The EU Council wants all your messages to be read by ominous AI. But government and military accounts will be exempt. Why? For security.
Vote: October 14.
Key meeting: September 12.
Act now: Chat Control is back & we've got two months to stop the EU CSAM scanning plans. | Tuta
What are the practical solutions for this if this passes in full?
De-centralized community maintained Signal so no singular non profit can be forced to do what these tech illiterates want to do? Apple users will be fucked since you can atleast install APKs on Android independently. Or will there be a web only version that’s available everwhere?
Good lord, seeing how bad the West is getting with this, even countries in the Gulf/Middle East/South Asia appear to be “better”. I know its an outrageous thing to say and some of those countries outright ban these services but I’d rather have them ban and have people get around than have the companies providing privacy and security for all people break their software.
My next big concern is, what happens when they go after VPNs like India did? What happens if Sweden goes after similar things and affects Mullvad?
Is nothing sacred anymore?
To add to this:
I have lived in several places in Asia, Middle East, USA, Canada among others. And have experienced life and the internet in all these places to have formed the following opinion:
We need to get back to the basics of what the internet was supposed to be. Decentralized non corporate owned and controlled democratized online spaces in such a way that even governments can’t do fuck all. This sounds like Tor or the Tor network. Perhaps a new internet will need to be made/born such that no central entity exists in any official capacity and even if governments ban this “new network”, it should still be accessible through another/new tool/browser/app/etc. And also such that it can’t be turned off - which means, turning this off will or should also mean turning to whole thing off.
This is inevitably going to lead to a splintered online world. The consequences of the coordinated efforts that’s gone on hyper-drive this year from majority of the Western world is going to get people killed if it hasn’t already. But as with any new dangers that come about for humanity in the world, it’s always too late before people realize they’ve been fucked. Happened during COVID where people didn’t listen (for various irrational reasons) and we had a 9/11 every day for months (death toll wise). Ironic since such tragedies were never meant to be forgotten.
Anyways, that’s my rant and frustration.
Please everyone, call/write your representatives: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
all 15 MEPs from
Alternative fǔr Deutschland are OPPOSED
(link)
Might be worth something when AfD is now the most popular party in Germany (link).
An email has been sent to every MEP in the country!
edit. And the country hasn’t decided yet…
@studentsfr01 listed relevant links in another thread.
Yes!
This Except that Tor is more centralized than it should be. While Tor nodes are more or less independently operated, in practice, they predominantly reside in countries like US and Germany, and IIRC the directory authority that controls the Tor network is centralized. This discussion would be better in a separate thread. will be hidden
If Chat Control becomes law, it may give EU governments a green light to go after E2EE messengers that don’t support client-side scanning. Even when decentralized, this would be a massive problem for software devs’ safety and projects’ morale/prosperity. Bitcoin has demonstrated the potential for a decentralized permissionless internet, but even that has not yet been tested against aggressive widespread crackdown.
You may think the same way IDK but I think governments want this. Governments worldwide have or are aspiring to nationalize the internet, or at the very least want their rulership to exist “online and offline” in spite of the fact that the internet as we know it reaches worldwide. Politically, technologically and in other ways, we need to stop that from happening.
Thanks for sharing, these are useful links!
EU parliamemt will reopen on August 25. That’s the time to start contacting MEPs. I would advise only contacting MEPs from your country, not other country otherwise it would be seen as not genuine (lobbying).
Also, fightchatcontrol website has MEPs office phone number as well.
MEPs have influence, but they don’t directly vote in this round.
Another good idea is to contact people in parliament of your country if you can figure out who exactly makes this decision for your government.
And because its so complex, website suggests to contact representatives of EU parliament, I guess, hoping they can figure out the maze and influence decision makers of government position (through their knowledge and contacts). Plus I believe there will be another vote by the EU parliament itself, that is why its extra important to contact EU parliament members.
P.S. In general, AI tells me that there are 3 decision makers for the government:
All three work together to reach decision, but in some countries cabinet of ministers have most power (final say), in other countries parliament committee for Europe have a lot of power, or in some other countries (France) president have a lot of say in making a decision, and other arrangements depending on the country.
True, but it is also important to already prepare for next phase should it happen. We have much more sway over MPs than ministers. The EU Parliament was until recently a steadfast opponent. This is changing quickly, and hence we need to make the Parliament against it again.
is there any likelihood of a blog post covering this topic. It would be very useful to point people to who are not understanding very well or on cusp to help push them to contacting MEPs
/cc @em
i wonder how can eu possibly enforce this?
say signal denies complying. eu can ask google to remove signal from googleplay, ask fdroid to remove it, can what, force github to make apks not downloadable in europe?
they cannot make signal not distribute apk from their site, since signal is not eu based.
looks like iran or russian scenario, but eu (yet) even has no infrastructure to block signal or other services all together
So many tools like signal could be used if
btw, can eu actually ban a domain? are they already doing it? how is it implemented, they just force it on all providers in all eu countries??
at the country level, domain names can be blocked, operators have to ban them in their DNS.
at the European level, DNS4EU is the European DNS (tentative). It is not mandatory to use this DNS, that’s why they can’t block domains at the European level. They have to ask all countries after a court decision (and it takes lot’s of time with European justice)
But there would be always available decentralized options:
@paranoid implementation would likely be left to member states after a finding that Signal doesn’t comply. Similar to the blocking of russian state propaganda RT websites in the eu. Member states already have domain blocking mechanism for blocking badly illegal and piracy websites.
Yes, this would be bypassable. Us, privacy nerds, will always be able to circumvent those laws. But your friends and family will not be able or will not want to take that step (after all, convincing friends & family to use Signal is already hard enough, imagine if you now have to explain they need to use a VPN, download an apk,etc.). And any messenger needs at least two people to use, otherwise it’s just a note-taking app.
On Android the problem will be easy to get round, so it’s not a problem. What worries me is that despite the DMA forcing Apple to open iOS, Signal and others still haven’t communicated so that they can install their applications on Iphones.