Tell the Eu: Don't Break Encryption with "chat Control"

"If you were able to break encryption only for criminals, it would increase the security of the people. Please try to break encryption only for criminals" is not completely unreasonable.

The problem, of course, is that it's not possible. But for those politicians, cryptography is pretty much magic. Why wouldn't it be possible?

Same thing happens for climate change: instead of understanding the problem and facing reality, politicians (and honestly most people) stop at "scientists just need to find a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently". That's not how it works, but it doesn't prevent them from behaving as if it was possible. "It's magic, just do this one more spell".

Have you ever had a really great mentor or teacher who was excellent at explaining things to you? Good news, you've now got a budget to hire several of them in full-time exclusively for yourself.

Unsure about something? Just ask and a huge apparatus of several departments, featuring dozens of expert panels with hundreds of domain specific experts each will sift through huge databases, many of them not available to anyone else but the government, of state-of-the-art research, current events, historic events, standards, whatever ..., they will analyze your problem from every possible perspective and make the result of these efforts available to you, together with several recommendations of actions according to the guidelines you provided.

I highly doubt that there are more than a hundred people on this planet who could be incompetent under these conditions. What we're observing is not incompetence, but a conflict of interests, between what they want and how often they need to throw you a little bone to keep you obedient.

No. Much of the legislation that gets introduced is provided as "model legislation" by political action groups (such as ALEC). This is why so many states seem to introduce the same legislation all at once.

The party whip tells them what to vote for. Sometimes, sensible people stop deranged legislation from getting out of committee (such as banning all mRNA vaccines (ID in 2024 & 2025, KY in 2025) or requiring blood banks to provide "pureblood" (from people who never had covid vaccines) at no additional cost to anyone requesting same (ID & KY in 2025). Or the one from ID in 2024 that would have made providing blood from a person who had a covid vaccine a felony.

You can follow along with the state legislatures at: https://www.billtrack50.com/info/

And the feds at: https://www.congress.gov/

For example, HR 22 passed the House of Representatives along party lines. The Senate has not scheduled the bill for hearing/vote yet. This bill is only 2 pages long, but I would like you to read it and take a guess at who they are trying to ban from voting in Federal elections. It has never been legal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22/t...

> A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.

This is called an Enhanced Driving License and only 5 states (MI, MN, NY, VT, and WA) issue these. From the front, they look just like the REAL ID compliant ID/DL from that state but with a cute little American flag on the front. The back has the funny OCR text like the page in your passport that has on the page with your picture.

They are trying to ban the following from voting in Federal elections:

1. Transgender people.

2. Non-citizens.

3. Women who took their husband's name upon marriage.

4. People who changed their name.

5. People who can't afford the $200 for a US Passport (if you never had one before, or lost yours like I did, this is about what you have to pay, otherwise it runs $110).

6. All of the above.

7. Something else (please explain)

For how long?

An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.

EU ministers want to exempt themselves (https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...)

The client-side scanning means that some amount of your communication will be uploaded in clear text to the government. And unless the government keeps it completely secure (spoiler: they won't) this will leak. Therefore it defeats the point of the encrypted channel.

So sure, it isn't as bad as just removing encryption from these apps. But it is very similar to giving the government a backdoor key to all messages. Maybe you see it as slightly better because only the messages flagged by the automated scanning are made vulnerable or maybe you see it as slightly worse because previously you would need both the backdoor key and access to the original messages and now all of the data you want is in a single location.

But the point is that this significantly weakens the security properties that these E2EE messengers provide if implemented.

Ever wondered why they position themselves like that? Because they repeated it so often that everyone believes it now.

New Pact on Migration and Asylum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pact_on_Migration_and_Asyl...)

'Women Are No Longer Safe': Critics Blame Surge in Migrant Crime Across Europe (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/women-are-no-longer-safe-critics-b...)

We are at a point where we shouldn't have to justify opposition to it. Just hold legislators of the EU accountable. If that isn't possible, hold the whole EU accountable and if that isn't possible, the EU has no legitimacy for such laws in the first place. Back to those responsible on a national level and repeat.

You probably don't like the comparission because you want to be an alarmist who is acting like this is new. All the fears you have, have literally been proven to be...

You kind of own your home – if someone places camera in your property, you can just remove it / obstruct vision / sound etc. If doing that will send you to jail then the level of dystopia around is so big it's irrelevant anyway – you're a slave with no rights and you will do that the shocking stick tells you to do.

Phones are different - you kind of don't own them by default because bootloader is locked so you are not free to execute the code you want on the device, as well as app store exists which it tells you what you can install and what you cannot install. The only leverage they have is to make Apple/Google remove certain apps from the EU stores.

The lack of financial interests?

For whatever it's worth, as an European, I will emphasize this as one of the most frustrating facts and the largest barrier to me having any serious form of respect for the EU. I have no doubt there's honest and good people there, but in my country it's well known that fuckups just get to "retire" and get out of the spotlight by shifting to EU positions. Not only does this devalue the EU, but also the original country itself, since politicians have less fear of career-ending consequences. It's a lose-lose situation for the collective.

I can only hope that experiences in my country do not reflect Europe as a whole.