EU ChatControl is back on the agenda

Funny enough, that’s actually a sound proposal and is “somewhat” implemented as high ranking officials are expected to always be with someone documenting their acts. It is usually considered scandalous when they ditch their translator or secretary and talk with other high ranking officials in complete secrecy.

It makes all the sense to have politicians %100 monitored %100 of the time. Store it in encrypted blackbox and if something big enough happens, then unlock it.

Let’s be fair, in a real democracy, there would be no government secrets… I mean.. we’re paying for all that, we need to know.

Imagine being an owner of a company, and having some middle managers talking stuff in secret and saying that you don’t need to know stuff, just let them use the money, and you don’t even get to see the contracts.

It’s not too different in the corporate world. I’m an owner of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others and they refuse to divulge their secrets to me. I can’t see their contracts, strategy documents or root passwords.

There would be government secrets as long as there’s more that 1 country. Also, unlike companies countries have subjects can be bad actors and there’s no way to get rid of, so some stuff will have to a secret even if the world is run by a single government.

That would be nice but it would put you at a significant disadvantage compared to authoritarian/totalitarian states which would certainly have very terrible consequences.

That would be even worse. The government only really wants to observe the messages of their political opponents, nobody else. Then they the can blackmail them as they want. As the American do in their corrupt surveillance state.

And it will never disappear from the agenda. Chat control is widely popular among some influential parts of the population. After the attempted terrorist attack in Vienna for the Taylor Swift concert the topic didn’t leave Austrian media. A lot of parents are in favor of this independently of terrorism because of fear of CSAM.

There is an awful lot of lobbying going on and given history of EU regulation this can only end up passing in the worst possible way at one point.

On the other hand, there are EU countries like Lithuania, which have a very privacy-conscious culture, and have not had any meaningful terror attacks for nearly all their history. The last notable one was 30 years ago(0). No one died. In Lithuania, privacy is quite meaningfully enshrined in its constitution(1).

I remember that Google StreetView faced significant regulatory challenges in simply photographing people’s homes, and today, many buildings are blurred out. This is only one example. But you can see that everyone takes privacy very seriously in the country. A lot of social engineering-type phishing for personal data does not work because people understand which boundaries cannot be crossed intuitively.

More privacy does not mean more terrorism. There may be situations where reducing privacy does reduce terrorism, but privacy is not the cause. I wish governments would rather address the cause.

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_i…

(1) https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/12/lithuania-pr…

I know you are somewhat joking. But there is an undertone of truth in what you say.

Oppressive state surveillance in the USSR (commonly verging on persecution of undesirable groups) was a strong reason for countries breaking away from it between 1990 and 1991, when the union collapsed. Lithuania was arguably the first one.

The privacy protections we see today are a reaction to some extent, but Lithuanians enjoy them. It was not an over-reaction.

It would be wise to use the examples of heavy-handed state surveillance in history in arguments for privacy laws. The US did this to argue for their economic model quite effectively. Whether that ultimately is good — I mean that some people have become so afraid of communism that they can’t agree on some fundamental social welfare systems and duty of care for each other as people — I don’t know. But contrasting liberal capitalism with planned-economy communism was effective in galvanising people towards the former. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that.

Anti-russian? Russia is a major security threat to Lithuania that engages in cyber warfare, disinformation and sabotage campaigns.

– Two months ago there were major arson attacks and failed attempts linked to Russians in multiple states like Poland and Germany.

– Russian linked agents at the beginning of school year dissiminated false information about bombs being planted at schools in Lithuania which disrupted the process in general and undermined trust of parents and children.

– They are also constantly creating false narratives about ongoing social events with ant-lithuanian anti-european spin and spreading them online.

– Lets also not forget that Russia is constantly using migrants to attack borders of European states.

Russians are trying to wage war in every gray area they can find. Why this paragon of free speech (kekw) constantly engages in anti-lithuanian policies?

Even more interesting recently they started mapping out locations of optic fibers scattered across the ocean. Lets hope they wont use this information.

Threat from terrorist isn’t real?

All of these are real threats. Even the CSAM arguments have a grain of truth to it. What changes overtime is people’s relationship to these threats and their perception of what mitigating factors are actually going to be effective

No I disagree, what are you even refering to? What are these particular actions?, curiously we never refer to russian actions as anti-ukrainian, anti-polish, anti-european. Its always the other way round.

I think you should go read the comment chain again.

The person was saying that you can use a “Russia” line to get the population to agree to a measure or chat control.

You just went in and basically proved their point.

If he worded it like you did now “Russian line”, I would agree–but he didnt. He used a word that Russia loves to use in cry bully situations. It implies that Lithuanians are doing this because they just happen to hate poor russians while they have legitimate reasons to be scared and are forced to react.

You may think that Im pedantic or whatever but Russia has history of subtly playing with words and thus dictating the discourse. For example term eastern europe was hijacked by soviets to enshrine and justify their sphere of influence which was a completely made up term which descends from germans and their ostsiedlung–the settling of lands to the east of germans states by germans.

I presume you are talking about WK 10235/2022 ADD 10(0), as I found many blogs and journals(1) talking about Lithuania’s position there and how it is anti-E2EE, pro-Chat Control. Some things should be clarified:

Firstly, it is a working document that someone obtained through a FOI request. So it is important to understand that this was not meant for the public, and therefore the opinion Lithuanian representatives provided there was not scrutinized as such prior to release. This is not a comprehensive position of Lithuania’s government or any of its branches.

Secondly, the document follows positions expressed in and around a police (LEWP) meeting. It is difficult to imagine that law enforcement would support E2EE or stand against Chat Control in principle, because it makes their daily work more difficult. This context should be kept in mind and is also pointed out by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society article I linked.

Thirdly, the opinion of a limited group of Lithuania’s law enforcement workers does not impact Lithuania’s constitution, nor culture. I also believe that it is not an opinion shared by many Lithuanians who have some distrust of authority following years of state surveillance, persecution, and the trauma this entailed. So it is important to understand that the culture, the constitution, and the opinion of law enforcement workers contributed to this working document are three distinct things.

Finally, this “let’s sacrifice anything and everything to protect the children” narrative unfortunately exists in Lithuania as well. It’s a polarizing political issue where people have very strong opinions on each side. It seems likely to me, as I read the document, that there was a strong bias towards one of the sides in the working group.

Overall, this consultation is not the overall opinion of Lithuanian people nor their government; law enforcement working groups will generally be biased towards access to encrypted information rather than privacy; and that no country can escape today’s polarizing political debates, so individual people will sometimes have strong opinions without having ever thought them through.

This is not to say that Lithuanian representatives could not have acted more responsibly. They could have. Frankly, as the Stanford article illustrates, Lithuanian reps’ opinion is naive to the point of incompetence. Many other countries did better. That is evident. But does this say Lithuania is against privacy? No. It is still one of the most privacy-respecting countries I have ever been to and done business in.

(0) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23819681-law-enforce…

(1) https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/eu-member-states-…

> terrorist … CSAM

it’s always the terrorists and the children. It turns off the logical, rational thought centers in the brain, and convinces ordinarily rational people to accept these poorly thoughtout security measures.

As a civid duty, you must fight against measures like these that erode security and privacy. It sucks, because the reward is “nothing”, and you must forever maintain vigilence against constant reproposals.

Even if that argument somehow statistically works/worked, sometimes it should be mentioned: I would rather have some 3 terror attacks more per year, than having privacy of millions invaded and our way of living destroyed, just to prevent those 3 cases. It would be letting the actual terrorists determin how we live, what rights and privacy we are allowed to have.

Terrorists would just either add e2e over existing apps or just move to ones that support it.

Criminals tend to not care about the law even making e2e illegal would do very little to stop anything.

> I would rather have some 3 terror attacks more per year, than having privacy of millions invaded and our way of living destroyed, just to prevent those 3 cases.

End to end encrypted chat for the general public has only been available for ~15 years. On the web, SSL is ~30 years old. PGP is ~35 years old.

As far as I can tell people’s way of living now is largely the same as it was back before any of those were around, so I don’t see how it would destroy our way of living if much of that went away.

terrorist, then pedos, then drug(dealers|addicts), then “criminals”. and finally used openly on everyone after all when the average person going about their business inadvertently commits an average of three felonies per day we are all criminals.

> A lot of parents are in favor of this independently of terrorism because of fear of CSAM.

A transparent CSAM checking process would be funny..

Imagine a 18, 19 yo., relatively skinny girl with small breasts (or a guy with a small dick) sending such a picture to her long-term boyfriend (…), and then getting messages from the system:

– “hello, our AI thinks your boobs are underage, we sent the photo to police station in Cityville for a manual checkup”

– “hello, the photo has been transferred to inspection team of Bobby Robertson, Johnny Walkerson and Jane Jameson to inspect”

– “hello, by a careful inspection of your boobs, with a 2-to-1 vote, the team has decided that your boobs are most probably old enough to be photographed and sent around. The photo was sent to your desired destination and just in case, arhchived in the police arhives for possible further inspections”.

I imagine this is popular in the same way Brexit was: only when the question is worded in a way that ignores all the possible negative outcomes. Something about having a cake and eating it…

I doubt you would see it on surveys. However there is a lot of very noticeable lobbying about this. Our school has a parent group that organizes events to inform parents about the dangers of social media and online grooming. You will find leaflets, PDFs etc.

If you are interacting with those circles you will find folks who made it their life’s mission to protect children and who are lobbying for this. You donut need a large number of people to sway legislation, you only need determined people.

The worst thing about this is that we the citizens have to fight this every time, but if this just passes one single time we may lose our rights on this issue forever.

Binding commitments or laws preventing the adoption of this sort of scheme could be lobbied for by citizens, but in reality I think your point holds

Funny that some also argue that it is why the left, no matter how extreme they are, often win in the end. The left keeps fighting, always trying to change the status quo. If a legislation attempt fails this year, they will just try again the next year. Year over year, whoever keeps fighting wins. In contrast, conservatives just want to be left alone, therefore the conservatives lose often.

You can just send encrypted text through a unencrypted channel, look, these are instructions for the next terrorist attack:

vss8uATnfADT6Z/XN3yUcjq3R5e8P8HjIkm2GbS6e8CbOnQb5qx0112mmjgUezWbAMxSPegGo8TSMIj3rEEe9mG/JYzsDb9g2tm6zfeLEYA=

I wonder if there’s precedent in court regarding that?

I mean, how does one prove that a message is anything but gibberish if they don’t have the means to decode it?

Creepy beyond belief.

They will never stop pushing for this in public – what are they doing when we aren’t looking?

State power has grown steadily for centuries now, even in the US where there are strict legal limits on it.

Of course it is.

Park it till the outrage dies down then try again is standard MO for passing shady acts.

And if this round fails they’ll be back in 3 months.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the US intelligence apparatus was pushing for this. There is a giant censorship industry in the US, despite the 1st amendment, mostly via NGOs/non-profits. Great way to circumvent the constitution.

German government will print out all messages on paper and hire thousands of civil servants to read each message. It’s gonna be a Beschäftigungswunder.

Well somewhere in Czech Republic, some public servants are receiving well formed digital XML messages, and transcribing values from them manually to an information system. Sometimes they make a mistake and swap some values, which is how we know.

Information age is upon us.

Our governments are a swamp of incompetence concerning anything “Information age”. But still my fav story is from the private sector:

In order to “merry” digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post (“digitization-as-a-service”) who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?

How would a law stop criminals from using encrypted applications without sharing private keys with gov? Shootings, pedophiles, drugs, terror etc should definetly be higher on the scale than hosting an illegal application.

In addition to this, how do they expect to implement this for non-EU companies? The DNS blockades that are already going on today are less than efficient.

I don’t believe the previous proposals contain penalties for end users, just operators of noncompliant services. There were also some exceptions that mean educated and determined users would still have access to secure options.

I think the policy goal is to make secure chat non-mainstream. It’s easy to imagine reasons governments might want that, and most of them aren’t aligned with the principles of liberal democracy.

Sure, but will it this time include all politicians, state officials and others who are “special”. If no, then GTFO. It’s a good litmus test to check the actual goal instead of the terrorism/save the children/drugs excuses.

Okay, so all Western societies are bound to go surveillance state in near future, unchecked by judicial forces and social credit systems to top it off. It will happen and we can only postpone it.

What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?

> What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society?

Cynically and probably realistically? A lot of them are busy implementing them either enthusiastically or “just following orders”.

> Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?

Likely both 🙁

Almost everybody I met working in IT doesn’t care about such political and societal developments and is happy as long as there is steady supply of exciting gadgets.

> Likely both 🙁

These scenarios are indeed not mutually exclusive. But in the cyberpunk fantasy the counter culture would be more visible and also accessible for outsiders. Like having your social credit score increased by some hackers hanging out in a Chatsubo hidden in a dark alleyway in exchange for a couple of illegal chips. In the black mirror version it would be completely hidden and super dangerous to even speak or think about it.

You cannot fix society’s problems through technical means, every technology workaround around a bad law can be countered by legal/judicial controls.

Invasive conservative policies always see upticks in times of social upheaval. We live in a time with a high rate of change, and people want stability and control, and vote for politicians and policies that deliver that.

Make people feel safe and stable and they’ll stop pushing for laws to control other people’s lives.

Not sure what society’s problems are you hinting at, but private communication is just a technical problem and has technical soultions. Even if it turns out to be a bit of a cat/mouse game in practice. Technical solutions often work on individual level, work right now, and work even if majority of people don’t care to implement the political soultion.

If competent individuals will want private communication, they will have it regardless of what minor distopia EU politicians will dream up.

> and social credit systems to top it off. It will happen and we can only postpone it.

What social credit systems are you talking about specifically? Maybe I live under a rock, but I haven’t heard anything about something like that in EU or Europe.

Not as bad as china yet, but you do have credit ratings, crime registers, and tracks on social media/facebook which can be mined to hang you out.

All three are regularly used in sweden to deny people jobs, services and opportunities.

SCHUFA for Germany. They want to get your bank payments next. If your score is bad (which can be if you live in a neighbourhood which is “bad”) you can’t get loans or other contracts like for mobile data.

If it’s based in part on where you live rather than your history of paying bills on time, debt to income ratio, and net worth, it’s not just a credit score.

Actually credit scorer like Schufa and similiar “pre-sorters” have been severely limited with the EuGH judgement from December 2023. Another win for the GDPR.

The new battleground is now the “essential” part of the GDPR, i.e. what pre-sorting is essential to arrive at a decision and what not. I guess we will see quite a few cases before the courts…

Currently they are somewhat hidden. When GDPR came out in force, I tried removing my name, phone number and address from all kinds of public places, and I also found some local company that collects personal and behavioral information on people and provides it to other institutions to asses whether they want to do business with you or not. (banks, etc.)

They gave me the results of their algorithm for me personally, but refused to describe the algorithm. Results were kinda non-sense, but when I wanted them deleted, they told me that I may have trouble in the future with their clients, due to lack of information on me in their systems. Probably a scare tactic, but still annoying and concerning.

depends on how you define it. in my book a SCS requires that what impacts the score is disconnected from what is impacted by it. the Punkte are just impacting your driver’s license. the Schufa score can lower your chances to get an apartment just because you had problems with a cellphone provider.

Paying a phone bill and paying rent are close enough to the same kind of thing that it’s rational to conclude someone who pays late or fails to pay one of those might also be delinquent on the other. A score based on bill payment history is just a credit score, not a social credit score.

It’s inevitable to some extent.

Maybe not exactly the same as China’s, but the “common understanding” that your internet persona must be tied to your identity, and that this identity can be scored based on a bunch of criteria. – or that how you spend your money must be trackable and traceable.

It will begin to grow out of the places that are already used this way: things like insurances, then will grow towards “securities” such as mortgages (“where do you spend money, does it look suspicious to us?”), and afterwards to “luxuries” such as air travel. Eventually nearly everything will require submission of financial documents and social profiles for nearly everything and only when that’s the case: with a whole host of people wasting time on re-validation of the same information and a huge bureaucratic mess; will someone come along and give it a government sponsored name and a centralised point of access and scoring. – and it will be sold as being better than what came before, and it will be.

This is how other forms of centralised identification have grown over time, so I’m not pretending to have prescient knowledge of the future.

This “inevitable” spiel is bad for discourse. There are absolutely ways to stop this, and even delaying should be considered is valuable for anyone who believes this is a bad end result.

It’s one thing to be negative, other to act like everything is determined and resistance is futile. By saying things can’t possibly be changed, we make it harder to change them.

I don’t disagree with the gist of your analysis; the forces you describe exist, and they work towards surveillance. They can still be opposed and curtailed in a number of ways.

> What is the response to that

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The root problem is that those in government do not fear any consequences for acting against the interests of the people they supposedly serve.

> What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys?

Do China and Russland have these people? Not more than anywhere else.

It would help a lot if counter-terrorism and other organisations fighting this kind of threat would publish a quarterly or annual summary (idk which is plausible) of the threats they’ve averted, the perceived number of threats they think are lurking out there, the number of cases that have not yet been solved and need to be taken down, etc. etc.

It would help whom and to achieve what? How do we know they’re not lying? And how do those numbers justify irreversible surveillance of everyone’s most private thoughts?

A terrorist organization isn’t going to use Facebook Messenger to discuss their plans, they’ll use a vetted application that doesn’t have a backdoor.

Given the politicians keep bringing back these same dangerous ideas, it is time for people who are aware of it to make everyone they know aware of the issue. And then organize towards mass protest. And after removing offending politicians from power, push for them to be jailed for violation of civil liberties. Push for local warrants for their arrest or bans that make their lives in Europe highly inconvenient. Tarnish their legacy as officials. Sure these efforts may not succeed but it’s important to make their lives so difficult as to deter others from ever doing this again.

None of this is easy, and it’ll be met by the same suppression of protests that has happened in other instances across Europe in the last few years. But I think it’s the only way. There is no shortcut for political pressure.

Meshtastic is very much insecure (except for the encrypted direct messages they added recently) by lacking Perfect Forward Secrecy, has a limit of 38 devices on a network due to its use of flood routing and can only operate over LoRa.
I would very much recommend using https://reticulum.network/ instead due to its Perfect Forward Secrecy, it’s current implementation supports billions of devices (could go up to galactic scale if necessary with a one line change) and can operate over any communication system which provides “at least half-duplex operation, and provide an average throughput of 5 bits per second or greater, and supports a physical layer MTU of 500 bytes” (rabbit hole warning)

MHO: Patrick is too trigger happy in his updates and HN is all too happy to crap-stir as much as possible

That being said, he can probably get a copy of the document if he asks the right people.

> Originator: Presidency

Also let it be known that everybody is pissed at Hungary at the moment (I mean, ok, this is kinda constant, but even more now)

Same caveats apply here: this has to go through Parliament, a lot of people is against it, then this is against EU fundamental law, etc

(but yeah this BS does get annoying)

This could be abused in any number of ways and would probably make people and their precious children less safe in the long run rather than more safe.

You can be sure Viktor Orban would use it to crack down on political opposition in Hungary, for example.

In the wrong hands, could be used to have these precious children or their parents killed or worse.

Authoritarian governments often do things, or threaten to do things, including sexual violence to children as a way to put pressure on and extract information from their parents. This type of surveillance tech would make it easier for them.

There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the “sudo tools” so they can override any protection to catch the bad people and that they are respected mature people so it is OK to grant them with these privileges, they will be careful and won’t abuse it.

Obviously that’s bad idea and a bad practice as we know it from IT systems.

Maybe their intentions are good but even proposing something like that should be considered a ground for dismissal. EU, USA etc. are not startups, these are not newly forming countries that full stack politicians need the sharpest tools to make something great quickly. Those are established, sophisticated institutions that must move slowly and be risk averse and there’s no space for sharp tools like these and the problems need to be solved through navigating the complex structure.

Maybe wouldn’t be as fun as running Turkmenistan, maybe they will lag behind this emerging unicorn called China in some respect but that’s how very large and complex structures have to operate. The new kids on the block will end up exactly the same if they are successful and mature beyond the hype.

> There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the “sudo tools”

I don’t care in what they believe or how they explain they need in the total control over you. In fact, it’s just a slavery, and I’m sure internally they know that and they like that. For some people it’s the meaning of life to achieve that kind of power over other people. Unfortunately, a lot of such people achieve this goal nowadays.

You assume a lot of bad intent where there is (usualy) none. I worked with people related to cybercrime investigation a lot, and they are always driven by idea to help people. But when you see for a hundredth time that a struggling single mother loses her life savings because she fell victim to a phishing scam, you start being angry at the criminals. And when you invest months of your life to locate the perpetrator, and the investigation is thwarted by, let’s say, encrypted chats, you start blaming the tools.

Now, I (obviously) don’t agree with this, just trying to explain how something like chat control could be proposed in good faith by someone.

> a struggling single mother loses her life savings because she fell victim to a phishing scam

I thought the banking system was designed to reverse transactions (unlike cryptocurrencies). Why do you need finding the scammer for that?

Scammers don’t keep their money in the account they used to scam people into wiring their money in. A common case is to use other people’s accounts(sometimes stolen, sometimes rented) or purchase something like crypto, gold or anything else that is expensive and easy to move.

Often times the seller also doesn’t know they are selling to a scammer, there’s this technique where the scammers will give the account number of a seller to their victim, the victim will wire the money and the scammers at the same time will be pretending to be buyers and claim that they just wired the money and therefore the transaction is complete and they leave with the scammed money laundered in form of something valuable.

So, in short, scammers can launder money in minutes, but investigators need months to track them and reverse everything. Yet, I don’t think ChatControl will solve anything.

I agree, it won’t solve anything. Maybe in short term some idiots will get caught but the criminals will quickly learn their lesson and use other tools and avoid the surveilled ones.

I’m not here to claim that Orban is anywhere near the level of a “real” dictator in terms of squashing dissent. But consider that one way Orban makes sure to maintain this – indeed significant – majority is to try to silence/discredit voices that go against his narrative. In fact, his party is spending millions of dollars in public funds to finance a continuous stream of propaganda on many channels. On top of this, there absolutely have been a few cases where more sinister tools like surveillance etc. were employed against independent news sources for example. Their newest invention “Szuverenitásvédelmi Hivatal” (= Sovereignty Protection Bureau, idk what the official English name is) is only the latest way to at least try to scare nonprofits/NGOs/news outlets that are in some way opposed to his goals.

I’ve seen a few recent videos out of the UK that made my blood boil. Police visits to your home because of mean posts, and then off to jail in handcuffs. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Those “mean posts” were people organising violent riots that cost the country millions and targeted small business owners just for being ethnic minorities.

People shouldn’t get a free pass on organising violence and riots just because they did it online.

Edit: I don’t normally comment on the peer moderation that happens on HN but wow there are a lot of people online today that believe free speech trumps all other laws.

Seems it’s ok to destroy people’s property just so long as you arrange to do it online. /s

Perhaps someone can explain why they think this way?

I’m a little hesitant to comment because I haven’t been able to dig up the actual charges, but there is a history of people in the UK being charged and arrested for mean posts. A few storys jumped out at me, eg the Kelly case did seem at the time to be a betrayal of the liberal tradition assuming the BBCs reporting is accurate – realistically people should be able to gratuitously insult people who contributed of the largest imperial project in history as military officers. For all that it was in terrible taste.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670

It’s hard to comment on that case without knowing what was Tweeted but on the surface of it, I do agree with you. However he wasn’t sent to jail and thus it wasn’t the incident the GP described.

What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.

Their actions were a lot worse and had real world, tangible, effects on people and their property. It wasn’t just them sharing a meme (which is the popular trope some on HN describe the event as).

It’s worth noting that people in America get arrested for similar actions. In another comment I drew parallels to the Capitol riots.

The crux of the reason people get put in jail “for posting mean things” is because they’ve broken other, much worse laws in the process.

> What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.

My friend, I didn’t refer to that at all, there’s no need to lie. You were referring to those cases, not me.

Then perhaps you can share what other recent cases there have been of people jailed for posting stuff online.

And please don’t call me a liar. You said it was recent, and they were jailed. I don’t know of anything else besides the incidents I’ve covered. Worst case is I’m misinformed. And if that’s the case then I’m sorry. But I assure you that I’m not a liar.

Oh I’m well aware of how strict the uk is. However none of those articles you shared are about people getting jail time (most of those cases were likely dropped in fact) and they certainly weren’t recent.

I’m not making generalisations here. The OP made a very specific statement about people being jailed recently for posting online and I’m saying they’ve completely missed the truth behind those actual arrests.

Just as all the subsequent posts yourself and others have made are glossing over the very specific claims the OP made.

I’m not going to argue that I think the UK gets things right with its approach to online content. But the OPs specific claim of people being arrested is missing the bigger story about why they got arrested. And that’s what I’m specifically calling FUD on — not the UKs wider policy. The uk is a shit show for a great many reasons (as a UK citizen I’m not blind to this at all). But that doesn’t mean we should exaggerate the truth for the sake of gaining a little extra karma on HN.

The simple fact is the reason for the recent arrests and jail time is for similar reasons people have been arrested and jailed for online content in the US (yes, it’s happened there too). This isn’t a problem with free speech, it’s actual criminals causing actual physical damage and thus who have broken other laws besides just communicating about it online. Hence my comparison to the Capitol riots.

If you’re trying to be precise about specific meaning, you probably should also be specific about only using the word jailed. You use “arrested” a few times there, and people do seem to be being arrested for mean tweets.

People were arrested in America over the Capitol riots and messages online was used as part of the evidence.

What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.

It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.

– In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)

– in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)

– in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)

> Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn’t actually want what the USA has.

>Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn’t actually want what the USA has.

The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It’s a felony to lie to Congress. It’s a felony to call for the assassination of the President.

Even speech in “public squares” is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.

Yes, what’s considered “hate speech” elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn’t make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren’t worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.

That is actually true.

Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.

EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.

There’s not a single place on earth that “has” free speech, it’s all shades of gray.

The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.

– “Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?”

I’m not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don’t know if there’s any other country with comparable protections.

(By which I specifically don’t mean “has ‘freedom of speech'” written on paper somewhere; nor “doesn’t typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)”. I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).

If people in Switzerland wanted that they could vote for it. But they actually prefer having limits on other peoples’ speech more than they resent the limits on their own, so they don’t.

I think it’s important to not conflate trespassing with speech.

Those people have freedom of speech.

They don’t, however, have the right to occupy private property against the will of the owners.

free speech is often not something one “enjoys”. If you are at a funeral and have protesters burning pictures of your dead child then you aren’t “enjoying” that.

Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.

>I’m not here to claim that Orban is anywhere near the level of a “real” dictator in terms of squashing dissent.

It is preposterous to concede this. Orban has destroyed the independence of media and weaponized it to support his party and spread disinformation against his opponents. He’s also weaponized the tools of the state to harass the family members of his political opponents with frivolous lawsuits and exhausting legal battles.

>gets bad reporting

He “gets bad reporting” because he has destroyed democracy in Hungary. Including but not limited to packing the courts, erasing the independence of media, and extreme redistricting that turned pluralities or slim majorities at the polls into super majorities in Parliament.

Recharacterizing that nightmare as if it is just ‘reporting’ helpfully introduces a layer of abstraction that implies there’s nothing in his actions to condemn.

I think one real good test of a democracy is to plot a line with years and above the name of the person ruling the country.

In the US you will see at least every 8 years a different name on top of the line.

I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.

Anything below won’t be stable enough for mid/long term policy changes. Anything above will be good for the leader and her entourage but most probably not for the entire country and its democracy.

It’s a good test of one aspect of a democracy, but a democracy is more than just its leader. A strongly independent judiciary is also a crucial element for a fair and free democracy. In my view the US fails in this regard. Its supreme court is effectively made up of politicians; judges with party affiliation who are appointed for life for partisan reasons. Its rulings frequently end up being split down party lines when such a thing is statistically improbable in a system where decisions should be based strictly on interpretation and application of the written words of the law.

So 8 years is fine but 10 isn’t?

Policy dictated by a single elected leader is better than policy set by a group of elected people?

Just because your cultural and educational background has told you that the relatively new US model of democracy is better than that of other countries doesn’t make it so.

True. If only these elected leaders wouldn’t be controlled by institutions and individuals who (1) are handlers to the elected leaders and (2) are not even elected in the first place.

In the US, who currently has the power over your country? Is it your Biden (where is he?), your Harris? It someone else, maybe unelected?

Not related? Surely I’m still commenting on my parent’s post:

> I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.

I’m saying that this democracy is an illusion as long as you have puppet masters controlling these “democratically elected” puppets like Biden.

FWIW the pervious Polish government modeled its state capture after Hungary quite openly. They quite miraculously lost the elections after a major mobilization (historic attendance of over 74%), and have now been stripped of funding due to illegally using state funds during their campaign in 2023. This was possible in Poland because, unlike Hungary, Poland still had free (non-state) mainstream media, and not for the lack of trying.

As far as I know Orban changed the electoral law, he uses the votes from Hungarians outside Hungary (weird to vote for shit that does not affect you), the people in cities are not voting for him so he gets the votes from uneducated people that do not know a foreign language and get indoctrinated by the Orban controlled media. He is also super corrupt and Putin fanboy so most online English support he gets are from Ruzzian trolls.

An interesting feature of people voting from abroad is that it is very easy to make it very easy or very hard for them to vote, and the choice between those two options tends to depend on how the current government thinks those people are likely to vote. So some countries allow expatriates to vote, but voters have to fill in a load of forms and then turn up with various document at the embassy at a particular time, while other countries proactively hunt down their expatriates and send them a form in the post with a prepaid envelope.

You are getting responses about expatriate voting. That’s not what he did.

Before WWII, Hungary was much larger. After, a large portion was ceded to Romania. He used a sudden super-majority to grant those people the right to vote. Subsequently, his political party has even held political conferences in Romania.

Those Romanians are not Hungarian citizens. They mostly do not suffer the consequences Orban’s policy decisions. Yet, they support him because he makes gestures to include them in the country of their cultural origin.

This is far different from allowing overseas voting. This would be like the UK allowing all Irish to vote in parliamentary elections.

Hungary lost vast swaths of territory after WW2. People who were Hungary citizens weren’t after the new borders were drawn.

I don’t see a big difference between that and Germany giving citizenship to all the people who were Germans prior to WW2, but weren’t after the war.

Many countries do put restrictions on this. Some examples:

Until literally this year, the UK removed the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad, and Canada even used to restrict that right to just 5 years.

Even now, civilian US citizens living abroad whose intent to return to live in the US is uncertain or who don’t intend to return, and Canadian citizens living abroad regardless of intent to return, are only federally guaranteed a right to vote from their last in-country address in federal elections, but often can’t vote in state, provincial territorial, or local elections. This is true even if they retain significant ties to the relevant state, province, territory, or locality, like having close family there (including kids too young to vote for whom they’re a legal parent), owning property there, operating a business there, or being owed a pension controlled by the relevant level of government.

And the guarantee of a right to vote from abroad in US federal elections is purely statutory, not constitutional – not to mention it has a few gaps in it, like citizens who have never lived in the US and neither of whose parents last lived in a state that allows the right to vote from abroad to descend to the next generation based on last parental residence.

Et cetera.

Yes they did. You could vote in the referendum from abroad (I did). There’s no such thing as EU citizenship anyway, so nobodies citizenship changed as a result.

Well just go ahead and apply to Brussels to get your EU passport back then?

Obviously you can’t, because there’s no such thing as EU citizenship. It doesn’t grant citizenship, and cannot because that would require it to be an independent nation recognized by other nations as such. There is only citizenship of member states. Playing with words doesn’t make something real, it only confuses people.

You’re right indeed that there is a real legal concept in EU law called EU citizenship, which everyone with the nationality of an EU member state holds. The other commenter is wrong on that point.

But the other commenter is also right that there is not the kind of independently existent EU citizenship that would persist when one ceases to be a national of an EU member state – it gets lost in that case even if the reason for this change is not an individual loss of the member state’s nationality but because the member state withdrew from the EU. The ECJ definitively settled this last year. Nor are EU passports issued on the basis of EU citizenship, nor would EU citizens typically include “EU” as one of the answers if they are asked by a government to list all their citizenships or view themselves as dual citizens if their only national-level citizenship is from a single EU member state.

For several reasons like this, it’s not at all unreasonable for the other commenter not to view EU citizenship as a real citizenship of its own, despite the use of the term under EU law.

Personally, I view the term EU citizenship in part as a briefer shorthand for “national of an EU member state” – including in the definition whatever edge-case handling is appropriate for each country’s special-case territories, and therefore more precise in a predictable way. Beyond that, it’s just a symbolic reflection of the EU’s official aspirational policy goal of ever closer union.

– “votes from Hungarians outside Hungary (weird to vote for shit that does not affect you)”

I don’t know if you’re double-trolling or not, but it’s pretty dehumanizing rhetoric to say people who’ve left their country for work or other reasons are not real citizens and presumptively have no stake in their own country’s future.

(It’s even stranger you apply this kind of–nativist?–language to a member state of the EU, where transnational ties are a founding ideal of that anti-nationalist union..)

> he uses the votes from Hungarians outside Hungary

That is pretty standard for EU voting; as long as you are citizen, you can vote, usually by mail or by visiting your embassy.

Otherwise, I happen to agree with you — why you should vote, if you don’t feel the impact of your vote?

> the people in cities are not voting for him

That’s the common occurrence, people in cities are easier to influence due to density; US also has the Rural-Urban divide.

> he gets the votes from uneducated people

Yes, this is what the (modern|progressive|educated|whatever) tell to themselves to fell on high horse in their bubble.

> Otherwise, I happen to agree with you — why you should vote, if you don’t feel the impact of your vote?

Very strange attitude. I voted while I was abroad for two decades, because my family and friends were still there, and I wanted the best from them.

Your family and friends know, what is best for them and can vote for themselves.

Meanwhile, you are abroad and do not have clear idea about the local situation; you are going to have one of game of telephone one (I know, I also lived abroad for a while). As a result, you might do more damage than helping.

> you are abroad and do not have clear idea about the local situation

You’re walking a path you’re almost guaranteed not properly equipped for. Probably nobody is but knowing not to charge ahead would already mean a lot.

If having a clear idea about the local situation is a prerequisite then what happens with locals exposed to misinformation? Do they lose the right to vote? Do you test people in advance to evaluate their level of understanding? If they vote for populist measures that are clearly unsustainable did they show a good understanding of the situation?

What happens if you’re abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim “sorry, I wasn’t allowed to vote so the rules don’t apply to me”? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you’re not allowed to vote still apply to you?

And more importantly, if you’re living abroad and you can’t vote in your home country because you’re away but you can’t vote in your country of residence because you’re a foreigner, what happens to your right to vote? This right is given to citizens of a country just like many other rights, like the right to private ownership. If one can be taken away due to lack of proximity, can the other? Can that car or house that you haven’t used in a year be taken away? What if you as a local didn’t exercise your right to vote, should it be taken away because you don’t need it?

> you might do more damage

You might too.

My initial comment was not clear, by I am referring of Hungarian citizens that are part of other countries like Romania, this people do not have relatives in Hungary, never lived there, will not move there.

Is it still a thing? AFAIK the neighbor countries protested against it as a passport of convenience. Some even made laws, that when you accept such a citizenship, you are going to lose your previous one. That curbed the enthusiasm for such citizenship rather significantly.

It is still a thing, Romania also does the same thing where we give citizenship to Romanians on territories we lost like R. Moldova so would be hypocritical for Romania to complain about Hungary, ,my personal opinion is that is not democratic if someone votes but they or their family are not affected by the vote. It would be like some jerk In UK gifts citizenship to people in ex colonies and then those people as gratitude wll vote for the jerk.

Slow down, you are taking it way to seriously, and skipped to another rail already.

Nobody ever even remotely suggested to go where you describe. That when you live abroad you are not familiar with local situation is a fact; you get to hear only partial, selected info. Maybe you should try it sometime. I did.

> What happens if you’re abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim “sorry, I wasn’t allowed to vote so the rules don’t apply to me”? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you’re not allowed to vote still apply to you?

Here, again on another track.

Nobody is ever going to figure out, when you live when you vote. The difference is showing up in the polling station inside the country or not. I.e. with not being able to vote via mail or embassy.

Again, in our country, we have several different elections (just like in other countries). But in some, you have to vote locally, in others, you can do via correspondence. So when all of them are local only, no harm done. If you can bring your ass to the polling station, that’s enough. Nobody is taking your right to vote, it is on you to decide, whether it is worth to you to exercise your right, or not.

>Yes, this is what the (modern|progressive|educated|whatever) tell to themselves to fell on high horse in their bubble.

Right, the peasants with no education and only watching state TV are clearly the ones without a bias, their children that went to university, got a good job, know english are the one brainwashed by CIA/Israel and the evil LGBTQ. I read so many cases of educated Hungarians or Russians ashamed of the level of brainwashing of their parents.

Yes, because the friculins (as in free-cool-in) in their reddit bubbles are so much more clever.

Case in point; any discussion involving policits here, on hn. Politologs are face palming at the naivety, when they see an extract.

If you would know Romanian I would share with you links my parents share with me and have you defend that bullshit to prove that my parents are the correct ones when they fall for the online bullshit like medical stuff (or you will claim that this less educated people are wrong when they fall for medical bullshit but when is about election they are correct).

Latest link from my father was a clip from some TV channel where some pretend doctor was claiming something super vague that is scientifically incorrect, this time I ignored it since I was not in the mood to try to find evidence that the guy is not a real doctor, that the vague shit is bullshit and find scientific shit to clarify things, and all would need to be in Romanian so he can understand.

For this old generation if is on TV or internet and some scammer pretends is a doctor and uses a few medical words they will fall for it, is the same with politics especially blaiming bad stuff on various groups, that stuff works well on the internet.

Give me an example where your or a friend uneducated pessant parents were actually correct in this kind of topics then their educated children that know more languages and read more media.

You can, in the communnal (local) elections.

For the parliamentary, it is here for a reason. To prevent voting touristic. The delay of several years — you have to live several years in the other country — serves exactly that.

But there is no delay, even if I’ve been in Spain for 10 years I still can’t vote for the parliament there.

I know about the local ones but it’s not that important IMO.

I could go to the trouble of obtaining Spanish citizenship after 10 years but it is incredibly difficult and long.

I understand the problem of touristic voting but then they should let me vote here after 3 years or so.

Right now I can only vote for the Dutch government which I have nothing to do with in my life (and which is an extreme-right regime since the last election anyway)

> Orban doesn’t need to crack down on political opposition he has a strong majority in his country.(1)

Erdogan had the majority of votes go his way in the last election. Also Putin. 🙂

Of course gerrymandering is an age old tactic:

> First, the party rewrote the entire Hungarian constitution in secret. Parliament passed the new constitution after only nine days of debate. Changes included a restructuring of Hungarian elections, such that more than half of parliamentary representatives would be chosen through single-member, American-style districts (the remainder are determined by a national proportional-vote share). In drawing the new districts, Fidesz abused a rule that allowed the government to vary them in size from roughly 60,000 to 90,000 people.

> The new map packed opposition voters into a handful of larger districts, diluting their votes, while pro-Fidesz voters were distributed among smaller districts. This gerrymandered system would allow Fidesz to fall short of a popular-vote majority but still win a two-thirds majority in Parliament—something that happened not once but twice, in 2014 and 2018.

> A blizzard of other electoral changes accompanied the redistricting. Each was incremental, and potentially even defensible in isolation. But in combination, the laws erected extraordinary barriers that would keep opposition parties from winning elections. For example, the old system had allowed for a runoff in any district where the victorious candidate got less than 50 percent of the vote. The new system abolished the runoff, allowing a party to win a district with a mere plurality. At the same time, Fidesz created a rule that required national parties to compete in at least 27 single-member districts—even as the party passed laws that made it trickier for small parties to unite on a joint list. The result was that the various opposition parties were basically forced to split the anti-Fidesz vote in many districts, allowing Orbán’s candidates to win with relatively small pluralities.

* https://archive.ph/6DiTT / https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/07/wh…

The trick in ‘modern’ authoritarian systems is (often) to not bother going after your opposition, but mostly trying to stay in power (see above) and helping your friends:

> The railway and stadium have been pilloried by the prime minister’s critics as vanity projects. But they have something else in common. Both were built, in part, by Felcsut’s mayor, and a childhood friend of Mr Orban, Lorinc Meszaros. Until a few years ago, Mr Meszaros was a gas fitter. Thanks to winning state contracts, he jumped to number five in this year’s list of the wealthiest Hungarians compiled by website Napi.hu. In a year, his fortune soared from Ft23bn (€73m) to Ft120bn.

* https://archive.ph/v8f6R / https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b…

> I guess you have a wrong opinion about Hungary and Orban because the media doesn’t like him because he is a pain in the ass for many plans of the European Union and gets bad reporting.

The Cato Institute called out Hungary in their most recent Human Freedom Report:

> Since 2007, the high point in human freedom, a minority of jurisdictions have increased their level of freedom, but many of them, such as Myanmar, began from a very low base, and many others experienced only minor improvements. The vast majority of jurisdictions saw declines. Among the countries and territories that deteriorated the most are Nicaragua, Syria, Hong Kong, Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary (see Table 3).

* https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-12/human-free…

* https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2023

If that’s what hungarians want, cheap gas, he’s working for hungarians, he’s their president, i don’t know what’s wrong with that.

I mean.. ask an average american, cut support for ukraine and in turn get cheaper gas.. what would a Billy or Bobby in texas say?

But overall he is one of the only European leaders which speaks with all relevant parties and tries to stop the conflict in Ukraine.

They may not be making visits to Moscow to kiss Putin’s hand, like Orban did. But the governments of all the major European countries are continually in contact with the relevant parties, and they all want to “stop the conflict in Ukraine”. It’s just a question of under which terms.

Strange that these European utopias seem to be on the edge of collapsing into civil conflicts if the plebs are permitted to communicate with one another without government supervision.

Hitlers rise to power can be attributed to free speech, which is why saying some things, and promoting some things, will land you in prison in places like Germany.

Even if that were true, it can be attributed to lots of things. The ruling class’s wars and economic mismanagement, common people feeling disenfranchised and abandoned by politcs, for some examples. In a real utopia it is those things that would be changed, not the peoples’ ability to communicate without government eavesdropping on them.

I wonder if this is a copypasta? Something in these lines pops up every time someone in an EU institution proposes something controversial.

That someone is usually Ylva Johansson and its quickly striken down but for some reason there’s this strange narrative pushed that feels almost automated.

WTF is this stuff about EU shutting down nuclear reactors? Complete fantasy world. Are you copy pasting this from somewhere or were you made to believe in on Twitter or something?

Please write a response I’m very curious about the roots of this comment.

Do you perhaps live in the US? The EU didn’t shut down any nuclear power plants. Local politicians in Germany and Sweden (and perhaps more countries) did. And they were very much elected. I don’t think any technocrats would do something that stupid.

The EU has elections every five years where the members of parliament are chosen. They very much answer to the public. Why would you think they don’t?

The EU considered nuclear energy to not be “green” up until very recently, which directly contributed to the demise of said nuclear power plants as well as many potential projects.

> Who in their right mind shuts down their nuclear power plants and exchanges energy independence for cheap gas imports from Russia?

What do you mean by “nobody”? The tree-huggers were all for more polluting forms of energy lest it made the USSR look like a state that didn’t give 2 worries about safety

This is not a good argument as to why we should break encryption.

Rather, it’s an argument that law enforcement should start engaging with those groups on telegram directly, i.e. setting up stings etc and just actually go and catch them. Do some good old police work.

If you’re able to find them on telegram, clearly law enforcement are capable too, if they’re resourced and willing. Encryption isn’t the problem here.

The chat you are referring to aren’t encrypted, I don’t see how breaking end to end encryption would affect the chat you’re talking about. That’s a problem that has to do with telegram governance. In telegram, group chats are not encrypted. 1:1 chats are also not encrypted if you don’t start a secret chat before

Now tell me, if law enforcement can just get into those group since they’re not encrypted, why are not they doing that? What do they need to break encryption for?

The ordering process is likely handled in e2e 1:1 chat. The public and unencrypted channel is only used as advertising/entry point. The evidence of purchase is as such not accessible to the authorities.

> Why should drug cartels have free and EASY access to such wonderful encrypted sales platform?

Drug cartels will continue to have easy access to such platforms, as will anyone willing to do business with them, since such cartels and their business partners do not care about following the law. The same is true for child pornographers, hitmen, and so on. The technology exists and does not inherently depend on any middleman amenable to EU authority. No EU legislation can reverse that. All this might do is force them to switch to a different chat provider that will ignore EU law, or to run one themselves.

The true effect of any legislation that purports to circumvent end-to-end encryption to address the concerns you list will primarily be reducing the privacy of law-abiding people, including those who really need it: a French journalist reporting on corruption in a public contract bidding process, a Hungarian dissident organizing opposition to Fidesz’s authoritarianism, or even someone seeking help to flee from the oversight of an abusive spouse with personal connections to EU member state surveillance institutions.

Not a useful way to catch up with tech – whether or not a better way exists, this law is literally worse than doing nothing.

> In Sweden, there are chat groups where hits on people are and have been ordered and executed.

Funny that they can pinpoint and read the messages of those groups already without ChatControl.

Also, perhaps issues around the demographic in question should perhaps be addressed with other measures. I think they would continue if the entire Internet were shut down.

Your example with Telegram has nothing to do with E2E encryption, which is precisely what Chat Control is aimed at. Please look for a more relevant straw man.

Poor law enforcement who are not capable of acquiring evidence via a controlled buy. Better give them access to everyone’s private messages, that will definitely solve crimes once and for all.

My point it: if shouting “I am doing something illegal” in public isn’t enough to get law enforcement’s attention, how would access to private messages change this?

> Isn’t it time to update the law and catch up with tech?

In case of Telegram groups you mention, local authorities can use existing laws regulating public social networks (Telegram really works similar to Facebook in these use cases, these telegram groups are neither private nor end to end encrypted). The fact that Telegram doesn’t cooperate is not because of lack of regulation, but lack of leverage against it (which seems to be one of the reasons why authorities in France detained Telegram CEO recently).

>Why should drug cartels have free and EASY access to such wonderful encrypted sales platform?

Why shouldn’t they?
When i buy drugs it’s a whole load of fucking about because they’re illegal where I am, but not illegal just 40km away.
Free and EASY apps reduce the friction.
Win.

Yeah normal here in the UK as well. I was at a party last year and someone just ordered coke off WhatsApp. This turned into a mess because they wanted to pay the “menu price” as advertised and two guys with a shooter turned up and took £500 off them instead of £200.

So we have extortion, illegal drug dealing and illegal guns in one fine evening.

ChatControl is not the solution however. Reporting it to the police didn’t do a damn thing either though so I don’t know!

The social problems, mental health and physical health issues related to cocaine, legal or not, far outweigh the benefits of legalising it.

I’ll add that my cousin was stabbed 6 times by a coke head flat mate who had a psychotic episode.

And I haven’t started on the slavery side of the production side of the supply chain.

> And I haven’t started on the slavery side of the production side of the supply chain.

That exists primarily because of the legal status. If cocaine were legal, for example, the production wouldn’t be much worse than say coffee cultivation.

And that’s terrible what happened to your cousin, but I don’t see how those relatively limited cases, as bad as they are, compare to the millions of lives that have been destroyed globally by the war on drugs.

Then you need a system that prevents drug users from getting into vehicles, and also a system that disqualifies them from public healthcare. It’s easier to criminalize drug use than to deal with the consequences.

> you need a system that prevents drug users from getting into vehicles

Driving under the influence is already illegal and would obviously remain so in a society where more drugs were legal. I think we mostly all accept that needing to pass a breathalyser test to start your car would be absurd, so why are currently illegal drugs any different?

> a system that disqualifies them from public healthcare

Why? We don’t exclude obese people, those who do no exercise, smokers, alcoholics from public healthcare. In my eyes that is the bedrock of a public service, you get it whether you “deserve” it or not. To say otherwise opens the door to far too many situations where people cannot get the help they need.

It’s like with drug dealing on the streets. If you force dealers off the streets, the deals will take place in private apartments that are much harder to surveil. If you force dealers from large social nets to private social nets or even specialized “underground” apps, the police work is going to be harder, not easier.

> Why should drug cartels have free and EASY access to such wonderful encrypted sales platform? Isn’t it time to update the law and catch up with tech?

To me, this as ridiculous as saying “Why should drug cartels have free and EASY access to the internet?”. The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no substitute for good old fashioned (hard) police work.

Not quite. Finding and ordering drugs using the good old www without “people nearby” feature is a big difference, wouldn’t you agree? Technology improved, police work must improve too.