Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices. Representatives from member states will meet on Friday to consider legislation critics call Chat Control, aka "laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse," which seeks to …
It's clear they work to control us. To restrain us. To make us their obedient slaves.
It has always been like this, because once you are in power you want to maintain that power and the only way to do it is crush the people under your heel, make them work for you (taxes), make them die for you (war).
Total control of communications is the second best thing to mind control, and since the second is not (yet) available, they'll go with the first.
And of course AI (paid by our taxes) will help them do it. And if it's sometimes wrong, who cares? Maybe some poor person will end up in prison for life, but who cares?
It's clear they work to control us. To restrain us. To make us their obedient slaves.
Maybe they just want us not to fuck children? Of course for some people that amounts to much the same thing, but let's not dismiss out of hand the possibility that this suggestion, impractical and intrusive though it is, is actually well-intentioned.
Hah! They are definitely not well-intentioned! The part where they want to "backdoor encryption so that intelligence agencies can do it" is telling: Do you see MI6 (or whatever your local spies are called) checking people for CSAM? Definitely not, they are only interested in political and strategic things.
(Didn't downvote you though.)
If it’s so well-intentioned then they should start by making these client-side systems completely optional on the user end. Provide it as a free client-side scanning service we can all use to detect and block known images of victims of abuse, complete with a simple button to resubmit said images for human moderation, quarantine them for later rescanning, or delete them. It would have been a godsend in the heyday of Gnutella P2P file sharing where people would mislabel things just to troll and let’s face it, such technology could even be augmented to allow people to block anything they don’t want to see, like, say, crapvertising.
Heck, throw in some other useful optional algorithms people can opt to use to block dick pics and other unwanted (but not illegal content) too, so that people don’t need to see things they don’t want to see. Even better, make it so senders client-side tag images they send to others with client-generated summary information ahead of time, so people can declare what types of legal images they’re willing to see and from which people, and the server can automatically allow/deny based upon tagging. If the receiving party’s phone disagrees with the tags prior to displaying an image, then the discrepancy can either be flagged, the image quarantined, a low-res or censored version displayed or the image deleted. That way, intimate partners can frequently send intimate photos and devices can legitimately keep those images hidden or blurred when said devices are located somewhere non-private (e.g. at work) and perhaps said images can be better protected than the cat photos would be in an automated way prior to sending them (e.g. force the use of zero knowledge encryption before the image is processed by the app used to send it). People who completely opt out would have untagged images, and users could could opt to refuse to receive them except from people they’ve allowlisted, incentivising the use of the system for convenience.
There are so many decent things which could be implemented which reduce the sharing of known CSAM while improving everyone’s lives in general, and these things could be made mandatory to implement but optional to enable. They could also be standardised and mandated to be open source for the most part (even if we cannot see all source data) so that we know what we’re getting ourselves into and have a means to find and fix bugs with the algorithms themselves. But they’ve chosen something deliberately dystopian, forcing spyware on people without their consent, and somehow not seeing the irony in that. At this point, I’m starting to believe it’s more malice than stupidity given the number of exceptions they’ve added to protect themselves without saying exactly why they deserve more protection then we do.
There are plenty of 'good' people working in 'government'—and we can be very thankful that is the case. There are also very powerful vested interests who make it their business to pursue those interests ruthlessly all the way up the governmental tree.
Rather than going all tinfoil hat and plunging down a pointless conspiracy rabbit hole, it's generally more sensible to acknowledge that 'they' are ordinary human beings, like the rest of us, but subject to the worst of human excesses and stupidity through their access to power and money.
By all means kick against the goads, but we shouldn't be foolish enough to think that there is nothing 'we' can do against our 'masters'. We're all together, in the same leaky boat.
"There are plenty of 'good' people working in 'government"
Yes there are but they are useful idiots who believe the bollacks they're told. Just like in the media who are captured. Also, do not under estimate what people will do when they have mortgages and kids to pay for in order to not have their life upended. But those good-ish people are not so good because rather than accept and understand they bury their heads and pretend the narrative is true so they don't feel bad about themselves or take a risk. I feel frustrated by them but not angry, we've all been there.
We need all people to understand the extreme danger they are in, not today or tomorrow but in a few years time it will impact. We are getting close to the point of no safe return. Our children and grand-children are in danger. When the majority realise, then we can stand as one and scream NO. But don't dismiss this as trivial, elites start wars to keep their power but they send us to die, they don't risk themselves. That's why they build their personal fallout shelters.
'Yes there are but they are useful idiots who believe the bollacks they're told. Just like in the media who are captured.'
Whereas you, presumably are immune to the brainwashing? Sadly, that way of thinking leads nowhere useful, because it is not based on a solid reality. The more we base our 'life view' on lies and distortions the more likely we are to demonise other human beings simply for not being 'like us', the more likely we are to take an arrogant view of ourselves as being 'superior'; the more likely we are to simply be 'part of the problem'.
There is no 'grand conspiracy'. There is simply the same 'human nature' that human beings have wrestled with since the year dot: greed, fear, hatred, etc. All leading towards division and violence.
The antidotes to these evils are well known, but not so easily practised: seeking peace, justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, humility, putting the wellbeing of others ahead of selfishness, etc.
So, we can choose to sit in our pity-pot, or congratulating ourselves about how much wiser we are than the 'useful idiots' we despise. Don't worry, they'll still come for you—those liars, haters, and fearmongers—even if you join them.
Alternatively, we're all free to choose life, and to learn to practise real love—if we want to, but it is our choice, our responsibility. No point blaming others for the consequences of the choices we make about what life is all about.
And then soon enough we're dead and gone, and it's too late then to wish we'd chosen differently.
It's not "about protecting children". That's just a familiar device which allows the politicians to demonise anyone who would dare criticise the idea.
This is yet another step along the road to the world wide panopticon where your opinions will land you in jail if the politicians don't like them. Dissent will not be tolerated!
If this truly comes to pass, the first thing I'll be getting rid of is any mobile phone new enough to be updated to include client side scanning. Then, my e-mail account will be hosted outside the EU. Any web sites I run will also be relocated. Like the elves, my data will leave these shores for somewhere much safer.
You'd think, at this time when we should be trying to divorce EU tech from an unreliable and hostile USA, that even the EU politicians could see that the only consequences of this draconian idea would be to push EU citizens straight into the arms of US technology companies.
"If passed, the legislation would require encrypted app makers like WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Telegram, and Tuta to find ways to enforce such scanning – something they have neither the ability nor the desire to do."
Reality doesnt matter this is politics and trying to obtain more control. It doesnt matter if its unworkable, dangerous and stupid, when does that stop government?
Now relate this article to the other one trying to get people to move their data away from the big bad US and into the EU.
If they caused the providers of secure messaging to end service in the EU, as far as the people pushing this are concerned that's great. If only backdoored communications are left then they've accomplished their goal. Anyone using one of the apps that has ended service in the EU via "non standard" means like sideloading or importing an iPhone from the US or whatever would be treated as a possible suspect - "why are you using this app when they have announced they no longer support operation in the EU?"
if it does we just need to have some innocent 'false positives', make them go viral and then let the fun begin.
With all the muppets addicted to socials, some adversarial pictures can be shared on regular bases by millions without them even knowing.
Doesn't really fixex teh problem if the goal is backdooring encryption for 'general use' though
First steps towards EU version of the Online Safety Act and can't they see how flawed and overreaching this disastrous piece of broken law is, for a few bleeding hearts that constantly bang the "think of the children" drum to suppress freedoms. If security services can't find paedo's online then what hope of nation states professional spies and hackers ?
Item #1: Quote: "...if client-side scanning was used..."
(a) What do you mean "if"? Both NSO/Pegasus and Paragon/Graphite
provide "client-side scanning" at the drop of some malware!!!
(b) ...and anyway the use of the phrase "client-side" is pure misdirection
since the scanning has to be based on HUGE server-based databases!!
====
Item #2: Quote: "...if encryption backdoors were implemented..."
What do you mean "if"? Who says that "encryption backdoors" are NOT ALREADY IMPLEMENTED?
.....maybe not by Signal.....but by other service providers?
====
Quote (William Burroughs): The paranoid is a person who knows a little of what is going on.
"Government and military communications would be exempt from the plan."
I wonder why. If the backdoors are so safe, and those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, then these rules should apply to everyone. It would be interesting to see how politicians' attitudes change, given the prospect of their own communications being scrutinised.
I've long been a critique of all the measures to combat 'child sexual abuse'. Not because I'm a kiddie porn fan, of course, but because its a handy way to slide in overall surveillance of any and everything under the umbrella of "Will Someone Think Of The Children!".
As we all know, information's information. Its an abstract concept, there's no inherent differentiation between information types. So building up a large detection and enforcement mechanism designed to suppress one class of information means that it can be used against any class of information. People outside the trade will immediately apply common sense and say "Obviously its only for such-and-such" but that sort of sentiment is really of the "It Can't Happen Here!" class and is easily exploitable.
There is no such thing as a security or encryption back door. There are just doors.
If encryption has a baked in key for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, who of course are well known for never overstepping their boundaries or committing abuse of their own, it WILL be leaked.
If content scanning is enabled for today's bogey man it WILL be expanded into "lawful but awful" (hmm where have I heard that phrase?) and on to whatever the elites du jour dislike.
@ChoHag
Quote: "...baked in key..."
Well.....the Diffie/Hellman scheme used by Signal generates a random encryption key for every message.
There are no fixed keys (like public/private schemes used by, for example, PGP).
There is nothing useful to "bake in".
.....and, of course, private groups can develop their own Diffie/Hellman private encryption/decryption schemes.
In fact, I quite like the idea of a private encryption/decryption scheme being used offline, and the resulting private
encrypted messages being sent over Signal. That way the snoops have TWO RANDOM keys and TWO Diffie/Hellman
schemes to crack!!!!
to these politicians how public/private key encryption actually works.
Then explain the only way to 'backdoor' these chat programs is to scan the message BEFORE its encrypted, then report the contents.
Which involves all sorts of client side scanning and what the scanning is supposed to pick up
Anyway, my boss went nuclear at 3pm, so its all out war................ oh brb special branch again..........
@Boris_the_Cockroach
Quote: "....to these politicians how public/private key encryption actually works..."
....and maybe explain how Diffie/Helman works:
- different random key for every message
- no public key data anywhere
- users don't know anything about keys
.....you know.....like Signal uses...............
Quote: "...scan the message BEFORE its encrypted,...."
And explain that NSO/Pegasus or Paragon/Graphite both do exactly that...plain text on end points
once snoops have dropped the malware on an end point.
Just a thought......maybe explain "to politicians" that all they need is a budget for NSO or Paragon software!!!!!
.....if they don't already have the software!!!!
@Evil_Auditor
Quote: ".....DH key exchange....."
Yup......we were talking about encryption/decryption keys........not talking about the D/H tokens which drive encryption/decryption key creation.
These tokens are not "keys"!!!!
The problem for the snoops is EXACTLY that there is "a different (encryption) key for every message"..................
.................unlike, say PGP, where there are static public/private key pairs.
And yet they want to make themselves even more unpopular, pissing off all their citizens by spying on them 24/7 and treating them all like criminals.
The OSA was a big nail in the coffin of Labour's dramatically declining popularity. Online porn is the prolefeed of the digital age. Interfering with access to it has cost them absolutely sacks of votes. And yet on they go, ruining something new each week. No talent, no nous, no ability.
They will all be out of power soon, having turned the net into a mass surveillance network and then handed control of their countries to fringe fascist parties. I'm sure that will go well.
Oh, and when they are out of power, they won't be able to opt themselves out of all that surveillance, either.
I wonder if Orwell ever thought that his dystopia would become a 'How To Guide' for politicians.
"European regimes are dropping like flies at elections"
Especially AfD politicians. 7 dead running up to elections. Although they are labelled far right I have yet to hear exactly which policies are extreme. Stop illegal immigration, avoid war, stop de-industrialising. Is anything but self-destruction now far-right?
> They will all be out of power soon
Yeah but to WHOM.
Tories started the shitshow called the OSA, Reform would be an economic disaster as they are just focused on immigration (just like Brexit), so WTF do we vote for instead?
Probably the best we can hope for is a totally hung election that will force them to work together....
What would the publics opinion be of every letter posted was opened read and then indexed just in case it contained “dangerous” information.
And every phone call recorded for “security”
This is the stuff that was condemned back then but the governments want to bring back.
People, you need to understand, things are not as they were even a decade ago. The self-appointed elites want to take absolute control, they have a schedule to get full control by 2030. Even if this gets blocked it will come back again very rapidly. It needs more than security experts complaining, it needs the population in general to understand what's happening. Then, if we can stop the surveillance state being installed we have to also stop them starting WW3, that tried and tested way, when the people get uppity, to ensure they keep all the money and power transferred through debt and inflation.
Look no further than the self confessed Globalisation expert Tony ‘Total Control’ Blair.
Do you want mass surveillance, mass data surveillance, mass media manipulation, Diigital ID, Central Bank Digital Currency? The Tony Blair Institute can help. Pay us loads of tax payers cash and we’ll help you keep those tax payer cows in the field so you can milk them of all their cash till they drop dead.
Check out Tony’s website for the full new world dystopia play book.
Got to go, there’s a knock at the door.
I am so happy to see there are others that understand what is happening. They will cull us if they get total control. Does anyone imagine that the "elites" (psychopaths) will want to pay for the old, the invalids or the weak? The view us as cattle, if we not producing or doing what they want, they have no need for us. All the apparent niceness we see at the moment is designed to weaken us mentally and physically.
This is why we have shitty food and drugs and are being taught men are women and white people are bad. Testosterone levels are low and so is fertility, why there is so much division. Why racial tensions are rising after declining in past decades.
Look up the term 'TSA keys' on Amazon and tell me what you find.
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