EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided (mastodon.social)

The exclusion includes politicians because there would suddenly be a paper trail. Especially in the EU there were lots of suddenly lost messages.

Security is just the scapegoat excuse.

> It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.

There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.

That one line on its own should be enough put the illegitimacy of this proposal on clear display. Privacy for me (the surveillance state) but not for thee (the populace).

If you read it closely they are not mandating backdoors in encryption.

WhatsApp could still have messages end-to-end encrypted. What they would be mandated to do is for the app to send copies of the messages to WhatsApp for their staff to review the contents.

This obviously breaks the point of end-to-end encryption. Without actually making it illegal for them to use encryption, or add any “backdoor” so it can be reversed.

It’s a weasely way of trying to have their cake and eat it.

> If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?

Its all a scam! No one cares about you.

They are just setting up the new infrastructure to manipulate & control the docile donkeys more effectively (working class)

Unfortunately, they will be successful.

It is pointless exception. If chat control will pass, everything is vulnerable by design. Or how do you distinguish if WhatsApp is installed on a phone of Joe Nobody or or a phone of a politician? You won't, unless you have some list, which can be leaked and from "do not touch credentials" will turn "target these credentials"

“False positives” is the most likely explanation. A common tactic for government agents is to pose as criminals and extremists, either to more effectively infiltrate existing criminal or extremist networks or to run sting/entrapment operations.

> If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary?

Because you'd be massively adding an attack surface on to National Security elements for no benefit to National Security.

I mean national security agencies usually have their own extensive internal monitoring.

EU rules typically contain carve outs for national security matters too.

This is a bad law, but these carve outs are normal and expected.

Carve outs for politicians are a different matter.

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  Oh Harry, don't worry! Everyone can happen to have bloated his aunt by an accident! 

  I like Ludo. He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favour: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."

>Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists

Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.

It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

It's not undemocratic. The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue.

One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.

Politician can not face consequences when they discuss something illegal. Politicians in parlaments literal job is to define legal and illegal. That they repeat that until success and against the perceived will of the general population is maybe a procedural problem (as in: do not disturb the legal body with stupid stuff) but it is still their job.

I 100% agree with your position. Chat control is basically an attack on every conversation everywhere because modern social habits are using it like my chat with my neighbors over the fence. It is not the same as mail interception it is much worse.

> and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

And who is going to hold them accountable? They make the laws, they're the ones who should know best this is illegal, so if they don't care no one else will. Voters? I live in America so I've lost a lot of faith in people voting for politicians who will protect their rights.

I legitimately have no idea how to fix this type of problem. We spent the better part of the 20th century setting up systems to enable people to thrive and have expanded rights. And now the generations that benefited from all of that want to tear it down and take us back to feudal times with unelected, unaccountable, all-powerful leaders and a nobility class that owns everything and leaving 95% of people live in poverty and sickness. It's like we forgot how to raise strong people with good morals.

European Commission is not a democratic body. No EU citizen voted for them.

I think the result of a referendum that would pose a question

"Do you want law enforcement to be allowed access to your private messages when investigating child molesters or would you like to listen to folks who put furry teen girls in front of their websites?"

would have results that you certanly wouldn't like. And they'd be democratic.

So perhaps before calling something undemocratic, first make sure that the majority of voters actually agree with you.

> This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.

> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)

Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.

> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.

> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.

Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.

They need to be named. Shouldn't be able to go anywhere in Brussels (or any city in any member state) without seeing their photo and name on a giant bus shelter poster. I would throw some € in the direction of that.

When the government is monolithic (which it tends to become) and holds a lot of power it is just a matter of time before "some animals are more equal than others". The best safeguards I know about are 1) limiting the power of government and 2) checks and balances on what powers they do have.

Nothing is perfect, and even having the two pillars above does not guarantee eternal justice (or even that the pillars will remain in place). But we can try to keep remembering and demand better. Sincerely: Good luck, EU.

Maybe those you call extremists are now the only sane people.

>This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.

The state(s) wants to snoop on the peasants' messaging and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.

I'm not a fan, but in what was is this, or any other topic, undemocratic to have debates and votes on?

The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

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Democracy is incompatible with freedom by definition, it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.

Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.

If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.

But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.

Worth noting that with RIPA (2000, activated in 2007) UK has enforced key disclosure. It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason (including random data).

I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...

You see, we the people are staunchly opposed. But the interests of our political leaders (we all know what 'leader' translates to) do not align with out interests. So ...

The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.

I didn't think this was even possible. Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states? I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights. If that's not the case, the danger isn't limited to just Germany. With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.

AfD is under the watch of spionage agencies but somehow they are THE risk, not the legacy parties and bureaucracy.

What did you expect? People voted for the party that gave the previous coalition a hard time because of the debt brake but totally ignored it as soon they came into power.

It's about as believable as a country with history involving the Third Reich and Stasi openly standing behind a country that the UN, and every relevant scholar on the subject, confirms is committing genocide.

In other words, it's very believable. It is incredible how billions of hours have been spent on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and nothing has been learnt. Potentially the best phenomenon in existence at showing that humanity is, after all, so much less intelligent than it believes it is - that even after such a destructive event and so much performative effort at analysis and learning, the key takeaway did not become part of the social psyche whatsoever.

You say this while Germany is actively supporting a genocide in Palestine. The world has really turned on its head.

> Third Reich and the Stasi

It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?

edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.

Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.

What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.

It's been constantly weakened and people were always saying "don't worry, we will find a workaround, we should do nothing".

It won’t.

It makes no attempt to outlaw encryption. We can still legally use PGP and completely avoid eavesdropping.

What it does mandate is that messaging providers who they will name (think WhatsApp, Signal), will be obliged to have people reviewing the content of all messages sent.

All but the stupidest of criminals will thus work around it, encrypting themselves over the top. While the average Joe gets all their messages read.

It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.

I believe the concept is that I may not be able to jail you for your criminal activity but I can still jail you for breaking the encryption law.

But more generally I think one has to account for the power of the default option - with so many criminals posting their crimes on social media and/or their Venmo descriptions, the likelihood of criminals abandoning (say) WhatsApp and coding their own is rather slim.

> [...] I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat?

HTTPS relies on centralised authority. It's right there in the name: Certificate Authority.

Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?

This is the part that I think most politicians simply don't understand.

I've been trying to argue this point with my government several times (some MPs even replied friendly, so they'd actually read it, but still don't understand or believe it).

I think the worst european country in terms of online freedom right now is the UK, which kind of defeats your point entirely.

and thus further decline of the only democratic superpower left? Why would that be desirable?

That seems naive — this was pushed by several Dutch ministers over the past decades. It would have been made law here in any case.

Law and order, tuff-on-crime political parties (PVV, VVD, CDA¹) just love the idea of control over citizen's chat messages.

This is not 'because of the EU'. We are part of the EU and influence its policies.

1: https://chatcontrole.nl/stemwijzer2023/

Datenschutz doesn't prevent court-ordered telecomms surveillance either. This would presumably fall in the same category. (Or in fact be unconstitutional, as BVerfG has already ruled several times regarding blanket data collection in other context.)

> What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany?

Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.

"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).

I mean it’s not hard to predict. Inevitably they will as their parent companies won’t give up such a big market.

How well a ban on signal would be enforced if they don’t comply would be interesting.

I still feel like this will fail to come into effect like all the other times. But we gotta keep eyes on it.

No EU means that most states would already have implemented Chat Control. Case in point, the UK.

Well that escalated quickly, didn't it?

No, just Ursula and lobbies among the Denmark wacko against privacy.

down with the EU

Good luck. EU has been producing one Europe crippling law and regulation after another and it still enjoys wide support for some reason. Ursula is facing two more no confidence votes in October so hopefully the tide is changing.

The EU began as a simple customs bloc and negotiating tool. It has morphed into a blood sucking behemoth preventing growth and discouraging progress.

But they do find them without the tools. Every other week there are terror suspects arrested. Every week some pedophiles are arrested.

If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.

This is utter nonsense. The "technology and encryption make law enforcement harder" narrative is pushed by people to gain power. That's all there is to it. Technology has, if anything, made surveillance and law enforcement so much easier than it ever has been before. Law enforcement always wants to look helpless and like the victim though because they want absolute control over your life.

> Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

No, this is not "unfathomably good luck", this is how the system works. Most of crimes are repeated crimes, most of the criminals are serial criminals. People who obey the law, then break it once, then obey it ever since -- are very rare and even if they're not caught I wouldn't care much anyway.

And if you're a normal criminal doing your criminal stuff day after day and year after year you'll make mistakes. One of them will get you caught.

Never in the history of humanity did the law enforcement cast a net that caught 100% of crime, it always had been the game of probabilities, luck and persistence. Steal once and you'll likely walk away. Steal every day to make a living and you'll get caught many times in your lifetime.

> "Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN."

Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.

Yeah, nonsense, bullshit, whatever you want to call it. Actual pedos will trivially bypass Chat Control by switching to a messaging service that doesn't enforce it, or even by sending encrypted ZIP files via any ordinary messaging service.

> silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth

Does this justify every browser reporting every URL you visit to the government, and implementing a government-controlled blocklist of URLs on the off chance that a criminal might use Chrome for their criminal activity?

Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.

Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.

I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone.

But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.

It seems to be mostly about mass survellance. The quote I've seen from Danish Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgaard seems to make that clear:

> We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,

https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/REU/spm/1426/index.ht...

What they want is everyone to be watched, all of the time. Crimes will be determined later.