FA+
Shop
What would you do if online privacy was gone?
4 months ago
General
Seems like we aren't getting rid of Chat Control in the EU, https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/po...../chat-control/
If this becomes a thing, if you read this, wherever you may live in the world, you will almost certainly be affected. In Europe, Telegram, Signal and similar encrypted messengers might get blocked overnight (probably voluntarily by their providers to avoid liability). If you are not in Europe, some of your contacts might be gone. And if Europe does this, others might follow.
VPN may be sort of an answer until that might also be made illegal for private usage (in the UK there are some worrisome signs with regards to them allowing getting around the Online Safety Act).
You can't get around this. Even if not outright blocked, authorities can easily have a list of what services you are using (In case of E2EE chats, they don't see the content, but see that you are using the service. VPNs, similar case).
So... What would you do? Get a life? Fortunate enough to have such real life contacts that you feel you could go on without online privacy?
I have hardly any real life connections myself in the UK. I am in contact with friends from Hungary, and people from countries at war. If the equivalent of Chat Control gets implemented there, they are screwed - well, will have to accept to be silenced to be left alone.
If this becomes a thing, if you read this, wherever you may live in the world, you will almost certainly be affected. In Europe, Telegram, Signal and similar encrypted messengers might get blocked overnight (probably voluntarily by their providers to avoid liability). If you are not in Europe, some of your contacts might be gone. And if Europe does this, others might follow.
VPN may be sort of an answer until that might also be made illegal for private usage (in the UK there are some worrisome signs with regards to them allowing getting around the Online Safety Act).
You can't get around this. Even if not outright blocked, authorities can easily have a list of what services you are using (In case of E2EE chats, they don't see the content, but see that you are using the service. VPNs, similar case).
So... What would you do? Get a life? Fortunate enough to have such real life contacts that you feel you could go on without online privacy?
I have hardly any real life connections myself in the UK. I am in contact with friends from Hungary, and people from countries at war. If the equivalent of Chat Control gets implemented there, they are screwed - well, will have to accept to be silenced to be left alone.
Kids, dammit. Somehow all the worst and dumbest things are done "for kids".
In fact the more concerning is the principle than whether the majority had their security set up right.
Without this sort of legislation, the courts could toss out any case using snooped chats as evidence. With the legislation, nope, they can be used, twisted around, however they like. So the thing is that it becomes much easier to convict people on lawful foundations - which becomes quite an issue with laws like the prohibition of insulting the President.
So the main thing with these is that they set up the foundations for an authoritarian police state.
2) even if they find some "bad behaviour" of you, unless it's nothing the state prosecutor has interest in, nothing will happen
3) again: this is paranoid, there aren't even enough police officers around to look into normal reports, so the chances of a "mass insight into chat protocols" is highly unlikely [trust me, I know what I'm talking about and I'm sick of constantly getting reports being put aside],
4) once they look for a murderer or terrorist and law-bases disallow to find evidence everyone was moaning and bitching about, the chat protocol insight is done mainly for those kind of things, the ones who are using explosives on cash machines, who are planning terroristic attacks, who are doing drug smuggling or who enslave and murder people.
But then take a look at Türkiye, Serbia, Russia... Or Hungary where I came from and which is an EU state. There they do abuse laws on "causing public unrest", which they try to apply on anything the opposition says, while they can blatantly ignore them.
You can't assume your homecountry's system will always remain working in good faith, especially now with the far right on the rise everywhere.
Then on the technological side, if E2EE chat is outlawed, it restricts where such services can exist, making lives more difficult in countries like above where there is repression (and moreover they may follow the example of the EU). These services do work, was in contact with people using them in such countries, and there the police was taking phones from people on the streets to try cracking down on dissident voices. Had they got better tools, no doubt they would have used them.
And again: for mass chat control in Germany, they'd need more people and they don't have those. In fact those officers who usually do things like that, currently have to control on Germany's borders.
Nevertheless - the EU is based on Rechtstaatlichkeit, that law is not used randomly or on bad will against the citizens - this is also the guideline for the chat-insight law here.
Could be, not saying it can't, by now having been lived for years in two very different cultures. If you feel your people generally are resilient enough to not let things veer away from those principles the first place.
Other countries, including ones within the EU, aren't that resilient (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, I don't even know what possessed Croats recently).
And then it won't be humans leafing through chat logs. Hungary had some scandals already with various surveillance software (Pegasus). Once data isn't outright inaccessible due to E2EE, these places will use it, not necessarily to directly convict people by such data, but to have them in focus for any opportunity easier sold to the majority in media.
So you might say, Germany might be mature enough to remove encryption accessible by the general public for a safer environment. However other EU countries very certainly aren't. And then the rest of the world is still there where dissidents need this security, and might have used European VPN servers to access it.
And Pegasus was a state trojan developed by the EU - for exact those cases for actually trying to hunt out terrorists. Yet these aren't allowed to be used that easily.
Problem here are governments which look for totalitary control like in Russia. presidents or prime ministers of the countries you named are in love with Putin, so you can imagine where this is coming from.
Thinking, Germany will also have a very immediate problem if outlawing access to E2EE. As far as I know, you have some 3 million Turks, who probably have Turkish citizenship (possibly alongside being naturalized), and a lot of them probably relatives and friends in Türkiye.
These people suddenly might find there is no channel to communicate about happenings in their homecountry which they can perceive safe (if a Chat Control compliant provider isn't blocked in Türkiye, within Türkiye they wouldn't know if the provider might share all data with the government to allow them continuing service).
I hear both from Hungary and Russia that police, that is that police which is meant to protect citizens from regular everyday crime, is in shambles, especially so in more rural areas.
Even Xhamster and Pornhub were just blocked via a URL-block, which can easily be worked around by changing "www" to "de" or "ge" etc.
And way too many people over here still use Whatsapp and less Telegram than you'd expect.