The Going Dark Initiative or Protecteu Is a Chat Control 3.0 Attempt

Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days

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.

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.

EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.

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.

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.

"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 courts so far seem to have disagreed.

>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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.