Time to become a proud criminal. When law becomes tyranny, resistance becomes moral.
The law restricts providing a commercial service in the EU that provides end-to-end encryption without monitoring of the content of communications, not using end-to-end encryption. Unless you’re planning to run some kind of underground messaging service, you probably won’t be the one violating the law.
What is to stop a company from offering their services in the EU though? As long as they don’t legally cooperate with the EU it should be fine. Like Telegram operating from Russia (if they weren’t collaborators already).
Fourthly, scanning for known, thus old material does not help identify and rescue victims, or prevent child sexual abuse. It will actually make safeguarding victims more difficult by pushing criminals to secure, decentralised communication channels which are impossible to intercept even with a warrant.
This point is huge, and on its own explains why half baked compromises are worthless.
The criminals will use banned chat apps, while innocent people get their messages read.
The reason they don’t care about that is that the whole thing isn’t about protecting children at all but about surveillance of the vast majority of people.
Well that’s the point, catching CSAM is just a very convenient excuse. Once that’s through, it will just be a matter of extending it to terrorism. Then you can declare anyone a terrorist and bam you have free reign to monitor anyone you want.
Or you could just accuse them of the really dangerous crimes, like copyright violations or insulting politicians.
That requires some kind of proof or bureaucratic fuckery. If you take any ecologist group for instance, you just have to pin a terrorist label on them, and bam, now you can spy on them legally. They’re trying to do it in France right now.
Germany too. They are trying to label the climate change protests by the “Letzte Generation” (Last generation) group as organized crime and terrorism.
Lol guess we can kiss post-quantum TLS goodbye.
This is going to have catastrophically negative effects for the internet in general. And, as others have said, actual bad actors will just keep using the most advanced encryption available anyways. This only makes the vast majority of internet users less secure and easier targets for exploitation.
As long as it applies to the normalplebian things like WhatsApp, I’m not really concerned nor surprised.
It is up to us to protect themselves and it has been since the wake of malicious ads that track your every click. It’s gotten so bad that you’d have to be insane to not use uBlock Origin.
Now it’s time to find another means of communication. So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends… such as SimpleX Chat and Session Messenger.
Don’t sleep on your OPSEC, unless you have a reason to. :)
Are they proposing opening every letter that goes in the mail too? And checking every memory card that gets sent?
I want cameras and microphones in every politicians house, in every room. These record 24/7 and will be live-streamed on twitch. Any politician against this proposal is obviously a child-abusing terrorist, or do they have something even worse to hide?
Don’t forget all their offices and vehicles.
Its really really great that in a time where fascists gain more and more influence in several EU states, we also make it possible to massively spy on citizens :)
They’re the same people.
Well, not the same people. The surveillance people are authoritarian fascists that have been in government parties a lot longer than the newer parties with similar views.
Well, I meant that they all belong to the same group, fascists.
Facism is not the same thing as wanting mass surveillance. Or is your definition fascist = bad?
Well, mostly I was thinking of the extreme nationalist views that most of these kinds of politicians showed in the past when they e.g. created intelligence agencies that completely ignored any international agreements, basic rights,… to ensure the supremacy of their own nation and their influence within it.
I am sure they will only use it against Pedos and Terrorists! ;)
Europol already said it would use it to fight „illegal migration“ and „human traffickers“ and drug dealers
A french politian demanded to use it against „Drag Queens“ and museums
An italian politian proposed to use chat control against „human traficking“ (in this case a dogwhistle for people, that rescue migrants), organ traffickers, illegal trading of weapons and drug dealers.
Some important german polititians want to expand it against antisemitism, far right extremism and child pornography
A lobbyist and another german politian want to also use it against illegally downloaded movies and music.
https://netzpolitik.org/2023/ueberwachung-politiker-fordern-ausweitung-der-chatkontrolle-auf-andere-inhalte/ (article in german)
Where there’s a through, the pigs will come.
Surprise surprise!
So this is how liberty dies…
I can’t see Signal operating in Europe if this is the case. Telegram has already handed over information, so they will likely adapt and continue doing their thing. Meta/WhatsApp will want to keep that money, so they will find a way to operate as well.
I suppose Signal could have a European server, but that might cut them off from the rest of the world.
Might end up using Briar or XMPP.
I haven’t given the proposition more than a once-over, but I assume this will cover emails too?
I will probably end up using Matrix but they really have to leave the UK before those facist shits force them to implement a backdoor!
How to contact your MEP.
Thanks for the link, but I’m still not sure who to contact. Apparently I’m supposed to know who is “my MEP”, but I don’t. How to?
Might depend on your country, but for Germany there are no direct candidates that we votes for. Everybody hat one vote one could give to a party, which had presented a list of people for the election. At the end the party then send the first x people of that list, according to how many of the German representatives were to be send by that party.
So, effectively all MEP which are German are “my” MEP. Or just the party I voted for if I want to be exclusive.
Germany suggests splitting up child sexual abuse material regulation
Germany has suggested splitting the file into two parts, namely “generally acceptable provisions”, which should remain in the compromise text, and “controversial provisions”, which should be removed. The removed parts should be included in a new draft regulation.
Controversial provisions could be “discussed without time pressure”, to come up with solutions that protect children and also respect data privacy.
