I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scope of such a dragnet, the economic impact, the societal damage, all seems rather broad. Yet why don't any major operators in the EU take a stance? Is it really so below the radar, or being kept so below the radar?

Just the network egress costs to whatever state sanctioned scanner gets built will in aggregate probably exceed a few hundred MEUR yearly.

This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is.

The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!

You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?

I do not understand.

The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it.

Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.

This needs to be a South Park episode if it isn’t already.

How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there?

Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

So then what? They start outlawing encryption altogether? knowledge of math? How would you claw back all the public and freely available software that people can already use to encrypt messages to each other?

The next step is to control your mind.

Now, you may think you are the smart one and can always revert to the good old days of OTR[1].

But no, the next thing I can see happening is the smartphone OS conveniently doing client-side scanning of everything on the screen for you. You know, for developers' convenience. And then it's game over: you will not be able to take a look at the Tiananmen Square picture in any installed app.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

They do this using warrants. And subpoena.

We need a personal declaration of rights that says private systems are not in anyway obligated to extend the reach of govt surveillance networks, without the consent of the private party.

It is a small protective measure. The next step will be for govt to bully everyone to give consent to their surveillance systems … or else.

But as of right now, the law is arbitrarily taking for granted that private surveillance systems belong to govt regulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

That's it.

It means that the government asserts the right to bug all your conversations. They've already assured the right to put you in prison for dissenting with the government on policy and you have little to no recourse. Now it's this.

You loved this during covid, you'll love this now, "or else". Signed, your local nanny state.

As long as you know when you're being used by their fake services.

Disclaimer that I actually don't know what the full extent this chat control law is asking for, except for the fact that it will deeply compromise encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...

EU's latest attempt to squash privacy rights.

If the writer of this post wants people to oppose it, they really should do a better job of explaining at the very top what "it" is.

I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my interaction with people is through comment sections. I have no interest in being in group chats, I’d rather meet up with people in person and socialize that way.

It’s not the end of the world if smartphones just become a convenient way for governments to track you, there is totally a different way to live without them, and maybe it’s simple and beautiful.

If you really have a serious use case for peer to peer end to end encryption, you should be using something like Meshtastic.

If other people around you recognize the name of a chat platform you're using, then it's not decentralized and it's almost certainly monitored.

So did anyone ask the question ... is law enforcement actually helping children, when they act? This of course often results in the state raising such children, so the real question is how well that works, compared to not acting at all. Turns out there's a huge study on this, and of course the answer is a big fat no. And that was before another 10+ years of funding cuts.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120609063509/https://www.usato...

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc...

So no, this is not about law enforcement helping children, because they don't provide a solution for the damage they do when acting. The result is law enforcement, on average, makes things worse for children, not better. These institutions are also getting systematically defunded across the EU, it's not getting better.

It is not reasonably believable this is about protecting children. You want to protect children? FIRST, you restore the budget of the institutions caring for children after law enforcement "helps".

Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.

Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.

Could it be that this is a last ditched attempt to presumably stop a civil war that seems to be brewing by predominantly muslim vs european populations?

If this isn't a sign that the integration and the multicultural experiment has failed completely in Europe then I don't know what. A free democratic society that is peaceful would never need wide surveillance net like this.

It seems that non of the HN comments touch on the internal demographic tensions that has been going on for quite sometime. Western Europe and Scandinavia reminds me very much of Lebanon before civil war broke out between the Muslims and Christians.