I can see a valid use for a version of chat control where the communications of all elected officials are retained forever and audited on a regular basis for doing anything illegal, proposing anything illegal, actions not in the public interest, cronyism etc. All data should be released when they die, 10 years after they leave office or upon conviction of a crime related to political appointment.
Logically it follows that anyone who "has something to hide" will seek the safe harbor of a political position. How many election cycles until all politicians are terrorists and pedophiles?
They should have used S3 Object Lock for her...Since she had already a previous track record of deleting data. When she was the German Defence Minister during the Bundestag “consultants affair” inquiry, data/SMS on her official phones were wiped after they were requested as evidence.
And of course the fact that her husband was working for a Pfizer supplier, while she was sending private SMS to the Pfizer CEO, is of course an incredible coincidence.
Well yes of course but don't think this couldn't happen here either. A lot of countries like France or Germany are very close to falling to the same extreme right forces the US has.
I don't think unlimited free speech is the answer anymore. I see a lot of bad actors taking advantage of this. For example a lot of republican anti-LGBT propaganda is flowing across the Atlantic through Instagram and TikTok. A lot of people are now repeating the same tired tropes like the toilet thing (which make no sense of you think about it). A lot of people making themselves angry about made-up scenarios that aren't even real. These are organised manipulation campaigns targeted at demonising entire communities.
This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France. This is not a good thing IMO. We need buttons to be able to push to disconnect from that when it gets too bad.
So I don't think this is a bad thing. Though Thierry Breton was a stooge who was mainly interested in promoting his befriended French tech companies yes. Still, even bad people can produce ok things sometimes.
Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information. We should never accept censorship.
> This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France.
These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
> Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information.
This doesn't work. As an example the toilet BS. So many times I've tried to explain that that is such an unimaginable scenario that it's completely unrealistic, let alone warrant the amount of anger against the community. But people don't care. They love being angry at someone, they revel in it. They don't want to know facts, they want to be angry and rile against something.
The same with the migrant thing. They're blamed for everything that's wrong in society. Even though these things are actually the result of decades of externalisation to the poorest in society, driven by right-wing pro-corporate policies. They try to convert that into even more right-wing votes.
> These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
It's not the will of the people but of a small group of tiktok influencers that are riling the people up without any actual facts.
It's the same in the US, it's not about facts anymore. Most of the things Trump says are provably false. Yet his followers worship him. It's become a religion. You can't fight that with facts. Nor does this 'will of the people' originate with the actual people. Nobody wakes up and thinks "Hey let's cut healthcare today", "Hey, let's hate on all the gay people that never harmed anyone". They're slowly manipulated into it.
What we have to do is stop the algorithms that try to maximise 'engagement' with hate. And the dark forces that publish all this misinformation.
Have you been to Berlin, Frankfurt, Antwerp or Brussels recently? Not watch some videos but actually been there? These cities are slowly turning to drug-ridden illegal immigrant hellholes. Many of those immigrants have been order to leave but the governments do not follow thru and they just stay. The current governments do nothing to stop it and EU is pushing for more immigration and have established quotas for countries to take in immigrants.
Europe is losing its safety and identity in pursue of "diversity". The immigrants refuse to integrate and instead bring their work ethic, religions and habits that made their own countries shitholes they are desperate to leave. European people naturally do not want this. What do the right-wing parties have in common? They are strictly against immigration. They will gain more and more support as long as nothing changes and rightfully so.
This is not true. The EU isn't asking for immigrants to "pursue diversity". It's just about sharing the load of legitimate asylum seekers as currently the load is too heavily borne by the border countries.
And we had crime before we had immigrants. It's a feature of social economic status not ethnicity. Before we had the Moroccan gangs in Amsterdam we had the local Mafia which was just as bad.
I do think immigrants without a permit should be evicted but the problem is that many countries like Morocco refuse to take them back.
And yes I live in a major EU city. The drug problem isn't as bad as you describe. And it's more a result of police budget cutting than immigration.
> On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
No one - the EU gets its money from force: taxes on citizens and fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
> Seems like we agree: you don't need to advertise when you can force money out of people through VAT and rent-seek your citizens as customers.
Not really. Like, the EU only has the powers given to it by national governments, 1% of VAT is probably too low tbh as there's a bunch of stuff that would be better solved at EU level. The politics around that are pretty tricky though.
Considering that they destroyed those messages, I guess that most likely the EU paid way too much for the vaccines or Pfizer paid so much in kickbacks that if it ever got out it will lead to a lot of people being prosecuted.
> All communication in the Government Offices is based on the core values of transparency, factualness and comprehensibility, relevance and topicality. Public access and oversight shall characterise all activities.
> The Government Offices' communication policy covers both internal and external communication.
Sweden is generally pretty good at transparency, both regarding representatives and everyone else. For example, given a full name, you can get a person's address, telephone number, what cars and businesses they own, and even what their salary is, for better and worse :)
Patrick Breyer has an article how American foundation Thorn is heavily lobbying Europol for this stuff. And there's some cross hiring going on according to him.
Clearly it's not even just "for the children" anymore. Just plain old panopticon surveillance. I guess they want their NSA too. Though they forget that NSA is only for terrorism purposes, their data is not too be used for regular policing.
No, terrorism "is the use or threat of serious violence, damage to property, or disruption of [...] systems to advance a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause, with the aim of influencing a government or international organization, or of intimidating the public."
"Whatever the government at the time doesn't like", is best described as "opposition". It's a healthy and critical component of a free and fair democracy. One that is increasingly silenced in the modern World, much to our shame when future generations judge us.
While I understand the point behind old line "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", the key point is that both terrorism and "freedom fighting" are about resorting to the use of violence, and the democracy involved (if it was ever present), has failed when people resort to such violence.
I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
And that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy - and by extension our freedom - that raises the question of what's truly worse?
> I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
> that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy
Are you describing bomb-wearing terrorists here, or the fables of child safety that's being used by people in power to erect a surveillance state before our very eyes?
The Provisional IRA destroyed the center of my home city (Manchester) with a bomb in the back of a lorry that weighed over 1,500kgs. While growing up in the years before that attack, I was regularly evacuated from shops and other buildings in the center so that controlled detonations could take place of smaller devices.
ISIS-attributed cells conducted attacks with bombs in London and Manchester over many years, starting with the 7/7 attacks on tube lines and bus routes I happen to use sometimes.
On the 22nd March 2017, my partner crossed Westminster Bridge on her way to the theater about 30-45 minutes before an ISIS-affiliated attacker used a car to mow down pedestrians (and because she'd made it to the theater and had her phone off, I wasn't able to contact her for the first hour or so).
A month later (to the day), a suicide bomber detonated a device at a pop concert in my old home city, killing 22 people - many of them children. The bomber had made the bomb while living in an address about 40 feet from my old address when I lived in Manchester. A few weeks after that, another attack happened on London Bridge and Borough Market, on streets and in pubs where I had been socialising the week before.
I was fortunate that I, and those I care about, were not hurt or killed in these incidents. But that was fortune, not skill - a slightly delay here, or a decision to "not go this week, let's go next week", and I would have been in the middle of it all.
And these, I should point out, are not isolated incidents. The full list on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... - is quite a thing. It's quite likely that most people living in a major city (or even large town), in the UK today of a similar age to myself (late 40s), will have memories of nearby terrorist attacks in their lifetimes.
Yes, there are fables of child safety at play, and since 2021 the mood has switched so perhaps there is a lesser sense of urgency, but we're now seeing the hard right starting to be responsible for more terrorist attacks and the sense of fear and paranoia is rising again.
Do I like that the price of the Manchester bombings is that the city center is now absolutely drowning in CCTV? No. Do I like that the price of the bridge attacks in London is the huge barriers to protect pedestrians on Westminster, Waterloo and London Bridges? No. Do I like that every time I go into a concert hall or sports venue, I have to have my bags checked and a metal detector is run over me? No. Do I like that there hasn't been a proper rubbish bin in a train station or bus station since the 1980s, lest it is used to place a bomb - as was a favoured technique of the IRA on many occasions? No. I hate all of it.
But would I rather all that, than have to bear the misery of more actual deaths of innocent civilians? Yes.
The US already has this via the UK, who've been tapping the undersea cables of EU members for 20+ years. Literally everything transmitted via Ireland - home of the DPC function for most of the US MNCs in the EU, the only US customs clearance on European Soil, and Datacentre hub for Amzn/Goog/Appl etc...
In terms of e2e chat encryption, binary blobs and 'managed' mobile platforms render it somewhat of a moot point to me. Bad actors can either be 0day'd or Social Engineered for those with advanced OpSec. To date though, the most successful network was Encrochat - an OTR-based messaging app which routed conversations through a central server based in France, which was eventually compromised by French police with a malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords
Europol got a taste for the heady power of it - The chief of the Dutch National Police Force, Jannine van den Berg , compared the malware to "sitting at the table where criminals were chatting among themselves".
Now the reality is that the equivalent of the Clipper Chip 'key escrow' is now implementable at a Firmware/Mandatory Push Update level, and probably as part of a 'secure' walled garden app-store API in future.
That's where I'm extremely opposed to conservatives/reactionaries of my country: they identify some issues correctly imho, but we're in total disagreement of the root cause, and thus on how to solve it.
To me, the US have way to much influence, and it's destroying us.
Its NGOs would never have qualified as NGO here (Thorn is only an example), yet we let them lobby as if they weren't weird, dark money adjacent groups. Worst, the Atlas network and all its foundations/schools are definitely culturally USian, yet they try (and succeed) in redefining Europe culture (the 'please think about the children' is definitely from there) and importing US culture wars we never cared about until the late 2000s. Europe and the EU is slowly turning into the US, our governments allow it, and I think that we should pump the brakes, fast.
I like the US, I like people there, but I don't want my country to become a satellite of the US.
Really sensationalized title, the source is "an unnamed Europol police official" so it basically boils down to personal opinion, not the official stance of Europol as a whole. Although I'm sure they aren't alone, sensationalizing really doesn't help to have a sensible discussion about it...
Weird how every time Chat Control comes up, people pipe up calling it sensationalised or saying it can never pass, yet the iterations get wider ranging and the push becomes harder and it gets closer to passing…
These are words from people who have a seat at the table in negotiating this attempt at getting chat control through. If they don’t manage it this time, don’t be surprised if the things described are in the next try, and then people will be looking for something else to call sensationalised.
From experience, in those high-level meetings if an official says such bold statements, it represents the position of the institution they are representing. It's not just a mere opinion given at the water cooler after lunch.
I think sensationalization is more or less warranted. We get these proposals regularly. Discussion is futile, you can just as well call everyone names at this point.
It doesn't help. Unfortunately, we either get used to this, or just start to ignore public spaces more and more. Sensible discussion was probably always the exception, but at least it was easier to find pockets of sanity 10 years ago. Misinformation, disinformation, and other reality distortion effects basically made finding those almost impossible. It's steadily getting worse since at least 2014.
One of my favorite random topic discussion places was /r/hungary, my country of origin's subreddit. In 2015, at the height of immigration "crisis", we had very good discussions about the whole topic, even when most Hungarians were, and are clearly racists, and we had very differing views. We discussed pros and cons, we pushed statistics here and there. And we weren't assholes with each others. Even when we were at different places on the political spectrum. And generally every topic could be discussed, without real retorsion.
In 2018, the number of people who has only faith and nothing else increased. That was the first time when, it started to bug me.
In 2020, the number of fake information about COVID, was already about 50-50 with real information. Simple facts which were against their faith were tolerated rarely. For some reason, I still thought that it's just an ephemeral thing, because they're afraid. I was wrong. Oh god, I was very-very wrong. For most people, this was the trigger to go into full unsubstantiated conspiracy theory field.
In 2022, the sub clearly started to be controlled by political parties. There were several obviously paid accounts by several parties.
Nowadays, it's fully controlled by a political party. Dissenting views are barely tolerated. And basically all views are based on faith, and faith alone. There is no - not just sensible, but simply - discussions anymore. Whoever wants to discuss Hungarian affairs sensibly, long left that place.
I've seen the same thing regarding my friends, and people who I followed on Twitter. Most of us just left public spaces all together. We don't follow news anymore that closely either. And who do, slowly go into a very dark place. One of my friends started with "classical liberalism". Nowadays, outspoken Nazi. One other was afraid of COVID, and started to share bullshit D-Vitamin spam blog posts. Nowadays, he's full blown antivax. Another, was deep into depression, after the amount of alt-right bullshit he consumed. Luckily, he got out from there, but there were times when I thought that I lost him. My mom doesn't know what's happening in the country where she lives. My dad knows, follows the news, and he's halfway into depression for the past years. And there are those people who I followed on Twitter, because they argued sensibly. They are either not there anymore, or slowly their fact based opinions were replaced by faith. They maybe still on the "right" "side", but it's more rarely a conscious decision. It's only a matter of time before they will slip, and even now sensible discussions are impossible with them.
I don't know what good solutions there are. I hate that I'm turning more, and more inwards, creating a bubble again, after I forcefully cut it open completely about 15 years ago. But unfortunately, it's worth less and less to read random people's opinion... or at least what many try to sell as opinion.
"those services should include publicly available interpersonal communications service"
Only publicly available messengers are liable.
So if one writes a messenger herself (not too hard) and only distributes it to her friends, family, or a close circle of child porn lovers, one is not liable.
I feel like we should create an open source P2P chat messaging with encryption thats super easy to use so that these kind of laws become pointless. Empower criminals so that they cant use this excuse to target civilian infra.
Just run your own XMPP server in your own domain, use OMEMO for encryption and you're set. You can communicate with others on other servers, none of them 'publically available' and the TLA's can stare at all that encrypted gibberish 'till the cows come home. Even if they break into a single server they won't get access to the cleartext, for that they'll need to access the terminal devices - phones, browsers, etc.
This is how I've been communicating for years now, it works fine and does not feed any of the data parasites out there.
And what are you going to do when they write a law that requires ISPs to drop any packet that lacks a digital signature from a trusted hardware manufacturer?
I don't think that's the issue, plenty are already. The issue to me is I'm not going to use something my friends/family aren't using. Maybe something matrix like where many clients are interoperable will work? I still think to take off it would need to support being a frontend for imessage/whatsapp/messenger too or no one will start using it, in a similar way to how imessage falls back to sms, this theoretical app could fall back to whatever shared app the two contacts have.
Matrix is overly complicated for the purpose and XMPP/OMEMO already are interoperable between many different clients. Just like all other communication systems it is the network effect which makes them usable. Tell your friends to install a client of choice and - for those so inclined - run a server or create an account on one. Keep your current W/app or Telegram or whatever active for now while you slowly move more communications to XMPP. Once you have contact with most of your friends and family via XMPP make it your default wat to communicatie, i.e. do not start conversations over the legacy apps and answer those who contact you over them through XMPP. You'll find that you'll end up using those legacy apps less and less. Keep them active if you want but don't initiate conversations over them and you'll be set for the moment using those services becomes untenable.
This is not just fiction, it is what I have done and am still in the process of doing, in my case moving from Telegram - I never used nor will I ever use things which requires accounts run by metafacebook or Google or Microsoft or any of the others.
Next, they will add some kind of verified signature that must be signed by a trusted third-party provider to the PWA spec and only allow the installation of such on Android
100%. Each country must regain the ability to decide for themselves and not be forced into something just because foreign lunatics have more votes or larger population.
For example the Stasi spy Anetta Kahane leading the political foundation of the Greens, which also established a state-run "reporting office for anti-feminism", whose declared goal is to persecute people for being critical of feminism.
Did they say that? We've got a Reddit post showing a screenshot of a quotation from an anonymous person during an unnamed meeting, but not much else to go on here.
The Europol is a EU support body, and not a federal police. They can't by law apply coercive measures, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures. It can only assist national police, can request, but not compel and may ask Member States to open investigations but the Capitals can say no.
It's nothing more one of the examples of EU bureaucrats trying to justify their inflated EU salaries. It is mostly coordination paperwork that inflates Brussels chaos without direct crime fighting effectiveness.
Should be closed as each country police already cooperates as needed. They are nothing more than a support only EU agency requesting bigger scopes to justify their existence.
> They can't by law apply coercive measures, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures.
They can't by law apply coercive measures today, and its staff cannot execute investigative measures today.
There are ample evidence of EU expanding authority beyond the original charter, from common market project into a political union with broad competences.
> There are ample evidence of EU expanding authority beyond the original charter, from common market project into a political union with broad competences.
Right, EU will probably look like USA after 100-200 years, but it takes time to get there, and likely will take a civil war where they decide that member states are not allowed to leave the union like what happened in USA.
Because laws represent the will of the people, not the will of the police. The individuals in Europol are already offered the same representation as the rest of us and the various branches of the EU legislative bodies can always call on them for consultation on specific matters.
That doesn't work very well. If you have a concern you need to voice, you can't rely on waiting for being consulted. I'm really not interested in a system where you are not allowed to speak up.
Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Naively, as a citizen I want to be protected from crime and I'm interested in Europol, experts on crime investigation across Europe, getting what they need to do their work and expressing their needs.
Of course I'm also not interested in privacy being thrown away.
Those two things apparently clash, and a healthy debate can help find an acceptable solution.
> Police is supposedly for protecting people's interests, ideally.
Police is supposedly for enforcing the law regardless of whose interests that serve. Making that enforcement easier isn't always a net positive for society, even when the laws themselves are just.
Police has its own subset of incentives and goals, and is not a transparent institution protecting citizens. It is made of humans that are prone to corruption, power abuse, ideological bias, and so on.
Problem is that theory very commonly doesn't match reality when dealing with humans.
Police may prefer to suppress freedom to achieve its goal, which is crime reduction. Or it may stop caring about difficult or dangerous problems (say, drug dealing cartels), and reorient into harassing the civilian population for petty things, such as policing distasteful memes on the internet.
If police feels confident enough to "express" the need to overthrow basic constitutional rights, you should be worried about how it is managed and what's coming for you. After all, they are the guys with the big sticks who make everyone obey.
Police forces in Europe have been lobbying for this kind of measures so eagerly that it can even turn out to be a national security issue, I fear. What if the police will end up siding with Russian and/or Chinese invaders, or with a some kind of domestic extremist movement, attempting to set up an authoritarian regime.
Because of the separation of powers. The police are the executive. They ENFORCE the laws, and only enforce them. They should not be involved in the legislative that makes those laws, or the judiciary that interprets/applies the laws.
This is rule of law 101, and has been figured out hundreds of years ago. Without separation of powers, you cannot have rule of law.
I liked it that it explains what Chat Control is, what is the current position of different countries and politicians, and suggests ways to contact your representatives to explain why you have one position or the other.
original title: Europol said Chat Control doesn’t go far enough; they want to retain all data of all citizens forever [Washington Post source in comment]
I mean, of course they would say that. Europol's job would probably be a whole lot easier if they had access to all conversations, media, live feed of webcams from all devices of all European citizens with unlimited history. Think of all the crimes they could solve if only there was absolutely no privacy for any of us!
> Europol's job would probably be a whole lot easier if they had access to all
Actually I think that that's even a fallacy. More data means more stuff to sift through, more false leads in there, more things to follow up. Watch an episode of House M.D. about full-body-scans in medicine: useless, because only wasted time to follow up on every blotch in the scan.
Sure, as long as it's a crime against a politician or rich person. For the rest of us: Hilarious! People already have their cars and bikes stolen with GPS trackers inside and can tell police exactly where their property is and get no response.
You might try your luck then. But law enforcement has shot the homeowners in such cases. They usually arrive late or never at all. They open a case file and then tell you "well, we are not going to do anything, theft has a very low rate of convictions, just give the case number to your insurance".
By that point they have already failed to protect you and at most someone will be by with a clipboard. I have had motorcycles stolen from me and reporting it was met with an automated response saying there is no capacity for any follow up.
My house got robbed. The police haven't found the robber, haven't dedicated a single iota of effort in pursuing the matter, nor has the merchandise being returned.
Is this what you meant by police making you safer from crime?
