain state level actors would love some more anti EU sentiments right now.
Why? What means do they have to produce it?
grim_io · 5h ago
What means? Are you unaware of the massive Russian government sponsored misinformation and political influencing?
And no, whatever the US or the EU do, it is not the same.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Well yes of course but don't think this couldn't happen here either. A lot of countries like France or Germany are very close to falling to the same extreme right forces the US has.
HPsquared · 6h ago
For everything else, there's Monarchy.
isolli · 6h ago
Indeed, politicians should not be controlling us; we should be controlling them.
theoreticalmal · 6h ago
How do you propose a law that’s illegal?
Longhanks · 5h ago
Happens all the time, otherwise, there wouldn't be such a thing as "unconstitutional".
lan321 · 6h ago
Goes against a higher law, such as the Constitution.
> All communication in the Government Offices is based on the core values of transparency, factualness and comprehensibility, relevance and topicality. Public access and oversight shall characterise all activities.
> The Government Offices' communication policy covers both internal and external communication.
Sweden is generally pretty good at transparency, both regarding representatives and everyone else. For example, given a full name, you can get a person's address, telephone number, what cars and businesses they own, and even what their salary is, for better and worse :)
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Oh that's pretty much in the worse book for me brrr
tmikaeld · 2h ago
It really is the criminals paradise, thus the record amount of shootings and rapes.
diggan · 6h ago
Really sensationalized title, the source is "an unnamed Europol police official" so it basically boils down to personal opinion, not the official stance of Europol as a whole. Although I'm sure they aren't alone, sensationalizing really doesn't help to have a sensible discussion about it...
stephen_g · 4h ago
Weird how every time Chat Control comes up, people pipe up calling it sensationalised or saying it can never pass, yet the iterations get wider ranging and the push becomes harder and it gets closer to passing…
These are words from people who have a seat at the table in negotiating this attempt at getting chat control through. If they don’t manage it this time, don’t be surprised if the things described are in the next try, and then people will be looking for something else to call sensationalised.
And the name was known but redacted before releasing the information to the journalists
The meeting in which it was said involved the europol executive director at the time
Saline9515 · 5h ago
From experience, in those high-level meetings if an official says such bold statements, it represents the position of the institution they are representing. It's not just a mere opinion given at the water cooler after lunch.
ruszki · 5h ago
It doesn't help. Unfortunately, we either get used to this, or just start to ignore public spaces more and more. Sensible discussion was probably always the exception, but at least it was easier to find pockets of sanity 10 years ago. Misinformation, disinformation, and other reality distortion effects basically made finding those almost impossible. It's steadily getting worse since at least 2014.
One of my favorite random topic discussion places was /r/hungary, my country of origin's subreddit. In 2015, at the height of immigration "crisis", we had very good discussions about the whole topic, even when most Hungarians were, and are clearly racists, and we had very differing views. We discussed pros and cons, we pushed statistics here and there. And we weren't assholes with each others. Even when we were at different places on the political spectrum. And generally every topic could be discussed, without real retorsion.
In 2018, the number of people who has only faith and nothing else increased. That was the first time when, it started to bug me.
In 2020, the number of fake information about COVID, was already about 50-50 with real information. Simple facts which were against their faith were tolerated rarely. For some reason, I still thought that it's just an ephemeral thing, because they're afraid. I was wrong. Oh god, I was very-very wrong. For most people, this was the trigger to go into full unsubstantiated conspiracy theory field.
In 2022, the sub clearly started to be controlled by political parties. There were several obviously paid accounts by several parties.
Nowadays, it's fully controlled by a political party. Dissenting views are barely tolerated. And basically all views are based on faith, and faith alone. There is no - not just sensible, but simply - discussions anymore. Whoever wants to discuss Hungarian affairs sensibly, long left that place.
I've seen the same thing regarding my friends, and people who I followed on Twitter. Most of us just left public spaces all together. We don't follow news anymore that closely either. And who do, slowly go into a very dark place. One of my friends started with "classical liberalism". Nowadays, outspoken Nazi. One other was afraid of COVID, and started to share bullshit D-Vitamin spam blog posts. Nowadays, he's full blown antivax. Another, was deep into depression, after the amount of alt-right bullshit he consumed. Luckily, he got out from there, but there were times when I thought that I lost him. My mom doesn't know what's happening in the country where she lives. My dad knows, follows the news, and he's halfway into depression for the past years. And there are those people who I followed on Twitter, because they argued sensibly. They are either not there anymore, or slowly their fact based opinions were replaced by faith. They maybe still on the "right" "side", but it's more rarely a conscious decision. It's only a matter of time before they will slip, and even now sensible discussions are impossible with them.
I don't know what good solutions there are. I hate that I'm turning more, and more inwards, creating a bubble again, after I forcefully cut it open completely about 15 years ago. But unfortunately, it's worth less and less to read random people's opinion... or at least what many try to sell as opinion.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK · 7h ago
"those services should include publicly available interpersonal communications service"
Only publicly available messengers are liable.
So if one writes a messenger herself (not too hard) and only distributes it to her friends, family, or a close circle of child porn lovers, one is not liable.
rafaelmn · 7h ago
I feel like we should create an open source P2P chat messaging with encryption thats super easy to use so that these kind of laws become pointless. Empower criminals so that they cant use this excuse to target civilian infra.
gempir · 6h ago
The device is under the power of law. You can already see it on iOS and Android is pushing for it too.
You will only be allowed to install "approved" applications, your device, not your choice anymore.
trallnag · 6h ago
Next, they will add some kind of verified signature that must be signed by a trusted third-party provider to the PWA spec and only allow the installation of such on Android
e2le · 5h ago
> open source P2P chat messaging with encryption
Tox/aTox [0][1] fits that description and both continue to be developed.
> Empower criminals so that they cant use this excuse to target civilian infra.
According to one webinar from CSIAC (2023) [2], XMPP is popular with Tox slowly catching up.
Tech is already there. It's just that it is 100 people use it.
the_third_wave · 6h ago
Just run your own XMPP server in your own domain, use OMEMO for encryption and you're set. You can communicate with others on other servers, none of them 'publically available' and the TLA's can stare at all that encrypted gibberish 'till the cows come home. Even if they break into a single server they won't get access to the cleartext, for that they'll need to access the terminal devices - phones, browsers, etc.
This is how I've been communicating for years now, it works fine and does not feed any of the data parasites out there.
meindnoch · 5h ago
And what are you going to do when they write a law that requires ISPs to drop any packet that lacks a digital signature from a trusted hardware manufacturer?
_zoltan_ · 5h ago
until there is a user friendly app like messenger or whatsapp, nobody is going to use these.
reorder9695 · 3h ago
I don't think that's the issue, plenty are already. The issue to me is I'm not going to use something my friends/family aren't using. Maybe something matrix like where many clients are interoperable will work? I still think to take off it would need to support being a frontend for imessage/whatsapp/messenger too or no one will start using it, in a similar way to how imessage falls back to sms, this theoretical app could fall back to whatever shared app the two contacts have.
wkat4242 · 6h ago
Patrick Breyer has an article how American foundation Thorn is heavily lobbying Europol for this stuff. And there's some cross hiring going on according to him.
Clearly it's not even just "for the children" anymore. Just plain old panopticon surveillance. I guess they want their NSA too. Though they forget that NSA is only for terrorism purposes, their data is not too be used for regular policing.
Terrorism is basically "whatever the government at the time doesn't like" anyway
PaulRobinson · 5h ago
No, terrorism "is the use or threat of serious violence, damage to property, or disruption of [...] systems to advance a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause, with the aim of influencing a government or international organization, or of intimidating the public."
"Whatever the government at the time doesn't like", is best described as "opposition". It's a healthy and critical component of a free and fair democracy. One that is increasingly silenced in the modern World, much to our shame when future generations judge us.
While I understand the point behind old line "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", the key point is that both terrorism and "freedom fighting" are about resorting to the use of violence, and the democracy involved (if it was ever present), has failed when people resort to such violence.
I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
And that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy - and by extension our freedom - that raises the question of what's truly worse?
piltdownman · 6h ago
The US already has this via the UK, who've been tapping the undersea cables of EU members for 20+ years. Literally everything transmitted via Ireland - home of the DPC function for most of the US MNCs in the EU, the only US customs clearance on European Soil, and Datacentre hub for Amzn/Goog/Appl etc...
In terms of e2e chat encryption, binary blobs and 'managed' mobile platforms render it somewhat of a moot point to me. Bad actors can either be 0day'd or Social Engineered for those with advanced OpSec. To date though, the most successful network was Encrochat - an OTR-based messaging app which routed conversations through a central server based in France, which was eventually compromised by French police with a malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords
Europol got a taste for the heady power of it - The chief of the Dutch National Police Force, Jannine van den Berg , compared the malware to "sitting at the table where criminals were chatting among themselves".
Now the reality is that the equivalent of the Clipper Chip 'key escrow' is now implementable at a Firmware/Mandatory Push Update level, and probably as part of a 'secure' walled garden app-store API in future.
That's where I'm extremely opposed to conservatives/reactionaries of my country: they identify some issues correctly imho, but we're in total disagreement of the root cause, and thus on how to solve it.
To me, the US have way to much influence, and it's destroying us.
Its NGOs would never have qualified as NGO here (Thorn is only an example), yet we let them lobby as if they weren't weird, dark money adjacent groups. Worst, the Atlas network and all its foundations/schools are definitely culturally USian, yet they try (and succeed) in redefining Europe culture (the 'please think about the children' is definitely from there) and importing US culture wars we never cared about until the late 2000s. Europe and the EU is slowly turning into the US, our governments allow it, and I think that we should pump the brakes, fast.
I like the US, I like people there, but I don't want my country to become a satellite of the US.
Arkhaine_kupo · 6h ago
> Though they forget that NSA is only for terrorism purposes
Yep thats def true, thats 100% the real reason and only purpose of the largest domestic agency
AlecSchueler · 6h ago
Did they say that? We've got a Reddit post showing a screenshot of a quotation from an anonymous person during an unnamed meeting, but not much else to go on here.
With the DDR and Stasi archives in living memory, who can think this is a good direction to head in?
46891283682 · 6h ago
For example the Stasi spy Anetta Kahane leading the political foundation of the Greens, which also established a state-run "reporting office for anti-feminism", whose declared goal is to persecute people for being critical of feminism.
ExoticPearTree · 5h ago
Ideologues. They think they can do it better and no corruption will occur. Because they know better.
AlecSchueler · 6h ago
The people who ensure the MI5 and other archives remain hidden.
TheChaplain · 5h ago
Kind of funny that years ago I was insulted and talked down to when I said that EU going from trade union to federalisation is a bad idea.
Chat Control and whatever is following from that is just the beginning.
nickslaughter02 · 3h ago
100%. Each country must regain the ability to decide for themselves and not be forced into something just because foreign lunatics have more votes or larger population.
Havoc · 6h ago
Surveillance state would no doubt make their lives easier but that doesn’t make it a good idea
rurban · 6h ago
So those Europol managers need to get their citizenships revoked, if they choose to stand outside the constitution. And observed. Simple as that.
raxxorraxor · 6h ago
Europol shouldn't have the legitimacy of even say anything on that topic.
jraph · 6h ago
Devil's advocate, but why not?
I don't like Chat Control and I believe privacy should be guaranteed, but Europol seems quite relevant in this matter.
AlecSchueler · 6h ago
Because laws represent the will of the people, not the will of the police. The individuals in Europol are already offered the same representation as the rest of us and the various branches of the EU legislative bodies can always call on them for consultation on specific matters.
jraph · 6h ago
That doesn't work very well. If you have a concern you need to voice, you can't rely on waiting for being consulted. I'm really not interested in a system where you are not allowed to speak up.
Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Naively, as a citizen I want to be protected from crime and I'm interested in Europol, experts on crime investigation across Europe, getting what they need to do their work and expressing their needs.
Of course I'm also not interested in privacy being thrown away.
Those two things apparently clash, and a healthy debate can help find an acceptable solution.
Saline9515 · 5h ago
A country where police decides the laws is called a police state. Do you feel that citizen's rights are well respected in such places?
We are not talking about power or decision making, we are talking about expression.
I'm really confused as to how some people here misunderstand this discussion as being about giving law-making power to the police.
I'm of course against a police state.
edit: I'm not even defending Europol or what they actually do, there are things they do I most certainly don't like.
AlecSchueler · 6h ago
I actually largely agree with you but
> Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Police is supposedly for enforcing the law regardless of whose interests that serve. Making that enforcement easier isn't always a net positive for society, even when the laws themselves are just.
jraph · 6h ago
The law supposedly protects the people's interest. Ideally.
Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world and I agree with you that in practice, law enforcement isn't always a net positive.
Saline9515 · 5h ago
Police has its own subset of incentives and goals, and is not a transparent institution protecting citizens. It is made of humans that are prone to corruption, power abuse, ideological bias, and so on.
jraph · 5h ago
Police [...] is not a transparent institution protecting citizens
It's its role, theoretically (I don't know about transparent, but protecting citizens for sure).
Of course, the reality is not ideal.
Tostino · 6h ago
Must be nice to have any trust in your police forces.
jraph · 6h ago
That's not what I'm saying! :-)
Unfortunately, I don't have much of this. I wish I could!
Happy you wrote this so I could clarify this point.
Hendrikto · 6h ago
Because of the separation of powers. The police are the executive. They ENFORCE the laws, and only enforce them. They should not be involved in the legislative that makes those laws, or the judiciary that interprets/applies the laws.
This is rule of law 101, and has been figured out hundreds of years ago. Without separation of powers, you cannot have rule of law.
jraph · 6h ago
We are not talking about power or decision making, we are talking about expression.
I think any organism should be able to express their needs and voice their concern.
Follow the money also has a few articles about... Well, money and thorn and eu csam regulation
general1465 · 40m ago
That is going against GDPR + who is going to pay for that? Slack is already limiting what you can retain on free account.
poisonborz · 5h ago
Of course they do, it's their job to say so. And the job of politicians with any integrity is to say "No, next topic".
Zealotux · 7h ago
I mean, of course they would say that. Europol's job would probably be a whole lot easier if they had access to all conversations, media, live feed of webcams from all devices of all European citizens with unlimited history. Think of all the crimes they could solve if only there was absolutely no privacy for any of us!
holowoodman · 7h ago
> Europol's job would probably be a whole lot easier if they had access to all
Actually I think that that's even a fallacy. More data means more stuff to sift through, more false leads in there, more things to follow up. Watch an episode of House M.D. about full-body-scans in medicine: useless, because only wasted time to follow up on every blotch in the scan.
schrectacular · 7h ago
Not as useless with the current generation of AI tools...
s1mplicissimus · 6h ago
I'd rather not have my doctors waste their time discarding useless LLM comments, tough
raxxorraxor · 6h ago
They should be out of their jobs anyway if they police anything beyond the very restricted fields the EU was made for.
morkalork · 5h ago
Sure, as long as it's a crime against a politician or rich person. For the rest of us: Hilarious! People already have their cars and bikes stolen with GPS trackers inside and can tell police exactly where their property is and get no response.
nickslaughter02 · 8h ago
original title: Europol said Chat Control doesn’t go far enough; they want to retain all data of all citizens forever [Washington Post source in comment]
croes · 6h ago
Does this include the chats of Ursula von der Leyen?
Typical. Give them a finger, they take an arm, a leg, your house, your firstborn and all your data.
Every request by law enforcement must be opposed. Do not talk to cops. Do not give them an inch. Ever.
They are insatiable and power-hungry. Nothing will suffice. A police state will still be a million police officers and some stricter laws short.
integralid · 6h ago
>Every request by law enforcement must be opposed. Do not talk to cops. Do not give them an inch. Ever.
What if your house get robbed? I'm quite fond of law enforcement actually, and I enjoy living in a safe country.
holowoodman · 6h ago
You might try your luck then. But law enforcement has shot the homeowners in such cases. They usually arrive late or never at all. They open a case file and then tell you "well, we are not going to do anything, theft has a very low rate of convictions, just give the case number to your insurance".
nehal3m · 5h ago
By that point they have already failed to protect you and at most someone will be by with a clipboard. I have had motorcycles stolen from me and reporting it was met with an automated response saying there is no capacity for any follow up.
nancyminusone · 6h ago
Your house being robbed represents a failure of them to protect you
stackedinserter · 5h ago
In our "safe" country law enforcement press charges on you if you oppose the robber.
holowoodman · 5h ago
Of course. It is far easier to press charges against the victim, because they already have his data and confession.
That's why you just avoid dealing with the police if at all possible.
stackedinserter · 50m ago
It's easier to avoid when you have a pig farm. I heard it takes 16 pigs to eat a human body in one setting.
r_lee · 6h ago
I love the EUSSR
robotomir · 6h ago
Do you think that monitoring and surveillance are less of a problem in the US? In China?
jraph · 6h ago
Come on, we don't need to race to the bottom :-)
(Note, I'm not vouching for the comment you replied to - EU is not even close/comparable to what peak USSR was)
stackedinserter · 5h ago
There's still more freedom (like, real, everyday freedom, not just abstract "rights") in US than in EU.
preezer · 6h ago
You bet I would find a way or service, where I could upload daily at least 100 GB of data just to troll them.
create-username · 5h ago
You’ve already got Facebook
belter · 6h ago
The Europol is a EU support body, and not a federal police. They can't by law apply coercive measures, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures. It can only assist national police, can request, but not compel and may ask Member States to open investigations but the Capitals can say no.
It's nothing more one of the examples of EU bureaucrats trying to justify their inflated EU salaries. It is mostly coordination paperwork that inflates Brussels chaos without direct crime fighting effectiveness.
Should be closed as each country police already cooperates as needed. They are nothing more than a support only EU agency requesting bigger scopes to justify their existence.
WaitWaitWha · 6h ago
> They can't by law apply coercive measures, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures.
They can't by law apply coercive measures today, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures today.
There are ample evidence of EU expanding authority beyond the original charter, from common market project into a political union with broad competences.
Jensson · 15m ago
> There are ample evidence of EU expanding authority beyond the original charter, from common market project into a political union with broad competences.
Right, EU will probably look like USA after 100-200 years, but it takes time to get there, and likely will take a civil war where they decide that member states are not allowed to leave the union like what happened in USA.
nickslaughter02 · 4h ago
> The Europol is a EU support body, and not a federal police.
This is supposed to change with the ProtectEU plan. Europol would become an FBI equivalent.
Politicians are the new clergy then. You're not wrong.
Now, consider, why should this one be excempt.
Foreign intelligence knows what's there, but local people don't.
And of course the fact that her husband was working for a Pfizer supplier, while she was sending private SMS to the Pfizer CEO, is of course an incredible coincidence.
And also the current NATO Secretary...
"Dutch PM has been deleting text messages daily for years" - https://nltimes.nl/2022/05/18/dutch-pm-deleting-text-message...
The EU isn't a democracy, it is actually governed by backroom deals between member states' governments.
Certain state level actors would love some more anti EU sentiments right now.
On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
EU is great at creating anti EU sentiments. They don't need foreign actors. Chat Control is just one example.
https://profdenoli.substack.com/p/an-essay-on-eus-dsa-censor...
No one - the EU gets its money from force: taxes on citizens and fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
1% of VAT goes to the EU, yes.
> fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
Mostly the ones that have actually been imposed (on GDPR) go to the national governments.
The EU, countries governed by pro-EU governments.
> Certain state level actors would love some more anti EU sentiments right now.
Why? What means do they have to produce it?
And no, whatever the US or the EU do, it is not the same.
> All communication in the Government Offices is based on the core values of transparency, factualness and comprehensibility, relevance and topicality. Public access and oversight shall characterise all activities.
> The Government Offices' communication policy covers both internal and external communication.
Sweden is generally pretty good at transparency, both regarding representatives and everyone else. For example, given a full name, you can get a person's address, telephone number, what cars and businesses they own, and even what their salary is, for better and worse :)
These are words from people who have a seat at the table in negotiating this attempt at getting chat control through. If they don’t manage it this time, don’t be surprised if the things described are in the next try, and then people will be looking for something else to call sensationalised.
And the name was known but redacted before releasing the information to the journalists
The meeting in which it was said involved the europol executive director at the time
One of my favorite random topic discussion places was /r/hungary, my country of origin's subreddit. In 2015, at the height of immigration "crisis", we had very good discussions about the whole topic, even when most Hungarians were, and are clearly racists, and we had very differing views. We discussed pros and cons, we pushed statistics here and there. And we weren't assholes with each others. Even when we were at different places on the political spectrum. And generally every topic could be discussed, without real retorsion.
In 2018, the number of people who has only faith and nothing else increased. That was the first time when, it started to bug me.
In 2020, the number of fake information about COVID, was already about 50-50 with real information. Simple facts which were against their faith were tolerated rarely. For some reason, I still thought that it's just an ephemeral thing, because they're afraid. I was wrong. Oh god, I was very-very wrong. For most people, this was the trigger to go into full unsubstantiated conspiracy theory field.
In 2022, the sub clearly started to be controlled by political parties. There were several obviously paid accounts by several parties.
Nowadays, it's fully controlled by a political party. Dissenting views are barely tolerated. And basically all views are based on faith, and faith alone. There is no - not just sensible, but simply - discussions anymore. Whoever wants to discuss Hungarian affairs sensibly, long left that place.
I've seen the same thing regarding my friends, and people who I followed on Twitter. Most of us just left public spaces all together. We don't follow news anymore that closely either. And who do, slowly go into a very dark place. One of my friends started with "classical liberalism". Nowadays, outspoken Nazi. One other was afraid of COVID, and started to share bullshit D-Vitamin spam blog posts. Nowadays, he's full blown antivax. Another, was deep into depression, after the amount of alt-right bullshit he consumed. Luckily, he got out from there, but there were times when I thought that I lost him. My mom doesn't know what's happening in the country where she lives. My dad knows, follows the news, and he's halfway into depression for the past years. And there are those people who I followed on Twitter, because they argued sensibly. They are either not there anymore, or slowly their fact based opinions were replaced by faith. They maybe still on the "right" "side", but it's more rarely a conscious decision. It's only a matter of time before they will slip, and even now sensible discussions are impossible with them.
I don't know what good solutions there are. I hate that I'm turning more, and more inwards, creating a bubble again, after I forcefully cut it open completely about 15 years ago. But unfortunately, it's worth less and less to read random people's opinion... or at least what many try to sell as opinion.
Only publicly available messengers are liable. So if one writes a messenger herself (not too hard) and only distributes it to her friends, family, or a close circle of child porn lovers, one is not liable.
You will only be allowed to install "approved" applications, your device, not your choice anymore.
Tox/aTox [0][1] fits that description and both continue to be developed.
> Empower criminals so that they cant use this excuse to target civilian infra.
According to one webinar from CSIAC (2023) [2], XMPP is popular with Tox slowly catching up.
[0]: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore
[1]: https://github.com/evilcorpltd/aTox
[2]: https://csiac.dtic.mil/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CSIAC-Webi...
This is how I've been communicating for years now, it works fine and does not feed any of the data parasites out there.
Clearly it's not even just "for the children" anymore. Just plain old panopticon surveillance. I guess they want their NSA too. Though they forget that NSA is only for terrorism purposes, their data is not too be used for regular policing.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-eu-ombudsman-l...
"Whatever the government at the time doesn't like", is best described as "opposition". It's a healthy and critical component of a free and fair democracy. One that is increasingly silenced in the modern World, much to our shame when future generations judge us.
While I understand the point behind old line "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", the key point is that both terrorism and "freedom fighting" are about resorting to the use of violence, and the democracy involved (if it was ever present), has failed when people resort to such violence.
I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
And that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy - and by extension our freedom - that raises the question of what's truly worse?
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/uk-spy-base-g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
In terms of e2e chat encryption, binary blobs and 'managed' mobile platforms render it somewhat of a moot point to me. Bad actors can either be 0day'd or Social Engineered for those with advanced OpSec. To date though, the most successful network was Encrochat - an OTR-based messaging app which routed conversations through a central server based in France, which was eventually compromised by French police with a malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
Europol got a taste for the heady power of it - The chief of the Dutch National Police Force, Jannine van den Berg , compared the malware to "sitting at the table where criminals were chatting among themselves".
Now the reality is that the equivalent of the Clipper Chip 'key escrow' is now implementable at a Firmware/Mandatory Push Update level, and probably as part of a 'secure' walled garden app-store API in future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
To me, the US have way to much influence, and it's destroying us.
Its NGOs would never have qualified as NGO here (Thorn is only an example), yet we let them lobby as if they weren't weird, dark money adjacent groups. Worst, the Atlas network and all its foundations/schools are definitely culturally USian, yet they try (and succeed) in redefining Europe culture (the 'please think about the children' is definitely from there) and importing US culture wars we never cared about until the late 2000s. Europe and the EU is slowly turning into the US, our governments allow it, and I think that we should pump the brakes, fast.
I like the US, I like people there, but I don't want my country to become a satellite of the US.
Yep thats def true, thats 100% the real reason and only purpose of the largest domestic agency
Chat Control and whatever is following from that is just the beginning.
I don't like Chat Control and I believe privacy should be guaranteed, but Europol seems quite relevant in this matter.
Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Naively, as a citizen I want to be protected from crime and I'm interested in Europol, experts on crime investigation across Europe, getting what they need to do their work and expressing their needs.
Of course I'm also not interested in privacy being thrown away.
Those two things apparently clash, and a healthy debate can help find an acceptable solution.
We are not talking about power or decision making, we are talking about expression.
I'm really confused as to how some people here misunderstand this discussion as being about giving law-making power to the police.
I'm of course against a police state.
edit: I'm not even defending Europol or what they actually do, there are things they do I most certainly don't like.
> Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Police is supposedly for enforcing the law regardless of whose interests that serve. Making that enforcement easier isn't always a net positive for society, even when the laws themselves are just.
Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world and I agree with you that in practice, law enforcement isn't always a net positive.
It's its role, theoretically (I don't know about transparent, but protecting citizens for sure).
Of course, the reality is not ideal.
Unfortunately, I don't have much of this. I wish I could!
Happy you wrote this so I could clarify this point.
This is rule of law 101, and has been figured out hundreds of years ago. Without separation of powers, you cannot have rule of law.
I think any organism should be able to express their needs and voice their concern.
That's of course not the same thing as deciding.
They have another interesting article: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Follow the money also has a few articles about... Well, money and thorn and eu csam regulation
Actually I think that that's even a fallacy. More data means more stuff to sift through, more false leads in there, more things to follow up. Watch an episode of House M.D. about full-body-scans in medicine: useless, because only wasted time to follow up on every blotch in the scan.
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Every request by law enforcement must be opposed. Do not talk to cops. Do not give them an inch. Ever.
They are insatiable and power-hungry. Nothing will suffice. A police state will still be a million police officers and some stricter laws short.
What if your house get robbed? I'm quite fond of law enforcement actually, and I enjoy living in a safe country.
That's why you just avoid dealing with the police if at all possible.
(Note, I'm not vouching for the comment you replied to - EU is not even close/comparable to what peak USSR was)
It's nothing more one of the examples of EU bureaucrats trying to justify their inflated EU salaries. It is mostly coordination paperwork that inflates Brussels chaos without direct crime fighting effectiveness.
Should be closed as each country police already cooperates as needed. They are nothing more than a support only EU agency requesting bigger scopes to justify their existence.
They can't by law apply coercive measures today, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures today.
There are ample evidence of EU expanding authority beyond the original charter, from common market project into a political union with broad competences.
Right, EU will probably look like USA after 100-200 years, but it takes time to get there, and likely will take a civil war where they decide that member states are not allowed to leave the union like what happened in USA.
This is supposed to change with the ProtectEU plan. Europol would become an FBI equivalent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/05/encrypt...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39609846)
Can start a discussion here without reddit threads of random article screenshots.
And then you compare this. Let's say you do get scammed into transferring money. Can Europol, or any police department, help you? No ...
Think of the children!