The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)
I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
I'd be curious what would happen if you pointed the relevant authorities at any decently sized store selling manga. There's got to be at least one stereotypical sexualised 4000 year old loli vampire or whatever in there.
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?
Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.
But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.
You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...
Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.
What's the point of criminalising hand-made pictures? I just don't understand it. I could understand the point of criminalising child porn photos, as producing these photos obviously requires violating other laws (actually not obviously, as you can dress adult actors to look like children, but whatever). But things that are obviously drawn without any involvement of real children, what's wrong with them? Just keep them away from general public (honestly any moderation will do that just fine) and weirdos who wants this stuff will find it and discharge their libido in a peaceful way.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense. It likely encourages pedophilia, meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay. It's similar to the way that regular porn affects the brain. I understand where you're coming from, though and I get your point, but I feel if someone consumes a lot of media of a certain type, they begin to 'embody' that media.
Ah, yes, the gateway drug trope. Always a good one for asserting control indirectly. Inevitably results in increased profits for the purveyors of the gateway drug and no reduction in demand or consumption. Prosecutors and jailors get richer too. Follow the money.
Of course pictures of gay people doesn't encourage being gay, but being gay is fine. Being a pedophile is not fine. If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it. We aren't talking about pictures of pedophiles, we are talking about what is, in essence, child pornography. Maybe 'encourages pedophilia' is not a thorough enough way to phrase it, but a 'dormant' pedophile is much more likely to become an 'active' one if they are consuming excessive amounts of media related to their interests.
> If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it.
I have this great idea. It involves clothes that completely cover up the people that could cause temptation, creating separate spaces for them, and so.
I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?
> Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case.
What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't? How would you even scientifically prove this? There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to rape or rape prevention.
Does modern sexual objectification and gratification increase the likelyhood that men will seek to actualize their fantasies? I believe it does.
From my own experience growing up watching porn from around 11-12 years of age and being an incel, when I was 21 I finally took things into my own hands and went to prostitutes to try and recreate those porn movies I was watching. I did not rape anyone but because of porn I learned that sex should be aggresive, that women respond "positively" to aggresive sex. I was sexually aggresive with the escorts I frequented, because of porn.
Over the span of 10+ years of doing this I even noticed shifts in sensibilities of escorts. Like young escorts these days by default gag when doing oral because this is what the market required in the past how many years but wasn't so common 10+ years ago.
For the record, in my experience, not even most escorts actually ENJOY aggressive sex. You would think they get used to it but trust me they don't. Aggressive sex is a perversion and I say this from experience not dogma.
> What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't?
I think it’s very obvious when looking at the last 20 years. Porn availability increased ridiculously since around 2000 due to internet becoming widespread. But look at statistics on rape in most countries and you see its decreasing in the large majority. Does that not convince you that at least there seems to be no causation??
Surveillance has also increased, fear of not getting away with it is higher. Also society has been militant about this issue more with "believe all women" etc. Maybe men invest more in video games and relieve their aggression that way without risking prison. I don't know, I am no sociologist but again, there are too many variables to prove any sort of causation.
Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?
Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.
I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.
> Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever.
That sounds like an actual negative effect, if there is actually causation. But I'd argue social media has overall a much more general influence by putting our whole lives into a panopticon. It is very hard to escape its reach even if one is not a social media user.
I know what you mean, but do you not agree that if someone is, let's say, on the point of becoming a pedophile, discovers such media, it will become more and more of what they think about, and what one thinks about determines their actions.
I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a state meaningfully denoted by “on the point of becoming a pedophile” which can be tipped by exposure to media in that way, no.
To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)
That's easily concievable scenario. Which doesn't make it true or overwhelmingly significant to the bottom line. Many untrue things are equally easy to imagine.
What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?
Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).
My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.
From a universal perspective, there is no such thing as "basic morality". Only what the most recent cultural norms of the largest (or strongest) group of people say.
In addition to “drawing”, it’s also the loosely interpreted age that concerns me. Any drawing “deemed under 18” is just as criminalized as the actual crime. While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18, many drawings of lewd acts, adding that the age is freely interpreted by judges… it’s a free field for general oppression.
If those countries have laws against making and consuming pedophile pictures and drawings (or "artwork"), I feel it's perfectly fine for people making and consuming those to be raided, even if they disagree with the law (if people could opt out of all laws they don't agree with, I'mnot sure what would be the point of making laws).
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
> Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.
Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
IRC is such a simple protocol seeing its implementation in <1k loc in many languages and I assume bot building process must be simple too compared to signal.
I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.
Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.
XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential
I was curious and searched to find more context and ... uh, no offense but what on earth have you been doing that you've been tangling with the law over CSAM for at least four years?
Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.
They just said "illegal" artwork, they didn't stipulate. (So this could be incest, bestiality, loli, etc, etc.)
Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.
Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.
I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.
> I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about
Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
> It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.
> Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".
Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
How do you determine that though? Do you put the pictures in front of a jury? I am riding the metro daily in a big Asian city and I am pretty sure many of the "anime" ads will be unacceptable on the other side of the world.
I can't really connect what you're saying here. I understand that you think drawing loli (I imagine) shouldn't be classified as pedophelia, but what does the law say?
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
> If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
> That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted"
Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.
You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.
I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.
The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.
In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.
On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.
The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?
I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.
For a long time there was push to handle some of that under magistrate courts and other approaches so that to properly defend you have to appeal to actually get in front of proper court.
There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.
50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.
Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.
> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.
The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.
I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.
You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.
I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.
I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.
The cycle of proposing the same surveillance legislation under different names is exhausting. Chat Control, ProtectEU, Going Dark - same invasive proposals, different branding.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services.
This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
"Going Dark" is perhaps the most honest and realistic branding yet, on multiple levels.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
They can't put you in jail, but they will often happily sell your data to the government so that they can put you in jail [1], and by holding the data they are now open to subpoenas anyway.
Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.
IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.
> The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
Chat Control was never the name of the legislation, it’s the name critics successfully gave to the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.
These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.
That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
Fascism requires an authoritarian state. If you don't want the horrors of the 20th century, be it fascists with a world war, or socialism with even more deaths despite being in peacetime, you don't want authoritarianism to take hold, and you want to move power out of the state.
People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.
Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.
And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the law to distinguish between official acts taken in an honest attempt to benefit the nation, and those taken to corruptly and brazenly benefit oneself.
That'd be a massive break from tradition in the US. AFAIK the only formal mechanism they have to separate the official from the person behind the role is impeachment by Congress. Apart from that there isn't really a mechanism to handle brazen corruption.
And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.
I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.
Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU
The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries
Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws
That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).
I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
This is just one example showing that circumventing any legal block, without ability to control every form of communication, does not achieve it's goal.
And if any government can control all such forms of communications, we are already beyond saving.
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
Who do you think is doing the CSAM? It's the criminal organizations and the terrorists and the Russian hackers, obviously.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
Its like govt banning bleach and when chemical companies protest, the govt tells them to fix problem of people mixing bleach and vinegar. Its a problem, it has to be solved. If you dont like this, find another solution govt says.
It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them.
We aren't at that part of the EU legislative process yet. First the commission agrees on a framework, then the working groups work with industry to fill out the details of the framework. That's standard EU process.
Okay? The framework being proposed here is designed to enable universal communications surveillance. No combination of "details" would make that acceptable.
This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.
Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.
(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
> It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides.
This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.
> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious
You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.
> We will build resilience against hybrid threats by enhancing the protection of critical infrastructure, reinforcing cybersecurity, securing transport hubs and ports and combatting online threats.
for their own personal benefit? What? (Quote from the ProtectEU document)
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.
Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.
The Epstein debacle seems to indicate that child sexual exploitation is a preferred method of entrapping, blackmailing, and controlling world political and science leaders and the wealthy. And implicates the same intelligence agencies calling for mass surveillance.
Intent is unimportant; the law itself is authoritarian. And if you think that there aren't nefarious actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of these kinds of laws, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you
Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.
I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.
I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.
At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to.
yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.
It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.
A few examples of how mitigate the problem
* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.
* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.
* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.
* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).
CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.
The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
If Mullvad could bother to link to this supposed "Presidency outcome paper" that would be great, after extensive searches on Concilium and eur-lex I have no idea what that is supposed to reference.
> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
In the ancient Greek colony of Locri, any who proposed a new law would do so with a rope around their neck, if the law was voted down, they would get hanged.
Well, Congress renewed the Patriot act so I don't have a lot of faith. Personally I'm starting to think that all of Congress, including aides, should get cycled out all at once periodically so that their internal culture of hating the masses gets broken.
Fair point. The USA PATRIOT Act shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But one of its most controversial parts (Section 215) did expire in 2020 (it was barely going to make it, though).
But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.
Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.
Once social trust (or assibiyah, to use Ibn Khandun's term) in a region collapses, it often returns slowly or not at all. Sadly common pattern in history. I think one could plausibly argue that in this way, Calabria never recovered from the collapse of antiquity, the Gothic wars, and generations spent as a Christian-Muslim war zone.
Intentionally misinformed citizens continued to charge the streets demanding "essential services" like barber shops need to be reopened and to intentionally dismantle and resist against all government protections on public safety during the pandemic (like wearing a mask during an active spreading event), literally while their grandparents and relatives slowly and painfully died on respirators in hospitals largely agreeing with the same notion of covid prevention measures being "pointless". They then attacked the institutions that provided either medical treatments or provided assistance, and continue to promote that culture. Lemmings to a cause they dont understand for a message they know is false.
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
Masks and protocols around them were largely just theatre though. Only very expensive n95 or better type masks, which were properly fitted and handled would actually provide any sort of protection from covid. Even the eventual proponents of masks initially were against the idea as in many ways many of the responses to covid were directed politically, not practically.
The mask mandates weren't to protect you, they were to protect others from you. If everyone did this, the spread would have been massively reduced, and super-spreader events wouldn't have happened anywhere near as much.
Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).
Perhaps the messaging was different where you lived, but I don't believe any credible professional was suggesting those outside healthcare wear masks for their own protection. Mask mandates are to reduce the risk of others catching covid from you, a considerably easier task for which even cloth masks are usefully effective. There's a reason surgeons masks are still used.
When governments push out clearly nonsensical regulations, like you must go to the office even if you can work from home, but you cannot go hiking, yes people do tend to get mad.
It was not that long ago, that most countries regulated products, communications, food, and many other things, even arms & munitions, very, very lightly. In the UK in 1903, a law was passed prohibiting the sale of pistols to children. The UK is a country where adults who have served in the military have a hard time buying a pistol today.
From 1900 onwards, the scope of safety regulation greatly expanded, and the state apparatus necessary to make that regulation stick also expanded. Different countries have gone in different directions with it. The US has a lot less safety than many other countries, but our regulations and regulatory apparatus greatly expanded, too. It's easy to sell safety to voters and with improving technology and information systems, more and more safety was possible.
We are probably approaching a local maxima of some kind in our approach to safety; or maybe we just suffer from a maniacal focus on it. Legislators are ever more willing to set aside the fundamental rights in the name of protecting the vulnerable from harm.
And hopefully this gets voted down like all the other laws. Even if it passes, it will probably be repealed or just not enforced within some member nations.
At least this is talked about and discussed... unlike in China, or Russia, or the US's own 20+-years-and-still-going-patriot act.
A reasonable point about the discussion, but I doubt it is a meaningful one. The intention of these international agreements is that they circumvent the laws by moving data out of jurisdiction and have someone else do the surveillance, right? I have to assume that the EU is doing metadata analysis. All the talking is just about bringing it in house.
On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance.
"If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what."
Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
They'll probably take it to court in the regions within the EU where this would be illegal, for example Germany. This is kind of what I meant by this law would be ignored/repealed as it goes against member nations own laws. I would expect there would be a lot of civic push back too. This law hasn't passed before, I'm not confident it will pass this time either. The real issue here is that the EU is not good at handling band faith actors - the same law in different wrapping should not be allowed to persist.
The way to stop it is to introduce a law that does exactly the opposite: that encrypted communication is always protected and should always be protected and that no legislation shall be introduced that weakens these technical guarantees.
That way, it essentially has to do a two step solution, of repealing the previous law that prohibits it, and then introducing their own.
I’m puzzled by the limited opposition from businesses regarding government attempts to access encrypted communications. Granting governments easy access—which inevitably leads to uncontrolled monitoring—compromises a company’s most valuable asset: its privacy. This would effectively hand over the keys to their operations, exposing them to security breaches, stifling growth potential, limiting access to competitive markets, and ultimately, jeopardizing company ownership. Corrupt officials could exploit this access to manipulate markets, facilitate insider trading, sabotage business plans, and even plant fabricated evidence within company communications and systems, leading to potential takeover and imprisonment of owners.
I'm not criticizing the content of this post, but the author is likely wrong about this specific initiative being called "Going Dark".
"Going Dark" has been the umbrella term various worldwide intelligence orgs have been using since the mid-2010s to describe their lack of access to encrypted communications. For example, here's FBI Director James Comey using the term in 2014: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-fbi-director-james-... It's a coordinated broad branding effort by intelligence agencies across the west, but I doubt that this specific EU initiative itself has ever been called "Going Dark" even internally.
Which VPN provider doesn’t have their addresses flagged? I know a few offer “residential” IP addresses (for quite the premium), but as I understand it, these are a bit of a grey area and are also usually shared, so usually just a matter of time until they’re banned or flagged as proxy/shared/anonymiser.
The financial incentives for VPNs as they get bigger cause them to both put as many subscribers on the same IP as possible and to share IPs over the entire subscriber base. It's possible for a VPN to sacrifice profit to avoid being detected as easily.
One reason not to choose Njalla is that they changed their legal entity without (to my knowledge) telling anyone. THat's a bit of a red flag for me.
They were incorporated as 1337 Services LLC in Nevis (the Caribbean island) and recently it suddenly changed to Njalla SRL in Costa Rica. Looks like some guy wrote a post about it where he contacted them, they said "internal restructuring, nothing to worry about" and refused to elaborate further.
I know Peter Sunde (of TPB fame) founded it but I don't know if it has changed hands now.
I'm happy Airvpn is rarely mentioned in mainstream vpn lists and don't typically mention them myself (sorry airvpn folks, but here's my apology) because I suspect its relative obscurity is in great part the reason it works so well. Not only reputation - it's technologically good too, supports all the payment methods, good prices, lots of exit points, no nonsense. I've been using them continuously for several years.
I love The Internet, it came into my life as I became an adult, I’ve watched it change the world, and I find attempts to lock it down to be abhorrent.
I also grew up in a world where intelligence fieldcraft was an in-person activity where it was just about possible for one side to keep track of the other side, or at least hold some kind of leverage, counter-leverage, and counter-counter-leverage to stop the Cold War getting out of control.
The internet, as well as giving us all this freedom to communicate, also gave the Controls of this world — high level intelligence officers based in their home countries but directing operations overseas — a wonderful new lever to influence, harass, and sabotage. Why burn an agent when you can find a useful idiot in a foreign country to agitate on your behalf?
I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
>I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?
If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.
Security services qualitatively have as many fuckups to their name as they do successes. I was listening to a podcast last week about British undercover police fathering children with the women they were undercover with. If the position of the anti-Chat-Control people is that we should reject not just the backdoors but also — on the basis that they just can’t be trusted — the whole idea of a national, secret security service, then they should be open and say so.
Well... Until people will react protecting their own interests we will only go in a death spiral.
Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.
This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.
> The EU Commission and several member states are also looking for new rules on data retention. In a new ”Presidency outcome paper”, the member states discuss metadata retention: which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often. The ambition is “to have the broadest possible scope of application” and this time some member states also want the proposal to include VPN services.
Centrists, I'd say. Same as the people pushing it in the UK.
The left, the anti-immigration parties and really, any party which isn't wholly 'let's do the same as we've always had' probably imagine that this would be used to their disadvantage somehow.
The EU is definitely more right than left after the last election. The Commission in particular, though it seems they're always more right-wing than the Parliament. As we speak they're watering down all sorts of regulations beneficial to the common citizen but inconvenient to the corporations, and the "moderate" right is now openly threatening to ally, or downright allying, with the far right in various right-wing matters in order to get them passed.
There would need to be some form of punishment towards them for their failure to deter them.
The most 'accessible' options to a disgruntled populace (or a small portion of it, down to N=1) are generally recognized as extreme things that very few sane people are on board with, because they are recognized widely as bad precedents for societies. Things like issuing death threats, assassinations, or burning down parliament buildings. To state what I hope is already obvious - this is not an endorsement of violence. For one Japan's history of 'government by assassination' was incredibly ugly and helped lead to extremism which helped lead to Imperial Japan's conduct becoming notorious as they did.
There are other far more peaceful options to be considered but they would require high degrees of coordination and agreement. For an example, the classic Amish shunning - if legislatures faced utter social ostracism for their attempts then they would be unlikely to attempt it again.
I'm not sure what policies could even provoke such extreme responses as those listed (violent or otherwise) in the first place, but for better or worse Chat Control isn't one of them. My most realistic guess would be that trying to abolish the pension/retirement system altogether.
I once liked the EU. Well still do it because of the east to travel without borders. But it's leadership is something dangerous and may shape to some form of dictatorship or entity that does not serve its people. But a small minority consisting out of some large companies.
No, the European Commission and the unelected bureaucrats behind it are the true leaders of the EU.
They are the only long lasting institution that can do time arbitrages (wait for the right presidency to push new regulations), they have the means to pressure individual MPs, and they are the ones holding the pen during the negociations between the parliament and the States. The EC is also the master of the legal agenda, the banana republic-style parliament can't decide which laws they vote.
Because the EC has little to no budget to spend, and its only tool is regulation (that doesn't require cost/benefit analysis btw), they...spend their day regulating. They are not constrained by execution either since the States are in charge of applying and dealing the regulations, however how detached from reality they are.
The EC bureaucrats come from a small elite, remote from the reality of the common man. Ursula Von der Leyen is a good example of this. Fun fact, a phd is required to become a EC bureaucrat, so many of them...just buy the services of a post-doc researcher to write it for them. I used to work with a colleague who did it as a side job.
There's democratic deficit in the whole system as this issue wasn't part of most internal election campaigns, effectively circumventing democratic process, due to lack of input from citizens themselves.
EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.
The EC has no democratic control, their members are not elected, only the commissioners are "approved" by the european parliament. Its actions are also obfuscated and mostly non-public (as we saw in the ChatControl case, for instance), so citizens hardly even know what's happening.
The president is responsible for the secretaries of State actions, and more generally their respective parties.
No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.
Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
I'm suggesting that there are enough layers of interdiction, that you can easily 'wash' political fallout and push legislation that would otherwise get you voted out of office in local elections.
This is a proposal from one wing of polititians that still hasn't even passed a basic voting process in EU parliament.
So what exactly are you screeching about? Which nation on this world has leadership that never proposes anything like this? Which one is 100% pure and noone even thinks about bad things to bring up to a vote?
We should absolutely be “screeching” about any attempt to push or rebrand chat control.
You’re framing it as some sort of business as usual type situation where a dumbass politician does a thing. Absolutely not the case and you’re either uninformed or a bad actor. There’s layers of lobbying, corruption and ideology to unpack here https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-present-and-then
Wow. I cannot fathom anyone thinking this, but also I am doubtful the EU pays for propaganda on HN so it is what it is I guess. After von der Leyen's corruption and the fast pace into totalitarianism against the will of the population nonetheless. Just wow.
Are you really convinced that the EU, which is not even a nation and is usually laughed away for being incapable of making any firm decision whatsoever, is on a faster track towards totalitarianism than the US has been since its last election?
I'm as pro european as they come, but I think the author didn't deserve a downvote.
If there is a moment when the EU could not afford to take hits to their popularity, it is now. And here we are, gifting free shots to anti-EU populists.
Measures such going dark and similar ones are wholly supported - and pushed - by police forces around europe, not by politicians. I do agree that the politician should grow a spine and trust computer scientists for one, since they're the ones making laws after all
No, trust the computer scientists on what can easily be circumvented by criminals while still allowing third parties to scan private conversations. But I do suspect a bit that this is only an intended side effect
There’s a common theme in the US to declare the existence of gay and trans people to be child abuse. Yes, existence. Like, telling a child gay people exist if they ask.
But the whole “think of the children” schlock has always been a power grab. Otherwise we’d start by eliminating child poverty which is a huge factor in the level of actual abuse they receive.
To be honest, I think VPN businesses and specifically politically charged ones like Mullvad is doing disservice for the security of the country and specifically EU in this case.
I think the right course of action should be a political activism, not a technological one. Especially when the company doing it makes a fortune.
The course, when one can just disengage from participating in society by sidestepping the problems by either using VPNs in terms of censorship or by using Crypto in case of regulations is very dangerous and will reinforce the worst trends.
Finally such person will still have to rely on the community around for physical protection to live.
So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
I just want to remind you that dismantling EU is strategic goal of the US, Russia and China.
Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
In the history of humanity, it's never been the side attempting to restrict expression and the flow of information that's been in the right.
You don't "solve" the spread of "disinformation" because it's not a real problem in the first place. What you call "disinformation" is merely an idea with which you disagree. It doesn't matter whether any idea comes from the west, from China, from Russia, or Satan's rectum: it stands on its own and competes on its merits with other ideas in the mind of the public.
An idea so weak that it can survive only by murdering alternative ideas in the cradle is too fragile to deserve existing at all.
When you block the expression of disagreement, you wreck the sense-making apparatus that a civilization uses to solve problems and navigate history. You cripple its ability to find effective solutions for real but inconvenient problems. That, not people seeing the wrong words, is the real threat to public safety.
As we've learned painfully over the past decade, it is impossible for a censor to distinguish falsehood from disagreement. Attempts to purify discourse always and everywhere lead to epistemic collapse and crises a legitimacy. The concept is flawed and any policy intended to "combat the spread of disinformation" is evil.
Arguing that "disinformation is not a real problem, there's only ideas" is reductionism, like arguing that there's no such a thing as a forest, only trees. And a "battle of ideas" can definitely favor the side with more money - if that weren't the case, then why do politicians spend millions trying to outspend their opponents?
There are most certainly groups of people spreading objectively false statements, not as "disagreement" (although that exists too) but because they expect to profit from it. Is it easy to detect? No. Does that mean we should give up? I'd also say no.
>So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Why is the onus of explaining this on the people opposing it? Did any of the proposing politicians ever explain how their plan is going to solve any of these, rather than just being a massive power grab packaged up in "think about the children"? There are plenty of explanations on why this is not going to stop crime, why do you want more explanations and solutions from people telling you this is not going to work, rather than asking the people proposing "how is this going to work"?
> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Education. Education. Education. The only thing that ever worked. is Education. Censorship and a total surveillance state aren't an option. Why bother protecting freedom and democracy if you have to destroy freedom and democracy to do so?
And in case of sabotage of critical infrastructure, the answer is three-fold: 1. Apply the law to the saboteurs. 2. Retaliate in asymmetric fashion. We can't sabotage their hospitals but we can stop buying russian oil and gas, take their money and 3. arm ukraine.
> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
Are you or have you ever been a communist? We surveived the cold war and the warsaw pact. We can survive a third rate petrol station masquerading as a state.
> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
The problem is that many of the most highly educated people are the ones fully supporting censorship in the fight against disinformation. Higher education has become a bastion of illiberal ideology.
Universities may have cured us of some forms of indoctrination but exposed us to others: for example, nuclear power was demonized for decades is academia and our avoiding it has set us back as a civilization.
The "answer" here isn't education per se. A would-be censor might look at the spread of an inconvenient idea and conclude the education isn't working and therefore harder measures are justified.
The answer is epistemic humility and historical literacy. A good education instills both. They teach us that one can be wrong without shame, that testing ideas makes us stronger, and that no good has come out of boost ideas beyond what their merits can support.
Specifically, I want universities to do a much better job of teaching people to argue a perspective with which they disagree. A well-educated person can hold the best version of his opponent's idea in mind and argue it persuasively enough that his opponent agrees that he's been fairly heard. If people can't do that at scale, they're tempted to reach for censorship instead of truth seeking.
Another thing I want from universities (and all schools) is for them to inculcate the idea that the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with its merits. The irrational primate brain up-weights ideas it sees more often. The censor (if we're steelmanning) believes that coordinated influence campaigns can hijack the popularity heuristic and make people believe things they wouldn't if those ideas diffused organically through the information ecosystem.
This idea is internally consistent, sure, but 1) the censorship "cure" is always worse than the disease, and 2) we can invest in bolstering epistemics instead of in beefing up censorship.
We are rational primates. We can override popularity heuristics. Doing so is a skill we must be taught, however, and one of the highest ROI things we can do in education right now is teach it.
Nuclear isn't a silver bullet. Producing, handling, and disposing of its fuel is dangerous and carbon-intense. My state college wasn't anti-nuclear. I think the fundamentals just don't make much sense as solar, wind, and other sources have improved.
> Most people don’t even have an internal monologue
Is there any scientific indication that whether private thoughts are automatically verbalized actually has an impact on cognitive activity or function?
Also where do you get this idea that most people lack an internal monologue? Afaik research indicates that totally lacking verbal thinking is very rare.
There is a person thinking about how to solve actual problems at the bus/rail stop. The other person is totally reactive (someone FaceTimes them), mostly glued to doomscrolling (consuming non stop). There are disproportionately more of the latter than the former.
There’s nothing wrong with that it’s just how humans are wired. It’s pretty obvious.
> I think the right course of action should be a political activism, not a technological one. Especially when the company doing it makes a fortune.
We tried that. My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.
> The course, when one can just disengage from participating in society by sidestepping the problems by either using VPNs in terms of censorship .. is very dangerous and will reinforce the worst trends.
It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.
Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.
Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?
> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Social media companies make money by keeping people engaged, and it seems the most effective way of doing that is to feed people fear and rage bait. Yes, that's a problem. As is disinformation campaigns by authoritarian states.
Powerful companies have powerful lobbyists, and systematically strive for regulatory capture. Authoritarian states who conduct disinformation campaigns against their population are unlikely to listen to reform proposals from their population.
I don't claim to have a solution for these complex issues, but I'm pretty sure mass surveillance and censorship will make things worse.
> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
Political reform through civil discourse cannot be taken for granted. Mass surveillance and censorship violate the principle of proportionality, and do not belong in a free society.
> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.
> My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.
I understand that.
You created a company which allows people to regain freedoms limited by their governments.
My only problem is that it ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.
By creating a technical solutions to subvert government function, you are basically moved into a business of bypassing government regulations for people with money. Obviously when the market becomes large enough, governments can no longer ignore it.
The problem is that it creates reinforcement loops in such ways that political change becomes more difficult.
For example, we may imagine that Russia and China target people through social media. I believe that the effectiveness of this influence cannot be overstated, so naturally some governments may start thinking about limiting it by enforcing bans on some social media platforms or create laws to force them to be more transparent. You may not agree with this personally, and believe in the freedom of choice, but you are still in a business of exposing people to enemy propaganda against their democratically elected governments.
> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.
Yes, in democratic countries I believe population should feel the pressure and resolve it through the process of electing the politicians representing their values, not buying workarounds from the vendor.
I believe that the exact same ads you have on the streets in the cities should be published by politicians or NGOs and not a business.
> Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.
I agree with that. To be honest, I do care about the EU mostly and I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.
> Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?
There is a very fine line, and I don't know the answer. I do belive that people should have a right for a private communication. I also do not trust law enforcement agencies and people there.
On the other hand, I do know that vulnerable people (teens, minorities, sick, elderly) in my country get recruited by Russia en masses through messengers. I do know that Russia engages in psychological warfare through Telegram, Facebook and TikTok without governments able to do anything. I do see the politicians in the western countries aligns with the psychological warfare of enemies because it helps them to get in power.
I do want for politicians to fight for my rights, but I don't want that from businesses to be honest.
> I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.
I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy. The more discussion you create around issues related to privacy and censorship the more users you'll have - that's why I call it performative. Mullvad's business depends on the performance of fighting for the rights at the same time as benefitting from the fight itself.
I do feel that there is a big disconnect between finding a technical solution and finding a political solution, and I feel like the tech sector becoming more and more influential and I also believe this will not end well.
> Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.
Likewise.
> You created a company which .. ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.
Undermining the power of governments and other powerful entities has benefits and drawbacks. Our thesis is that making mass surveillance and online censorship ineffective is a net good for humanity in the long term.
You are arguing that censorship is a net good in the much more specific context of disinformation campaigns on social media during war time. Yes, government censorship might be effective and proportional in that context. It could also backfire.
You are also arguing that the dynamics and algorithms of social media is the vector through which disinformation spreads. Wouldn't it then be more effective and proportional to target social media for regulation?
>> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to .. not circumvent censorship through technological means..
> Yes, in democratic countries..
What should people in undemocratic countries do?
> I believe that the exact same ads you have on the streets in the cities should be published by politicians or NGOs and not a business.
> .. I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.
> On the other hand, I do know that vulnerable people (teens, minorities, sick, elderly) in my country get recruited by Russia en masses through messengers. I do know that Russia engages in psychological warfare through Telegram, Facebook and TikTok without governments able to do anything.
I agree that is a serious problem and I don't know how to solve it. I'm sorry.
> I do want for politicians to fight for my rights, but I don't want that from businesses to be honest.
Why not?
> I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy.
From a cause-and-effect point of view it would be more correct to say that starting a business is a part of our activism strategy. My opinions on the proportionality of mass surveillance and government censorship were formed a decade before I started Mullvad. Running a business is hard work, and if I didn't believe in its mission I would move on to something easier.
> The more discussion you create around issues related to privacy and censorship the more users you'll have - that's why I call it performative. Mullvad's business depends on the performance of fighting for the rights at the same time as benefitting from the fight itself.
I see. I interpreted it as "for show" in the sense of not being genuine.
I am sorry, but I don't follow — are you saying that Chat Control is a solution to any of these problems?
It achieves the opposite. Undermining encryption under the pretext of "think of the children" won't end well. It only creates more national security risks.
The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)
I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
I'd be curious what would happen if you pointed the relevant authorities at any decently sized store selling manga. There's got to be at least one stereotypical sexualised 4000 year old loli vampire or whatever in there.
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?
Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.
https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...
But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.
You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...
Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.
What's the point of criminalising hand-made pictures? I just don't understand it. I could understand the point of criminalising child porn photos, as producing these photos obviously requires violating other laws (actually not obviously, as you can dress adult actors to look like children, but whatever). But things that are obviously drawn without any involvement of real children, what's wrong with them? Just keep them away from general public (honestly any moderation will do that just fine) and weirdos who wants this stuff will find it and discharge their libido in a peaceful way.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense. It likely encourages pedophilia, meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay. It's similar to the way that regular porn affects the brain. I understand where you're coming from, though and I get your point, but I feel if someone consumes a lot of media of a certain type, they begin to 'embody' that media.
Just don't goon.
> meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay.
I've been reading "illegal" manga for 20 years. I've never once thought that these acts would be okay to do in real life.
Same when I read the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher.
Ah, yes, the gateway drug trope. Always a good one for asserting control indirectly. Inevitably results in increased profits for the purveyors of the gateway drug and no reduction in demand or consumption. Prosecutors and jailors get richer too. Follow the money.
> It likely encourages pedophilia
It's like saying that pictures of gay people encourages homosexuality
Or saying playing violent video games makes you violent, which sounds familiar...
Of course pictures of gay people doesn't encourage being gay, but being gay is fine. Being a pedophile is not fine. If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it. We aren't talking about pictures of pedophiles, we are talking about what is, in essence, child pornography. Maybe 'encourages pedophilia' is not a thorough enough way to phrase it, but a 'dormant' pedophile is much more likely to become an 'active' one if they are consuming excessive amounts of media related to their interests.
> If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it.
I have this great idea. It involves clothes that completely cover up the people that could cause temptation, creating separate spaces for them, and so.
> Being a pedophile is not fine.
You're not equating pedophilia with child abuse, are you? Because having an attraction to children (pedophilia) isn't in itself a crime.
I like this parallel. No joke intended.
I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?
> Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case.
What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't? How would you even scientifically prove this? There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to rape or rape prevention.
Does modern sexual objectification and gratification increase the likelyhood that men will seek to actualize their fantasies? I believe it does.
From my own experience growing up watching porn from around 11-12 years of age and being an incel, when I was 21 I finally took things into my own hands and went to prostitutes to try and recreate those porn movies I was watching. I did not rape anyone but because of porn I learned that sex should be aggresive, that women respond "positively" to aggresive sex. I was sexually aggresive with the escorts I frequented, because of porn.
Over the span of 10+ years of doing this I even noticed shifts in sensibilities of escorts. Like young escorts these days by default gag when doing oral because this is what the market required in the past how many years but wasn't so common 10+ years ago.
For the record, in my experience, not even most escorts actually ENJOY aggressive sex. You would think they get used to it but trust me they don't. Aggressive sex is a perversion and I say this from experience not dogma.
> What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't?
I think it’s very obvious when looking at the last 20 years. Porn availability increased ridiculously since around 2000 due to internet becoming widespread. But look at statistics on rape in most countries and you see its decreasing in the large majority. Does that not convince you that at least there seems to be no causation??
Surveillance has also increased, fear of not getting away with it is higher. Also society has been militant about this issue more with "believe all women" etc. Maybe men invest more in video games and relieve their aggression that way without risking prison. I don't know, I am no sociologist but again, there are too many variables to prove any sort of causation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1464272/reported-sexual-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1418831/sexual-offences-...
I realise I respond to a stupid argument. I'm just annoyed.
You cherry picked a few outliers. Here’s a chart showing many countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rape_in_the_Unite...
It’s clearly going down in most places, including the USA.
I googled my country, the USA, and the two European countries I have most experience of. I didn't cherry pick anything, I just stopped.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
I don't know what to tell you, except to say the messiness of the data goes to underline how poorly sourced your claim is.
Exactly, people will watch porn videos of girls being choked or whatever, will be with a girl and assume she will like being choked. Not okay at all.
> It likely encourages pedophilia
Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?
Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.
I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.
> Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever.
That sounds like an actual negative effect, if there is actually causation. But I'd argue social media has overall a much more general influence by putting our whole lives into a panopticon. It is very hard to escape its reach even if one is not a social media user.
I know what you mean, but do you not agree that if someone is, let's say, on the point of becoming a pedophile, discovers such media, it will become more and more of what they think about, and what one thinks about determines their actions.
I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a state meaningfully denoted by “on the point of becoming a pedophile” which can be tipped by exposure to media in that way, no.
To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)
That's easily concievable scenario. Which doesn't make it true or overwhelmingly significant to the bottom line. Many untrue things are equally easy to imagine.
What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?
Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).
My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.
> will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay
I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.
Basic morality and human rights
From a universal perspective, there is no such thing as "basic morality". Only what the most recent cultural norms of the largest (or strongest) group of people say.
How is it moral to claim "Murdering people (in fiction) is fine," then?
It normalises a market for abuse imagery and pornographic escalation is a known phenomenon.
In addition to “drawing”, it’s also the loosely interpreted age that concerns me. Any drawing “deemed under 18” is just as criminalized as the actual crime. While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18, many drawings of lewd acts, adding that the age is freely interpreted by judges… it’s a free field for general oppression.
> While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18
Do you support robust and mandatory age verification to enforce existing rules on social media websites, like Instagram?
What? What’s the relation between your question and being safe while consuming ok-content?
I said “deemed”. The judge can decide anything even if the user really is above 18.
Not even to ask how you enforce age verification of characters in a drawing?
If those countries have laws against making and consuming pedophile pictures and drawings (or "artwork"), I feel it's perfectly fine for people making and consuming those to be raided, even if they disagree with the law (if people could opt out of all laws they don't agree with, I'mnot sure what would be the point of making laws).
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
> Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
I read this as "It's perfectly fine to persecute people for their art". And boy, you're on the wrong side of history.
There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.
For clarification, you got raided despite using tor? You mention tor but dont say so directly so I'm not sure.
I've don't use Tor. I've never had a reason to.
All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.
Publically accessible doesn't necessarily mean legal.
They're all long established websites. The oldest one I have an account on (and use to get posters) is 2007.
Also doesn't mean they're legal.
Maybe no point beating up the guy. Maybe he's slightly naive.
Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
Manga used to be distributed on irc, you would message a bot and it woul initiate a file transfer.
IRC is such a simple protocol seeing its implementation in <1k loc in many languages and I assume bot building process must be simple too compared to signal.
I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.
Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.
XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential
> this is honestly going to get much worse
Just like with Brexit, the majority of UK's population voted (and will keep voting) for this.
"God save the queen, the fascist regime"
I was curious and searched to find more context and ... uh, no offense but what on earth have you been doing that you've been tangling with the law over CSAM for at least four years?
Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.
They just said "illegal" artwork, they didn't stipulate. (So this could be incest, bestiality, loli, etc, etc.)
Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.
Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.
I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.
> I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about
Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
> If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care?
No and I'm sure every judge in Britain would throw that case out.
> Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
> It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.
Hate speech is also illegal in the UK, yes.
>"It can in certain circumstances encourage..."
Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances". They should go get busy with some real crime.
> Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances"
Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
> Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".
Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
How do you determine that though? Do you put the pictures in front of a jury? I am riding the metro daily in a big Asian city and I am pretty sure many of the "anime" ads will be unacceptable on the other side of the world.
I can't really connect what you're saying here. I understand that you think drawing loli (I imagine) shouldn't be classified as pedophelia, but what does the law say?
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
> If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
> That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted"
Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.
You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.
The problem lies on the wide margin of interpretation those laws give the police.
50kph is a number.
"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.
The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.
In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.
On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.
The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?
I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.
For a long time there was push to handle some of that under magistrate courts and other approaches so that to properly defend you have to appeal to actually get in front of proper court.
There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.
50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.
Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.
> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.
The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.
I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.
You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.
I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.
Wasn't his comment exactly "advocating for that position"?
I like this answer posted in the other leg of this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352710
I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.
The cycle of proposing the same surveillance legislation under different names is exhausting. Chat Control, ProtectEU, Going Dark - same invasive proposals, different branding.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services. This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
"Going Dark" is perhaps the most honest and realistic branding yet, on multiple levels.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
Pretty sure Google and meta are the ones that normalised mass surveillance...
Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.
They can't put you in jail, but they will often happily sell your data to the government so that they can put you in jail [1], and by holding the data they are now open to subpoenas anyway.
Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.
IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
> The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
Chat Control was never the name of the legislation, it’s the name critics successfully gave to the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
The other way would be to ruin the career prospects of any politicians that put their name behind this.
Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.
Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.
People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.
That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
How would anyone be voted out in the EU?
Election cycles are unfortunately too long for that to work. Would need to reduce office terms to 2-3 months for "vote them out" to be viable.
Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
The people who push such laws are not voted in to begin with. Thorn et.al do not have elections.
Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.
You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
Fascism requires an authoritarian state. If you don't want the horrors of the 20th century, be it fascists with a world war, or socialism with even more deaths despite being in peacetime, you don't want authoritarianism to take hold, and you want to move power out of the state.
>"you don't want authoritarianism to take hold"
I think the EU is well on its way of accomplishing just that. Not that it is unique in aspirations
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People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
Well the italian constitution says that freedom and secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are not to be violated.
Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
Secrecy of communiations frequently constitutionally protected:
See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...
There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.
Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
Text, phone calls and emails which are not encrypted are the equivalent of a postcard. They don't need to seize the effects, only observe them.
Encrypting, end to end, would be the equivalent of posting a letter. The contents are concealed and thus are protected.
Time to wiretap all of Congress and then have a bot post it all to mastodon...
Except, wiretapping was considered very illegal in the USA.
> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.
And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the law to distinguish between official acts taken in an honest attempt to benefit the nation, and those taken to corruptly and brazenly benefit oneself.
That'd be a massive break from tradition in the US. AFAIK the only formal mechanism they have to separate the official from the person behind the role is impeachment by Congress. Apart from that there isn't really a mechanism to handle brazen corruption.
And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.
I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.
> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy
Which apply equally to the government?
Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU
The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries
Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws
Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.
Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention
That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).
If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd.
A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.
That is not enough.
We need to make every EU law contiguent on subsequently being adopted by the people - and at a significant majority (say 75% of eligible voters).
Yes that means fewer new laws, which is not a bad thing when the EU people are so detached from their population.
like the Amercan Bil of Rights?
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I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
are you unable to comprehend hypothetical?
This is just one example showing that circumventing any legal block, without ability to control every form of communication, does not achieve it's goal.
And if any government can control all such forms of communications, we are already beyond saving.
Which lobbying group?
Thorn
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
But ProtectEU stuff is about organised crime, terrorism, cybersecurity, and countering Russian sabotage operations, not sure why you brought up CSAM.
Who do you think is doing the CSAM? It's the criminal organizations and the terrorists and the Russian hackers, obviously.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
Don't forget the elite like Epstein et al.
That seems like a criminal organization.
(Can't reply directly): I know he was involved in it, I just didn't realize it was on the scale of a network.
Really? When I think criminal organization I think "Mafia."
Your argument is that, among other things, a human trafficking network isn't a criminal organization?
Its like govt banning bleach and when chemical companies protest, the govt tells them to fix problem of people mixing bleach and vinegar. Its a problem, it has to be solved. If you dont like this, find another solution govt says.
It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them.
It's like a lot of things.
But they aren't working with industry here.
We aren't at that part of the EU legislative process yet. First the commission agrees on a framework, then the working groups work with industry to fill out the details of the framework. That's standard EU process.
Okay? The framework being proposed here is designed to enable universal communications surveillance. No combination of "details" would make that acceptable.
This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.
Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.
(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
> It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides.
This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.
> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious
You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.
The people proposing it believe it to be to their own personal advantage. They don't necessarily believe it to be just and fair.
The commissioners are porposing
> We will build resilience against hybrid threats by enhancing the protection of critical infrastructure, reinforcing cybersecurity, securing transport hubs and ports and combatting online threats.
for their own personal benefit? What? (Quote from the ProtectEU document)
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.
Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.
The Epstein debacle seems to indicate that child sexual exploitation is a preferred method of entrapping, blackmailing, and controlling world political and science leaders and the wealthy. And implicates the same intelligence agencies calling for mass surveillance.
Intent is unimportant; the law itself is authoritarian. And if you think that there aren't nefarious actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of these kinds of laws, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you
I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?
Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.
I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.
I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.
At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to.
yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.
Yeah, the Irish really should step up their GDPR enforcements.
It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.
A few examples of how mitigate the problem
* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.
* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.
* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.
* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).
CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.
The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
This is a way more sick proposal of authoritarianism than any law that would allow cops to read chat messages with a warrant.
Which part exactly?
If Mullvad could bother to link to this supposed "Presidency outcome paper" that would be great, after extensive searches on Concilium and eur-lex I have no idea what that is supposed to reference.
In any case here's the actual "ProtectEU" text the Comission sent on the first of April which contains most of the text Mullvad is quoting from the "presidency outcome paper": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
As a bonus, here's input report listing the problems that are supposed to be solved: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/05963640...
This is from the introduction:
> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
I believe it's this one (which is likely leaked document as that document number isn't publicly accessible): https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/eu-data-retention-presidency-...
There's also this one: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/WK-11640-2025-...
The first one appears to be the result of the of the second which called member states to submit their opinions.
In the ancient Greek colony of Locri, any who proposed a new law would do so with a rope around their neck, if the law was voted down, they would get hanged.
Food for thought.
U.S. lawmaking has a built-in ratchet effect: passing new laws is politically easier than repealing old ones.
An easy way to solve this is all laws should have an expiration date by default.
Well, Congress renewed the Patriot act so I don't have a lot of faith. Personally I'm starting to think that all of Congress, including aides, should get cycled out all at once periodically so that their internal culture of hating the masses gets broken.
Fair point. The USA PATRIOT Act shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But one of its most controversial parts (Section 215) did expire in 2020 (it was barely going to make it, though).
But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.
Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.
But then how would all these lawyers be able to charge you $500/hour?
Excellent idea (re:mandatory expiration dates/sunset clauses)
I don't think that system would have the desired results in a world where most people have already voted to hang themselves.
Zaleucus [0] from Locri wrote the first law system in the 7th century BC. Might be connected to what you have shared.
Today's Locri is in Calabria, a region in Italy that many consider infested with mafia-like organizations, which is of course sad, but also ironic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaleucus
Once social trust (or assibiyah, to use Ibn Khandun's term) in a region collapses, it often returns slowly or not at all. Sadly common pattern in history. I think one could plausibly argue that in this way, Calabria never recovered from the collapse of antiquity, the Gothic wars, and generations spent as a Christian-Muslim war zone.
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Won't someone think of the regime? :(
Intentionally misinformed citizens continued to charge the streets demanding "essential services" like barber shops need to be reopened and to intentionally dismantle and resist against all government protections on public safety during the pandemic (like wearing a mask during an active spreading event), literally while their grandparents and relatives slowly and painfully died on respirators in hospitals largely agreeing with the same notion of covid prevention measures being "pointless". They then attacked the institutions that provided either medical treatments or provided assistance, and continue to promote that culture. Lemmings to a cause they dont understand for a message they know is false.
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
Masks and protocols around them were largely just theatre though. Only very expensive n95 or better type masks, which were properly fitted and handled would actually provide any sort of protection from covid. Even the eventual proponents of masks initially were against the idea as in many ways many of the responses to covid were directed politically, not practically.
The mask mandates weren't to protect you, they were to protect others from you. If everyone did this, the spread would have been massively reduced, and super-spreader events wouldn't have happened anywhere near as much.
Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).
Perhaps the messaging was different where you lived, but I don't believe any credible professional was suggesting those outside healthcare wear masks for their own protection. Mask mandates are to reduce the risk of others catching covid from you, a considerably easier task for which even cloth masks are usefully effective. There's a reason surgeons masks are still used.
The proper masks are not expensive and an imperfect fit still helps a lot.
The majority of people were not wearing the proper masks, nor were they mandated or even in great supply. As I said, it was theatre.
When governments push out clearly nonsensical regulations, like you must go to the office even if you can work from home, but you cannot go hiking, yes people do tend to get mad.
I saw a couple unreasonable restrictions like that in some places. It's not what caused the vast majority of complaints.
Yes yes everyone except you is stupid.
You're making some big jumps in guessing my thoughts and those jumps are wrong.
It was not that long ago, that most countries regulated products, communications, food, and many other things, even arms & munitions, very, very lightly. In the UK in 1903, a law was passed prohibiting the sale of pistols to children. The UK is a country where adults who have served in the military have a hard time buying a pistol today.
From 1900 onwards, the scope of safety regulation greatly expanded, and the state apparatus necessary to make that regulation stick also expanded. Different countries have gone in different directions with it. The US has a lot less safety than many other countries, but our regulations and regulatory apparatus greatly expanded, too. It's easy to sell safety to voters and with improving technology and information systems, more and more safety was possible.
We are probably approaching a local maxima of some kind in our approach to safety; or maybe we just suffer from a maniacal focus on it. Legislators are ever more willing to set aside the fundamental rights in the name of protecting the vulnerable from harm.
And hopefully this gets voted down like all the other laws. Even if it passes, it will probably be repealed or just not enforced within some member nations.
At least this is talked about and discussed... unlike in China, or Russia, or the US's own 20+-years-and-still-going-patriot act.
A reasonable point about the discussion, but I doubt it is a meaningful one. The intention of these international agreements is that they circumvent the laws by moving data out of jurisdiction and have someone else do the surveillance, right? I have to assume that the EU is doing metadata analysis. All the talking is just about bringing it in house.
On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance.
"If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what."
Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
They'll probably take it to court in the regions within the EU where this would be illegal, for example Germany. This is kind of what I meant by this law would be ignored/repealed as it goes against member nations own laws. I would expect there would be a lot of civic push back too. This law hasn't passed before, I'm not confident it will pass this time either. The real issue here is that the EU is not good at handling band faith actors - the same law in different wrapping should not be allowed to persist.
The way to stop it is to introduce a law that does exactly the opposite: that encrypted communication is always protected and should always be protected and that no legislation shall be introduced that weakens these technical guarantees.
That way, it essentially has to do a two step solution, of repealing the previous law that prohibits it, and then introducing their own.
Unfortunately the EU has no 2nd Amendment, or they could go the route of classifying encryption as a munition.
I’m puzzled by the limited opposition from businesses regarding government attempts to access encrypted communications. Granting governments easy access—which inevitably leads to uncontrolled monitoring—compromises a company’s most valuable asset: its privacy. This would effectively hand over the keys to their operations, exposing them to security breaches, stifling growth potential, limiting access to competitive markets, and ultimately, jeopardizing company ownership. Corrupt officials could exploit this access to manipulate markets, facilitate insider trading, sabotage business plans, and even plant fabricated evidence within company communications and systems, leading to potential takeover and imprisonment of owners.
I'm not criticizing the content of this post, but the author is likely wrong about this specific initiative being called "Going Dark".
"Going Dark" has been the umbrella term various worldwide intelligence orgs have been using since the mid-2010s to describe their lack of access to encrypted communications. For example, here's FBI Director James Comey using the term in 2014: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-fbi-director-james-... It's a coordinated broad branding effort by intelligence agencies across the west, but I doubt that this specific EU initiative itself has ever been called "Going Dark" even internally.
VPN is a trust exercise, but, I’m sure if Mullvlad isn’t the best out there, they’re far from the worst.
They are not the best because they no longer support port forwarding. Their IPs are low quality and get you flagged as suspicious.
Which VPN provider doesn’t have their addresses flagged? I know a few offer “residential” IP addresses (for quite the premium), but as I understand it, these are a bit of a grey area and are also usually shared, so usually just a matter of time until they’re banned or flagged as proxy/shared/anonymiser.
The financial incentives for VPNs as they get bigger cause them to both put as many subscribers on the same IP as possible and to share IPs over the entire subscriber base. It's possible for a VPN to sacrifice profit to avoid being detected as easily.
Tbh between that and cgnat I'm kinda hoping that the entire ipv4 space gets sufficiently tainted that sites stop blocking by ip
Can recommend https://njal.la if you still need port forwarding.
how does it compare to mullvad?
One reason not to choose Njalla is that they changed their legal entity without (to my knowledge) telling anyone. THat's a bit of a red flag for me.
They were incorporated as 1337 Services LLC in Nevis (the Caribbean island) and recently it suddenly changed to Njalla SRL in Costa Rica. Looks like some guy wrote a post about it where he contacted them, they said "internal restructuring, nothing to worry about" and refused to elaborate further.
I know Peter Sunde (of TPB fame) founded it but I don't know if it has changed hands now.
Or proton
They had to disable port forwarding due to abuse and spam iirc.
Are you expecting a public IPv4 from a VPN?
A VPN provider could easily support Port Control Protocol / NAT-PMP without giving each VPN client its own public IPv4.
Not a whole public IPv4, just one port on it (or a couple). And the public IP should change every reconnect.
Airvpn does it
I'm happy Airvpn is rarely mentioned in mainstream vpn lists and don't typically mention them myself (sorry airvpn folks, but here's my apology) because I suspect its relative obscurity is in great part the reason it works so well. Not only reputation - it's technologically good too, supports all the payment methods, good prices, lots of exit points, no nonsense. I've been using them continuously for several years.
Yep they are great! Wireguard support on Linux too
Mullvad is one of the few that work in China today, any others? Or is it possible to run your own Mullvad server?
Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days
Which other VPN providers support the range of payment methods that Mullvad does?
They're doing it so often now. We should throw them away. Too bad they haven't been elected
I love The Internet, it came into my life as I became an adult, I’ve watched it change the world, and I find attempts to lock it down to be abhorrent.
I also grew up in a world where intelligence fieldcraft was an in-person activity where it was just about possible for one side to keep track of the other side, or at least hold some kind of leverage, counter-leverage, and counter-counter-leverage to stop the Cold War getting out of control.
The internet, as well as giving us all this freedom to communicate, also gave the Controls of this world — high level intelligence officers based in their home countries but directing operations overseas — a wonderful new lever to influence, harass, and sabotage. Why burn an agent when you can find a useful idiot in a foreign country to agitate on your behalf?
I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
>I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?
If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.
Security services qualitatively have as many fuckups to their name as they do successes. I was listening to a podcast last week about British undercover police fathering children with the women they were undercover with. If the position of the anti-Chat-Control people is that we should reject not just the backdoors but also — on the basis that they just can’t be trusted — the whole idea of a national, secret security service, then they should be open and say so.
Well... Until people will react protecting their own interests we will only go in a death spiral.
Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.
This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.
> The EU Commission and several member states are also looking for new rules on data retention. In a new ”Presidency outcome paper”, the member states discuss metadata retention: which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often. The ambition is “to have the broadest possible scope of application” and this time some member states also want the proposal to include VPN services.
So, they succeed and repeal it a third time. What can be done to stop them from trying again and again and again until they get away with it?
Not much really, unless the EU takes a big turn to the left. Which is unfortunately not something that's likely to happen anytime soon.
The left? The authoritarian politicians pushing this legislation in the EU are more leftist than right.
Centrists, I'd say. Same as the people pushing it in the UK.
The left, the anti-immigration parties and really, any party which isn't wholly 'let's do the same as we've always had' probably imagine that this would be used to their disadvantage somehow.
They’re center-right.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/digital-house-arrest-how-th...
They're usually liberals, so right wing but they don't specifically hate homosexuals.
> They're usually liberals
The irony.
Aside from that I also thought EU is more left than right wing right now. Nothing what they try to push this term of office seems right wing to me.
The EU is definitely more right than left after the last election. The Commission in particular, though it seems they're always more right-wing than the Parliament. As we speak they're watering down all sorts of regulations beneficial to the common citizen but inconvenient to the corporations, and the "moderate" right is now openly threatening to ally, or downright allying, with the far right in various right-wing matters in order to get them passed.
No? Kaja Kallas and Ursula VDL are trying to push war with Russia…
There would need to be some form of punishment towards them for their failure to deter them.
The most 'accessible' options to a disgruntled populace (or a small portion of it, down to N=1) are generally recognized as extreme things that very few sane people are on board with, because they are recognized widely as bad precedents for societies. Things like issuing death threats, assassinations, or burning down parliament buildings. To state what I hope is already obvious - this is not an endorsement of violence. For one Japan's history of 'government by assassination' was incredibly ugly and helped lead to extremism which helped lead to Imperial Japan's conduct becoming notorious as they did.
There are other far more peaceful options to be considered but they would require high degrees of coordination and agreement. For an example, the classic Amish shunning - if legislatures faced utter social ostracism for their attempts then they would be unlikely to attempt it again.
I'm not sure what policies could even provoke such extreme responses as those listed (violent or otherwise) in the first place, but for better or worse Chat Control isn't one of them. My most realistic guess would be that trying to abolish the pension/retirement system altogether.
How long before the EU comes out with a social credit system like China?
How long before the EU has its own version of China's Great Firewall?
> How long before ...
20 years ago in the EU & US.
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They're downvotes, not bullets. GP isn't brave for enduring them.
I once liked the EU. Well still do it because of the east to travel without borders. But it's leadership is something dangerous and may shape to some form of dictatorship or entity that does not serve its people. But a small minority consisting out of some large companies.
The EU leadership is the leaders of the 27 sovereign countries
Now you can argue there is a democratic deficit in those countries, sure.
No, the European Commission and the unelected bureaucrats behind it are the true leaders of the EU.
They are the only long lasting institution that can do time arbitrages (wait for the right presidency to push new regulations), they have the means to pressure individual MPs, and they are the ones holding the pen during the negociations between the parliament and the States. The EC is also the master of the legal agenda, the banana republic-style parliament can't decide which laws they vote.
Because the EC has little to no budget to spend, and its only tool is regulation (that doesn't require cost/benefit analysis btw), they...spend their day regulating. They are not constrained by execution either since the States are in charge of applying and dealing the regulations, however how detached from reality they are.
The EC bureaucrats come from a small elite, remote from the reality of the common man. Ursula Von der Leyen is a good example of this. Fun fact, a phd is required to become a EC bureaucrat, so many of them...just buy the services of a post-doc researcher to write it for them. I used to work with a colleague who did it as a side job.
There's democratic deficit in the whole system as this issue wasn't part of most internal election campaigns, effectively circumventing democratic process, due to lack of input from citizens themselves.
EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.
Are you suggesting the existence democracies that only ever implement policies that were a significantly theme during elections?
The EC has no democratic control, their members are not elected, only the commissioners are "approved" by the european parliament. Its actions are also obfuscated and mostly non-public (as we saw in the ChatControl case, for instance), so citizens hardly even know what's happening.
Dunno about European governemt but us secretaries of state are appointed by the head of government just like a commissioner is
The president is responsible for the secretaries of State actions, and more generally their respective parties.
No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.
Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
I'm suggesting that there are enough layers of interdiction, that you can easily 'wash' political fallout and push legislation that would otherwise get you voted out of office in local elections.
In the U.K. you can vote for local councillors all you want, won’t make any difference to Westminster
This is a proposal from one wing of polititians that still hasn't even passed a basic voting process in EU parliament.
So what exactly are you screeching about? Which nation on this world has leadership that never proposes anything like this? Which one is 100% pure and noone even thinks about bad things to bring up to a vote?
We should absolutely be “screeching” about any attempt to push or rebrand chat control. You’re framing it as some sort of business as usual type situation where a dumbass politician does a thing. Absolutely not the case and you’re either uninformed or a bad actor. There’s layers of lobbying, corruption and ideology to unpack here https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-present-and-then
I think EU will manage without you liking it. But painting its leadership as the one trying to shape dictatorship is incredible ignorant.
Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.
A country serving small minority of large companies is the best description of the US, not the EU.
Wow. I cannot fathom anyone thinking this, but also I am doubtful the EU pays for propaganda on HN so it is what it is I guess. After von der Leyen's corruption and the fast pace into totalitarianism against the will of the population nonetheless. Just wow.
Are you really convinced that the EU, which is not even a nation and is usually laughed away for being incapable of making any firm decision whatsoever, is on a faster track towards totalitarianism than the US has been since its last election?
No, and I didn't claim that - but it is sliding at a fast pace too.
> Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.
Let's assume for a moment that would be true. And let's also ignore the lack of a nuclear weapons in most EU countries.
How does breaking encryption for normal people help? Spies and Operatives will just use PGP and ignore these laws, because that's what spies do.
Mind you I don’t believe this, but the logic is if encryption is banned, then anyone using it will be easier to find like spies.
Before online encryption, spies still used code books but having one in your house was essentially proof you were a spy.
Didn’t spies just use common books like war and peace or the bible
> Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.
Are you attempting to justify ChatControl with that situation? You might need to help us out with how you arrived at that exactly
I'm as pro european as they come, but I think the author didn't deserve a downvote.
If there is a moment when the EU could not afford to take hits to their popularity, it is now. And here we are, gifting free shots to anti-EU populists.
Measures such going dark and similar ones are wholly supported - and pushed - by police forces around europe, not by politicians. I do agree that the politician should grow a spine and trust computer scientists for one, since they're the ones making laws after all
> I do agree that the politician should grow a spine and trust computer scientists for one
Trust the computer scientists on how to prevent crime? Uh, well that's certainly creative.
No, trust the computer scientists on what can easily be circumvented by criminals while still allowing third parties to scan private conversations. But I do suspect a bit that this is only an intended side effect
As opposed to blindly trusting the police and LEA? Yes, absolutely — I'd rather trust computer scientists.
Your description match the US as well.
Like, whos is pushing this shit? Who exactly is it that wants this? Which individuals?
How would you like your censorship wrapped? Anti-terrorism or protecting children?
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/control-of-i...
The same ones that pushed to scuttle Germany's nuclear reactors.
There’s a common theme in the US to declare the existence of gay and trans people to be child abuse. Yes, existence. Like, telling a child gay people exist if they ask.
But the whole “think of the children” schlock has always been a power grab. Otherwise we’d start by eliminating child poverty which is a huge factor in the level of actual abuse they receive.
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Well, Chat Control was approved by the Council, so I can't wait for the time Going Dark is also approved by ot.
EU, a democracy idol, now turning into a fascism idol.
GDPR for thee, but not for me.
GDPR (flawed as it may be) is there to protect consumers. So are you saying the ruling class is exempting itself from that protection?
The political class has already exempted themselves from chatcontrol so yeah
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These lobbyists will never give up. This is one reason why the EU in its current form simply does not work.
Can we see the names of these people?
To be honest, I think VPN businesses and specifically politically charged ones like Mullvad is doing disservice for the security of the country and specifically EU in this case.
I think the right course of action should be a political activism, not a technological one. Especially when the company doing it makes a fortune.
The course, when one can just disengage from participating in society by sidestepping the problems by either using VPNs in terms of censorship or by using Crypto in case of regulations is very dangerous and will reinforce the worst trends.
Finally such person will still have to rely on the community around for physical protection to live.
So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
I just want to remind you that dismantling EU is strategic goal of the US, Russia and China.
Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
In the history of humanity, it's never been the side attempting to restrict expression and the flow of information that's been in the right.
You don't "solve" the spread of "disinformation" because it's not a real problem in the first place. What you call "disinformation" is merely an idea with which you disagree. It doesn't matter whether any idea comes from the west, from China, from Russia, or Satan's rectum: it stands on its own and competes on its merits with other ideas in the mind of the public.
An idea so weak that it can survive only by murdering alternative ideas in the cradle is too fragile to deserve existing at all.
When you block the expression of disagreement, you wreck the sense-making apparatus that a civilization uses to solve problems and navigate history. You cripple its ability to find effective solutions for real but inconvenient problems. That, not people seeing the wrong words, is the real threat to public safety.
As we've learned painfully over the past decade, it is impossible for a censor to distinguish falsehood from disagreement. Attempts to purify discourse always and everywhere lead to epistemic collapse and crises a legitimacy. The concept is flawed and any policy intended to "combat the spread of disinformation" is evil.
Arguing that "disinformation is not a real problem, there's only ideas" is reductionism, like arguing that there's no such a thing as a forest, only trees. And a "battle of ideas" can definitely favor the side with more money - if that weren't the case, then why do politicians spend millions trying to outspend their opponents?
There are most certainly groups of people spreading objectively false statements, not as "disagreement" (although that exists too) but because they expect to profit from it. Is it easy to detect? No. Does that mean we should give up? I'd also say no.
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>So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Why is the onus of explaining this on the people opposing it? Did any of the proposing politicians ever explain how their plan is going to solve any of these, rather than just being a massive power grab packaged up in "think about the children"? There are plenty of explanations on why this is not going to stop crime, why do you want more explanations and solutions from people telling you this is not going to work, rather than asking the people proposing "how is this going to work"?
> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Education. Education. Education. The only thing that ever worked. is Education. Censorship and a total surveillance state aren't an option. Why bother protecting freedom and democracy if you have to destroy freedom and democracy to do so?
And in case of sabotage of critical infrastructure, the answer is three-fold: 1. Apply the law to the saboteurs. 2. Retaliate in asymmetric fashion. We can't sabotage their hospitals but we can stop buying russian oil and gas, take their money and 3. arm ukraine.
> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
Are you or have you ever been a communist? We surveived the cold war and the warsaw pact. We can survive a third rate petrol station masquerading as a state.
> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
Who is earning a fortune here?
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> Education. Education. Education.
The problem is that many of the most highly educated people are the ones fully supporting censorship in the fight against disinformation. Higher education has become a bastion of illiberal ideology.
Just because some education implementations have problems doesn't mean education itself must be excluded from the solution.
Public education and universities played a large role in freeing me from generations of magical thinking and religious indoctrination.
Universities may have cured us of some forms of indoctrination but exposed us to others: for example, nuclear power was demonized for decades is academia and our avoiding it has set us back as a civilization.
The "answer" here isn't education per se. A would-be censor might look at the spread of an inconvenient idea and conclude the education isn't working and therefore harder measures are justified.
The answer is epistemic humility and historical literacy. A good education instills both. They teach us that one can be wrong without shame, that testing ideas makes us stronger, and that no good has come out of boost ideas beyond what their merits can support.
Specifically, I want universities to do a much better job of teaching people to argue a perspective with which they disagree. A well-educated person can hold the best version of his opponent's idea in mind and argue it persuasively enough that his opponent agrees that he's been fairly heard. If people can't do that at scale, they're tempted to reach for censorship instead of truth seeking.
Another thing I want from universities (and all schools) is for them to inculcate the idea that the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with its merits. The irrational primate brain up-weights ideas it sees more often. The censor (if we're steelmanning) believes that coordinated influence campaigns can hijack the popularity heuristic and make people believe things they wouldn't if those ideas diffused organically through the information ecosystem.
This idea is internally consistent, sure, but 1) the censorship "cure" is always worse than the disease, and 2) we can invest in bolstering epistemics instead of in beefing up censorship.
We are rational primates. We can override popularity heuristics. Doing so is a skill we must be taught, however, and one of the highest ROI things we can do in education right now is teach it.
Nuclear isn't a silver bullet. Producing, handling, and disposing of its fuel is dangerous and carbon-intense. My state college wasn't anti-nuclear. I think the fundamentals just don't make much sense as solar, wind, and other sources have improved.
I think it’s because once you educate yourself, you see how the masses behave and it’s like the ultimate revelation.
They are consumers. Feeders. They want to be told what to think.
Most people don’t even have an internal monologue and many people say they don’t even think much, not even a thought.
You thought for yourself. You used your brain. But you are outnumbered. Vastly.
> Most people don’t even have an internal monologue
Is there any scientific indication that whether private thoughts are automatically verbalized actually has an impact on cognitive activity or function?
Also where do you get this idea that most people lack an internal monologue? Afaik research indicates that totally lacking verbal thinking is very rare.
There is a person thinking about how to solve actual problems at the bus/rail stop. The other person is totally reactive (someone FaceTimes them), mostly glued to doomscrolling (consuming non stop). There are disproportionately more of the latter than the former.
There’s nothing wrong with that it’s just how humans are wired. It’s pretty obvious.
Thank you for your constructive criticism.
> I think the right course of action should be a political activism, not a technological one. Especially when the company doing it makes a fortune.
We tried that. My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.
> The course, when one can just disengage from participating in society by sidestepping the problems by either using VPNs in terms of censorship .. is very dangerous and will reinforce the worst trends.
It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.
Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.
Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?
> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.
Social media companies make money by keeping people engaged, and it seems the most effective way of doing that is to feed people fear and rage bait. Yes, that's a problem. As is disinformation campaigns by authoritarian states.
Powerful companies have powerful lobbyists, and systematically strive for regulatory capture. Authoritarian states who conduct disinformation campaigns against their population are unlikely to listen to reform proposals from their population.
I don't claim to have a solution for these complex issues, but I'm pretty sure mass surveillance and censorship will make things worse.
> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.
Political reform through civil discourse cannot be taken for granted. Mass surveillance and censorship violate the principle of proportionality, and do not belong in a free society.
> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.
I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.
Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.
> My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.
I understand that.
You created a company which allows people to regain freedoms limited by their governments. My only problem is that it ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.
By creating a technical solutions to subvert government function, you are basically moved into a business of bypassing government regulations for people with money. Obviously when the market becomes large enough, governments can no longer ignore it.
The problem is that it creates reinforcement loops in such ways that political change becomes more difficult.
For example, we may imagine that Russia and China target people through social media. I believe that the effectiveness of this influence cannot be overstated, so naturally some governments may start thinking about limiting it by enforcing bans on some social media platforms or create laws to force them to be more transparent. You may not agree with this personally, and believe in the freedom of choice, but you are still in a business of exposing people to enemy propaganda against their democratically elected governments.
> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.
Yes, in democratic countries I believe population should feel the pressure and resolve it through the process of electing the politicians representing their values, not buying workarounds from the vendor.
I believe that the exact same ads you have on the streets in the cities should be published by politicians or NGOs and not a business.
> Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.
I agree with that. To be honest, I do care about the EU mostly and I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.
> Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?
There is a very fine line, and I don't know the answer. I do belive that people should have a right for a private communication. I also do not trust law enforcement agencies and people there.
On the other hand, I do know that vulnerable people (teens, minorities, sick, elderly) in my country get recruited by Russia en masses through messengers. I do know that Russia engages in psychological warfare through Telegram, Facebook and TikTok without governments able to do anything. I do see the politicians in the western countries aligns with the psychological warfare of enemies because it helps them to get in power.
I do want for politicians to fight for my rights, but I don't want that from businesses to be honest.
> I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.
I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy. The more discussion you create around issues related to privacy and censorship the more users you'll have - that's why I call it performative. Mullvad's business depends on the performance of fighting for the rights at the same time as benefitting from the fight itself.
I do feel that there is a big disconnect between finding a technical solution and finding a political solution, and I feel like the tech sector becoming more and more influential and I also believe this will not end well.
> Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.
Likewise.
> You created a company which .. ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.
Undermining the power of governments and other powerful entities has benefits and drawbacks. Our thesis is that making mass surveillance and online censorship ineffective is a net good for humanity in the long term.
You are arguing that censorship is a net good in the much more specific context of disinformation campaigns on social media during war time. Yes, government censorship might be effective and proportional in that context. It could also backfire.
You are also arguing that the dynamics and algorithms of social media is the vector through which disinformation spreads. Wouldn't it then be more effective and proportional to target social media for regulation?
>> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to .. not circumvent censorship through technological means.. > Yes, in democratic countries..
What should people in undemocratic countries do?
> I believe that the exact same ads you have on the streets in the cities should be published by politicians or NGOs and not a business. > .. I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.
I agree. At the same time, freedom of expression and of the press is under attack on a global scale. Consider this article from Reporters Without Borders: https://rsf.org/en/world-press-freedom-index-2025-over-half-...
> On the other hand, I do know that vulnerable people (teens, minorities, sick, elderly) in my country get recruited by Russia en masses through messengers. I do know that Russia engages in psychological warfare through Telegram, Facebook and TikTok without governments able to do anything.
I agree that is a serious problem and I don't know how to solve it. I'm sorry.
> I do want for politicians to fight for my rights, but I don't want that from businesses to be honest.
Why not?
> I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy.
From a cause-and-effect point of view it would be more correct to say that starting a business is a part of our activism strategy. My opinions on the proportionality of mass surveillance and government censorship were formed a decade before I started Mullvad. Running a business is hard work, and if I didn't believe in its mission I would move on to something easier.
> The more discussion you create around issues related to privacy and censorship the more users you'll have - that's why I call it performative. Mullvad's business depends on the performance of fighting for the rights at the same time as benefitting from the fight itself.
I see. I interpreted it as "for show" in the sense of not being genuine.
What? You don't need VPNs to do anything of that, we have political parties and journalists doing the job from within already
I am sorry, but I don't follow — are you saying that Chat Control is a solution to any of these problems?
It achieves the opposite. Undermining encryption under the pretext of "think of the children" won't end well. It only creates more national security risks.