Why are EU pols so obsessed with passing Chat Control?

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cczona i.e.: everyone should have to follow the rules, the rules can be made by sensible Government People who set forth a vision of the common good, and if math — or economics, or physics, or whatever — disagrees or the rules are so vague that they're selectively enforced by biased regulators, who cares, at least it's orderly. EU regulators seem to feel entitled to have everyone just obey their intended outcomes, and ignore all their unintended consequences.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cczona much as I think we absolutely need *something* like GDPR, the rollout is continuously botched in ways that smell vaguely chat-control-y and nobody seems to want to take responsibility for the plague of things like cookie banners or gigantic piles of putatively-necessary PII sitting around at various aggregators

[frankortiz078@mastodon.social]

@cczona Honestly. When people seem creepily obsessed with chat control, it’s usually that mix of fear and control: they say it’s about safety and fighting crime, but it also gives them huge power over our private conversations. That clash between 'we’re protecting you' and 'we’re watching you' is exactly why it feels so uncomfortable.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cczona Of course I shouldn't make it out so that Europe is really worse in any way; in addition to not wanting to have good regulations, the USA is also doing a worse version of this now, with plain-old authoritarianism and a whole lot fewer good intentions. and the Clipper Chip, KOSA, various attempts at "AI" regulations, all look suspiciously like chat control anyway

[deshipu@fosstodon.org]

@cczona From what I can tell (mostly vibes) it's mostly coming from a handful of companies that are selling the monitoring technology, and are heavily lobbying for it to be required by law.

[cczona@hachyderm.io]

@glyph I remember Clipper Chip. But I'm not familiar with KOSA. As an American living in the EU, Chat Control is very unnerving. It's deeply invasive and treats everyone in the EU as presumptive criminals whose every word must be captured and surveilled. That the data gathering is largely by American companies that are eagerly cooperative with an authoritarian regime that is openly hostile to the EU should be reason enough in my view for EU politicians to want to cancel this thing. Instead it's gone in a few months from 15 countries in favor to 20+. That support is terrifyingly reckless, both for individuals and for government.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cczona fully agreed. and it will absolutely make Americans less safe transitively by weakening global cybersecurity for individuals and for organizations. it sucks all around.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cczona I do think that there's an Occam's Razor to this in terms of why they're doing it: ACAB includes regulators. The cops asking for this shit just keep repeating themselves, the politicians who want to stay on their good side assume that there's something valid there, and everyone involved is too arrogant and incurious to bother understanding the cybersecurity nuclear bomb they're about to accidentally set off

[cczona@hachyderm.io]

@glyph so far Italy is one of the 4 remaining holdouts. If there is a serious security incident at the Olympics, that will crumble. We're precariously close to locking in this harmful scheme permanently.

[master_squinter@infosec.exchange]

@glyph @cczona

For law enforcement, I think there’s a knee-jerk reaction among the upper echelons to cover themselves by blaming tech. I think politically, it’s easier to sell that, than “it’s because we’re underfunded, and everyone wants us to spend our budget on visible cops, rather than back-office ‘pen pushers’, so we simply cannot retain skilled investigators.”

The particularly irritating part is that it won’t work. Criminals will simply bypass it; citizens will lose rights and freedoms, be opened up to new attacks and deeper corporate surveillance and manipulation; and the last few skilled investigators will have an even bigger haystack to dig through, while their bosses whine about the next technology.

[zilahu@mastodon.laca.dev]

@cczona @glyph they want to wiretap us all erhm, i mean they protect the children.

[frankortiz078@mastodon.social]

@cczona EU home affairs people and law‑enforcement lobbies really want a legal way around encryption, and wrapping it in ‘think of the children’ makes it politically resilient even when experts, courts, and some governments say it’s disproportionate and doesn’t actually fix CSAM. There’s no hard limit on retries: as long as the CSAM regulation file stays open and a few big member states think ‘chat scanning = being tough on crime,’ they can keep bringing a slightly mutated version back.

[catsith@ieji.de]

@cczona @glyph because they are politicians, trained to create compromise. They don’t understand unmoveable facts. Everyday they optimize compromises between stakeholders and interest groups by giving everyone something.
Also they are accustomed to people lying to them like everytime they try to regulate industry, these industries tell them: We will leave/be bankrupt if you do this. Usually this doesn’t happen, but it rhymes with our pleas to please not kill end-to-end-crypto.
Their burocrates are trained, expected and rewarded to be generalists, not experts in a domain, so their „expertise“ is shallow and there is no one „inside the house“, and therefore trusted, who can validate our position against the other sides lobby position. Traditionally the media could provide some of that, but as good journalism has been gutted for a long time, there is no one there either.
And the real alternative, funding police and courts adequately is expensive for the public purse (chat control is payed for by the chat providers) and would require raising taxes. Nobody thinks that politically possible and the left who are thinking about it are always under the suspicion of being soft on crime. So there isn’t really an alternative and therefore if you’re against this you‘re „in favor“ of csam.