Comment by nickslaughter02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickslaughter02 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nickslaughter02

> “The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer. “They seem to fear that even military secrets without any link to child sexual abuse could end up in the US at any time. The confidentiality of government communications is certainly important, but the same must apply to the protection of business and of course citizens communications, including the spaces that victims of abuse themselves need for secure exchanges and therapy. We know that most of the chats leaked by today’s voluntary snooping algorithms are of no relevance to the police, for example family photos or consensual sexting. It is outrageous that the EU interior ministers themselves do not want to suffer the consequences of the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption that they are imposing on us.”

EU ministers want to exempt themselves (https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...)

The fact that they will only pass this law if they exclude themselves from it should be enough to reject the idea without any further consideration.

And of course if you do still consider further it only gets worse.

What about industrial espionage? Is a technician of Rheinmetal/Dassault/Thales also exempt?

Well, the list of exempts is the list of defense contractor employees, and the negative list of non-exempts subtracted from the list of everyone is list of high-value targets.

The locations where exempts are gathered, locations where there are high commerce traffic and/or verified sent-in data, but no sent-out data, or abnormally low traffic altogether, those are all high-value targets as well.

No matter how you slice it, they're creating a list of airstrike targets and means to aid literal foreign spies. If the affected locations and people are as obvious and well guarded as the US DoD headquarters and uniformed guys there, fine, otherwise, they're just creating doors in the wall exclusively open for "enemy" uses.

They probably have internal chat systems (cough matrix cough) that don't go above 50 M MAU which afaik is the threshold of applicability of this law. So this particular is a non-issue, unfortunately.

But then it begs the question, why politicians feel the need to use public (>50MMAU) chat systems to conduct the protected (official) business?

>But then it begs the question, why politicians feel the need to use public (>50MMAU) chat systems to conduct the protected (official) business?

It also begs the question why CSAM "distributors" would use those ;)

Because they don't know better (see also: criminals are stupid).

I think politicians should not be stupid and isolate their official business from the private one. (That would be ideal, anyway).

Stupid criminals disproportionally get caught.

Selective pressure on the intelligence of criminals will cause them to become more intelligent.

You now need even more draconian legislation to disproportionally keep catching the intelligence-wise lowest quantile of criminals.

It's not about people's safety, it's about politicians' safety. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331829

Of course they don't need to spy on themselves. The goal is to stop targeted attacks against politicians and any attempts to overthrow the government. The government is uniquely unlikely to overthrow itself.

Empirically that’s absurd. The US is currently undergoing an internal struggle that’s exemplified by the agents of change being part of the government AND dangerously hostile to opposition.

the theater that is US Dem-Rep politics would never threaten its own existence regardless how much one side screams the other will be the end of democracy when the stage changes. Maybe bookmark this thread and come back next term when the next play hast started.

If you had said that 30 years ago I might have agreed with you. But I don't because in the last 30 years I've watched both parties drift farther right until one decided to team up with actual nationalists (project 2025, they wrote a book about it and several of the authors work for this administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 ) that intend to undermine the foundation of the government in order to enforce a white christian nationalist order.

I don't remember Democrats ever conducting a legal (fake elector scheme) or extralegal attempt (insurrection) to overthrow an election. I don't remember any leader ever saying the kinds of hateful things Trump does. Even Reagan and Bush 1 who peddled the whole "welfare queen" bullshit. I don't remember any admin prior to this one that removed research and published number wholesale from government website.

This is not normal and hasn't been for some time. I don't have a comprehensive list right now of all the ways this is batshit crazy because keeping track would be a full time job.

But sure, let's bookmark this thread and come back to it.

I'd like to know how that exemption would even work in practice. Many politicians happily use WhatsApp etc. on their personal devices with no VPN for official business.

Maybe when they see private conversations with their colleagues being leaked because someone stupidly used their personal account, they'll see the light.

> EU ministers want to exempt themselves

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

..and this was allegedly Orwell's allegory for the Soviet Union. Are we there yet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com