Official statement from @Mer__edith: the new EU chat controls proposal for mass scanning is the same old surveillance with new branding.
Whether you call it a backdoor, a front door, or “upload moderation” it undermines encryption & creates significant vulnerabilities.
@pauld That the legislators fail to appreciate facts or their consequences will likely remain irrelevant as long as persuasion works, i.e. as long as legislators remain human.
Hypothetical or real cases in which the ability of the good guys to intercept the communications of the bad guys resulting in a desirable outcome strongly persuades that doing so is for the greater good, but the consequences of failing to do so, e.g. the dying captive relative or sex-trafficking drug-dealing paedophile
terrorist, are maximally persuasive. Consider how effective it would be on you.
We know that compromising privacy generally does not serve the greater good, that real cases are almost always solved by competent law enforcement work or @briankrebs, that the abuse by the incorrectly presumed "good guys" is not just inevitable, but consistently and substantially harmful, that actual cases of broken encryption are almost never instrumental in saving the day, and that legislation only affects the law-abiding while the criminals can always ignore that law too and use technology which works.
The challenges are how to articulate sufficiently persuasively and how to do so consistently every time a legislator is caused to imagine their child chained in a basement or a dirty bomb in their district.
@schneierblog said it better: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/scaring_people_.html
Exactly, they're not suggesting that the general public would use this. In fact, the point is that the general public wouldn't use this.
And not “a few geeks” specifically, either, but rather those who these laws are ostensibly targetting - those exchanging CSAM or organizing terrorist operations or whatever who may or may not be geeks as a whole but probably have at least enough geeks available to help them set this up.
For many purposes they wouldn't even need any sort of public-key encryption; simple password-protected zip files with the password sent in a separate message, or perhaps by a separate channel, would be sufficient to bypass this scanning.
Likely, actually just putting the password in the message would be safe enough (I've done that in the past to get round enterprise email scanners disallowing .exe files).
@david_chisnall @signalapp @Mer__edith oh, they'll come via the app stores first. Then OS that allow side loading. Then OS that allow unsigned apps. Then compilers.
@falken @david_chisnall @signalapp @Mer__edith
This. I have an OG Droid with a cross-compiled userland that runs an older gcc. I can not compile large programs though due to lack of ram.
But, useful for testing, especially to learn configure cache settings to use for the cross-compiler.
Cross-compiling is not for the faint of heart because configure will get things wrong very often.
@signalapp
@Bundesregierung @GrueneBundestag @eskensaskia Bitte! Setzen Sie sich für uns ein. Verschlüsselung ist die einzige Chance zu kommunizieren, wenn man in Gefahr ist.
[Update: Vote has been postponed to Thursday, keep up the pressure!] The Belgian EU Council presidency seems set to have bulk Chat Control searches of our private communications greenlighted by EU governments on Wednesday 19 Thursday 20 June. This confirms concerns that the proponents of Chat Con
I prepared a mail text for German citizens to send to their representative:
https://metalhead.club/@schm43cky/112632505587161299
This might help some to just send out a mail, rather than helplessly doing nothing against the upcoming chat control proposal.
#chatcontrol #Chatkontrolle #EU #masssurveillance #massenueberwachung #mailtemplate #mailvorlage
Edit: added some context and hashtags as this answer is being boosted quite a lot.
Attached: 1 image Wer wg. der Chatkontrolle-Abstimmung eine Mail an unsere ständige Vertretung bei der Europäischen Union senden möchte, sich aber mit dem Mailtext schwer tut: vielleicht hilft meine Vorlage ein wenig. Sicher ist persönlich formulieren besser, aber mehr gleichtönende Stimmen sind hoffentlich lauter, als viele schweigende, die sich nicht ausgedrückt bekommen. Hier gibt es Betreff, Text und Mail-Adressat: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/BD8dNsDAseXUc+nhu1EV6ALGWLnLyPnPyQuGsCSUUZk/embed/ #Chatkontrolle #MailVorschlag #EU #datenschutz #Erdmenger
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This would be #devastating for #endtoendencryption.
@signalapp @Mer__edith so will #Signal stop requesting #PII like #PhoneNumbers and refuse to comply with such #cyberfacist demands.
But ofc they want to exclude themself from the Chat controls.
Source:
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-exempt-themselves/
According to the latest draft text of the controversial EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation proposal leaked by the French news organization Contexte, which the EU member states discussed, the EU interior ministers want to exempt professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the envisaged scanning of chats and messages (Article 1
@signalapp @Mer__edith
Cf the society of "smile, you are protected".
La société du souriez-vous-êtes-protégé
All details are there :
https://www.les-cris.com/pages-300-articles-de-CRIs/theme-040-Evol-generale/art-2024/cri-evolgen-240514-La-societe-du-souriez-vous-etes-protege.php
In french.
Sorry if not easy for you.
Les-CRIs.com : des Constat-Reflexion-Impulsion (CRI) : publication d'articles, et animation de reflexion. Tous domaines, quand j'aime. L'évolutions de la société, l'argent, l'agricole, les institutions, le Kravail, l'énergie, le commerce, le numérique,... la nouvelle civilisation.
(1/?)
@signalapp
> the new EU chat controls proposal for mass scanning is the same old surveillance with new branding
I don't disagree with anything @Mer__edith says in the linked blog post, but I think it misses the point. Yes, lack of technical knowledge among regulators makes the problem worse. But it's not the root cause of why the CSAM-scanning zombie refuses to die.
(2/?)
Let's zoom out a bit and look at the various motives for wanting "upload moderation". They include;
* genuine concerns for children harmed in the production of CSAM
* law enforcement who see E2EE as a limit on legitimate search powers
* the techlash, prompted by legitimate concern about the dodgy practices of digital technology companies
* knee-jerk pearl-clutching ("think of the children") by both conservatives on the hard right and crypto-conservative "liberals" on the centre-right
(3/?)
Most importantly IMHO, are the corporate DataFarmers. For whom robust privacy protection is bad for business, but compulsory automated message scanning is a whole new market. Both for their "cloud" services, and lucrative partnerships with spy agencies, both state and corporate (eg Palantir). As well as being a new source of MOLE food, especially useful if trained MOLEs ("AI") are judged to be derivative works under copyright law.
#MOLE: Machine Operated Learning Emulator
(4/4)
As my activist mentors always say, follow the money. The magic zombie reanimation fluid is funding from the DataFarmers, for anyone willing to run reputation laundering campaigns in their interests. In this case, reframing mass privacy violation as a moral good, so they can recruit groups with legitimate concerns as Useful Idiots.
To protect E2EE effectively, we need to engage with those legitimate concerns. Including in the messaging we put out against stuff like "upload moderation".
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