"CHAT CONTROL" Vote SHOT DOWN TODAY for EU States: Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, and Sweden
Under a “Combating Child Sexual Abuse” bill, the plan for "chat control regulation" is POSTPONED. It was slated to end ALL private text messages and secure encryption. #ChatControl
“Chat control” is something we should know about, an active censorship that has been in European news.
From the Desk of Patrick Breyer
Emphases are mine.
Chat control vote postponed: Huge success in defense of digital privacy of correspondence!
Today EU governments will not adopt their position on the EU regulation on “combating child sexual abuse”, the so-called chat control regulation, as planned, which would have heralded the end of private messages and secure encryption. The Belgian Council presidency postponed the vote at short notice. Once again the chat control proposal fails in Council. Pirate Party MEP, digital freedom fighter and negotiator for his group in the European Parliament, Patrick Breyer, cheers:
“Without the commitment and resistance of countless individuals and organizations in Europe, the EU governments would have decided today in favour of totalitarian indiscriminate chat control, burying the digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption. A big thanks to all who have contacted politicians and spoken out in the past few days. The fact that we have prevented the orwellian chat control for the time being should be celebrated!
For now the surveillance extremists among the EU governments and Big Sister Ylva Johansson have failed to build a qualified majority. But they will not give up and could try again in the next few days. When will they finally learn from the EU Parliament that effective, court-proof and majority-capable child protection needs a new approach?
Now the critical governments should finally do their homework and agree on a joint list of requirements. It is not enough to defend encryption. The indiscriminate, error-prone screening of private messages is the most toxic part of the draft regulation, but the problems go far beyond that. We therefore need a new approach that focuses on preventive child protection instead of mass surveillance and paternalism! The last ‘compromise proposal’ put forward by the Council Presidency needs to be fundamentally revised in at least 4 points:
1) No indiscriminate chat control: Instead of blanket message and chat control, the judiciary should only have the power to order searches in the messages and uploads of suspects. This is the only way to avoid a disproportionate mass surveillance order inevitably failing in court and achieving nothing at all for children.
2) Protect secure encryption: So-called client-side scanning to infiltrate secure encryption must be explicitly ruled out. General declarations of support for encryption in the text of the law are worthless if scanning and extraction take place even before encryption. Our personal devices must not be perverted into scanners.
3) Protect anonymity: Remove mandatory age verification by all communications services to save the right to communicate anonymously. Whistleblowers risk being silenced if they have to show ID or face to the communications service before leaks.
4) No app censorship and digital house arrest for young people: It is completely unacceptable to exclude young people from apps such as Whatsapp, Instagram or games in order to protect them from grooming. Instead, the default settings of the services must become more privacy-friendly and secure.
The push for indiscriminate chat control is unprecedented in the free world. It divides child protection organizations, abuse victims, other stakeholders and governments. It’s time for a fresh start that relies on consensus, as proposed by the European Parliament. I am convinced that we can protect children and all of us much better.”
Background:
According to the latest text proposal, users of apps and services with chat functionalities would be asked whether they accept the indiscriminate and error-prone scanning and, if necessary, leaking of their privately sent images, photos and videos. Previously unknown images and videos would also be screened using “artificial intelligence”. If a user objects to the scanning, they would no longer be able to send or receive any images, photos, videos or links (Article 10). Despite paying lip service to encryption, end-to-end encrypted services would have to implement chat control by installing monitoring functions that are to take effect “before data transmission” (so-called client-side scanning, Article 10a). The scanning of text messages for indications of grooming, which has hardly been used to date, has been removed from the proposal, as was the scanning of voice communication. The chats of employees of security agencies and the military would be exempted from the error-prone chat control scanners.
At a meeting on 24 May, the Council’s Legal Service made it clear that mass chat monitoring without suspicion is still being proposed and remains a violation of fundamental rights.
On 16 June it has been revealed by Der SPIEGEL that most of the chats leaked voluntarily by US-based Big Tech companies are not criminally relevant.
Why are US Big Tech companies leaking chats?
Further information:
The wording of today’s voting proposal:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/csam_cleaned.pdfThe European Parliament’s approach to protecting children online:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#epmandateHow we would be affected by chat control:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#how-does-this-affect-youMyths/arguments in favour of chat control debunked:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#MythsArguments against chat control:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#AdditionalInformationWhy message and chat control is particularly harmful to children and victims of abuse:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#why-messaging-and-chat-control-harms-children-and-abuse-victimsAlternatives to chat control:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#alternatives
NOTE: What starts in the EU can spread to the US, Canada, and other countries. I will try to keep abreast of such international dealings, and if you see something we should know, please message me or comment on any of my articles. Thank you!
Additional Information
Link: https://www.europaportalen.se/2023/10/ylva-johansson-kravs-pa-svar-om-kontroversiell-barnporrlag
Google Translate from German to English:
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson (S) is responsible for the proposal to access child pornography and grooming online.
Ylva Johansson is required to answer about lobbyists around the controversial child pornography law.
BRUSSELS 2 October 2023
The EU Parliament's Home Affairs Committee asks Commissioner Ylva Johansson to explain herself after media revelations about suspected conflicts of interest and that lobbyist organizations have gained too much influence over her proposal about internet scanning in the hunt for child porn.
Last week, several European media published an examination of how the controversial proposal from EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson on accessing child pornography on the Internet was developed and lobbied for. The proposal should be able to force internet giants such as Facebook and Google to scan communications - even encrypted - in search of child porn. Critics believe, among other things, that the proposal would undermine the right to privacy, open to wider surveillance and have limited effect. From them, the proposal has been nicknamed "chat control 2.0".
The review paints a picture where several lobbyist organizations for work against online child pornography, such as the Ashton Kutcher-founded Thorn and the WeProtect Global Alliance, have had great influence over the design of the bill and how it should be sold to the public.
Thorn sells an AI tool that does exactly what the proposal calls for. The US Department of Homeland Security alone has purchased $4.3 million worth of Thorn's software.
On Thorn, this is what Time said: he resigned after supporting Danny Masterson, who has been convicted of raping two women and is to serve 30 years.
Continued:
"It is a synthesis that gave certain actors, AI companies and interest groups - who have significant financial support - a dubious influence over the design of EU policy," the article says.
At the same time, media review shows several suspected conflicts of interest between people in the European Commission who simultaneously worked for the lobbying organizations.
Committee requires answers
The disclosure has now caused concern in the committee in the EU Parliament which has the main responsibility for drawing up the committee's position on the proposal. In a letter to Ylva Johansson dated September 28, the committee gives her a week to respond to the allegations of conflicts of interest and "possible undue influence in the preparation of the proposal".
"Particularly worrying are the claims that the solutions set out in the legislative proposal to combat child pornography online would be a copy of the solutions designed by these groups and thereby contribute to promoting their economic interests," writes the committee executive Spanish Social Democrat and former Minister of Justice Juan López Aguilar.
Europol wants to expand
The EU Commission's proposal also includes that a new center should be set up where suspected child pornography material should be reviewed before it is forwarded to national law enforcement authorities. The European police agency, Europol, is proposed to have a prominent role there. The review shows that Europol, on the one hand, demanded unfiltered access to the material that comes to the center in the proposed scan and that there should be no restrictions on how it can be used.
Europol has also proposed that the scan be expanded to include crimes other than child pornography, according to the review.
What are your thoughts?
What human rights activists need to grasp is the role that sovereign debt plays in driving forward these attacks on individual privacy. And once we see that causal relationship to the attacks, we then need to launch a political offensive against voter bribery with debt-financed social benefit programs whose costs are not immediately paid by taxes upon voters.
A nurse I know, who has almost zero experience haggling or bartering and does not understand the fundamental economic principle, that if I make someone a promise then fail to deliver, at best I will disappoint a friend and at worst my failure to keep the promise will result in serious harm to someone. Economics is not the study of money. It is the study of value. Markets that count sales with money are a convenience to the research economist, but value was the driving force behind every barter trade, in the days before money was invented.
So my nurse friend lived near Washington, DC in the 1990s and held a clerical job on the Hill, first for a Congressman and then for a Senator. All those many years ago, her employers boasted that the US national debt and the sovereign debts of other nations, would "wash away" when the new global money came into use.
That's an amazing promise when made to gullible people. Don't worry about the cost of anything. Borrow as much as you can. Let that debt "wash away" as if the things you acquired with it, were gifts.
So applying that lie to real-world events: All of the G-7 and G-20 nations have old age pensions and massive public debts they are unable to repay. How will they feed, clothe, house, and medicate millions of elderly and disabled people who were solemnly promised they would be paid those promises pensions, if they default?
Liars in politics are clueless how to deliver what they promise. They're not in medical practice and cannot work for free to treat the poor. They don't farm or make clothing. They don't build or maintain housing. Their sole skills are 1) finding gullible people and 2) lying to them.
The US alone owes $110 trillion dollars it borrowed from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, that Congress refuses to discuss, plus $30 trillion of bonds it does acknowledge as debt. Let's suppose a future Congress votes to default on all the bonds, then try to provide food, clothing, housing and medical care priced at $110 trillion. That's a 73% cut in benefits from what Congress promised. How many of our elderly will survive, on 73% less than they were promised?
We can readily see the reason for suicide promotion. Dead people stop using medical care and stop eating, wearing clothes, and occupying housing. If surgery could be made so painful that the news one needs an operation would lead most folks to buy a gun and shoot themselves in the head, Medicare would pay no benefits at all.
All of these schemes attacking human rights serve the common goal of impoverishing the world enough that we don't blame politicians and central bankers for ripping us off, and instead view our forced poverty and compulsory euthanasia on something unrelated to its actual cause.
What's highly disturbing to learn from my nurse friend, is that she still sincerely believes that digital currency can wash away all debts, without any harm done to the people who were promised the benefits. She believes it so much so, that she considers it her patriotic duty to conceal the details she knows. because she cannot imagine Congress lying.
Yeah 😀