Remember EU “chat control”? It’s growing, putting out roots.
The EU’s “chat control” legislation is the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) March 10, 2023
The author of this Twitter thread, Matthew D Green, teaches practical cryptography at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. You should read the whole thread, but I will single out this point as particularly scary:
From my reading, detection orders can be issued to *entire services* once there is a finding that the service contains abuse material.
So for example, all of Facebook Messenger (and its 1.4bn users) might hypothetically be in scope. pic.twitter.com/KjWqHZaxBD
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) March 13, 2023
Green is replying to someone with the user name f00b4r who offers as reassurance the statement that nothing will be done without a “detection order” issued by a competent authority. I have no doubt the paperwork will be in order, but that does not reassure me. Likewise, the idea that “that service providers are not liable for the content if they comply” is phrased by f00b4r as if it softens the threat, but so far as I can see it is the threat: comply or be made bankrupt.
Perhaps we had all better trust in the fact that the United Kingdom has left the European Union so none of this cannot possibly affect us. I’m sure we’ll be fine.
It isn’t like the authorities need an order when Facebook, Google, and Twitter bend over backwards to do anything government asks, especially when so many government officials are also working for those companies in one capacity or another.
Obviously, the situation at Twitter is a bit different today, but even with Musk holding the company’s deed, the damage is already done.
Meh.
I’m sanguine on the issues, TBH.
Once these idiots succeed in pissing off the weaponized autists of 4Chan, I suspect that the chat spaces will become so thoroughly seeded with false information that they’ll effectively be unable to sort out anything from the background noise.
The same sort of thing will happen with all of the various “social credit” schemes, first and foremost the ones in China. The more control these idiots reach for, the less they’re actually going to have. Over anything.
Here’s an analogy: You’re tracking a specific deer, because reasons. While you’re out and about in the forest, you have little difficulty seeing the deer’s tracks and following him. Add in a couple more deer from his herd, and you’ll still be able to track him. Should that deer wander into a wallow around a mudhole where thousands of cattle or other hooved ungulates have been walking? LOL… Good luck figuring out where that specific deer went.
Chaos be a bitch, and the more you try to control things, the more chaos you’re going to introduce into the system due to people willfully not cooperating and actively seeking to obfuscate, just on general principles.
I think when W signed the Patriot Act and then it came out just exactly what the unholy alliance of the NSA and the ISPs were up to under General Clapper and all the FISA court shenanigans and goings on since 9/11 (thanks for saying the Sixth Amendment requirement for Open Courts didn’t really mean that Supremes. I appreciated that) and nobody seemed all that concerned about it was when I realized it wasn’t going to somehow get any better, here or abroad. This is just our European brethren codifying it on their end is all.
The interesting thing, to me, is that as governments make the internet one of their prime centers of power and control and propaganda, it becomes more of a target to take down in the fight against those governments.
Those 4-Chan autists will be setting their sights a bit higher than just disrupting websites. Currently, they have little incentive to take down their own playground, but if it all becomes a government playground, things change. If you park a tank inside a church, the church becomes a target.
Meanwhile, those wishing to communicate terrorist plans will be busy using GNU pgp messages hidden inside images (steganography) on 4Chan and similar websites, hiding their content amidst other noise or alternately as notes passed along with Hawala transactions. Those are literally the extremes.
As always the “intelligence” agencies exacerbate the Right Wing Extremists angle because they want the power that comes with widespread monitoring of the general population and in so doing miss the actual terrorists (mostly leftwing and Islamic) by a complete lack of focus on the reality.
They’d get better results by placing agents in every Mosque, but that would of course by Islamophobic.
At this point its easier to just defund the buggers and put the cash into a reserve to deal with the aftermath when they do blow shit up, because it’s not like they’re going to catch them anyway.
All this nonsense about “He was on our radar”. Get phuqued.
Isn’t the UK’s proposals in the Online Safety Bill almost as egregious? Making it illegal to operate End to end communication without encryption that can be decoded/intercepted. Does the Government have the moral right to access all private online communications?
Yes. Probably worse in some respects.
They believe that being the law they have both the legal right AND legitimacy to do this.
They are wrong and while companies like Facebook might well comply to access the UK’s market share enough companies will simply ignore the UK and EU laws, maintain no presence in either jurisdiction and what will the UK and EU do then?
Block them? Good luck with that.
This is the reason that I personally encrypt all files with strong encryption before uploading them to the cloud as backups, so that they cannot be read by either companies or government spy agencies.
Government agents want to read the contents of them? Get a phuqing court order.
Those aren’t the targets. Those are only the ostensible targets; the actual targets are those obstreperous people who dare to use the wrong pronouns, who think that perhaps men cannot become women, or who otherwise fail to genuflect to the pious deities of wokeness. You know … the Nazis™.
It is not just the European Union – this is part of an international agenda that has been pushed for a long time. By both governments and corporations – for example the cultural aspect of Agenda 2030 (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals).
Yes the Biden Administration is on board with the extermination of liberty – as was the Obama Administration. But so is Mr Putin and the People’s Republic of China.
We may even face a “1984” style situation where there are rival powers, indeed perhaps at war with each other, but all following a policy of liberticide.
The largest population areas where there is still, perhaps, a majority in support of Freedom of Speech and other basic liberties, are Texas and Florida – but these are NOT independent nations (they can not protect you from the FBI and other vicious-totalitarian-thugs).
No US government has ever been on board with expanding liberties, not since the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. No matter how many times they say they do, every single administration has passed or enforced laws drawn up by We The People to restrict our own liberty, or just ordered it on their own accord via the various agencies or EOs.
Not that I would ever run or be elected, but my entire administration would be based on dismantling as much of the bureaucracy as I could and exposing as many of the Federal government’s dirty little secrets. Just put it out there for the public to see and let the chips fall where they may.
A pox on all of them.
“…the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen.”
Noting that any region that imposes such surveillance system is not part of the free world.
Very much so. But at least due to Brexit, we ‘only’ have to win in Westminster some day to abolish this abomination.
Steven R. – no Sir, not all Presidents have wanted to undermine liberties, saying they have all been (basically) the same from the start of the Republic, is not true Sir.
Indeed it is like the Russian saying “first they smash your face in, then they say you were always ugly” – the American government has NOT always been as it is now. And some (some) Presidents (and others) really did reduce the size and scope of government in various ways.
However, it is now (now) the case that both the Federal Government and the Wall Street (Federal Reserve dependent) Corporations that are joined-at-the-hip with the Federal Government, are an abomination.
This government-corporate Corporate State abomination may well be beyond the point where it can be reformed – it may indeed have to go.
The collapse will be terrible – but it is the endless delaying of the collapse (the endless bailouts – over the years and decades) that have made it so much worse than it needed to be.
As for fundamental civil liberties, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and so on…..
As Senator Cruz has pointed out (for example in his recent book) – a couple of appointments to the Supreme Court and these basic civil liberties are dead.
It is fashionable to talk of the senility of Joseph Biden – but long before he went senile he was extreme in his hatred of basic civil liberties. This is why I had to choke back rage when I read people (good people) calling Mr Biden a “moderate” – underneath that fake smile he was never a moderate.
Mr Biden has hated such things as the 2nd Amendment and such structural things as the local election of county sheriffs (independent of both State and Federal bureaucracy) for many years.
When the Corporate State establishment choose Mr Biden (the Democrat nomination process in 2020 was almost as corrupt as the November election was) they choose a man they knew had always shared their hatred of liberty – and their desire to destroy it.
As the “Old Whigs” (such as Sir John Holt – Chief Justice from 1689 to 1710, the sort of person whose history the Founding Fathers of the United States knew so well and identified with) defined basic liberties, private ownership of land, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to keep and bear arms…. perhaps the largest place on Earth where some basic commitment to basic liberties (although, alas, NOT to sound money – commodity money) remains is Texas, Florida as well.
But although they are lands of tens of millions of people, neither Texas or Florida are independent countries – as I have said before, neither can protect you from the vicious Political Police such as the FBI, or from the abomination of an economy created by the Cantillon Effect Federal Reserve (the Credit Bubble economy), and the endless (unsupportable) Entitlement Spending of the Federal Government.
It is becoming increasingly clear that social media really isn’t worth it.