A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to:

> Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere.

then apparently either there are so many perpetrators that regular conversations with partners etc. are about as common as crime, or such regular conversations don't have such a high risk of being reported after all.

I don't think chat surveillance is a good idea. But please use transparent and open communication. Don't manipulate us just like the enemy does.

It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this.

[0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...

you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel.

stop treating the ECHR like some talisman that keeps the wolves at bay, as if authoritarian drift politely obeys paperwork. stop playing with this whole “actually, the loophole is X,” “no, the loophole is Y,” like you're debugging a bad API instead of staring at the obvious: when a state wants to expand surveillance, it does, and the justifications are retrofitted later, be it "public safety", or "keeping your children safe."

  (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union.

On the 13th, Breyer wrote:

> Yesterday, EU gov'ts rejected changes to mandatory backdoor #ChatControl & anonymity-destroying age checks.

https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1155418089245415...

Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...

In a nation state, it’s easier to pull off authoritarian shifts, because citizens will not usually revolt over such things alone. But the EU relies on sustained support and a positive image. There are already at the very least 10s of thousands EU skeptics created from the last wave alone, and probably much much more to come.

Zooming out, I think this is the time when the EU is needed the most, given the geopolitical developments. Both Russia and China are drooling about a scattered Europe consisting of isolated small states. That makes it more infuriating. Someone, ideally the press, needs to dig into the people behind this and expose them.

There’s an arms race element to this that I don’t see people discussing.

Do EU citizens have any privacy from US tech? Is there anything to protect?

Do we want the USA to have exclusive right to spy on the world?

Is it better to have 1 Big Brother or 10?

This time, we should feel 100% completely reassured (from the proposal):

   Regulation whilst still allowing for end-to-end encryption, nothing in this
   Regulation should be interpreted as prohibiting, weakening or circumventing,
   requiring to disable, or making end-to-end encryption impossible.

The Zombie proposal just keeps rising from the dead. The technical/mathematical objections don’t change.

I still haven’t seen a counter-argument stating why a mass-scanning architecture should be expected to work, given the base rates and error rates involved.

There will be massive backlash towards EU. Texting is just so embedded to the daily life, if the EU causes inconveniences or trouble with texting, this might create massive anger. It could start off Brexit-like campaigns in some countries.

I'm not saying that it is impossible this is going to be implemented. But I think it's just some bureaucrats dreaming.

Might as well let it go pure evil so when the time comes, the people will be less hesitant to get rid of the whole EU bureaucracy and the armies of corporate lobbyists altogether

It can't be illegal to role-play a grooming situation between consenting adults in a private conversation. If millions of people do that, they must be buried in reports.

And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult.

How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.

Then it's no end to end, or at least end to end while traveling but easily collectible at rest, I mean it already is, who would stop meta from collecting messages in clear on the whatsapp ui? We should opt for a peer to peer solution or implement one

Germany first voted against chat control 2.0, then they clarified why they were against it, became "undecided". And now "Denmark" came out with a (lighter) version "some others" are more willing to vote for. [0]

What a joke. In front of our eyes.

Then they wonder why people hate their guts and are becoming increasingly violent, euro-skeptical, etc.

[0]: https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/

I think "oops" or "d'oh" are the phrases we're looking for here.

Someone said it's an asymmetric conflict, so we need to pull it to our (human-size) level and fight on our chessboard.

The difficulty which PGP had of key exchange could be handled somewhat like Signal does now, via a personal physical sync of the phones.

At which point, the authorities will still be able to make use of "traffic analysis" as they always have. So they'll be able to tell which parties are communicating, but not what is being said.

Well - colour me not so surprised. The lobbyists are back at it.

I think we need to permanently crush them now. They attack us here. This is a war.

The only real solution is to counterattack. Get legislation through the EU parliament that guarantees a right to privacy and anonymity.

Dunno if there's any chance of that happening.

A snippet I posted before:

If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.

The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.

It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.

The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.

I wonder if one could train an LLM to automatically protest all the new chat-control? This is getting ridiculous.

The other excuse being used to push these laws is CSAM scanning. But CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. A society's efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place.

These attempts for more surveillance and control are being pushed under the guise of these very bad excuses, and we need to call them out in every conversation to reduce the number of gullible dorks that might vote for it.

People need to actually understand that governments are very close to having the tools needed for authoritarian governance all around the world. It might not happen immediately, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost inevitable.

We can't just hope to rely on technological measures because we can't out-tech the law at scale all of the time. But we can and should fight back on both fronts. On the technological front, the first step is securing VPN access to ensure anonymity on the Internet. The best effort at the moment IMO is SoftEther, which is VPN over Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS.[0] It's open-source. It has a server discovery site called VPNGate.[1] You can host a server to let somebody else use, then use a server someone else is hosting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN

[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/

We're really only missing a few things before there's decentralized VPN over HTTPS that anyone in the world can host and use, and it would be resistant to all DPI firewalls. First, a user-friendly mobile client. Second, a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a sparse and decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent (or we may be able to make use of the BT protocol as is), and we'd have to build such auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client itself. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its existence for other clients to discover.

If we can make and keep the Internet a free place, these discussions can keep happening without fear of censorship and prosecution, and people can coordinate to fight authoritarianism and create better technologies to guard against it in the future. This is very much doable if we tried. So let's ensure the free flow of information is not a temporary blip in the long arc of humanity's history.

Instead we take a moral high ground over Russia banning and blocking what are basically non-compliant messaging platforms and pushing Russian citizens to Max, which is controlled by the government. All the while these legislations in Europe will lead to the same end result.

How am I supposed to to argue against chat control in Russia when we are doing it too, just with a different twist.

I never wanted privacy anyway: I wanted no discrimination, inclusion, healthy democracy, etc, etc.

Privacy has always been a tool for me.

At this point, selective privacy like we are experiencing today (we cannot know what’s in the epstein files, but google can send a drone and look into my backyard) serves none of the things I am interested in!

[1] https://xmpp.org/