The CDU/CSU is doing something good. That didn't happened for a long time? I appreciate it.
Ausgerechnet Spahn. Manchmal glaubt man seinen Augen und Ohren nicht.
Wir müssen Wachsam bleiben. Mit dem Argument das es böse Menschen gibt, wurde schon viel böses getan. Massenüberwachung zerstört jede Gesellschaft. Deutschland hat mehrfach darunter gelitten. Und die Versuche Massenüberwachung einzuführen wiederholen sich.
AfD has f'd up views on many things. I wouldn't even be surprised if they would vote for it, as soon as they are in a position of power. However in its current state, they would hurt themselfs with a chat control law. So yes, your a right. I would also not expect them to vote for it.
AfD is classified as extreme-right not only in the eyes of the public, but also by German intelligence. Therefore I'd personally expect them to support potential tools that authoritarian governments would find useful.
They are not in government just yet. But if they gain control, expect their position to change. That's why it is critical to reverse government positions across the block, or we'll see a new authoritarian wave sweep Europe.
It's the classical playbook. Capture the media, declare the opposition illegal, bye bye democracy.
The public was sold this Nazi story about the AfD by the established powers to keep them down. Looking at what has been going on it's wild to me to call the AfD authoritarian compared the the Altparteien...
Open communication online about the problems of mass migration is what has fueled the rise of right wing parties across the west, so no they would not support suppressing communication (which is aimed primarily at stopping this very rise).
But this is not about suppressing all communication, this is ultimately about giving the ability to steer the conversation to avoid what people in power would find problematic.
I find it amusing how Germans stumble over themselves to constantly insert “extreme” or “far” in front of right wing when describing AfD.
Yet, other parties that include coalitions of literal communists, antivax hippies and people who want to bring Europe back to the Stone Age using dictator-like authoritarianism in the name of saving “the environment” are not labeled extreme left.
Many German political parties have extremist elements in them. Why they are okay with calling out the far right but not okay calling out the far left I will never understand.
I think the hypocrisy is pushing more people to toward alternatives.
Same in neighboring Holland, certain parties, groups, or positions can never be labelled "conservative", "right", or ... it must always be extreme. It is telling and very tiresome.
In the case of Germany I guess I can understand due to…uh…history. I’m sure the eastern bloc countries are more trigger happy to label people “far” left when they see it due to their history of the opposite.
But it seems to be a Europe-wide phenomenon in traditional media outlets. Nobody calls out the far left properly, and the bias is just oozing out from the pages of all European news media.
The backlash is just waiting to happen. It’s so obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking. And it will probably just lead to more irrational policies but from the opposite side.
> Maybe they've learned something from history and they're not doing the AfD a service before they grab onto more power?
The lesson from history is to keep the autocrats from grabbing power. Trying to contrain them with laws ex ante hasn't worked since like Cicero. I'm not sure Berlin opposing Chat Control fits into their domestic anti-authoritarian arc.
> Trying to contrain them with laws ex ante hasn't worked since like Cicero
This isn't so much about making Chat Control illegal (thereby containing or limiting future authoritarians) as it is not setting up the infrastructure for them to wield as soon as they win an election.
I'd argue the current stance of being opposed to Chat Control is more like "Don't collect religious affiliation on the census" - meaning we can both agree with your comment I partially quoted, while also recognizing that Berlin's public oppostion can be meaningful.
Yeah, no. Ressilient state structure is there to slow them down long enough for the popular support to throw their weight behind something else.
If you have an absolutist monarchist state that is flourishing because its past 3 kings were good people that cared about the people and the country, a potentially bad leader that would take that over could use that power to cement their position indefinitely.
Meanwhile in countries with separation of powers, term limits and checks and balances, gaining absolute power and staying there is a higher difficulty level, requires for more things to align, and most importantly: takes much longer to pull off.
The point isn't to make it impossible for bad governments to yield power. The point is to add checks to that power that make it useless in the hands of a bad actor that doesn't outright use violent force.
For example a good stage might see use in keeping good data on which citizens are in which political movements, but whenever you collect and maintain such data on behalf of your citizens you should also consider how a bad power could abuse such data. Thst is literally the bare minimum when it comes to acting responsibly.
The reaction is very weak, though. Chat Control is an act of terrorism and it should have triggered criminal investigation why this has gone this far.
Before you downvote:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance.
Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
You can argue legality if you like, but the substance matches the textbook definition.
I actually upvoted this. It's a well-argued comment, but I'm not convinced.
My sticking point is the word "terrorism" itself. Words are defined by how we collectively use and understand them, and the common understanding of terrorism involves bombs and bullets, not software and surveillance.
I get your logic, however. You're breaking down the definition into intimidation for political ends, and you're not wrong that coercive control is a form of violence. But the leap to calling it "terrorism" just doesn't work for me. It feels like you've reverse-engineered a justification for a word that, on its face, is hyperbolic in this context. It's an authoritarian nightmare, for sure, but it isn't terrorism.
Sorry, but that's talk like that that cheapen the meaning of terrorism. Once you expand it to "targeting civilian or civilian infrastructure", already it's cheapened.
I agree with the expansion of meaning, but that mean nazi resistance was terrorism. Ukraine counterstrike on the crimea bridge/russian raffineries is terrorism. I do think it is, but now i do need to qualify terrorism before using the word.
If we expand to all kind of violence, not only physical, well any new policing laws is terrorism. Laws that increase poverty are terrorism, as poverty is an economic violence exerced by the society on its most frail. Taxation is violence too. I will need to add qualifiers each time i use terrorism, and that cheapen the meaning.
[edit] my la setnence cheapened my argument and could start a new side debate that doesn't interest me, i'm removing it.
This is strange, because not long ago it was Germany (!!) that pushed heavily for mass-sniffing of people. I don't trust this. People should watch very, very carefully what Germany is actually doing next. I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking.
There is considerable opposition in Germany against these things. It’s true that some political circles keep pushing for it, but there is also a strong constitutional and civil basis against it. It’s exceedingly unlikely to happen that “nobody is looking”. The biggest risk is the far right coming into power.
No, they position themselves against it, because they have a narrative similar to the (former) “deep state” narrative in the US, but you can be assured that they will reverse course as soon as they can afford it.
Other European countries like Switzerland, also banned full face veils(burqas) in public. Try entering a bank, city hall, school, etc with a balaclava, ski mask or motorcycle helmet see how that goes.
Allowing the surveillance of minors if they show signs of radicalization? This to me makes sense under existing child protection laws. If kids are being raised in environments that are harmful to themselves and society, should we just sit by and let them get permanently wrecked till they reach adulthood, over a technicality? The earlier you can catch the issues the better for everyone and the higher the chance you can rescue the child. Existing child protection laws in Germany already allow the state a lot of power to take children away from parents if they're seen as unfit.
Controlling how people dress sounds pretty authoritarian to me. The fact that it's currently not acceptable to enter a bank with a covered face would indicate a law banning it in all public locations is not needed.
Taking rights away from people labelled as terrorists is a pretty standard way for governments to control viewpoints. It gives them the power to add any group they don't like to a list, and deport/imprison them with minimal judicial process.
I don't know enough about surveillance of minors to comment on that one.
>Controlling how people dress sounds pretty authoritarian to me
You're making it sound like under these rules, the government can force you to wear GAP jeans instead of Levi Strauss, when in reality the government has always enforced laws on public attire in public to preserve decency and security.
Otherwise it would be tyrannical since I'm not allowed to go naked in public or wearing the loincloths and Tribal Penis Gourd of my ancestors near schools.
Similarly, burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that, or there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms, or so much more nefarious cases.
Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
You're throwing a bunch of straw man arguments out, which makes it a lot of work to actually respond to this whole post.
Rights are always on a spectrum with a large amount of grey area.
> burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that
This is silly. Everyone wears coats in the winter.
> there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms
Is this actually a concern? AFAICT this isn't happening, it's just something that could theoretically happen, which doesn't make it a reason to decrease people rights. That would be another standard tactic for pushing authoritarian laws.
> Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
This seems valid, but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people. It hasn't gone well historically.
To play devil's advocate, isn't it illegal wear a swastika in Germany? How is wearing a burqa, a symbol of female oppression any different?
Freedom of religion only goes so far, because the culture of the host country takes precedence. To take it to the extreme, if there were a religion where part of standard practice involved assaulting women and children, we would obviously limit those practices.
The ban on swastikas in Germany is an authoritarian law, it's just one which is popular enough there that there isn't enough support to repeal it despite it being an unambiguous constraint on speech.
Non-consensual violence is prohibited because it directly harms other people. Face coverings don't directly harm anyone and laws that exist only for the government's convenience are authoritarian laws. There are ways to investigate bank robberies even if the robbers are wearing masks and in fact a law against masks is fairly ridiculous because anyone willing to break the law against robbing banks would be willing to break a law against wearing a face covering, so such laws only afflict innocent people.
>The ban on swastikas in Germany is an authoritarian law,
Withy this logic, all laws authoritarian then, like speeding laws, theft laws, and anything else that prevents you from doing what you want to do becomes authoritarian.
> Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists, this is really dangerous. If the government can classify any organisation as terrorists, and then remove citizenship from any members of that organisation, that is horrifying.
So yes, I very, very, strongly disagree with this measure, for very good reasons. How could anyone with any common sense support it?
>Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists
If your current laws allow for such oppressive abuse on the population without due process, then these new laws won't make things any worse for the people and you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away form registered ISIS members is the biggest problem.
Authoritarian is often used as a pejorative strawman rather than as any particularly coherent concern. For instance Italy's Meloni was framed by the media, and people who still believe it, as being the next Mussolini, if not Hitler. In reality? Her time as leader has been largely inconsequential and relatively popular, especially contrasted against the leadership in places like Germany and France.
In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.
Globalist views didn't lead to positive results? Until very recent no one was complaining: everything was going up and everyone got better. Now it goed a little less and the underbelly starts whining. And of course people do believe misinformation. People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade and now 'only' got inflafion correction whining its the globalist issue because some guy on tiktok explained it so well. Italy (or me personally for that matter) would be have been absolutely screwed without the EU and globalism, but keep listening to propaganda while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.
So then would you want to live next to an ISIS member? Or you want other people to live next to an ISIS members.
Calling the people you disagree with as "authoritarians", "-phobes", "racist", "nazis" and all kinds of slurs, without any arguments, doesn't work in your favor or help the conversation in any way, on the contrary.
Agreeing with common sense takes doesn't make one "authoritarians".
Learn to do critical thinking and augmenting, instead of heard mentality parroting oppressive slurs against people you disagree with, because you convicted yourself (or propaganda has) that you're on the right side of history, and everyone else with contrary viewpoints is evil reincarnate that needs to be crushed or silenced.
I find it peculiar that you types are always concerned with the civil liberties of offenders and foreigners, but never of the civil liberties of citizens or victims. It’s just basic, text book abusive behavior.
Ring wing conservatives avidly throw our freedoms under the bus when convenient. Their electoral base is also very susceptible to thinkofyoungsebastian narratives.
Extreme collectivism affects both extreme, that is the concept that people are nothing but sacrificial lambs for the religion, the country, or the revolution.
> I'm not familiar with the far right in Germany. Why should we be assured that they will reverse course as soon as they can afford it?
In addition to the authoritarian aspect pointed out by a sibling comment, the far-right generally consider the ends to justify the means because of their sense of righteousness. They will compromise their values to get what they want (control over others). Just look at the hypocrisy of the free-speech absolutists on twitter who have no complaints over Lonnie shutting down Leftist accounts.
Because, similar to the US, they have authoritarian tendencies - strong nationalism and anti-immigration. How are you going to round up the bad people if you don't have surveillance everywhere?
Here is an interesting review of how the two are historically strongly correlated[1].
Their conclusion is that "[...] ethnic and elitist forms of
nationalism, which combine to forge exclusive nationalism,
help to perpetuate autocratic regimes by continually legitimating minority exclusions [...]"
Right-wing nationalism as we're currently experiencing it is exclusive. It broadly advocates for restoring revised historical cultural narratives of a particular ethnic group, for immigration restriction and immigrant removal, for further minority culture erasure, and so on.
Well the Axis powers from World War II are the most obvious demonstrations of nationalism begetting authoritarianism. Germany, Italy, and Japan were nationalist in the extreme. And Italy from that time is such a clear example that it's basically the canonical example used to teach how fascism emerges.
Contemporary examples include the Philippines, Hungary, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and arguably Russia, Turkey and India. Modi is a Hindu nationalist. The United States unfortunately is shaping up to count as an example as well.
Extreme forms of nationalism tend to have a narrative of grievance, a desire to restore a once a great national identity, and a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens, and enemies without and within, against whom authoritarians powers must be mobilized.
So there's a conceptual basis, in terms of setting the stage for rationalizing authoritarianism, as well as abundant historical examples demonstrating the marriage of nationalism and authoritarianism in action. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but I would say there's an extremely strong and familiar historical canon to those who study the topic.
But that would only be something nationalism signaled if the converse weren’t also true — eg, totalitarian states like the USSR, CCP, etc.
Those also had:
- grievance narratives;
- a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens and enemies; and,
- use the above to justify authoritarian powers.
You haven’t shown that nationalism played a particular part in that cycle; just that it also happened in nationalist states. Almost like the problem is those factors, rather than nationalism.
The USSR absolutely used a nationalist view in their propaganda [0]
As did the CCP [1]:
> Ideals and convictions are the spiritual banners for the united struggle of a country, nation and party, wavering ideals and convictions are the most harmful form of wavering.
Do you know the history of nationalism in Europe, and Germany in particular? Hint: it’s the “Na” part of “Nazi.”
You are getting downvoted because this pretty basic stuff. Either you’re part of today’s lucky 10k, or your post reads very much like far-right Gish galloping.
I don't know. It seems like from what you saying that you and honestly an enormous amount of people need to actually learn about 20th century European history and WWII. People are throwing around these terms of NAZI and Gestapo and all of this and I think they have no idea what they mean. The left is not against authoritarian. The left does not even want to really eliminate the police. They just want to be the ones to decide who are the thought-criminals and what to do with them. Also, that is not what Gish galloping. I don't know what is happening here.
Authoritarian? You're saying this because of immigration; this comes from a position that is basically open borders. It is an interesting double standard. The people that hold this position would not consider non-Western countries that don't want to have open borders or have dramatic demographic shifts in their population and culture to be "authoritarian." This whole notion of "rounding up the bad people" is just infantile leftist stuff. How do you have a sovereign country if you are not able to have a policy that prevents unfettered 'immigration' or unable to deport those that immigrated contrary to law?
The whole concept of a country as a related group of people from one ethnicity or historical origin is relatively recent.
Feudalism did not have this concept; a country was the land belonging to a king (or equivalent), mediated through a set of nobles. There was no concept of illegal or legal immigration; the population of a country were the people who worked for, or were owned by, the nobles ruling that country. There were land rights granted to peasants who had historically lived in that place, but these could and were often overruled by nobles.
European nobility had no such idea of ethnicity or national grouping; the English monarchy is a German family, and most of European nobility were related to each other much more closely than to the citizens of their country.
Early post-monarchy states didn't have this concept. The English Civil War and the French Revolution didn't create states that had a defined concept of the citizen as a member of any ethnic grouping. Again, there's no mention of immigration in any of the documents from this period. It just wasn't a concept they thought about.
The whole concept that a nation-state is a formalisation of a historical grouping of ethnically related people is a very recent one, only a couple of hundred years old.
So to answer your question: It is very easy to have a sovereign country without a policy that prevents unfettered immigration; you just don't care about your population being ethnically diverse. Your citizens are the people who live in your country, and have undergone whatever ceremony and formality you decide makes them citizens.
This is, after all, how America historically did this; if you arrived in America and pledged allegiance, you became a citizen of America.
Because it’s just manipulative and abusive, self harming and self destructive narcissistic psychopathic people calling things that thwart their suicidal mindset as “far right”. If you don’t want to LoL yourself, you must be far-right. If you don’t feel safe in your own community because of foreigners that have no right to be there, then you must be a racist.
It’s an odd phenomenon called a mass formation in large populations, when groups of people get fixated or obsessed with a certain concept or even a thing that the group ourself becomes self-reinforcing; usually until a point of exhaustion is reached or self-destruction. It can also be effectively injected into a culture as it was in Germany’s case after the war through endless and limitless collective and hereditary blame abuse to the point that Germans generally do not have self-respect, and if they show even a slight bit of self-respect they are branded far right, as of that means anything being the subconscious conditioning people have been subjected to.
It’s kind of sad and unfortunate and humanity should never have allowed the collective torture, abuse, and punishment of Germans even to this day 80 years later. It’s a sick and depraved thing only the most devious and evil people would condone, let alone perpetrate.
> No, they position themselves against it, because they have a narrative similar to the (former) “deep state” narrative in the US, but you can be assured that they will reverse course as soon as they can afford it.
We seem to have a general problem with people not understanding that democracies have regular elections and the other party is going to get back in at some point. So then whenever one party is in power, instead of thinking ahead by five minutes and realizing that adding new constraints on the government and adding rather than eroding checks and balances will help you the next time the other team gets in, everybody thinks of them as an impediment to doing whatever they want immediately.
And then like clockwork they get butthurt when they checks they eroded or failed to put into place aren't there after the next election, as if they had nothing to do with it.
1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).
2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).
Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).
Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians, which is why politicians are very active suing random supporters of their opponents, because that is an effective way to police speech, open specifically to politicians.
I do think a lot of people care, but censorship in Germany does a lot to protect the people who could change the law. That law obviously needs to be abolished, politicians are uniquely unworthy of protection when it comes to speech.
If you look at the concrete laws, they are less spectacular.
For example, the concept of privacy protecting against media coverage is actually weaker for politicians (when in official duty) than for ordinary citizens (Allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht).
And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
>If you look at the concrete laws, they are less spectacular.
And if you look at how these laws are used by politicians they look quite spectacular.
>And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
The Wikipedia article and how the law was applied article disagrees.
Do not forget that this applies to insults. E.g. calling a politician "dumb" is enough to get sued. These laws create a way for politicians specifically to prosecute people criticizing them. This isn't a hypothetical, it is how the law is actually used.
> This isn't a hypothetical, it is how the law is actually used.
You make it sound like it happens all the time and everyone is used to it. I know of once case (Pimmel-Andy), and that led to a shitstorm, including part of the police operation being declared unlawful after the fact.
A good friend of mine was recently sentenced to prison for publicly using this kind of phrase during a protest for climate justice. When Germany's equivalent of the Supreme Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, learned of this case, the court immediately ordered their release and declared the original verdict void: According to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, (in the specific situation at hand) this phrase is more a value judgment and less a factual claim.
Together with a fellow activist, who also served as informal legal counsel, they gave a talk on this case at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5RmTOGucZo
>Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians,
As Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, the idea that you should be able to slander anyone in power is a nice underdog philosophy (particularly popular in the US, where the underdog is always right) but what it gets you is a post-truth environment in which reputation means nothing.
And as a German what a lot of people don't get, we're very much an honour based society, not an English or French liberal society. People in power aren't suspicious just because they have power, the crank is not correct just because he's the little guy. I think Lee Kuan Yew was largely correct if one looks at Anglosphere media and politics, where truth and reputation have entirely been replaced by conspiracy and tantrums. Far from the wisdom of the crowds being some truth finding mechanism you just enable the most charismatic nutjob.
>And as a German what a lot of people don't get, we're very much an honour based society
We aren't. We are a totally Americanized failed state governed by mentally ill losers who continue to destroy this country in every possible way imaginable.
The German society which was the basis for this law does not exist anymore. Politicians are all complete clueless losers who do not deserve an ounce of respect.
> I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking.
That's the problem with these proposed laws.
We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again. The nations that want this mass spying only have to win once.
We need a way to permanently stop these proposals once defeated the first time so that they cannot just continue to try over and over again until it passes.
No you don't, that's not how laws work, if you want society to look the way you want you need to actively work for it, you can't delegate that process to a law. It's not how participation in a free society works
Permanently stopping those proposals wouldn't necessarily eliminate illegal, back-door mass government surveillance, nor would it eliminate private sector mass surveillance (think social media) which then gets accessed by the government (whether legally or not).
Fighting corruption only works when enough people fight it at enough levels, and continue to fight it. There is no getting around the fact that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
> We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again.
We do have a way to reinforce our position, though!
We can design and consume technology that makes this hard.
We can stop working for companies that build centralized platforms for messaging.
We can teach our neighbors how important rights to privacy and speech are in language that they understand.
There can be enough friction that this becomes harder for politicians. Remember the Reddit Sopa and Pipa protests? - that was pretty epic! I don't think Reddit will help us in its current state, but we can absolutely mount those defenses on Wikipedia, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
And we should continue to move off of platforms that don't align with our freedoms. And build our platforms in a way that encourages "normies" to join.
Yes to all of the above! I just want to whine a bit that every time I try to educate anybody about this, I am promised a tin foil hat in return (even from Software Engineers!).
The tinfoil hat treatment is due to the fact that these days everything that fits the mould of a conspiracy theory is dismissed simply for fitting the mould of a conspiracy theory. In the same time as this cultural headspace was being cultivated in the US:
A billionaire pedophile ran a covert sex ring with a suspected who's who of a client list who was almost barely prosecuted for "reasons™"
Social media companies caught red-handed psychologically manipulating users for various ends
Damn near everyone helping to destroy actual free speech and privacy willingly because they've been talked into it (ironic)
Governments that engage in mass surveillance so egregious if you had tried it 40 years ago there would have been an uprising. Aided by the tech community I might add.
Industries that abuse data and algorithms to manipulate pricing or commit outright fraud.
A pharma corp addicting countless americans to opioids with almost no real consequence, killing hundreds of thousands and ruining millions of families.
Several industries have poisoned the planet and its inhabitants in various long term ways for profit.
And yet if you suggest something is a conspiracy it is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Speaking of conspiracies that doesn't sound like an accident... The trick to conspiracy theories is critical thinking and not uncritical dismissal.
If I have any words of consolation: when the "conspiracy theory" turns out to be more practice than theory you get to say I told you so.
This is just lifestylist nonsense to make yourself feel better than everyone else. If you design technology to make this hard, they will hit you with a stick, and find everyone who uses your technology and hit them with a stick. If you still do it, they will hit you all with the sticks until you are dead, and also hit your family and friends with sticks. If you don't work for them, they'll find a bro who will. Teaching your neighbors just makes them another potential victim, and they will report you or curse you as they die with you. Moving off platforms when there are no alternatives just means you won't be able to bank, or file your taxes. And if you fail to file your taxes, they will hit you with a stick.
The cage is real, it's not a state of mind. It's not something that can be recycled out of. You'll know when you're really doing something when you can give people a time and a place to show up; when that showing up isn't to stand in the street and socialize with each other, burn down a Starbucks, or spit in the face of a cop who makes less than you do; and when most of you end up dead or in prison.
I always reply like this, but some people think everybody else in the world is so weak and naïve, when they themselves aren't doing anything important and have not taken a fraction of the risks or suffered a fraction of the loss of the people they're asking to speak up. Speaking against power is an impotent magic spell. You can recognize journalists who speak against real power by their deaths.
Everybody is just aping the US black civil rights struggle, where watching the violence done in their name to nicely dressed, well-behaved people filled enough people with disgust that politicians wouldn't get a boost from continuing to support it. That was how a small minority population faced with irrational restrictions in a media-saturated society was able to barely overcome explicitly unfair laws (and go no further, we're still the underclass, we're still dying.)
The history of effective, revolutionary, positive protest by what are often majorities involved people getting out into the streets as a show of strength, not a show of weakness. It always involves converting and including portions of the army and the police forces. It involves building strong shadow governments. Not this pantomime where everybody pretends to be black, and the people who are the blackest, weakest, most undeserving of their treatment win because mommy parliament or daddy supreme court are moved enough to declare them the winner.
I can't remember where I read it, but I read that Signal's popularity was high (highest?) in Germany. Assuming I'm not misremembering or that the situation hasn't changed, it seems that Germans care enough about the issue to stake out a position.
Never trust the CDU. They were the ones pushing for the illegal data retention (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) and von der Leyen from the CDU is big on censorship and mass surveillance. They are just against it now because the country has bigger problems and the CDU has the worst approval ratings in history.
At voting is a bit late probably. You don't just trust leaders, you watch, you criticize, you communicate and sometimes you act. Political or otherwise as a matter of fact
They'll do nothing now, people don't want it, people complain, it's a bad thing politically. They'll wait for a year, people will forget, a new proposal for "Clean Chat" will appear, with effectively the same measures, they'll try to pass it quietly, maybe no one will notice, maybe there will be a terrorist attack or something similar by then, and more people will want it, and if it fails again, rinse and repeat a year after.
They only need to succeed once, we (the ones opposing the law) have to succeed every time.
Germany will not abandon chat control just like the data perseveration they're so keen on. Europe is preparing for war so they need ways to make opposition more difficult. They're just waiting for the opportune moment where the opposition to these acts won't be as organized or is distracted with something else.
What war, against who? I don't know what kind of narrative you are tying to push here but know that any attempt would immediately meet strong opposition (I've seen the graves of Verdun and I for one would do anything to actively undermine and sabotage any kind of active war effort)
Relax. NATO countries pushing for war with Russia is a far right talking point. He assumed that this line of thinking was pushed.
There are so many Poles in Germany there is no way in hell Germans would as a collective actively sabotage any defensive war efforts if Poland got invaded. I honestly don’t see it with any EU member but I don’t think there is a seizable number of Germans that don’t know somebody from Poland or with family in Poland.
Ukraine before 2014 was just a smaller Russia to us. Barely a Ukrainian community in Germany, unable to tell the language apart, unable to even read the script. Poland was never that. In modern Germany, Polish people have always been our neighbors, friends, colleagues, care takers for our kids, the sick and the old, skilled tradesmen, owners of the good restaurants in town and many more things.
Even the jokes about thieves that were so popular when I was in school stopped.
Couldn't be further from the truth. Just look at how NATO countries have tiptoed around supporting Ukraine. Every major step (artillery shells, tanks, rocket artillery, air defense systems, and fighter jets) took ages of largely pointless discussion before the decision was made. Not to mention the very weak response to Russian military intelligence terror cells that have been caught red-handed across Europe in recent years while they were preparing attacks like smuggling incendiary devices onto DHL cargo airplanes. If this isn't an unbelievably unconfrontational reaction to Russia's actions, then what is?
Jens Spahn, the speaker in the video OP shared, is not a member of the government but a leading member of the parliament and of one of the ruling parties. A tiny but important difference.
I think ‘a leading member’ is underselling it a little. He is the “Fraktionsvorsitzender”, which is comparable to the majority leader in the US Senate.
Just like breathing, sleeping, and eating, you will always have to oppose tyranny. People who seek control will always try to get more. As long as ordinary people sustain strong opposition in word and deed it is sustainable, just like breathing.
Yep. And that's exactly why the EU has the structure it does.
Unfortunately the only country that ever left proceeded to shoot itself in both knees, light itself on fire and jump in a pool of gasoline. For NO reason.
It's not going to get reversed once they're able to analyze all comms automatically for wrong think and stop 'extremist groups' because something 'Nazi'. The Stati letter steamers could only dream of such a system.
Freedom will not ever be finally settled in this life. Laws can be changed, constitutions amended, and of course the law is only as good as willingness to enforce it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as nice as it would be if that wasn't so.
Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that.
It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allowed to advocate for the murder/rape/extermination of other human beings because of the way they look)
I'm not sure that's relevant to Chat Control. What's at stake here is not a definition of 'acceptable communication' in public, but the possibility of all private communication being scanned.
That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.
We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.
My comment is 100% relevant to the comment I was replying to. (Sometimes I do wish people who down vote were forced to comment why they were making such erroneous decisions)
And again with the passive aggressive "downvote because you have no ability to explain your disagreement"
Edit: To anyone reading and thinking of joining in to any of the discussions, the message is clear - Facebook or Reddit level of inanity is all you will find here.
I don't think that this is really relevant to my point. My point is not that the proposed EU laws are good or bad (frankly, I don't know anything about them and I'm not in the EU so it's not my business), but that this topic can't be definitely settled for all time. No matter what resolution is reached in the EU today, in 5 years' time someone will be fighting to change it. That's just how it goes.
I expect it to become settled, just not in the way we want it.
Sure, there is the rollercoaster, ups and downs, small wins and losses going on all the time. But look at the general trends - these freedoms that we enjoyed are by and large being chipped away, it's all trending down, worldwide. It's two steps back, one step forward. Maybe CC doesn't get put in place this particular time, but they will ram it through eventually, at some point the right angle will be found to make the right people vote for it. Then the battleground will move onto something even more egregious, and so on. I'm not seeing why there would be a sudden reversal of this trend in the coming decades.
From a non-EU perspective, it seems like the EU tries to push something akin to this every couple of years. So I guess it’s settled for at least a few years…?
Chat control very likely violates at least german law, if not EU law too already. As experts as well as the ministry of justice of the previous government in germany have pointed out time and time again.
Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".
It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.
And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.
Laws can be changed, can be reinterpreted, there are no absolutes. What matters is who is in power, and how powers are kept in check. There is no finality to any of that. It’s a constant process of keeping things up, or failing to keep things up.
This is actually one of my own fears for efficient organization at state level and above:
- any new technology, any new opportunity either has checks and balances or gets exploited by smart optimizers with no regards for the commons or human flourishing
- checks and balances are as you say a constant drain on public attention and resources: you need smart people doing the checking (finite resource), and receptive eyeballs (finite also)
- it is thus an optimization problem. attack_surface - check_capacity = societal_explots
I worry that the check_capacity term is constrained, but that the attack_surface keeps aexpanding with new technologies. At some point, we started playing whack a mole, frantically jumping from one check to another, and we're holding the fray stochastically. but at some point it's going to become extremely adversarial.
It's difficult to entrench things. In the UK they have often said "one Parliament can't bind another Parliament", and in the U.S. it's also sometimes said "one Congress can't bind another Congress".
The most obvious mechanism is a constitutional amendment, but in the U.S. the only amendment to be drafted and adopted in modern times is the 26th amendment (1971), 54 years ago. (The 27th amendment had a weird status where it was belatedly adopted with a 200-year delay.) It's hard to imagine many constitutional amendments actually being passed now because it's been challenging to find consensus on many things within U.S. politics lately.
I don't know that the EU at a supranational level has any mechanism at all to ban future EU directives. Maybe they could decide to remove something from the list of areas of competence of the EU? But Chat Control is under the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" and I can't imagine the EU deciding that that should be abandoned as an area of Union competence.
Edit: The international human rights treaties, at least in regulating law enforcement, have tended not to follow the idea that some kind of regulation or law enforcement power is completely off-limits, but just that they need procedural safeguards -- especially for surveillance and investigatory powers. In this case, Chat Control opponents (including me) would like it to be completely off-limits, but the human rights instruments arguments might more naturally go into "did they create enough surrounding rules and mechanisms about how it's used and how it's regulated?" rather than "can we just say governments just can't make this rule?".
Given that freedom can mean different things even to the same society at different times and in different circumstances, such a law would essentially have to be sentient.
I mean, the right to privacy is already enshrined in the EU's human rights. The courts would likely strike Chat Control down if it were to pass. But I wish there was a way to prevent our politicians from even trying this shit.
Other things are enshrined in the EU human rights as well, many of them ultimately contradicting each other if you follow them to their logical conclusion.
It's the task of parliaments, governments, and courts to reevaluate and resolve all these contradictions over and over again. It's tedious and takes a lot of resources, but that's the price for democracy.
> I mean, the right to privacy is already enshrined in the EU's human rights.
The constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) famously guarantees freedom of expression as a fundamental right for the people. That hasn't stopped the government from trampling all over freedom of expression, though. The EU is of course nowhere near North Korea in terms of what is considered acceptable, but don't ever trust that the words in the constitution will be enough to keep the government from doing something.
Just imagine some other people will carry the burden and mentally distance yourself from it to relax from it wearing you out. You can take up the burden again later once you've recovered and others are worn out
The German social perspective on privacy has been strongly for the individual over the state for a long time. Chat Control goes too far, and Germany should be a loud voice in the heavy moderation of state surveillance powers.
Any software mandated by the government should be required to be open source to diminish the incentives for big spyware firms lobbying for their product.
"Mit der CDU/CSU wird es keine anlasslose Chatkontrolle geben, wie sie von einigen Staaten in der EU gefordert wird."
Anlass is cause/reason here, so keine anlasslose literally translated means: not without cause/reason.
What about "reasonable causes", and the infrastructure enabling those? Be it legal/bureaucratic/technical? IMO it's already in place, mostly, and got abused many times, already.
This is just "weasel wording", changing nothing for so called "lawful interception".
If you got flagged by some algorithm somewhere, or got reported by someone behind your back, there will be Anlass!
Automagically...
Because neither the algorithms, nor the organizations handling the flagging, enabling the reporting are transparent.
They are unaccountable (to the public/affected) black boxes by design, be it for economic, organizational, or political reasons.
"anlasslose Chatkontrolle" => Chat Control without cause.
Ok, maybe these are not weasel words in this case. The CDU probably wants to present itself as a friend of the people using a popular issue that they don't really care about. My suspicion is that this is exactly why the ChatControl issue is brought up yearly. It distracts people from wars, the economy etc., there is a big discussion and finally the government graciously comes down on the side of the people. Each and every year.
Were this true, some politicians would do it for that reason. It would need to get a lot of attention to be an effective distraction, and it does not. The mainstream press barely covers the issue. Many people who would be directly harmed by it don't even know what's being considered.
Yeah, this isn't being covered at all. At least, up to its significance. Most people are computer illiterate too, so it is unlikely they would understand or care either.
It's no wonder we see the countries that oppose this as well. Makes one think.
Sweden's case is peculiar given their military opposed it. I wonder what's going on there.
the internet is already dying and social media largely sucks. the whole ass thing is going to be 100% ai driven ads, scams, astroturfing, propaganda, trolls and other fuckery sooner rather than later. just let chat control kill it, fuck it. accelerate to a cyberpunk future of local mesh networks.
It won't but luckily no government is powerful enough to govern math and therefore cryptography. Mathematics is more of a liberator than the second amendment in this respect.
Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.
If running a mesh network is illegal, does it matter that the traffic is just math? Without a network, there's no data transmission of that math. The government controls the airwaves. It doesn't matter if you're broadcasting Top40 or encrypted messages, if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.
There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.
In the hypothetical world that you've set out, where surveillance is so extreme and overreaching as to help finish off the entirety of the internet for good, there's no way it would stop at the internet. The goal isn't controlling this set of standards and protocols that defines just the internet, the goal is controlling communication and the internet is the #1 way of communicating between people at the moment.
If people all started talking through letter mail, you'd get Letter Control, they wouldn't just forget about it because it's not the internet. If the people somehow become smart and coordinated enough to move to some cryptographically-secure method of communication, your government will probably outlaw the equipment and actions associated with using it in the first place instead of trying to decrypt all communications.
The goal is control of information, and the way of doing that is to force everyone to use unsecured communication with no feasible alternatives. I wouldn't expect kid glove treatment with that, unlike speeding or minor shoplifting.
running an actively transmitting network is an easy thing for them to come and shut down. you doing any of the other things can easily be done without them knowing about it. you can be flippant about it all you want, but you don't look intelligent by doing so
More than anything, this is a good lesson in information theory. A blank sheet of paper isn't devoid of information just because it doesn't contain ink - rather, it is the context of the current situation that defines the information being conveyed. This is true in all forms of communication.
This reminds me of a story I read once about when Victor Hugo had just published Les Miserables. Just after publication, he went to his vacation home due to the controversy he was sure was going to follow the publication of the book. Wanting to know how the reception was going, he mailed his publisher a letter simply containing a question mark. The publisher responded with only an exclamation mark, and Hugo immediately understood - he had written an eternal classic.
(BTW, I read this in the book The User Illusion - a fantastic read)
you missed the reference. as a history lesson, the deCSS code was written on a t-shirt and was deemed acceptable. having the deCSS compiled as an executable was deemed not acceptable.
I got the reference. Seems like it worked out quite nicely for the government/court though, given that deCSS isn't much use printed on a t-shirt, compared to in a binary on a computer?
you can't share the compiled binary, but you can share a shirt. if you have the shirt, you can compile on your own. the t-shirt became the sharing network
That’s the thing about speech: It’s very hard for governments to physically prevent it, but attaching consequences to making use of that capability usually works just as well.
No matter what the state says, or what legislatures pass what laws, we're going to continue to live out our right to general purpose computing, including sending only what we choose to send over the wire, and encrypting content as we see fit.
I like the sentiment but it sounds very similar to Soverign Citizen nonsense. You can't just plug your ears and say that a law doesn't apply to you because you didn't consent to it.
The reasoning isn't about consent or social contracts, but about the evolutionary trajectory of humankind.
By way of example: in the United States, the 1st amendment to the constitution guarantees freedom of "the press" - it is referenced not by the right to print what one wants, but specifically in reference to the technology of the time, the printing press.
It's obvious that our evolutionary trajectory is one in which widely distributed general purpose computing is normal.
Making laws that contradict this is just childish, and at some point the adults in the room need to be willing to ignore them.
That works until the government and media successfully push the narrative to the public that anyone using encryption is supporting child molesters and terrorists.
That doesn't counter the argument. The people arguing against encryption would just liken it to the government being able to use military equipment that you, as an individual, can't have. "Free communication is a dangerous tool, only the government can be entrusted with the power it provides" and so on.
This may work on boomers but for younger people 90% of the use of a phone is for messaging and obviously you don't want anyone listening in to your private conversations especially for sexting.
People are not going to stop sending each other their boobs or penii, and while that remains the case, encrypted messaging will thrive.
-ChatControl, as it is currently defined, is not going to happen, because it's absolutely stupid and would make impossible, amongst other things, online banking
-Yet, there is a growing and legitimate demand for lawful interception of 'chat' services. I mean, "sure, your bank account got emptied, but we can't look into that because it happened via Signal" just isn't a good look
-So, something has got to give. Either 'chat' services need to become 'providers of telecoms services' and therefore implement lawful interception laws, or the malware industry will continue to flourish, or something even more stupid will happen
> -Yet, there is a growing and legitimate demand for lawful interception of 'chat' services. I mean, "sure, your bank account got emptied, but we can't look into that because it happened via Signal" just isn't a good look
Why on earth would mass intercept be necessary or even help in that?
If you got scammed by someone, then you can contact the police and hand over your message history. Why would the cops be interested in someone else's message history for this?
It's the ability to surveil traffic from/to a clearly identified party, upon a judicial order for specific reason, for a limited time.
ChatControl, on the other hand, is mass interception. I'm against it. Most people in the EU are against it. But to prevent things like ChatControl coming up over and over again, a basic tool to combat Internet crime is required.
From what I know this basic tool already exists. In the US, the government can just ask any old company for their data and they have to give it up, just like they would their mail or their physical locations. I'm assuming the rest of the West has similar tools, warrants of some kind.
The problem is nobody uses them to combat crime on the internet. They use them for stupid shit usually or stuff that involves lots and lots of money.
We're jumping the gun here. We already have a fire bomb, and we're not using it, but we're going ahead to developing the nuke. Makes no sense.
The problem we have is that was OK when someone had to actually listen in or you had to have a tape recorder connected up to every line you want to tap, or physically open individual letters.
Now we have found “lawful intercept” can easily just become mass surveillance, and not just by the people who are meant to use it but other parties too. We saw this with CALEA which was used by China (and who knows who else) for espionage and spying for years before anyone realised.
You make a system for the “good guys” and it always turns out adversary, criminal groups etc. will gain access, even if the “good guys” don’t start acting like bad guys themselves.
Technology made mass surveillance easy, so every lawful intercept becomes mass surveillance as well as vulnerable to scammers, criminals and foreign intelligence.
And we don’t have any way of making lawful intercept possible without that unfortunately.
Something does have to give: the constant demands for interception capabilities on end-to-end encrypted protocols. Those demands must be thoroughly destroyed every time they rear their head again.
It's interesting that this initiative seems to be mostly driven by influential actors in the "online safety" space that want their flawed scanning tech embedded into every device. Thorn is the most public-facing one, but if you dig into advocacy groups you'll find there's a dozen or so more, and they competed for being the technical solution to the UK online safety act too. But if it involves CSAM it's an even more perfect monopoly - only a very select group of people can train these models because the training data is literally illegal to possess.
If you needed any indication for how these pseudo-charities (usually it's a charity front and a commercial "technology partner") are not interested in the public good, SafeToNet, a company that up until last year was trying to sell a CSAM livestream detection system to tech companies to "help become compliant" ("SafeToWatch") now sells a locked down Android phone to overprotective parents that puts an overlay on screen whenever naked skin can be seen (of any kind). It's based on a phone that retails for 150 pounds - but costs almost 500 with this app preinstalled into your system partition. That's exceptionally steep for a company that up until last year was all about moral imperatives to build this tech.
I am having a legitimately hard time wrapping my head around not being able to prosecute bank fraud because signal exists. Was it impossible before when criminals would talk in person instead over a recorded telephone?
No, there is definitely abuse of lawful interception.
But, in a jurisdiction with a functioning rule of law, these abuses can be spotted and remedied.
Doing the same for mass surveillance (such as ChatControl) or state-sponsored malware is much harder.
I'm advocating against ChatControl and malware, and proposing existing lawful interception frameworks as an alternative. But, apparently it's not my day :)
There is a famous case of US Mafia meeting in rooms, or out on streets to discuss their "business activities" face to face to prevent authorities from surveilling the phone calls.
The reason we know is because authorities were able to place listening devices into the rooms that they were in, or surveil them from other buildings.
This is analogous to getting a warrant to someone’s phone. (Chat control is like putting a microphone into every room in case the government wants to listen after the fact.)
I’m still unconvinced that this make’s law enforcement’s job so hard that something has to give.
Why would the malware industry benefit from digital message privacy?
If you're the victim, just hand over the relevant chats yourself. Otherwise, just follow the money. And if the attackers are sitting in a country whose banks you can't get to cooperate, intercepting chat messages from within that country won't do you any good either.
Also, if someone has malicious intent and is part of a criminal network, the people within that network would hardly feel burdened by all digital messages on all popular apps being listened in on by the government. These people will just use their own private applications. Making one is like 30min of work or starting at $50 on fiverr.
”Follow the money”. Yes, let’s decide that no bank is to have anything to do with crypto from next year. And not do business with other banks that accepts crypto. That would help stop fraud much more effective than
Chat Control.
For the vast majority of crypto currencies tracing the transactions is trivial. And even currencies like XMR are hardly as anonymous as people think.
The challenging regulations around technically anonymous crypto currencies require you to actively make trackable arrangements with your financial service providers. VERY few people will ever do this, and therefore if anything suspicious were to occur, all you've achieved is putting yourself on the suspect list preemptively.
Sure, if you want to read the messages, but the whole point is that that's rarely necessary and the price isn't worth the minimal gain.
Of the serious criminals, the only ones you'll be catching are those with low technical knowledge (everyone else will just be using their own applications) and the Venn diagram of those with little tech knowledge and those whose digital privacy practices could deceive law enforcement resembles AA cups against a pane of glass.
Regarding Encrochat, it is no surprise that an (unintentional?) watering hole gathered up a bunch of tech-illiterate, the fallacy is that those people wouldn't have been caught if they weren't allowed to flock to a single platform for some time.
Would some people have not been caught until much later or even not at all? Sure, but if LE would do its job (and not ignoring, or even covering up, well known problem areas and organizations for years to decades), only those of low priority.
Is that little gain worth creating a tool to allow Iran or similar countries to check every families' messages if they suspect some family member might be gay?
Hard nope.
> Or just downvoting me.
Don't worry, I rarely do that and that's not just because I can't...
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that we’d really like for there to not be an omnipresent panopticon because protect the children or terrorists or, apparently, malware. If your imagination is particularly lacking on how this might be weaponized just remember that antifa is now designated as an terrorist organization in US, so you better not be a suspected member of it — as in, you best not have sent a buddy a message on signal about how those tiki torch carrying nazi larpers aren’t exactly great guys, or off to a black site you go for supporting terrorism.
If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.
OK, sorry to keep repeating myself here, but... I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl.
What I would like to see, is, say, Signal complying with lawful interception orders in the same way that any EU telecoms provider currently does.
So, provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party, for a limited time, by judicial order, for a clearly specified reason.
> pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything
This is exactly what lawful intercept laws are supposed to prevent. And yeah, of course, abuse, but under a functioning rule of law there are at least ways to remedy that, unlike with mass surveillance and/or malware...
> I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl. What I would like to see, is, say, Signal [...] provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party
Those statements simply aren't compatible.
Right now, Signal is designed by cryptography experts to provide the best privacy we know how to build: messages are only readable by you or the intended recipient. "Lawful intercept" necessarily means some additional third party is given the ability to read messages.
It doesn't matter what kind of legal framework you have around that, because you can't just build a cryptosystem where the key is "a warrant issued under due process." There has to be a system, somewhere, that has access to plaintext messages and can give law enforcement and courts access. The judges, officers, technicians, suppliers, and software involved in building and using this system are all potential vectors by which this access can be compromised or misused -- whether via software or hardware attacks, social engineering, or abuse of power.
Maybe your country has "functioning rule of law", and every single government official and all the vendors they hire are pure as snow, but what about all the rest of us living in imperfect countries? What about when a less-than-totally-law-abiding regime comes into power?
You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks.
For a real-world example of the problem you're describing, China's Salt Typhoon attacks compromised lawful intercept infrastructure in the USA to engage in espionage. A mandatory backdoor in Signal would be at risk from similar attacks.
> You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks
No -- that's an incredibly reductive summary, and the attitude you display here is, if left unchecked, exactly what will allow something equally ridiculous like ChatControl to pass eventually.
There has been plenty of previous debate when innovations like postal mail, telegraph traffic and phone calls were introduced. This debate has resulted in laws, jurisprudence, and corresponding operating procedures for law enforcement.
You may believe there are no legitimate reasons to intercept private communications, but the actual laws of the country you live in right now say otherwise, I guarantee you. You may not like that, and/or not believe in the rule of law anymore anyway, but I can't help you with that.
What I can hopefully convince you of, is that there needs to be some way to bring modern technology in line with existing laws, while avoiding "9/11"-style breakdowns of civil rights.
We can draw analogy between any two things. An encrypted chat is not a letter in the mail or a call on the telephone. It is an entirely new thing. Backdooring such chats is not "bringing technology in line with existing laws" it is, very clearly, passing new laws, and creating new invasions of privacy. It must be justified anew. The justification for wiretapping was not that there was no way to fight crime without it. Otherwise, when the criminals became wise to it, and began to hold their conversations offline, there would have been a new law, requiring that all rooms be fitted with microphones that the police could tap into as necessary. No such law was passed. Instead, the justification for wiretapping was simply that, once police had identified some transmission as relating to the committing of a crime, they could obtain a warrant, and then tap into the communication. The physical capacity without any effort by uninvolved individuals was the entire justification. That capacity does not exist with encrypted chats. The analogy is therefore much closer to the "mandated microphones" described above. Everyone is being required to take action to reduce their own privacy, regardless of whether they are subject to a warrant.
What is most striking about our "mandated microphone" analogy is the utter futility of it. Criminals have no issue breaking the law, and hence have no issue outfitting a room with no microphones in which to carry out their dealings. The same is true of any law targeting encrypted chats.
I would rather online banking be impossible, or only available to those that take training and sign waivers, than have all my communications surveiled.
OK, you be you, But please note that I did not list "online banking becoming impossible" as a likely outcome. Merely malware continuing to be state-sponsored, or certain communications to be surveilled. Not all of yours, unless you draw an especially vinidicative judge (and yes, I'm assuming a functioning rule of law here -- if that's gone, what's left?)
> But please note that I did not list "online banking becoming impossible" as a likely outcome.
No, but it should be a likely and maybe even desired outcome, especially if a justification for surveillance is the prevention of online banking fraud among other crimes.
> Merely malware continuing to be state-sponsored, or certain communications to be surveilled.
Norms and mores change over time, so the only conclusion is that "certain communications" will become "all communications" at some point in the future. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, but laws tend to be more constant, and lawful interception laws are, 100% guaranteed, a thing, right now, in the country where you live.
They apply to telegrams, postal mail, telephone conversations, and a whole bunch of other things nobody really does anymore. They don't really apply to the things people do tend to do these days.
ChatControl is an incompetent attempt to remediate the lapses in law enforcement that this has caused. I strongly oppose it. But I also strongly oppose the idea that the Internet should be off limits for any kind of law enforcement, unless it is through dubious mechanisms like state-sponsored malware.
Your "slippery slope" argument is much more compelling in the absense of extended lawful interception than in the situation where Signal messages would somehow be equated to postcards or SMS messages...
And yet lawful intercept laws cannot force you to decrypt the OTP-encrypted physical letter you sent to your friend. (Except in authoritarian shitholes like the UK.) Same principles would seem to apply here.
A hot take: removing protections guaranteed by constitution should require modification of the constitution. There is already a "temporary" European regulation [1] that is in violation of the German constitution [2]. CSAR would be a further erosion of the legal foundation. Americans were happy when their federal laws that restrict marijuana use were simply ignored by executive fiat without proper processes, well, they aren't so happy now to see that other laws can be freely ignored too.
If people speak up and say "take away our rights" at a referendum, let that be their decision, not a political backroom deal.
> A hot take: removing protections guaranteed by constitution
Lawful intercept laws exist in most, if not all, EU countries.
It's just that super-national overlay services like Signal don't entirely fall within the framework of those.
So, there is now a choice: expand interception powers indefinitely (a.k.a. ChatControl, which, to make things crystal-clear, I'm 100% against), or bring new services into the fold of existing legislation.
No existing legislation requires proactive interception of mail, physical or electronic. Bringing new services into the fold of existing legislation would mean forbidding any proactive scanning by civilians and forbidding such scanning by authorities without a warrant or court order.
> proactive interception of mail, physical or electronic
Lawful interception is not proactive: it requires a judicial order to collect plaintext communications from/to specifically identified individuals (resident in the country demanding the interception), for a limited time and for a specific purpose.
ChatControl, which I strongly argue AGAINST would sort-of be what you describe. But: I. Am. Arguing. AGAINST. That.
A piece of open source software running on Alice's computer exchanges keys with a piece of open source software running on Bob's computer. Later Alice and Bob exchange messages encrypted with those keys through Charlie's server.
Eve, a police officer has evidence that Alice and Bob are messaging each other about crimes and obtains a warrant to require Charlie to intercept their communication. Charlie has no ability to do so because it is encrypted with keys known only by Alice and Bob.
If you want a different result, someone has to proactively change part of this process. Which part should change?
One option is to mandate that any encrypted messaging software also give a key to the government or the government's designee, but someone using open source software can modify it so that it doesn't do that, which would be hard or impossible to detect without a forensic search of their device.
Another option is to mandate that a service provider like Charlie's only deliver messages after verifying that it can decrypt them. This, too is hard to enforce because users can layer additional encryption on top of the existing protocol. Signal's predecessor TextSecure did that over SMS.
Both of those options introduce a serious security vulnerability if the mechanism for accessing the mandatory escrowed keys were ever compromised. Would you like to suggest another mechanism?
About the only thing I can think of is to mandate the use of (flawed) AI to identify messages that seem nonsensical and refuse to pass them, and then to play a game of Chinese-style DPI whack-a-mole in an attempt to suppress open alternatives.
If you have the ability to run custom software—even if it’s a bash script—you can develop secure alternatives. And even if you somehow restrict open source messaging, I can just use good old pen-and-paper OTP to encrypt the plaintext before typing it in, or copy/paste some other text pre-encrypted in another program. But even then, all this will do is kick off a steganographic arms race. AI generated text where the first letter of each word is the cyphertext may be nearly impossible to identify, especially at scale.
If anything like this were to pass, my first task would be making a gamified, user-friendly frontend for this kind of thing.
why do you think they want relation trust. unless you mean trusting that if you go against the man, the man will come for you. maybe it would be better for s/trust/fear/
Malware has existed nearly since the dawn of computing. Making the world even less secure under the guise of combating w/e today's latest bogeyman is is not gonna solve that. And having secure private communications is not gonna make it worse.
That anyone thinks this blatantly obvious attack on free speech is actually going to be used only for law enforcement is wild to me.
> You want the police to regularily intercept and check your signal chats for fraud
No, that's not how lawful intercept laws work.
I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity.
ChatControl is not that, and it's one of the reasons it's a nonstarter.
"I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity."
They already have that in most (?) jurisdictions by now.
With a warrant, they can install a virus on the device that will then do targeted surveillance.
ChatControl is bad, because it is blanket surveillance of everyone without warrant.
But to further clarify: I would like existing lawful interception laws to be extended to services like Signal.
Not in the sense that any EU country should be able to break Signal crypto (as ChatControl proposes, and which I think is an utterly ill-advised idea), but that competent law enforcement agencies should be able to demand unencrypted Signal communications from/to an identified EU party, for a limited time and purpose, upon a (reviewable) judicial order.
Most, if not all, EU countries currently have similar laws applying to telegrams, snail mail, email, telephony and whatnot. If you don't like those either, that's fine, but that's the status quo, and I would like to see that extended to services like Signal, as opposed to incompetently dumb measures like ChatControl...
Ok, so you want to break Encryption by law demand.
Because this is what this means. Or how exactly would it work, technically?
Signal does not know the private key of the 2 parties. Signal would have to inject a infected update into the client .. which is also malware. I rather have just those on target devices with a warrant, instead of breaking all encryption.
Or would you go extreme and outlaw decentraliced encrypted communication alltogether?
> law enforcement of which countries, under which sets of laws?
We're taking about ChatControl here, so law enforcement of EU countries, under their respective laws, into which EU law should have been incorporated
> Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws
Same answer as "should Thailand be granted arrest rights to enforce <whatever>": they submit a legal assistance request to the country where the alleged crime occurred.
In the case of a lawful interception request for "lease[sic] majeste" reasons, I'm pretty sure this would be immediately rejected.
But, if not, the EU subject of such interception would have lots and lots of avenues to get redress.
Again, and I'm getting sort of tired from repeating myself: "lawful interception" does not mean "indiscriminate surveillance at the whim of whomever" -- it is a well-defined concept that has been used to determine which telegrams and mail pieces to open and which telephone calls to record for ages now. Your country absolutely does it, as we speak, no matter where you live. It's just that modern technology has far outpaced the scope of this legislation, and things like ChatControl are (incompetent) responses to that.
ChatControl is not a good idea, and has very little chance of becoming reality. But to stop dumb proposals like this from coming up over and over again, something has got to give.
I’ll go a step further: if EU sovereigns claim the right to “lawfully intercept” their citizens' private communications, why shouldn’t every state enjoy the same privilege? Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uganda will be exemplary custodians of such technology. You have nothing to fear, citizen: their democratic constitutions and impeccable legal codes will protect you.
Fail to see that it would even work. If the scam has happened how would lawful interception afterwards help? The criminal can just use burner accounts and the chat log exist on the scammed persons device.
Ausgerechnet Spahn. Manchmal glaubt man seinen Augen und Ohren nicht. Wir müssen Wachsam bleiben. Mit dem Argument das es böse Menschen gibt, wurde schon viel böses getan. Massenüberwachung zerstört jede Gesellschaft. Deutschland hat mehrfach darunter gelitten. Und die Versuche Massenüberwachung einzuführen wiederholen sich.
The public was sold this Nazi story about the AfD by the established powers to keep them down. Looking at what has been going on it's wild to me to call the AfD authoritarian compared the the Altparteien...
Yet, other parties that include coalitions of literal communists, antivax hippies and people who want to bring Europe back to the Stone Age using dictator-like authoritarianism in the name of saving “the environment” are not labeled extreme left.
Many German political parties have extremist elements in them. Why they are okay with calling out the far right but not okay calling out the far left I will never understand.
I think the hypocrisy is pushing more people to toward alternatives.
But it seems to be a Europe-wide phenomenon in traditional media outlets. Nobody calls out the far left properly, and the bias is just oozing out from the pages of all European news media.
The backlash is just waiting to happen. It’s so obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking. And it will probably just lead to more irrational policies but from the opposite side.
But I guess you can’t guard against something you either do not have the capacity to or do not wish to see.
Last time I checked we had free votes and I could say that I hate Merz.
Or maybe this course of action is just more convenient at this time?
Probably the latter.
The lesson from history is to keep the autocrats from grabbing power. Trying to contrain them with laws ex ante hasn't worked since like Cicero. I'm not sure Berlin opposing Chat Control fits into their domestic anti-authoritarian arc.
This isn't so much about making Chat Control illegal (thereby containing or limiting future authoritarians) as it is not setting up the infrastructure for them to wield as soon as they win an election.
I'd argue the current stance of being opposed to Chat Control is more like "Don't collect religious affiliation on the census" - meaning we can both agree with your comment I partially quoted, while also recognizing that Berlin's public oppostion can be meaningful.
Fair enough, you’re right. If they’re incompetent authoritarians (or just non-authoritarian right-wingers), this could mitigate the damage.
read both of your comments and was wondering what happens if both of you were correct.
If you have an absolutist monarchist state that is flourishing because its past 3 kings were good people that cared about the people and the country, a potentially bad leader that would take that over could use that power to cement their position indefinitely.
Meanwhile in countries with separation of powers, term limits and checks and balances, gaining absolute power and staying there is a higher difficulty level, requires for more things to align, and most importantly: takes much longer to pull off.
The point isn't to make it impossible for bad governments to yield power. The point is to add checks to that power that make it useless in the hands of a bad actor that doesn't outright use violent force.
For example a good stage might see use in keeping good data on which citizens are in which political movements, but whenever you collect and maintain such data on behalf of your citizens you should also consider how a bad power could abuse such data. Thst is literally the bare minimum when it comes to acting responsibly.
Before you downvote:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
You can argue legality if you like, but the substance matches the textbook definition.
These people should be arrested.
My sticking point is the word "terrorism" itself. Words are defined by how we collectively use and understand them, and the common understanding of terrorism involves bombs and bullets, not software and surveillance.
I get your logic, however. You're breaking down the definition into intimidation for political ends, and you're not wrong that coercive control is a form of violence. But the leap to calling it "terrorism" just doesn't work for me. It feels like you've reverse-engineered a justification for a word that, on its face, is hyperbolic in this context. It's an authoritarian nightmare, for sure, but it isn't terrorism.
But we must stop somewhere, else we end up like the people arguing that the most democratic country in the middle east is somehow the apartheid one.
It only works if one looks away from the fact that there are so many more things that need to be declared terrorism first.
And it directly misleads people.
I agree with the expansion of meaning, but that mean nazi resistance was terrorism. Ukraine counterstrike on the crimea bridge/russian raffineries is terrorism. I do think it is, but now i do need to qualify terrorism before using the word.
If we expand to all kind of violence, not only physical, well any new policing laws is terrorism. Laws that increase poverty are terrorism, as poverty is an economic violence exerced by the society on its most frail. Taxation is violence too. I will need to add qualifiers each time i use terrorism, and that cheapen the meaning.
[edit] my la setnence cheapened my argument and could start a new side debate that doesn't interest me, i'm removing it.
https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2021/kw02-de-p...
https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2018/kw08-de-v...
https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/304/1930412.pdf
https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/111/1911127.pdf
>https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2018/kw08-de-v...
Other European countries like Switzerland, also banned full face veils(burqas) in public. Try entering a bank, city hall, school, etc with a balaclava, ski mask or motorcycle helmet see how that goes.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/304/1930412.pdf
Allowing the surveillance of minors if they show signs of radicalization? This to me makes sense under existing child protection laws. If kids are being raised in environments that are harmful to themselves and society, should we just sit by and let them get permanently wrecked till they reach adulthood, over a technicality? The earlier you can catch the issues the better for everyone and the higher the chance you can rescue the child. Existing child protection laws in Germany already allow the state a lot of power to take children away from parents if they're seen as unfit.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/111/1911127.pdf
Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
These are common sense viewpoints a lot of Europeans agree with, not authoritarian ones.
Taking rights away from people labelled as terrorists is a pretty standard way for governments to control viewpoints. It gives them the power to add any group they don't like to a list, and deport/imprison them with minimal judicial process.
I don't know enough about surveillance of minors to comment on that one.
You're making it sound like under these rules, the government can force you to wear GAP jeans instead of Levi Strauss, when in reality the government has always enforced laws on public attire in public to preserve decency and security.
Otherwise it would be tyrannical since I'm not allowed to go naked in public or wearing the loincloths and Tribal Penis Gourd of my ancestors near schools.
Similarly, burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that, or there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms, or so much more nefarious cases.
Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
Rights are always on a spectrum with a large amount of grey area.
> burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that
This is silly. Everyone wears coats in the winter.
> there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms
Is this actually a concern? AFAICT this isn't happening, it's just something that could theoretically happen, which doesn't make it a reason to decrease people rights. That would be another standard tactic for pushing authoritarian laws.
> Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
This seems valid, but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people. It hasn't gone well historically.
Freedom of religion only goes so far, because the culture of the host country takes precedence. To take it to the extreme, if there were a religion where part of standard practice involved assaulting women and children, we would obviously limit those practices.
Non-consensual violence is prohibited because it directly harms other people. Face coverings don't directly harm anyone and laws that exist only for the government's convenience are authoritarian laws. There are ways to investigate bank robberies even if the robbers are wearing masks and in fact a law against masks is fairly ridiculous because anyone willing to break the law against robbing banks would be willing to break a law against wearing a face covering, so such laws only afflict innocent people.
Withy this logic, all laws authoritarian then, like speeding laws, theft laws, and anything else that prevents you from doing what you want to do becomes authoritarian.
Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists, this is really dangerous. If the government can classify any organisation as terrorists, and then remove citizenship from any members of that organisation, that is horrifying.
So yes, I very, very, strongly disagree with this measure, for very good reasons. How could anyone with any common sense support it?
If your current laws allow for such oppressive abuse on the population without due process, then these new laws won't make things any worse for the people and you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away form registered ISIS members is the biggest problem.
In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.
Calling the people you disagree with as "authoritarians", "-phobes", "racist", "nazis" and all kinds of slurs, without any arguments, doesn't work in your favor or help the conversation in any way, on the contrary.
Agreeing with common sense takes doesn't make one "authoritarians".
Learn to do critical thinking and augmenting, instead of heard mentality parroting oppressive slurs against people you disagree with, because you convicted yourself (or propaganda has) that you're on the right side of history, and everyone else with contrary viewpoints is evil reincarnate that needs to be crushed or silenced.
Extreme collectivism affects both extreme, that is the concept that people are nothing but sacrificial lambs for the religion, the country, or the revolution.
In addition to the authoritarian aspect pointed out by a sibling comment, the far-right generally consider the ends to justify the means because of their sense of righteousness. They will compromise their values to get what they want (control over others). Just look at the hypocrisy of the free-speech absolutists on twitter who have no complaints over Lonnie shutting down Leftist accounts.
Blame the Jews, the immigrants, the trans, and then people will grudgingly accept the Gestapo, ICE, prosecution without proof or courts.
Which then allows you to target the opposition without proof.
Their conclusion is that "[...] ethnic and elitist forms of nationalism, which combine to forge exclusive nationalism, help to perpetuate autocratic regimes by continually legitimating minority exclusions [...]"
Right-wing nationalism as we're currently experiencing it is exclusive. It broadly advocates for restoring revised historical cultural narratives of a particular ethnic group, for immigration restriction and immigrant removal, for further minority culture erasure, and so on.
1: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:859c6af4-d4fd-461e-b605-42...
Contemporary examples include the Philippines, Hungary, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and arguably Russia, Turkey and India. Modi is a Hindu nationalist. The United States unfortunately is shaping up to count as an example as well.
Extreme forms of nationalism tend to have a narrative of grievance, a desire to restore a once a great national identity, and a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens, and enemies without and within, against whom authoritarians powers must be mobilized.
So there's a conceptual basis, in terms of setting the stage for rationalizing authoritarianism, as well as abundant historical examples demonstrating the marriage of nationalism and authoritarianism in action. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but I would say there's an extremely strong and familiar historical canon to those who study the topic.
Those also had:
- grievance narratives;
- a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens and enemies; and,
- use the above to justify authoritarian powers.
You haven’t shown that nationalism played a particular part in that cycle; just that it also happened in nationalist states. Almost like the problem is those factors, rather than nationalism.
As did the CCP [1]:
> Ideals and convictions are the spiritual banners for the united struggle of a country, nation and party, wavering ideals and convictions are the most harmful form of wavering.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Chinese_Commun...
You are getting downvoted because this pretty basic stuff. Either you’re part of today’s lucky 10k, or your post reads very much like far-right Gish galloping.
Feudalism did not have this concept; a country was the land belonging to a king (or equivalent), mediated through a set of nobles. There was no concept of illegal or legal immigration; the population of a country were the people who worked for, or were owned by, the nobles ruling that country. There were land rights granted to peasants who had historically lived in that place, but these could and were often overruled by nobles.
European nobility had no such idea of ethnicity or national grouping; the English monarchy is a German family, and most of European nobility were related to each other much more closely than to the citizens of their country.
Early post-monarchy states didn't have this concept. The English Civil War and the French Revolution didn't create states that had a defined concept of the citizen as a member of any ethnic grouping. Again, there's no mention of immigration in any of the documents from this period. It just wasn't a concept they thought about.
The whole concept that a nation-state is a formalisation of a historical grouping of ethnically related people is a very recent one, only a couple of hundred years old.
So to answer your question: It is very easy to have a sovereign country without a policy that prevents unfettered immigration; you just don't care about your population being ethnically diverse. Your citizens are the people who live in your country, and have undergone whatever ceremony and formality you decide makes them citizens.
This is, after all, how America historically did this; if you arrived in America and pledged allegiance, you became a citizen of America.
It’s an odd phenomenon called a mass formation in large populations, when groups of people get fixated or obsessed with a certain concept or even a thing that the group ourself becomes self-reinforcing; usually until a point of exhaustion is reached or self-destruction. It can also be effectively injected into a culture as it was in Germany’s case after the war through endless and limitless collective and hereditary blame abuse to the point that Germans generally do not have self-respect, and if they show even a slight bit of self-respect they are branded far right, as of that means anything being the subconscious conditioning people have been subjected to.
It’s kind of sad and unfortunate and humanity should never have allowed the collective torture, abuse, and punishment of Germans even to this day 80 years later. It’s a sick and depraved thing only the most devious and evil people would condone, let alone perpetrate.
We seem to have a general problem with people not understanding that democracies have regular elections and the other party is going to get back in at some point. So then whenever one party is in power, instead of thinking ahead by five minutes and realizing that adding new constraints on the government and adding rather than eroding checks and balances will help you the next time the other team gets in, everybody thinks of them as an impediment to doing whatever they want immediately.
And then like clockwork they get butthurt when they checks they eroded or failed to put into place aren't there after the next election, as if they had nothing to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany
https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/russia-today-verbot...
1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).
2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).
Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).
Such as removals because of copyright claims?
Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians, which is why politicians are very active suing random supporters of their opponents, because that is an effective way to police speech, open specifically to politicians.
I do think a lot of people care, but censorship in Germany does a lot to protect the people who could change the law. That law obviously needs to be abolished, politicians are uniquely unworthy of protection when it comes to speech.
For example, the concept of privacy protecting against media coverage is actually weaker for politicians (when in official duty) than for ordinary citizens (Allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht).
And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
And if you look at how these laws are used by politicians they look quite spectacular.
>And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
The Wikipedia article and how the law was applied article disagrees.
Do not forget that this applies to insults. E.g. calling a politician "dumb" is enough to get sued. These laws create a way for politicians specifically to prosecute people criticizing them. This isn't a hypothetical, it is how the law is actually used.
You make it sound like it happens all the time and everyone is used to it. I know of once case (Pimmel-Andy), and that led to a shitstorm, including part of the police operation being declared unlawful after the fact.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/landgericht-hamburg-a...
Is that an opinion or a harmful false claim?
Together with a fellow activist, who also served as informal legal counsel, they gave a talk on this case at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5RmTOGucZo
As Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, the idea that you should be able to slander anyone in power is a nice underdog philosophy (particularly popular in the US, where the underdog is always right) but what it gets you is a post-truth environment in which reputation means nothing.
And as a German what a lot of people don't get, we're very much an honour based society, not an English or French liberal society. People in power aren't suspicious just because they have power, the crank is not correct just because he's the little guy. I think Lee Kuan Yew was largely correct if one looks at Anglosphere media and politics, where truth and reputation have entirely been replaced by conspiracy and tantrums. Far from the wisdom of the crowds being some truth finding mechanism you just enable the most charismatic nutjob.
We aren't. We are a totally Americanized failed state governed by mentally ill losers who continue to destroy this country in every possible way imaginable.
The German society which was the basis for this law does not exist anymore. Politicians are all complete clueless losers who do not deserve an ounce of respect.
That's the problem with these proposed laws.
We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again. The nations that want this mass spying only have to win once.
We need a way to permanently stop these proposals once defeated the first time so that they cannot just continue to try over and over again until it passes.
Fighting corruption only works when enough people fight it at enough levels, and continue to fight it. There is no getting around the fact that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
We do have a way to reinforce our position, though!
We can design and consume technology that makes this hard.
We can stop working for companies that build centralized platforms for messaging.
We can teach our neighbors how important rights to privacy and speech are in language that they understand.
There can be enough friction that this becomes harder for politicians. Remember the Reddit Sopa and Pipa protests? - that was pretty epic! I don't think Reddit will help us in its current state, but we can absolutely mount those defenses on Wikipedia, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
And we should continue to move off of platforms that don't align with our freedoms. And build our platforms in a way that encourages "normies" to join.
A billionaire pedophile ran a covert sex ring with a suspected who's who of a client list who was almost barely prosecuted for "reasons™"
Social media companies caught red-handed psychologically manipulating users for various ends
Damn near everyone helping to destroy actual free speech and privacy willingly because they've been talked into it (ironic)
Governments that engage in mass surveillance so egregious if you had tried it 40 years ago there would have been an uprising. Aided by the tech community I might add.
Industries that abuse data and algorithms to manipulate pricing or commit outright fraud.
A pharma corp addicting countless americans to opioids with almost no real consequence, killing hundreds of thousands and ruining millions of families.
Several industries have poisoned the planet and its inhabitants in various long term ways for profit.
And yet if you suggest something is a conspiracy it is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Speaking of conspiracies that doesn't sound like an accident... The trick to conspiracy theories is critical thinking and not uncritical dismissal.
If I have any words of consolation: when the "conspiracy theory" turns out to be more practice than theory you get to say I told you so.
Edit: typo
The cage is real, it's not a state of mind. It's not something that can be recycled out of. You'll know when you're really doing something when you can give people a time and a place to show up; when that showing up isn't to stand in the street and socialize with each other, burn down a Starbucks, or spit in the face of a cop who makes less than you do; and when most of you end up dead or in prison.
I always reply like this, but some people think everybody else in the world is so weak and naïve, when they themselves aren't doing anything important and have not taken a fraction of the risks or suffered a fraction of the loss of the people they're asking to speak up. Speaking against power is an impotent magic spell. You can recognize journalists who speak against real power by their deaths.
Everybody is just aping the US black civil rights struggle, where watching the violence done in their name to nicely dressed, well-behaved people filled enough people with disgust that politicians wouldn't get a boost from continuing to support it. That was how a small minority population faced with irrational restrictions in a media-saturated society was able to barely overcome explicitly unfair laws (and go no further, we're still the underclass, we're still dying.)
The history of effective, revolutionary, positive protest by what are often majorities involved people getting out into the streets as a show of strength, not a show of weakness. It always involves converting and including portions of the army and the police forces. It involves building strong shadow governments. Not this pantomime where everybody pretends to be black, and the people who are the blackest, weakest, most undeserving of their treatment win because mommy parliament or daddy supreme court are moved enough to declare them the winner.
I'm borderline not joking that there should be warning labels like those on cigarettes on the ballot when voting.
They only need to succeed once, we (the ones opposing the law) have to succeed every time.
There are so many Poles in Germany there is no way in hell Germans would as a collective actively sabotage any defensive war efforts if Poland got invaded. I honestly don’t see it with any EU member but I don’t think there is a seizable number of Germans that don’t know somebody from Poland or with family in Poland.
Ukraine before 2014 was just a smaller Russia to us. Barely a Ukrainian community in Germany, unable to tell the language apart, unable to even read the script. Poland was never that. In modern Germany, Polish people have always been our neighbors, friends, colleagues, care takers for our kids, the sick and the old, skilled tradesmen, owners of the good restaurants in town and many more things.
Even the jokes about thieves that were so popular when I was in school stopped.
Talking point or not, is there truth in this statement?
Jens Spahn, the speaker in the video OP shared, is not a member of the government but a leading member of the parliament and of one of the ruling parties. A tiny but important difference.
I think ‘a leading member’ is underselling it a little. He is the “Fraktionsvorsitzender”, which is comparable to the majority leader in the US Senate.
It's an unsustainable situation.
Unfortunately the only country that ever left proceeded to shoot itself in both knees, light itself on fire and jump in a pool of gasoline. For NO reason.
Article in German: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/eu-ueberwachungsplaene-unionsfr...
Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that.
It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allowed to advocate for the murder/rape/extermination of other human beings because of the way they look)
That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.
We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.
Edit: To anyone reading and thinking of joining in to any of the discussions, the message is clear - Facebook or Reddit level of inanity is all you will find here.
Sure, there is the rollercoaster, ups and downs, small wins and losses going on all the time. But look at the general trends - these freedoms that we enjoyed are by and large being chipped away, it's all trending down, worldwide. It's two steps back, one step forward. Maybe CC doesn't get put in place this particular time, but they will ram it through eventually, at some point the right angle will be found to make the right people vote for it. Then the battleground will move onto something even more egregious, and so on. I'm not seeing why there would be a sudden reversal of this trend in the coming decades.
Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".
It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.
And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.
The most obvious mechanism is a constitutional amendment, but in the U.S. the only amendment to be drafted and adopted in modern times is the 26th amendment (1971), 54 years ago. (The 27th amendment had a weird status where it was belatedly adopted with a 200-year delay.) It's hard to imagine many constitutional amendments actually being passed now because it's been challenging to find consensus on many things within U.S. politics lately.
I don't know that the EU at a supranational level has any mechanism at all to ban future EU directives. Maybe they could decide to remove something from the list of areas of competence of the EU? But Chat Control is under the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" and I can't imagine the EU deciding that that should be abandoned as an area of Union competence.
Edit: The international human rights treaties, at least in regulating law enforcement, have tended not to follow the idea that some kind of regulation or law enforcement power is completely off-limits, but just that they need procedural safeguards -- especially for surveillance and investigatory powers. In this case, Chat Control opponents (including me) would like it to be completely off-limits, but the human rights instruments arguments might more naturally go into "did they create enough surrounding rules and mechanisms about how it's used and how it's regulated?" rather than "can we just say governments just can't make this rule?".
It's the task of parliaments, governments, and courts to reevaluate and resolve all these contradictions over and over again. It's tedious and takes a lot of resources, but that's the price for democracy.
The constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) famously guarantees freedom of expression as a fundamental right for the people. That hasn't stopped the government from trampling all over freedom of expression, though. The EU is of course nowhere near North Korea in terms of what is considered acceptable, but don't ever trust that the words in the constitution will be enough to keep the government from doing something.
In fact, if ChatControl does fail, they have already planned to include this in ProtectEU - a larger package coming soon...
Edit: 234K signatures at the time of this posting.
The German social perspective on privacy has been strongly for the individual over the state for a long time. Chat Control goes too far, and Germany should be a loud voice in the heavy moderation of state surveillance powers.
"Mit der CDU/CSU wird es keine anlasslose Chatkontrolle geben, wie sie von einigen Staaten in der EU gefordert wird."
Anlass is cause/reason here, so keine anlasslose literally translated means: not without cause/reason.
What about "reasonable causes", and the infrastructure enabling those? Be it legal/bureaucratic/technical? IMO it's already in place, mostly, and got abused many times, already.
This is just "weasel wording", changing nothing for so called "lawful interception".
If you got flagged by some algorithm somewhere, or got reported by someone behind your back, there will be Anlass!
Automagically...
Because neither the algorithms, nor the organizations handling the flagging, enabling the reporting are transparent.
They are unaccountable (to the public/affected) black boxes by design, be it for economic, organizational, or political reasons.
Inevitably leading to kafkaesque absurdities like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
It's funny how politicians want laws against issues for which they usually are the guilty party.
Ok, maybe these are not weasel words in this case. The CDU probably wants to present itself as a friend of the people using a popular issue that they don't really care about. My suspicion is that this is exactly why the ChatControl issue is brought up yearly. It distracts people from wars, the economy etc., there is a big discussion and finally the government graciously comes down on the side of the people. Each and every year.
Were this true, some politicians would do it for that reason. It would need to get a lot of attention to be an effective distraction, and it does not. The mainstream press barely covers the issue. Many people who would be directly harmed by it don't even know what's being considered.
It's no wonder we see the countries that oppose this as well. Makes one think. Sweden's case is peculiar given their military opposed it. I wonder what's going on there.
¹ Quelle = source, TKÜ = Telekommunikationsüberwachung = telecommunication surveillance. aka installing trojans on your devices.
Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.
> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.
There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.
If people all started talking through letter mail, you'd get Letter Control, they wouldn't just forget about it because it's not the internet. If the people somehow become smart and coordinated enough to move to some cryptographically-secure method of communication, your government will probably outlaw the equipment and actions associated with using it in the first place instead of trying to decrypt all communications.
The goal is control of information, and the way of doing that is to force everyone to use unsecured communication with no feasible alternatives. I wouldn't expect kid glove treatment with that, unlike speeding or minor shoplifting.
It is the same as free speech. You can say what you want, but you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing in many countries.
Shooting someone is also "just physics", yet many governments have been known to frown upon it (depending on the context).
More than anything, this is a good lesson in information theory. A blank sheet of paper isn't devoid of information just because it doesn't contain ink - rather, it is the context of the current situation that defines the information being conveyed. This is true in all forms of communication.
This reminds me of a story I read once about when Victor Hugo had just published Les Miserables. Just after publication, he went to his vacation home due to the controversy he was sure was going to follow the publication of the book. Wanting to know how the reception was going, he mailed his publisher a letter simply containing a question mark. The publisher responded with only an exclamation mark, and Hugo immediately understood - he had written an eternal classic.
(BTW, I read this in the book The User Illusion - a fantastic read)
No matter what the state says, or what legislatures pass what laws, we're going to continue to live out our right to general purpose computing, including sending only what we choose to send over the wire, and encrypting content as we see fit.
Now let's talk about something else.
Civil disobedience involves breaking the law with full knowledge that it's illegal, to protest injustice.
By way of example: in the United States, the 1st amendment to the constitution guarantees freedom of "the press" - it is referenced not by the right to print what one wants, but specifically in reference to the technology of the time, the printing press.
It's obvious that our evolutionary trajectory is one in which widely distributed general purpose computing is normal.
Making laws that contradict this is just childish, and at some point the adults in the room need to be willing to ignore them.
In fact the proposed chat control law has an exception for government agencies
People are not going to stop sending each other their boobs or penii, and while that remains the case, encrypted messaging will thrive.
-ChatControl, as it is currently defined, is not going to happen, because it's absolutely stupid and would make impossible, amongst other things, online banking
-Yet, there is a growing and legitimate demand for lawful interception of 'chat' services. I mean, "sure, your bank account got emptied, but we can't look into that because it happened via Signal" just isn't a good look
-So, something has got to give. Either 'chat' services need to become 'providers of telecoms services' and therefore implement lawful interception laws, or the malware industry will continue to flourish, or something even more stupid will happen
Pick your poison.
Why on earth would mass intercept be necessary or even help in that?
If you got scammed by someone, then you can contact the police and hand over your message history. Why would the cops be interested in someone else's message history for this?
Lawful interception is not "mass intercept."
It's the ability to surveil traffic from/to a clearly identified party, upon a judicial order for specific reason, for a limited time.
ChatControl, on the other hand, is mass interception. I'm against it. Most people in the EU are against it. But to prevent things like ChatControl coming up over and over again, a basic tool to combat Internet crime is required.
The problem is nobody uses them to combat crime on the internet. They use them for stupid shit usually or stuff that involves lots and lots of money.
We're jumping the gun here. We already have a fire bomb, and we're not using it, but we're going ahead to developing the nuke. Makes no sense.
Now we have found “lawful intercept” can easily just become mass surveillance, and not just by the people who are meant to use it but other parties too. We saw this with CALEA which was used by China (and who knows who else) for espionage and spying for years before anyone realised.
You make a system for the “good guys” and it always turns out adversary, criminal groups etc. will gain access, even if the “good guys” don’t start acting like bad guys themselves.
Technology made mass surveillance easy, so every lawful intercept becomes mass surveillance as well as vulnerable to scammers, criminals and foreign intelligence.
And we don’t have any way of making lawful intercept possible without that unfortunately.
Something does have to give: the constant demands for interception capabilities on end-to-end encrypted protocols. Those demands must be thoroughly destroyed every time they rear their head again.
If you needed any indication for how these pseudo-charities (usually it's a charity front and a commercial "technology partner") are not interested in the public good, SafeToNet, a company that up until last year was trying to sell a CSAM livestream detection system to tech companies to "help become compliant" ("SafeToWatch") now sells a locked down Android phone to overprotective parents that puts an overlay on screen whenever naked skin can be seen (of any kind). It's based on a phone that retails for 150 pounds - but costs almost 500 with this app preinstalled into your system partition. That's exceptionally steep for a company that up until last year was all about moral imperatives to build this tech.
There's a different set of laws for that...
But, in a jurisdiction with a functioning rule of law, these abuses can be spotted and remedied.
Doing the same for mass surveillance (such as ChatControl) or state-sponsored malware is much harder.
I'm advocating against ChatControl and malware, and proposing existing lawful interception frameworks as an alternative. But, apparently it's not my day :)
The reason we know is because authorities were able to place listening devices into the rooms that they were in, or surveil them from other buildings.
I’m still unconvinced that this make’s law enforcement’s job so hard that something has to give.
If you're the victim, just hand over the relevant chats yourself. Otherwise, just follow the money. And if the attackers are sitting in a country whose banks you can't get to cooperate, intercepting chat messages from within that country won't do you any good either.
Also, if someone has malicious intent and is part of a criminal network, the people within that network would hardly feel burdened by all digital messages on all popular apps being listened in on by the government. These people will just use their own private applications. Making one is like 30min of work or starting at $50 on fiverr.
The challenging regulations around technically anonymous crypto currencies require you to actively make trackable arrangements with your financial service providers. VERY few people will ever do this, and therefore if anything suspicious were to occur, all you've achieved is putting yourself on the suspect list preemptively.
Because if lawful interception of in-transit messages is not possible or permitted, hacking either the client or the server becomes the only option.
You may enjoy reading https://therecord.media/encrochat-police-arrest-6500-suspect.... Or just downvoting me. Or both.
Of the serious criminals, the only ones you'll be catching are those with low technical knowledge (everyone else will just be using their own applications) and the Venn diagram of those with little tech knowledge and those whose digital privacy practices could deceive law enforcement resembles AA cups against a pane of glass.
Regarding Encrochat, it is no surprise that an (unintentional?) watering hole gathered up a bunch of tech-illiterate, the fallacy is that those people wouldn't have been caught if they weren't allowed to flock to a single platform for some time.
Would some people have not been caught until much later or even not at all? Sure, but if LE would do its job (and not ignoring, or even covering up, well known problem areas and organizations for years to decades), only those of low priority.
Is that little gain worth creating a tool to allow Iran or similar countries to check every families' messages if they suspect some family member might be gay?
Hard nope.
> Or just downvoting me.
Don't worry, I rarely do that and that's not just because I can't...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_global_telecommunications... https://unshakled.org/salt-typhoon-the-unintended-consequenc... https://group2000.com/articles/a-wake-up-call-for-securing-l...
The two sides in this debate seem to be talking at cross purposes, which is why it goes round and round.
A: "We need to do this, however it's done, it was possible before so it must be possible now"
B: "You can't do this because of the implementation details (i.e. you can't break encryption without breaking it for everyone)"
ad infinitum.
Regardless of my own views on this, it seems to me that A needs to make a concrete proposal
Apps like Signal don't entirely fall within the scope of these, which is the cause of the current manic attempts to grab more powers.
My point is that these powers grabs should be resisted, and that new services should be brought into the fold of existing laws.
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that, instead, state hacking should be endorsed. Which, well...
If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.
OK, sorry to keep repeating myself here, but... I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl.
What I would like to see, is, say, Signal complying with lawful interception orders in the same way that any EU telecoms provider currently does.
So, provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party, for a limited time, by judicial order, for a clearly specified reason.
> pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything
This is exactly what lawful intercept laws are supposed to prevent. And yeah, of course, abuse, but under a functioning rule of law there are at least ways to remedy that, unlike with mass surveillance and/or malware...
Those statements simply aren't compatible.
Right now, Signal is designed by cryptography experts to provide the best privacy we know how to build: messages are only readable by you or the intended recipient. "Lawful intercept" necessarily means some additional third party is given the ability to read messages.
It doesn't matter what kind of legal framework you have around that, because you can't just build a cryptosystem where the key is "a warrant issued under due process." There has to be a system, somewhere, that has access to plaintext messages and can give law enforcement and courts access. The judges, officers, technicians, suppliers, and software involved in building and using this system are all potential vectors by which this access can be compromised or misused -- whether via software or hardware attacks, social engineering, or abuse of power.
Maybe your country has "functioning rule of law", and every single government official and all the vendors they hire are pure as snow, but what about all the rest of us living in imperfect countries? What about when a less-than-totally-law-abiding regime comes into power?
You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
No -- that's an incredibly reductive summary, and the attitude you display here is, if left unchecked, exactly what will allow something equally ridiculous like ChatControl to pass eventually.
There has been plenty of previous debate when innovations like postal mail, telegraph traffic and phone calls were introduced. This debate has resulted in laws, jurisprudence, and corresponding operating procedures for law enforcement.
You may believe there are no legitimate reasons to intercept private communications, but the actual laws of the country you live in right now say otherwise, I guarantee you. You may not like that, and/or not believe in the rule of law anymore anyway, but I can't help you with that.
What I can hopefully convince you of, is that there needs to be some way to bring modern technology in line with existing laws, while avoiding "9/11"-style breakdowns of civil rights.
What is most striking about our "mandated microphone" analogy is the utter futility of it. Criminals have no issue breaking the law, and hence have no issue outfitting a room with no microphones in which to carry out their dealings. The same is true of any law targeting encrypted chats.
I don't know what you mean by this.
> But please note that I did not list "online banking becoming impossible" as a likely outcome.
No, but it should be a likely and maybe even desired outcome, especially if a justification for surveillance is the prevention of online banking fraud among other crimes.
> Merely malware continuing to be state-sponsored, or certain communications to be surveilled.
Norms and mores change over time, so the only conclusion is that "certain communications" will become "all communications" at some point in the future. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, but laws tend to be more constant, and lawful interception laws are, 100% guaranteed, a thing, right now, in the country where you live.
They apply to telegrams, postal mail, telephone conversations, and a whole bunch of other things nobody really does anymore. They don't really apply to the things people do tend to do these days.
ChatControl is an incompetent attempt to remediate the lapses in law enforcement that this has caused. I strongly oppose it. But I also strongly oppose the idea that the Internet should be off limits for any kind of law enforcement, unless it is through dubious mechanisms like state-sponsored malware.
Your "slippery slope" argument is much more compelling in the absense of extended lawful interception than in the situation where Signal messages would somehow be equated to postcards or SMS messages...
If people speak up and say "take away our rights" at a referendum, let that be their decision, not a political backroom deal.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2021/1232/oj
[2] Article 10 at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
Lawful intercept laws exist in most, if not all, EU countries.
It's just that super-national overlay services like Signal don't entirely fall within the framework of those.
So, there is now a choice: expand interception powers indefinitely (a.k.a. ChatControl, which, to make things crystal-clear, I'm 100% against), or bring new services into the fold of existing legislation.
Lawful interception is not proactive: it requires a judicial order to collect plaintext communications from/to specifically identified individuals (resident in the country demanding the interception), for a limited time and for a specific purpose.
ChatControl, which I strongly argue AGAINST would sort-of be what you describe. But: I. Am. Arguing. AGAINST. That.
Eve, a police officer has evidence that Alice and Bob are messaging each other about crimes and obtains a warrant to require Charlie to intercept their communication. Charlie has no ability to do so because it is encrypted with keys known only by Alice and Bob.
If you want a different result, someone has to proactively change part of this process. Which part should change?
One option is to mandate that any encrypted messaging software also give a key to the government or the government's designee, but someone using open source software can modify it so that it doesn't do that, which would be hard or impossible to detect without a forensic search of their device.
Another option is to mandate that a service provider like Charlie's only deliver messages after verifying that it can decrypt them. This, too is hard to enforce because users can layer additional encryption on top of the existing protocol. Signal's predecessor TextSecure did that over SMS.
Both of those options introduce a serious security vulnerability if the mechanism for accessing the mandatory escrowed keys were ever compromised. Would you like to suggest another mechanism?
If you have the ability to run custom software—even if it’s a bash script—you can develop secure alternatives. And even if you somehow restrict open source messaging, I can just use good old pen-and-paper OTP to encrypt the plaintext before typing it in, or copy/paste some other text pre-encrypted in another program. But even then, all this will do is kick off a steganographic arms race. AI generated text where the first letter of each word is the cyphertext may be nearly impossible to identify, especially at scale.
If anything like this were to pass, my first task would be making a gamified, user-friendly frontend for this kind of thing.
Don’t give them any ideas!
And how in the world can we have safety if relational trust is suffocated before it can even take root?
Please use your imagination! Those aren't the only options if we embrace trust as essential rather than looking at any need for it as a liability.
That anyone thinks this blatantly obvious attack on free speech is actually going to be used only for law enforcement is wild to me.
Do you want the police to regularily intercept and check your signal chats for fraud and crime so this does not happen, or what is the point here?
No, that's not how lawful intercept laws work.
I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity.
ChatControl is not that, and it's one of the reasons it's a nonstarter.
They already have that in most (?) jurisdictions by now.
With a warrant, they can install a virus on the device that will then do targeted surveillance.
ChatControl is bad, because it is blanket surveillance of everyone without warrant.
Yeah, and that sponsors an entire malware industry!
I don't really know how I can make my position any clearer, but...
-Malware: bad!
-ChatControl (encryption backdoors): bad!
-Inability to do any kind of law enforcement involving "the Internet": double-plus bad!
-Enforcement of existing lawful interception laws in the face of new technology: maybe look at that?
You could state in plain words what do you propose as an alternative.
I read what you wrote, but have no idea what you propose.
It's literally the last item in my list?
But to further clarify: I would like existing lawful interception laws to be extended to services like Signal.
Not in the sense that any EU country should be able to break Signal crypto (as ChatControl proposes, and which I think is an utterly ill-advised idea), but that competent law enforcement agencies should be able to demand unencrypted Signal communications from/to an identified EU party, for a limited time and purpose, upon a (reviewable) judicial order.
Most, if not all, EU countries currently have similar laws applying to telegrams, snail mail, email, telephony and whatnot. If you don't like those either, that's fine, but that's the status quo, and I would like to see that extended to services like Signal, as opposed to incompetently dumb measures like ChatControl...
Or would you go extreme and outlaw decentraliced encrypted communication alltogether?
Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws, for example? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Th...
Who gets to decide what gets made available to who?
We're taking about ChatControl here, so law enforcement of EU countries, under their respective laws, into which EU law should have been incorporated
> Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws
Same answer as "should Thailand be granted arrest rights to enforce <whatever>": they submit a legal assistance request to the country where the alleged crime occurred.
In the case of a lawful interception request for "lease[sic] majeste" reasons, I'm pretty sure this would be immediately rejected.
But, if not, the EU subject of such interception would have lots and lots of avenues to get redress.
Again, and I'm getting sort of tired from repeating myself: "lawful interception" does not mean "indiscriminate surveillance at the whim of whomever" -- it is a well-defined concept that has been used to determine which telegrams and mail pieces to open and which telephone calls to record for ages now. Your country absolutely does it, as we speak, no matter where you live. It's just that modern technology has far outpaced the scope of this legislation, and things like ChatControl are (incompetent) responses to that.
ChatControl is not a good idea, and has very little chance of becoming reality. But to stop dumb proposals like this from coming up over and over again, something has got to give.
It's a lame excuse.
They are using the A word exactly like they used the self-A word for self-pleasure a few decades earlier.
Raise your hand who's never used your phone to create some A word material as a child.