Denmark Reportedly Withdraws Chat Control Proposal Following Controversy

> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.

Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)

It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.

> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time

I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.

We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.

I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.

That is the only way to run a government.

Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.

We aren't at the end of history.

Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.

Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.

Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.

Unfortunately the ECJ’s orders aren’t strictly followed and they recently pretty much indicated they could support an atrocious law like ProtectEU. Perhaps to save face.

Not just. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767226

I’m not sure how punishments are calculated, but surely a former politician pedophile remains dangerous - even if they don’t abuse children directly they will have residual power that they can use to harm children. Or maybe the low sentence is because of his existing power.

The judge noted that given the publicity of the case, Henriks true penalty would be living in a country of 6 million people that all know his face and that he is a pedophile.

You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again. This isn’t the US after all…

Directive 2011/92/EU article 5.2 would suggest no less than 1 year of imprisonment. Depending on how kindly you read the other articles, and given how much pornography instances he had, I'd argue for more.

As a Dane I am ashamed of the current government, but I didn't vote for them. Hopefully we'll get a more liberal government next year. But a lot of people seems to think that more surveillance means less crime. Problem is that this has not been proven.

In practice it is entirely about wanting to expand the power of the state and cement its supremacy over the rights of the individual.

Those other things are a means to this end. They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.

How ~is it working there though? Is there less CSAM going around in these places?

You're responding to a completely different thing:

>many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to (total surveillance)

It's not about the malicious elites. These societal problems surveillance keeps being pushed for never get fixed in either China or Russia. Yet people (not just politicians) keep pushing for it or at the very least ignoring the push. A decade+ after the push, things like KYC/AML regulations are not even controversial anymore, and never even were for most people. Oh, these are banks! Of course they need the info on your entire life because how else would you stop money laundering, child molesters, or shudders those North Koreans? What, are you a criminal?

And of course you somehow manage to blame the usual bad guys for something that happens in your society, because of course they're inherently evil and are always the reason for your problems. Guess what, the same often happens there and they copy your practices. Don't you have your own agency?

The reality is that the majority in any place in the world doesn't see privacy, or most of their or others' rights for that matter, worth fighting for. Having the abundancy and convenience is enough.

> The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.

Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?

Are you seriously trying to suggest that monitoring of all private messages in Russia and China has stopped child abuse images from being shared?

That is preposterous.

We dismiss the suggestion of removing the right to privacy precisely because it doesn’t stop these crimes but it does support political repression.

The crimes go on, only criticism of the government for failing to address them is stopped.

EDIT: the more I reread your post the more I suspect this might be exactly the point you are making. Sorry, too subtle for me first thing in the morning. Need more coffee.

But in those countries the intended goal is not just to stop CSAM, but primarily to censor communications and suppress the opposition from voicing their opinion. If you still want to give our politicians the benefit of doubt, then they don't, after all, want to actually censor communications in the same way to destroy democracy.

This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.

Yes it had a great impact on political opposition. Such a weird coincidence that the politicians who want to keep their unlimited power indefinietly supporting a way of catching opposition early.

I guess this is what we need in the West too. Lets just cement the current ruling class in for decades.

I don't know about China, but in Russia private conversations do not trigger immediate response and they do not control every possible means of communication. They simply do not have capacity to investigate every violation - too many people talk negatively about the government and ongoing events, so use reactive approach. People may get in trouble while being searched on the border crossing or after being reported by someone, but it is hardly different from border searches in USA. Things may change with their new messenger and disruption of WhatsApp and Telegram there (Russia just started blocking SMS verification codes making registration there difficult).

Really? It’s working? No crime, no abuse, it has stopped perfectly or near so compared to other countries all of the things, like CSAM, that proponents want it to?

Your comment is precisely what I mean when I said people end up fixating on #1 to the exclusion of #2.

This is simply not true, this is Western paranoid fantasy. It's also the kind of fantasy that allows escalation of surveillance and censorship. You should look up the "missile gap."

Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.

How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?

* "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

EDIT: I improved my comprehension, and it looks like I agree actually, not disagree.

I agree, it's a great, proven tool to do away with political enemies, and to selectively enforce the law, for whatever motivation.

I just don't understand what you mean by

>We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.

We (as in, "the people") don't do any disservice for us by opposing such an effort. Specifically because we are also looking at what goes on in Russia and China to name a few. Authoritarian regimes do "work", but don't, generally, want that kind of working over here in Europe for example.

Right there are no pedos or child abuse in Russia and China? I kinda doubt it.

those are not democracies. thats why unchallanged. if chalanged you might fly out of the window or disappear for some years for "re-education".

That just sounds like advocating for these policies is inherently undemocratic, in a Western understanding of democracy. Which is even worse than the policies simply being ineffective at their stated goals. Leadership being challenged is an essential part of our (stated) government system

> The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies

I know that. The problem it is evil, not that it is stupid and silly.

The whole point is that I do not want to give government power over me like it happened in China and Russia.

With "think about children" as smokescreen.

> We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.

The inherent flaw is: It is despotic and only serves despots and their minions, at the cost of oppressing the majority of people.

"proven effective model" -- lol what?

It's working. But that's at the expense of individuals. Unless you consider people are just meat working for the all powerful state.

I think the O^n problem of attention & memory means that with AI it still really isn’t all that possible either.

>people are all ok with reading chats

Eh, no?