German government comes out against Chat Control

AfD has f'd up views on many things. I wouldn't even be surprised if they would vote for it, as soon as they are in a position of power. However in its current state, they would hurt themselfs with a chat control law. So yes, your a right. I would also not expect them to vote for it.

AfD is classified as extreme-right not only in the eyes of the public, but also by German intelligence. Therefore I'd personally expect them to support potential tools that authoritarian governments would find useful.

Giving credit where it's due, even (or especially) to someone you find distasteful, is a mark of maturity and good character.

AFDs operation-mode is to be always against the government and most others, so usually they are always debating against it, just because.. And in their case its far more than the usual playing opposition, they often switch even on their own stances.

Additionally, this is something that would be in their ideological background. I guess they just fear to become victims themselves.

Conservatives sometimes have an interesting habit of using the freedoms to come into power and then take these freedoms away.

But so far the only german politician convicted of posession of pedophile material comes from the SPD as far as I remember?

(And the russia and china connections of the AfD should be a case for the secret services anyway. Unfortunately the former boss of one service is a fan of the party, so not sure if they are really looking now)

Please clarify how people in Germany are unfree and unsecure now.

Last time I checked we had free votes and I could say that I hate Merz.

Fair point - but that’s mainly a reflection of how power defines language. The word terrorism was never limited to bombs; it was coined during the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to describe state violence used to intimidate the population.

We’ve since normalised it to mean only non-state actors with weapons, while the organised psychological violence of governments gets rebranded as “policy.” The fact it’s done by men in suits, with forms instead of grenades, doesn’t make it less coercive - only more efficient and socially acceptable.

If a law deliberately instils fear in civilians to secure political obedience, it meets the core definition. The method evolved; the principle didn’t.

Also part of the reason it doesn’t feel like terrorism to many is bias. We’ve been conditioned to picture terrorists as outsiders with explosives, not officials with conference badges.

While I don't want to defend the application of "terrorism" to chat control, the examples in your second paragraph don't follow from the definition outlined above. Resistance to Nazis was meant to damage military and administrative capabilities. The Crimea bridge is a valid military target. I think Russian refineries, too, could be considered a valid target, since they support the Russian military. But even if they can't be considered valid targets, the question of intention remains.

And while I'm sure there are some people (from opposites sides of the political spectrum) who would agree that poverty-causing laws and taxation are violence, perhaps even terrorism, there also remains the question of intention.

In contrast, the 2011 attacks in Norway, the Unabomber attacks, and anything the Rote Armee Fraktion did aside from robbing banks, all have a very clear intention to primarily affect public opinion, political discourse, and civil society in general.

My doubt in the parent comment's assertations lies in the intention as well. Certainly this policy would cause fear in some way, but I think the intention of this policy really is just a techno-authoritarian power grab.

> Trying to contrain them with laws ex ante hasn't worked since like Cicero

This isn't so much about making Chat Control illegal (thereby containing or limiting future authoritarians) as it is not setting up the infrastructure for them to wield as soon as they win an election.

I'd argue the current stance of being opposed to Chat Control is more like "Don't collect religious affiliation on the census" - meaning we can both agree with your comment I partially quoted, while also recognizing that Berlin's public oppostion can be meaningful.

Yeah, no. Ressilient state structure is there to slow them down long enough for the popular support to throw their weight behind something else.

If you have an absolutist monarchist state that is flourishing because its past 3 kings were good people that cared about the people and the country, a potentially bad leader that would take that over could use that power to cement their position indefinitely.

Meanwhile in countries with separation of powers, term limits and checks and balances, gaining absolute power and staying there is a higher difficulty level, requires for more things to align, and most importantly: takes much longer to pull off.

The point isn't to make it impossible for bad governments to yield power. The point is to add checks to that power that make it useless in the hands of a bad actor that doesn't outright use violent force.

For example a good stage might see use in keeping good data on which citizens are in which political movements, but whenever you collect and maintain such data on behalf of your citizens you should also consider how a bad power could abuse such data. Thst is literally the bare minimum when it comes to acting responsibly.

Bravo. Great start, disappointing conclusion. Why are you not sure?

No, they position themselves against it, because they have a narrative similar to the (former) “deep state” narrative in the US, but you can be assured that they will reverse course as soon as they can afford it.

Nitpick:

1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).

2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).

Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).

Censorship != forced breaking of E2EE. People can care differently about different things.

This might sound insane to every American, but German law especially protects politicians from insults, slander and libel. (See https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html for the actual law)

Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians, which is why politicians are very active suing random supporters of their opponents, because that is an effective way to police speech, open specifically to politicians.

I do think a lot of people care, but censorship in Germany does a lot to protect the people who could change the law. That law obviously needs to be abolished, politicians are uniquely unworthy of protection when it comes to speech.

Yes to all of the above! I just want to whine a bit that every time I try to educate anybody about this, I am promised a tin foil hat in return (even from Software Engineers!).

This is just lifestylist nonsense to make yourself feel better than everyone else. If you design technology to make this hard, they will hit you with a stick, and find everyone who uses your technology and hit them with a stick. If you still do it, they will hit you all with the sticks until you are dead, and also hit your family and friends with sticks. If you don't work for them, they'll find a bro who will. Teaching your neighbors just makes them another potential victim, and they will report you or curse you as they die with you. Moving off platforms when there are no alternatives just means you won't be able to bank, or file your taxes. And if you fail to file your taxes, they will hit you with a stick.

The cage is real, it's not a state of mind. It's not something that can be recycled out of. You'll know when you're really doing something when you can give people a time and a place to show up; when that showing up isn't to stand in the street and socialize with each other, burn down a Starbucks, or spit in the face of a cop who makes less than you do; and when most of you end up dead or in prison.

I always reply like this, but some people think everybody else in the world is so weak and naïve, when they themselves aren't doing anything important and have not taken a fraction of the risks or suffered a fraction of the loss of the people they're asking to speak up. Speaking against power is an impotent magic spell. You can recognize journalists who speak against real power by their deaths.

Everybody is just aping the US black civil rights struggle, where watching the violence done in their name to nicely dressed, well-behaved people filled enough people with disgust that politicians wouldn't get a boost from continuing to support it. That was how a small minority population faced with irrational restrictions in a media-saturated society was able to barely overcome explicitly unfair laws (and go no further, we're still the underclass, we're still dying.)

The history of effective, revolutionary, positive protest by what are often majorities involved people getting out into the streets as a show of strength, not a show of weakness. It always involves converting and including portions of the army and the police forces. It involves building strong shadow governments. Not this pantomime where everybody pretends to be black, and the people who are the blackest, weakest, most undeserving of their treatment win because mommy parliament or daddy supreme court are moved enough to declare them the winner.

At voting is a bit late probably. You don't just trust leaders, you watch, you criticize, you communicate and sometimes you act. Political or otherwise as a matter of fact

Yeah, it's getting quite obvious that HN prefers to remain within the bounds of Wikipedia, NYT/WaPo narratives. Good luck with that, I'll just refrain from commenting on these topics. It's useless anyways.

True, I guess I was thinking of the meaning of "government" in German for a second. Either way, though, if you consider "government" to include all three branches (executive, legislative, judicative), then there is really no way for the "the" government to take a stance on any issue, so "German government comes out against Chat Control" would be a rather nonsensical headline.

Citing articles is tricky because people have agendas. I cannot take any of them at face value because we both know that the writing will skew to push the narrative they want.

There is a long history to CSAM, long before your 2021 date. If we want to keep it fairly recent, here is a straight from the source link for you (no journalist or blogger added their skew). This is 2019 where The Council (elected ministers of member states) are deciding for push this forward. This is how the EC (commission) usually get their mandate.

https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12862-2019-...

Research also tells us that various NGOs and Europol have been pressing the commission to act on this (side stepping national governments), but ultimately The Commission goes through the Council to get their mandate.

And keeping it more recent, this is being pushed (again unfortunately) through elected ministers of member states onto the Commission.

I'm not saying that the commission are not involved, but your message is trying to make this complicated scenario down into "evil unelected beurocrats" coming up with schemes to spy on us. It is narrow minded and directs people the wrong way.

What exactly does that entail, outside of the analogy and in the real world, in the context of Chat Control legislation?

At issue here is... what exactly "freedom" is

Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that.

It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allowed to advocate for the murder/rape/extermination of other human beings because of the way they look)

You're right: even when one proposal gets stopped, it rarely kills the idea

Chat control very likely violates at least german law, if not EU law too already. As experts as well as the ministry of justice of the previous government in germany have pointed out time and time again.

Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".

It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.

And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.

Laws can be changed, can be reinterpreted, there are no absolutes. What matters is who is in power, and how powers are kept in check. There is no finality to any of that. It’s a constant process of keeping things up, or failing to keep things up.

It's difficult to entrench things. In the UK they have often said "one Parliament can't bind another Parliament", and in the U.S. it's also sometimes said "one Congress can't bind another Congress".

The most obvious mechanism is a constitutional amendment, but in the U.S. the only amendment to be drafted and adopted in modern times is the 26th amendment (1971), 54 years ago. (The 27th amendment had a weird status where it was belatedly adopted with a 200-year delay.) It's hard to imagine many constitutional amendments actually being passed now because it's been challenging to find consensus on many things within U.S. politics lately.

I don't know that the EU at a supranational level has any mechanism at all to ban future EU directives. Maybe they could decide to remove something from the list of areas of competence of the EU? But Chat Control is under the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" and I can't imagine the EU deciding that that should be abandoned as an area of Union competence.

Edit: The international human rights treaties, at least in regulating law enforcement, have tended not to follow the idea that some kind of regulation or law enforcement power is completely off-limits, but just that they need procedural safeguards -- especially for surveillance and investigatory powers. In this case, Chat Control opponents (including me) would like it to be completely off-limits, but the human rights instruments arguments might more naturally go into "did they create enough surrounding rules and mechanisms about how it's used and how it's regulated?" rather than "can we just say governments just can't make this rule?".

Ask the U.S. lately just how binding those laws are.

Given that freedom can mean different things even to the same society at different times and in different circumstances, such a law would essentially have to be sentient.

I mean, the right to privacy is already enshrined in the EU's human rights. The courts would likely strike Chat Control down if it were to pass. But I wish there was a way to prevent our politicians from even trying this shit.

If running a mesh network is illegal, does it matter that the traffic is just math? Without a network, there's no data transmission of that math. The government controls the airwaves. It doesn't matter if you're broadcasting Top40 or encrypted messages, if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.

Cryptography is privacy. Privacy can taken away by law.

It is the same as free speech. You can say what you want, but you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing in many countries.

Ah yes, fortunately governments have never in history successfully declared certain large integers illegal and prosecuted people for sharing them.

Shooting someone is also "just physics", yet many governments have been known to frown upon it (depending on the context).

¿Por qué no los dos?

The problem we have is that was OK when someone had to actually listen in or you had to have a tape recorder connected up to every line you want to tap, or physically open individual letters.

Now we have found “lawful intercept” can easily just become mass surveillance, and not just by the people who are meant to use it but other parties too. We saw this with CALEA which was used by China (and who knows who else) for espionage and spying for years before anyone realised.

You make a system for the “good guys” and it always turns out adversary, criminal groups etc. will gain access, even if the “good guys” don’t start acting like bad guys themselves.

Technology made mass surveillance easy, so every lawful intercept becomes mass surveillance as well as vulnerable to scammers, criminals and foreign intelligence.

And we don’t have any way of making lawful intercept possible without that unfortunately.

From what I know this basic tool already exists. In the US, the government can just ask any old company for their data and they have to give it up, just like they would their mail or their physical locations. I'm assuming the rest of the West has similar tools, warrants of some kind.

The problem is nobody uses them to combat crime on the internet. They use them for stupid shit usually or stuff that involves lots and lots of money.

We're jumping the gun here. We already have a fire bomb, and we're not using it, but we're going ahead to developing the nuke. Makes no sense.

Chat Control is in some ways a response to E2E, by saying "let's backdoor the endpoints, then".

This is analogous to getting a warrant to someone’s phone. (Chat control is like putting a microphone into every room in case the government wants to listen after the fact.)

I’m still unconvinced that this make’s law enforcement’s job so hard that something has to give.

And we all know those laws are never abused and are absolutely only used to target criminals.

For the vast majority of crypto currencies tracing the transactions is trivial. And even currencies like XMR are hardly as anonymous as people think.

The challenging regulations around technically anonymous crypto currencies require you to actively make trackable arrangements with your financial service providers. VERY few people will ever do this, and therefore if anything suspicious were to occur, all you've achieved is putting yourself on the suspect list preemptively.

Sure, if you want to read the messages, but the whole point is that that's rarely necessary and the price isn't worth the minimal gain.

Of the serious criminals, the only ones you'll be catching are those with low technical knowledge (everyone else will just be using their own applications) and the Venn diagram of those with little tech knowledge and those whose digital privacy practices could deceive law enforcement resembles AA cups against a pane of glass.

Regarding Encrochat, it is no surprise that an (unintentional?) watering hole gathered up a bunch of tech-illiterate, the fallacy is that those people wouldn't have been caught if they weren't allowed to flock to a single platform for some time.

Would some people have not been caught until much later or even not at all? Sure, but if LE would do its job (and not ignoring, or even covering up, well known problem areas and organizations for years to decades), only those of low priority.

Is that little gain worth creating a tool to allow Iran or similar countries to check every families' messages if they suspect some family member might be gay?

Hard nope.

> Or just downvoting me.

Don't worry, I rarely do that and that's not just because I can't...

The prevailing opinion here seems to be that we’d really like for there to not be an omnipresent panopticon because protect the children or terrorists or, apparently, malware. If your imagination is particularly lacking on how this might be weaponized just remember that antifa is now designated as an terrorist organization in US, so you better not be a suspected member of it — as in, you best not have sent a buddy a message on signal about how those tiki torch carrying nazi larpers aren’t exactly great guys, or off to a black site you go for supporting terrorism.

If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.

> OK, you be you

I don't know what you mean by this.

> But please note that I did not list "online banking becoming impossible" as a likely outcome.

No, but it should be a likely and maybe even desired outcome, especially if a justification for surveillance is the prevention of online banking fraud among other crimes.

> Merely malware continuing to be state-sponsored, or certain communications to be surveilled.

Norms and mores change over time, so the only conclusion is that "certain communications" will become "all communications" at some point in the future. I'd love to be proven wrong.

No existing legislation requires proactive interception of mail, physical or electronic. Bringing new services into the fold of existing legislation would mean forbidding any proactive scanning by civilians and forbidding such scanning by authorities without a warrant or court order.

: _ (

"I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity."

They already have that in most (?) jurisdictions by now.

With a warrant, they can install a virus on the device that will then do targeted surveillance.

ChatControl is bad, because it is blanket surveillance of everyone without warrant.

The law enforcement of which countries, under which sets of laws?

Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws, for example? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Th...

Who gets to decide what gets made available to who?

Your comment is incoherent and displays a total misunderstanding of the technology. There is no way to make lawful intercept work with end-to-end encryption: it is mathematically impossible. And don't waste our time with stupid suggestions about key escrow or the like. We know that those keys will inevitably be leaked or misused for political purposes.

Fail to see that it would even work. If the scam has happened how would lawful interception afterwards help? The criminal can just use burner accounts and the chat log exist on the scammed persons device.

That doesn't counter the argument. The people arguing against encryption would just liken it to the government being able to use military equipment that you, as an individual, can't have. "Free communication is a dangerous tool, only the government can be entrusted with the power it provides" and so on.