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I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused. If we d

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused. If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

jdthedisciple 2y ago
You realize criminals can stack infinitely many layers of encryption onto any compromised (govt-controlled) channel right? So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution??
- tzs 2y ago
  > So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution?? Who said it is supposed to be the solution? Almost no crime problems have a the solution. Instead reducing crime is almost always a matter of a variety of measures that each make the crime a little less likely.
  - account42 2y ago
    Which is why we also need to look at the cost of the measures to non-criminals, which in this case is extremely high for most likely little gain.
KptMarchewa 2y ago
We just won't catch some criminals, and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
Sander_Marechal 2y ago
Same way as they have always done. Identify suspects, get warrants, confiscate computers and other electronic devices, build a case, etc.
cbeach 2y ago
There are criminals operating behind the safety of closed doors with locks on. We need to compromise all door locks, in order to keep everyone safe from criminals.
Rucadi 2y ago
If a message platform is gov controlled, criminals will use other alternatives that are not monitored, which they probably already do. What you end up is just having the gov having all information about private citizens, which can be used against us. For example, the government of Spain constantly shares private citizen data of people near political adversaries for political reasons, also, I don't want people knowing what I share with my girlfriend, regardless of it they do something or not with it publicly.
WhackyIdeas 2y ago
It’s not a stupid question. But to think that it will make people more safe is double think. Right wing dictorship is on the rise across Europe and the World. No-one knows the future, but it’s sure looking bleak. We are all making ourselves less secure to the future. And with AI… ooft. AI will get to a point where it takes over, and decisions like these help it to. We are destroying our future fast.
wepple 2y ago
Crime, whether CSAM or drugs or theft, all have a component in the real-world: it’s never purely in messaging. Stop the CSAM where it’s being created. Catch the drug manufacturers and distributors. Etc. do police work.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Drug manufacturers, like weed farmers (in countries other than the US, for one)? The only reason I am able to use weed as an example is because it pretty much has been normalized, but what about other drugs, say, psychedelics, ketamine, opiates? I would rather not get into the War on Drugs here, anyways.
- tzs 2y ago
  What kind of police work are you envisaging?
  - ranguna 2y ago
    The one being done right now without this law
  - account42 2y ago
    Well for one, the FBI could investigate the list of Epstein's clients which they almost certainly have.
    - tekknik 2y ago
      You’ve jumped the pond, this article is about Europe not the US
      - account42 2y ago
        It's an example. You don't think Interpol and individual EU countries' police have similar options? The fact that these things often end up brushed under the rug makes me doubt that the goal here is really to catch abusers.
cauch 2y ago
I'm seeing more value in your comment than, apparently, the other people who have answered it here. I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle. I'm not convinced by the other arguments here that usually contains a hint of slippery-slope, what-aboutism or false dichotomy fallacies. The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. However, it does not mean that the equally terrible situation of having easy way for criminals to avoid justice is the good solution either. Personally, I think that a good system should be a distributed system where several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt (for example, a message can be decrypted only if Amnesty International, Interpol and the Austrian Justice Department put their 3 keys together, each individual key being useless on its own). In this model, abuses are almost impossible while obvious crime can still be investigated. I don't know any argument that really works to say that this model is not always better than the free-for-all-all-anonymised-messaging. Such ideas already exist, and David Chaum even came up with proof of concept of something similar https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/ https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-a...
- latexr 2y ago
  > I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle. That conclusion is logically wrong and does not follow from the premises. You are decrying fallacies in other arguments while making them yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation > The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. Then the logical course of action is to try to stop this legislation. Everything else about the argument is irrelevant right now, what matters is the close very bad thing in front of us that we can do something about. Eliminate that and then we can have a reasoned discussion about what the proper approach is. > several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt There’s no such thing as keys that only good guys have access to. It has been shown time and again that someone with access will abuse it or be tricked. I won’t go long on this point, however, as I was not familiar with your specific example. I’ll read up more on it. But again, that’s a conversation that matters later.
jiggawatts 2y ago
Replace "chat" with "speak", and suddenly it is trivially obvious to everyone how horrific this is: > If we don’t hijack privacy in speech, how do we fight crime happening in private conversations? If [the] government doesn’t have access to what you say at home, what’s stopping criminals from using their homes and never getting tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof was said behind closed doors? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Should we be obsessed with privacy, or should we let the government put microphones in every house just in case there are paedophiles talking about their sex acts and hence getting away with it? Similar arguments can be made by substituting other things that were traditionally considered the domain of only authoritarian dictatorships, such as opening all letters and reading them before they're delivered by the postal service, or keeping tabs on what books you borrow from the library. I grew up in one of those countries, and I can tell you that it's not at all nice that they tracked what you photocopied, you know, just in case you wanted to print out anti-party ("one" party!) propaganda... I mean... something... something distributing child porn. Yeah, that's it. That's the reason.
- defrost 2y ago
  > I lived in one of those countries, and I can tell you that it's not at all nice that they tracked what you photocopied, That's all photocopiers & printers though, with US manufacturers being ground zero for tracking, IIRC - https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer-Spying-on-/ https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your...
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    Which is one reason I stopped using printers entirely.
  - account42 2y ago
    Black & white printers cannot implement the yellow dots at least and even with color printers it is not literally every one of them. Adding tracking information, while it shouldn't be happening, is also many steps away from e.g. the printer analyzing everything you print and reporting to the government if it is something unapproved.
prasoonds 2y ago
The criminals absolutely will move away to something that is outside government control. Many such apps already exist and you can run what you like on Android phones with custom ROMs. Think about it - if you're a criminal, and you know about chat control, why would you risk your chats being leaked at all? Why wouldn't you use a different app that you know to be more secure (this already happens for any serious crime already btw) It's precisely the law-abiding people whose privacy will be invaded for no-gain
- MzHN 2y ago
  Until possession and distribution of such apps becomes a crime in itself. That's the only way to enforce it and there is history for it in cryptography export laws and anti-circumvention laws.
  - swat535 2y ago
    Criminals don't care about what is "legal", that's what makes the criminals in the first place and in any case, what are you going to do? Ban encryption entirely? Perhaps we also should ban mathematics and books while we are at it? After all, criminals can read chemistry books and learn how to make explosives..
    - tekknik 2y ago
      Apparently the cartels in Mexico have discovered a way to mix crystal meth with gasoline, put it in a cars tank, drive it across the boarder then separate it from the gas for distribution. The process is supposedly currently unknown to science (I’m no chemist so can’t be sure).
latexr 2y ago
> Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? You’re hurting yourself more by being too lax with it. Remember that a crime is whatever the law says it is. So if an authoritarian government makes it so criticising them becomes a crime and has access to all your communication, good luck ever breaking that cycle. You can use other examples, like making homosexuality illegal. These are real examples that real governments (or people with a good chance of being elected) want. Remember that the ultimate goal of these laws is never to “protect the children”—that’s just the convenient given reason, because how could you be against that—but to exert more control over the populace and cement the position of those in power. Even if the current government employs the technology only for good—highly unlikely—you don’t know about the next one.
- account42 2y ago
  > if an authoritarian government makes it so criticising them becomes a crime If? https://www.lewik.org/term/15692/defamation-of-persons-in-the-political-arena-section-188-german-criminal-code/ https://www.lewik.org/term/15692/defamation-of-persons-in-th...
prmoustache 2y ago
These laws only hurt abiding citizens. Same as with DRMs and those annoying "piracy is a crime" banner we got for minutes before watching a DVD. Nobody pirating content has ever seen those.
Moldoteck 2y ago
think of terrorists. Suppose your country has banned/restricted selling guns and explosives. Do you think this will stop terrorists? No, it'll stop normal citizens to not do any of this stuff... but they will not be affected since they are not terrorists. Terrorists on the other hand will find illegal ways to overcome the restrictions. It's the same with encryption - (open-source) tools with e2ee are already broadly available, sideloading is available - nothing will stop terrorists/other criminals to just install that and continue doing what they want. On the other hand this chat control opens a huge area of opportunities for govts to spy on citizens or maybe journalists/other politicians that they dislike. And this is if we assume the system doesn't have bugs that would allow third parties/hackers to break it and get all the info by themselves, or bugs that can trigger a false-positive event. That's why it's a bad idea. Criminals will find ways to overcome the limit, govs will get new tools for suppression (even if current govs are 'good', what if the next govt is some ultra conservative or radical nationalist, do you think they'll not use these new tools?) and normal ppl are basically left without any privacy
swat535 2y ago
How do we fight crime happening in houses? If government agents doesn’t have access to house contents, what’s stopping criminals from using locks and curtains in homes to hide their illegal activities and never get tracked down?
gitaarik 2y ago
You should't fight crime with other crime, that makes you no better than the other criminals and doesn't solve the problem of crime but only increases it, and doesn't make society safer. If you want crime to stop, you should at least give a good example and deal with it in a responsible manner, and not deal with it by being a criminal too. Then you just get society divided even more. It doesn't help anybody. You can't expect other people to cease their crime if you're doing it yourself. A better society starts with being responsible. Crime should not be approved of, and "crime fighting crime" shouldn't magically get an exception. "But crime X is way worse than crime Y fighting it". Crime should certainly be punished, but you cannot punish someone before you can prove their wrongdoing. And we have a court system for that. Punishing people before they're proven of wrongdoing is criminal in itself. You should't give a certain group of people allowance to put prison collars on others without them having done any crime. At least not if you want to live in a free society.
gitaarik 2y ago
> If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? Compare it to: if we don't put cameras and microphones in everybody's houses, how do we fight domestic violence? You can't control everything, and you shouldn't want to. Giving a certain small group control over a much larger group is not a good idea, because you can never know that that small group will handle their power responsibly. And domestic violence and crime happening on messaging platforms can still be dealt with in the traditional way: through our court system. And that happens and it works and it is fair (at least in essence, not counting corruption).

jdthedisciple 2y ago

You realize criminals can stack infinitely many layers of encryption onto any compromised (govt-controlled) channel right? So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution??

tzs 2y ago
> So how is "Chat Control" supposed to be the solution?? Who said it is supposed to be the solution? Almost no crime problems have a the solution. Instead reducing crime is almost always a matter of a variety of measures that each make the crime a little less likely.
- account42 2y ago
  Which is why we also need to look at the cost of the measures to non-criminals, which in this case is extremely high for most likely little gain.

KptMarchewa 2y ago

We just won't catch some criminals, and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.

Sander_Marechal 2y ago

Same way as they have always done. Identify suspects, get warrants, confiscate computers and other electronic devices, build a case, etc.

cbeach 2y ago

There are criminals operating behind the safety of closed doors with locks on. We need to compromise all door locks, in order to keep everyone safe from criminals.

Rucadi 2y ago

If a message platform is gov controlled, criminals will use other alternatives that are not monitored, which they probably already do. What you end up is just having the gov having all information about private citizens, which can be used against us. For example, the government of Spain constantly shares private citizen data of people near political adversaries for political reasons, also, I don't want people knowing what I share with my girlfriend, regardless of it they do something or not with it publicly.

WhackyIdeas 2y ago

It’s not a stupid question. But to think that it will make people more safe is double think. Right wing dictorship is on the rise across Europe and the World. No-one knows the future, but it’s sure looking bleak. We are all making ourselves less secure to the future. And with AI… ooft. AI will get to a point where it takes over, and decisions like these help it to. We are destroying our future fast.

wepple 2y ago

Crime, whether CSAM or drugs or theft, all have a component in the real-world: it’s never purely in messaging. Stop the CSAM where it’s being created. Catch the drug manufacturers and distributors. Etc. do police work.

johnisgood 2y ago
Drug manufacturers, like weed farmers (in countries other than the US, for one)? The only reason I am able to use weed as an example is because it pretty much has been normalized, but what about other drugs, say, psychedelics, ketamine, opiates? I would rather not get into the War on Drugs here, anyways.
tzs 2y ago
What kind of police work are you envisaging?
- ranguna 2y ago
  The one being done right now without this law
- account42 2y ago
  Well for one, the FBI could investigate the list of Epstein's clients which they almost certainly have.
  - tekknik 2y ago
    You’ve jumped the pond, this article is about Europe not the US
    - account42 2y ago
      It's an example. You don't think Interpol and individual EU countries' police have similar options? The fact that these things often end up brushed under the rug makes me doubt that the goal here is really to catch abusers.

cauch 2y ago

I'm seeing more value in your comment than, apparently, the other people who have answered it here. I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle. I'm not convinced by the other arguments here that usually contains a hint of slippery-slope, what-aboutism or false dichotomy fallacies. The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. However, it does not mean that the equally terrible situation of having easy way for criminals to avoid justice is the good solution either. Personally, I think that a good system should be a distributed system where several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt (for example, a message can be decrypted only if Amnesty International, Interpol and the Austrian Justice Department put their 3 keys together, each individual key being useless on its own). In this model, abuses are almost impossible while obvious crime can still be investigated. I don't know any argument that really works to say that this model is not always better than the free-for-all-all-anonymised-messaging. Such ideas already exist, and David Chaum even came up with proof of concept of something similar https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/ https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-a...

latexr 2y ago
> I think you are 100% right that above-the-law communication is not good for society. This should be obvious. At the same time, allowing government to be able to spy everywhere is also not good for society. Also obvious. The correct solution is therefore something in the middle. That conclusion is logically wrong and does not follow from the premises. You are decrying fallacies in other arguments while making them yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation > The proposed legislation is terrible: it is not balanced and does not contain any safeguard to avoid abuse. Then the logical course of action is to try to stop this legislation. Everything else about the argument is irrelevant right now, what matters is the close very bad thing in front of us that we can do something about. Eliminate that and then we can have a reasoned discussion about what the proper approach is. > several independent justice organizations share the set of key needed to decrypt There’s no such thing as keys that only good guys have access to. It has been shown time and again that someone with access will abuse it or be tricked. I won’t go long on this point, however, as I was not familiar with your specific example. I’ll read up more on it. But again, that’s a conversation that matters later.

jiggawatts 2y ago

Replace "chat" with "speak", and suddenly it is trivially obvious to everyone how horrific this is: > If we don’t hijack privacy in speech, how do we fight crime happening in private conversations? If [the] government doesn’t have access to what you say at home, what’s stopping criminals from using their homes and never getting tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof was said behind closed doors? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Should we be obsessed with privacy, or should we let the government put microphones in every house just in case there are paedophiles talking about their sex acts and hence getting away with it? Similar arguments can be made by substituting other things that were traditionally considered the domain of only authoritarian dictatorships, such as opening all letters and reading them before they're delivered by the postal service, or keeping tabs on what books you borrow from the library. I grew up in one of those countries, and I can tell you that it's not at all nice that they tracked what you photocopied, you know, just in case you wanted to print out anti-party ("one" party!) propaganda... I mean... something... something distributing child porn. Yeah, that's it. That's the reason.

defrost 2y ago
> I lived in one of those countries, and I can tell you that it's not at all nice that they tracked what you photocopied, That's all photocopiers & printers though, with US manufacturers being ground zero for tracking, IIRC - https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer-Spying-on-/ https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your...
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Which is one reason I stopped using printers entirely.
- account42 2y ago
  Black & white printers cannot implement the yellow dots at least and even with color printers it is not literally every one of them. Adding tracking information, while it shouldn't be happening, is also many steps away from e.g. the printer analyzing everything you print and reporting to the government if it is something unapproved.

prasoonds 2y ago

The criminals absolutely will move away to something that is outside government control. Many such apps already exist and you can run what you like on Android phones with custom ROMs. Think about it - if you're a criminal, and you know about chat control, why would you risk your chats being leaked at all? Why wouldn't you use a different app that you know to be more secure (this already happens for any serious crime already btw) It's precisely the law-abiding people whose privacy will be invaded for no-gain

MzHN 2y ago
Until possession and distribution of such apps becomes a crime in itself. That's the only way to enforce it and there is history for it in cryptography export laws and anti-circumvention laws.
- swat535 2y ago
  Criminals don't care about what is "legal", that's what makes the criminals in the first place and in any case, what are you going to do? Ban encryption entirely? Perhaps we also should ban mathematics and books while we are at it? After all, criminals can read chemistry books and learn how to make explosives..
  - tekknik 2y ago
    Apparently the cartels in Mexico have discovered a way to mix crystal meth with gasoline, put it in a cars tank, drive it across the boarder then separate it from the gas for distribution. The process is supposedly currently unknown to science (I’m no chemist so can’t be sure).

latexr 2y ago

> Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? You’re hurting yourself more by being too lax with it. Remember that a crime is whatever the law says it is. So if an authoritarian government makes it so criticising them becomes a crime and has access to all your communication, good luck ever breaking that cycle. You can use other examples, like making homosexuality illegal. These are real examples that real governments (or people with a good chance of being elected) want. Remember that the ultimate goal of these laws is never to “protect the children”—that’s just the convenient given reason, because how could you be against that—but to exert more control over the populace and cement the position of those in power. Even if the current government employs the technology only for good—highly unlikely—you don’t know about the next one.

account42 2y ago
> if an authoritarian government makes it so criticising them becomes a crime If? https://www.lewik.org/term/15692/defamation-of-persons-in-the-political-arena-section-188-german-criminal-code/ https://www.lewik.org/term/15692/defamation-of-persons-in-th...

prmoustache 2y ago

These laws only hurt abiding citizens. Same as with DRMs and those annoying "piracy is a crime" banner we got for minutes before watching a DVD. Nobody pirating content has ever seen those.

Moldoteck 2y ago

think of terrorists. Suppose your country has banned/restricted selling guns and explosives. Do you think this will stop terrorists? No, it'll stop normal citizens to not do any of this stuff... but they will not be affected since they are not terrorists. Terrorists on the other hand will find illegal ways to overcome the restrictions. It's the same with encryption - (open-source) tools with e2ee are already broadly available, sideloading is available - nothing will stop terrorists/other criminals to just install that and continue doing what they want. On the other hand this chat control opens a huge area of opportunities for govts to spy on citizens or maybe journalists/other politicians that they dislike. And this is if we assume the system doesn't have bugs that would allow third parties/hackers to break it and get all the info by themselves, or bugs that can trigger a false-positive event. That's why it's a bad idea. Criminals will find ways to overcome the limit, govs will get new tools for suppression (even if current govs are 'good', what if the next govt is some ultra conservative or radical nationalist, do you think they'll not use these new tools?) and normal ppl are basically left without any privacy

swat535 2y ago

How do we fight crime happening in houses? If government agents doesn’t have access to house contents, what’s stopping criminals from using locks and curtains in homes to hide their illegal activities and never get tracked down?

gitaarik 2y ago

You should't fight crime with other crime, that makes you no better than the other criminals and doesn't solve the problem of crime but only increases it, and doesn't make society safer. If you want crime to stop, you should at least give a good example and deal with it in a responsible manner, and not deal with it by being a criminal too. Then you just get society divided even more. It doesn't help anybody. You can't expect other people to cease their crime if you're doing it yourself. A better society starts with being responsible. Crime should not be approved of, and "crime fighting crime" shouldn't magically get an exception. "But crime X is way worse than crime Y fighting it". Crime should certainly be punished, but you cannot punish someone before you can prove their wrongdoing. And we have a court system for that. Punishing people before they're proven of wrongdoing is criminal in itself. You should't give a certain group of people allowance to put prison collars on others without them having done any crime. At least not if you want to live in a free society.

gitaarik 2y ago

> If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? Compare it to: if we don't put cameras and microphones in everybody's houses, how do we fight domestic violence? You can't control everything, and you shouldn't want to. Giving a certain small group control over a much larger group is not a good idea, because you can never know that that small group will handle their power responsibly. And domestic violence and crime happening on messaging platforms can still be dealt with in the traditional way: through our court system. And that happens and it works and it is fair (at least in essence, not counting corruption).