Boing Boing published an article today about Chat Control.
Despite a blocking minority achieved on Friday, Denmark is reportedly planning to go ahead with the proposal for a final vote on October 14th.
Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgaard, was the key architect of the so-called “Chat Control” plans.
“We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,” he writes, as translated by one source.
Hummelgaard’s unguarded remarks are a reminder of the broader purpose of these laws: to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with pervasive surveillance of private communications without any real accountability or oversight.
I’m really really starting to wonder what these politicians know that we don’t. What plans do they really have? Why the strong and sudden onslaught now?
Just why?
I mean, I know we all have our presumptions, assumptions, pragmatic predictions, and a variety of rationales why any government would want this - is all about control but why like this and why now is where I keep coming back to when trying to break my mind deciphering this monumental ineffable stupidity of such proposals.
Or is it really heads of states having no regard for the sanctity of and for intelligence, common sense, rationality, and sound logic by pushing such agendas and regulations to become law come hell or high water for whatever they’re trying to accomplish? At this point I want to know why this than trying to actively fight against this because I can’t personally do much than advocate against this as much as possible and every chance I get especially since I don’t live in the EU.
Encryption and privacy tech gets more and more popular and mainstream, so it gets more difficult for agencies to access data and wiretap communications.
Corporations do real time mass surveillance anyway, so governments also want this capability
Secret agencies too do mass surveillance anyway, law enforcement also want such capability
There is fresh new AI capabilities and possibilities, so governments want to tap into it. Now previously impossible mass scanning becomes technically possible.
Give the public a full cleartext view of all messages sent and received on your own devices, along with the same for all the heads of every ministry you triage with.
That would be interesting indeed. Yet, funnily enough all these laws have always special exceptions.. for which you are the dangerous guy par excellence, just because you are being pointed the finger at.
since they want surveilence - how about total government transparency, where any citizen can at any time read any communication of any government official.
that would add extra insentive for “public servants” to leave office and let new people in, instead of clinging to power till death
of course they will immediately counter it with “national security”…
why when anything happens its always you two: “national security” and “protect children”
These crazy lunatics will do everything they can to get this law passed, and whether we like it or not, Chat Control will eventually be implemented. I think we need to start thinking now about how to get around it, based on what is being done in other countries that have this kind of system.
Privacy Guides should be updated accordingly, in anticipation of this.
If I remember correctly a activist named Lars Andersen actually did something like this to him but was other debate about car surveillance in Denmark. He posted foto’s of Peter’s government ID, house address, car licence plate. And more If I remember correctly.
He also made fake covid pass and he also payed people too destroy car surveillance towers in Denmark. (no idea what they are called in English)
Make secret agencies more accountable (are they useful? cost too much? process too much information? do they following laws to the letter? who checks them whether they follow laws?)
I mean, more ProtonMail or Tuta than Outlook I would say. Thunderbird and Nextcloud provide email clients, not email service providers like Outlook. But I guess you could be referring to the Outlook app (which again would not support privacy forward email service providers for the most part if at all).
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But thanks for sharing the other links. I didn’t know about all of them.
Ok, you are right. I thought it is a server (because email servers are easy to setup), but indeed it seems it is only a client.
But Nextcloud offers full suite of other apps to the governments.
Its debatable if government employees should use encrypted mail as they have to be transparent, but something to explore and think about what should good policy be.
People say Germany is pro-privacy. I wonder what secret agents are doing in this building? largest in the world:
located at the Chausseestraße in the Mitte district in the centre of Berlin. The building that houses its headquarters is the largest intelligence building in the world
And it is not communist remnant, but a new building. Cost €1.086 billion.
If only governments would invest fraction of it to open source?
I also guess secret agencies have influence behind the scenes to how governments decide on chat control. Take a look at Netherlands example. Secret agency said ‘no’ to chat control, and government decision followed:
For me age of internet, smartphones comes to the end, because goverment wants to know what are you’re doing there. Do you stand by your goverment or maybe you hate your goverment. They want to control our money, our voice, our whole life. This needs to end at some point , this whole modern dictatorship.
Check Privacy Guides’ Chat Control article for ways to fight back for privacy.