Hundreds of academics and engineers and non-profit organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, as well as the Council of Europe, believe that the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) would mean sacrificing confidentiality on the internet, and that this price is unaffordable for democracies.
The European Data Protection Supervisor, who is preparing a statement on this for late October, has said that it could become the basis for the de facto widespread and indiscriminate scanning of all EU communications. The proposed regulation, often referred to by critics as Chat Control, holds companies that provide communication services responsible for ensuring that unlawful material does not circulate online. If, after undergoing a risk assessment, it is determined that they are a channel for pedophiles, these services will have to implement automatic screening.
The mastermind behind the billboards and newspaper exhortations calling on Apple to detect pedophile material on iCloud is, reportedly, a non-profit organization called Heat Initiative, which is part of a crusade against the encryption of communications known in the U.S. as Crypto Wars. This movement has gone from fighting against terrorism to combating the spread of online child pornography to request the end of encrypted messages, the last great pocket of privacy left on the internet. “It is significant that the U.S., the European Union and the United Kingdom are simultaneously processing regulations that, in practice, will curtail encrypted communications. It seems like a coordinated effort,” says Diego Naranjo, head of public policies at the digital rights non-profit EDRi.
The question I have is where does the world go from here? I can’t foresee a future where these attempts by government to enact a kind of all-encompassing control and monitoring of citizens’ lives just suddenly stop and we return to a time when our every movement wasn’t watched. It seems like they will just keep trying, taking any pushback as a sign that their social engineering just needs a few tweaks and a little more corporate/media brainwashing before they try it again. The only winners are government and their corporate buddies.
We’re entering a world that myself and a not insignificant percentage of humanity are fundamentally incompatible with. I don’t see a reason to remain optimistic about the future, to keep building upon what I’ve got going on, to strive for more, when we’re staring down the barrel of a technofeudalist nightmare dystopian future that it seems most people don’t give a shit about eventuating because they’ve “got nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to worry about.”
Somebody give me a reason to think things will get better.
The executive in the federal government in the US tried to punch holes in encryption since at least the Clipper Chip in the early 1990s, and it’s been repeatedly rejected. Also, there used to be hard restrictions on export of strong encryption from the US – it had been treated as a munition – and that was removed in the late 1990s. I’m not so sure that there’s some sort of inevitable future Panopticon down the line.
considers
I suppose that, depending upon the structure of a system of government, if there’s enough effort, constitutional amendments can create a high bar for change, as one could guarantee a right to private communication. In the US, it’s quite difficult to change the US Constitution, so anything that goes in there is gonna be pretty difficult to for a government to ignore. If an amendment like that went in, you’d first have to have three-quarters of states agree to back it out. Then have the federal legislature pass a law that previously would have been unconstitutional. It’d be pretty visible.
As it stands, there is no explicit right to privacy in the US Constitution. You do have the Fourth Amendment, and what flows from it, and that can be closely-related to privacy:
There has been case law based on interpretation of explicit rights that has established various non-explicit constitutional rights to privacy; Roe v. Wade had originally been based on such an interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
If an explicit right were authored and then added as a constitutional amendment, that would be a substantial bar.
In contrast, in the UK’s present system of government, there’s fundamentally no way to restrain the legislature in that way; that’s not really a viable route.
The EU presently doesn’t have treaty-level guarantees of privacy either, which is the closest analog to an EU constitution that exists today, but treaty change has a very high bar, and any such change guaranteeing a right would be exceptionally difficult to back out, as treaty change requires unanimity. The flip side, though, is that getting such a right through would also be exceptionally difficult, and I would personally bet that the bar for such a right being added to the EU treaties will not be met, given a unanimity requirement.
The EU does have regulations and directives, like GDPR. Something like that will protect against change in an individual EU member without corresponding change at the confederation level, though that assumes that the concern is specifically about a member state monitoring communications.
Member states may have individual constitutional guarantees related to private communication; the extent and status of those is going to vary, but anything there will have both a local effect and a broader effect on the EU:
The EU is able to pass law that mandates member state action that directly conflicts with an EU member’s constitution. However, it is also unlikely to do so, since within that member state’s legal system, the member state constitution is a higher authority for the system of government than the EU. That would cause the member state to immediately be in immediate violation of EU law. Brussels will probably not intentionally create such a situation.
So unless EU law is going to specifically create a carve-out for constitutional requirements in member states – as they did for the neutrality exception for the mutual assistance clause in the EU treaties – such a guarantee in one member state will also discourage EU-level legislation that affects other member states. The EU has no restriction on creating such carve-outs, but my guess is that there is probably a desire not to do so. If, say, Italy, Estonia, and Ireland all guarantee a constitutional right to end-to-end encryption, my guess is that the EU will not pass EU-level laws disallowing it.
They won’t get better, hence why security expert start to talk more and more about things like “sous-veillance” or “transparency”. The philosophy behind these being: “if you spy on me, then I should be able to spy on you”. If we know precisely what is being done with our data, and if we can also access the data of the one surveilling us (imagine getting to know the text exchanges of the representatives presenting this bill…) then we’d loose privacy but gain much more freedom in return
If encryption is outlawed only outlaws will use encryption. That means citizens are made much more vulnerable, business models are made mir difficult and democracy is significantly weakened. Add to what kind of people still want that - the people who will benefit from that. Corrupt despots and criminals.
Definitely agreeing with the second section. The more i think about this shit, the more i think the only way out of this is violence. But fuck if i know how this should be approached. I’m mostly in a constant panic attack over this. I mean, how tf can i calm down considering the death of freedom and privacy we are marching into, if not there already.
Think that people will increasingly become disillusioned with online services, perhaps not because of the erosion of privacy as few seem so interested in that, but from deterioration of experience.
So though they may continue to use the internet for administrative stuff, which governments often had access to anyhow, there might be a return to letters & face-to-face stuff.
Companies pushing AI seems likely to accelerate the disillusion.
My hypothesis is that “enshittification” isn’t just happening to internet services, but to everything. Prices are going up, and quality is going down at an accelerating pace; the majority of the inflation in the past ~4 years has been due to corporations simply raising prices and blaming it on “the economy”, executive compensation and stock buybacks have gotten completely out of hand (even compared to what’s been going on in the past 30 years) while wages stay at the same level – meaning that everybody except the 1% is getting paid less due to the cost of living skyrocketing.
Honestly it feels like the ruling class has realized that the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan very soon and is scrambling to maximize their wealth and making sure everybody else is worse off so people don’t have too much time to think about what’s going on. Plus they know that increasing inequality will drive people to vote for populists, and right-wing populists are invariably pro-plutocracy despite what they claim to be (and left-wing populists are vastly less popular nowadays, although not completely extinct as eg. Slovakia recently showed)
Agreed.
Though am not sure it is really planned out so much as there was an insane scramble to both invest in & rely upon a multitude of systems which were unstable & unsustainable, and that now these are fracturing.
Add to that the scramble to get money out before & patch over flaws before it collapses, and we’re hurtling toward very uncomfortable times.
Oh yeah I doubt this has all been planned decades in advance, but it definitely does seem to be the plan now. Also it’s not like this all isn’t a fairly logical consequence of our economic system.
We also have the added bonus of executives realizing that they can replace a huge chunk of their workforce with some shitty “AI” system, either now or in the near future. There’s already many publicized cases of this happening, and many of the examples have been… well, predictable. Like that one eating disorder helpline that replaced its meatbag helpline staff with a barely-tested LLM that gave dangerous advice – but hey, exec compensation went up and it’s surely going to trickle down any day now
Revolutions are always sudden, and people always say its impossible right before it happens.
The thing about revolutions is that they spread, and usually very fast.
The domination of Capital and the Centralizing States is no more eternal than the Roman Empire was.