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Chat Surveillance: A law from Surveillance Fantasyland

2022-05-11T19:00:48.050Z


The EU Commission is jeopardizing the confidentiality of electronic communication, including WhatsApp. Your proposal for chat control is full of wishful thinking and contradictions. Others should pay for it.


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WhatsApp chat: "limited", "minimal", "targeted"?

Photo: Gerald Matzka/ dpa

How far does the European Commission have to go to be lumped in with the governments of China and Russia?

Exactly as far as on Wednesday with her suggestion how the distribution of pictures and videos documenting child abuse could be curbed.

The draft is full of wishful thinking and contradictions, but please let others resolve them.

The proposed measures are said to be “limited”, “minimal” and “targeted” – but they can affect hundreds of millions of users of WhatsApp, Signal, Apple’s iMessage, Instagram and many other services.

There are a number of ideas and demands in the draft that show how unrealistic the project is:

  • A new EU center is to be set up to develop "reliable" detection technology for screening chats - and make it available to those companies whose highly paid engineers have been failing for years to invent flawless mass filters for certain content.

  • The technology to be used should search through all content anonymously and only identify the respective user if there is an alleged hit.

    Whether it is a real hit will of course only be decided later in the process.

  • They say they don't want to dictate to any provider how they design their service.

    End-to-end encryption is also not to be restricted under any circumstances, because it is "an important tool that guarantees the security and confidentiality of communication, including that of children".

    But the search for abuse material and grooming attempts undermines this guarantee, because it has to take place outside of the encrypted communication.

  • The EU Commission demands that the scanners must be designed in such a way that employees of the service providers or third parties can never misuse them - which is tantamount to the idea of ​​a back door through which only good people can go.

"A little bit of encryption" is like "a little bit pregnant"

The Commission should have known all this by now.

Experts have been emphasizing for decades that "a little bit of encryption" is like "a little bit pregnant".

Politicians and security authorities always reply that the nerds should just try harder to find a technical solution.

Of course, the Commission knows that its drafts will still be significantly modified by Parliament and the Member States.

Maybe she just deliberately aimed high in order to get a compromise in the end that she can sell as a success.

That would be an understandable political move.

Nonetheless, it is more than disappointing that the same commission that wants to use values-based technology to counter the surveillance state of China and the turbo data capitalists of the USA is apparently willing to sacrifice the confidentiality of billions of chats.

So she shows every government on this planet how to enforce a new surveillance infrastructure.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-05-11

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