I agree with you (i.e., I share your belief that the whole "safety" argument is a bold-faced excuse to just gain more control and surveillance power over the population), but I believe that the parent comment was just trying to be extra charitable to those pushing for the bill.

I think it is fair to give the opponent's position (which both you and I believe is in the wrong) a steel-man argument treatment, by assuming the best possible interpretation of their argument (even if they don't imo deserve it, and you don't believe in their stated intent).

The approach makes sense to me, as attacking and debating genuineness of someone's intentions is an endless rabbithole. So if you have an option to decimate their case, all while assuming their stated intent to be truthful and genuine, that's a pretty solid way to actually move the needle on the argument in a desired direction.

They have evil intentions, but they are also idiots. The nature of an authoritarian government is one that requires maximizing control for survival. As a particular country shifts to a more authoritarian government, and those people who enabled dumb ideas fall out of power (right, left, or whatever) those same tools will be used by their political adversaries to control, imprison, or kill them.

Why are they idiots? Because western Europe is not yet authoritarian and thus there is little personal benefit to hasten a slide towards it, there are so many other ways to gain power in a free society. (I wouldn't bet money that Europe will remain free in 25 years.)

There is a secondary problem here -- anything that decreases the information security of European countries hands more power to the US and China (and to a lesser degree other nations with advanced infosec capabilities like Russia and Israel.) If you are European (I'm not) the first thing that should be done is investigate the people pushing this stuff.

> good intention or have good goals

People need to understand that some people are abusers by nature and mentality, some from birth, some by upbringing. And they crave power.

The sayings like "those who want power rarely deserve it" exist for a reason, except until the last few decades we didn't have a good enough understanding of psychology to explain why. Now we do. Some people have anti-social traits and they should never be allowed in positions of power because they are mentally ill.

Difference is "normal" mental illness like psychosis is harmful to the individual who has it. Anti-social mental illness is harmful to those around them, especially those under them in hierarchical power structures.

There needs to be accountablility regardless of intent for policies that affect everyone.

I agree with you though, they know what they are doing and about some implications at least.

I hope most services will just block Denmark though. Any investment in such technologies is a waste and should come to a great cost to developers. In this case Google products in general should be shunned. Not that they were famous for steady support of products instead of quickly killing them.

It’s right there in the name: Chat Control. Take them at their word!

Look at Australia’s “hacking” bill. It was about letting the government hack (take over) your account and post as you. The “hacking” referred to ahat THEY would do — to YOUR accounts:

https://www.accessnow.org/surveillance-state-incoming-with-a...

Australians even made a movie about a dystopian future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8

> they are doing it to have more power over people

Is there any evidence for this other than vibes?

Everyone thinks they have good goals, and that they are the ones who won't abuse the power given to them. History shows otherwise time and time again.

Why do you call them "leaders"? They are "people in positions of power".

I don't understand where this desire to be led comes from. Other people do not have your best interest in mind. I want others to get out of my way, unless we have a conflict of interest and then we _might_ need a third party to resolve it. But I certainly don't need or want to be led.

"the science" I don't agree with this part, and I think it's quite dangerous to rope that in.

Science is not one way of thinking, it's a methodology, it's seeking truth. There might be bad actors and idiots, there is likely lots wrong, but the beautiful thing about science is that facts matter. If someone publishes bullshit you can repeat the study and proof them wrong.

That science is (wrongfully) taken as justification for stupid things, is not on "the science" as a whole.

If anything makes me hopeful, it is science and the remarkable developments happening.

you think it's bad now

wait until they start all using "AI", that'll agree with everything they say

You're absolutely right. Competency has lost its value.

When was the last time you heard someone praise someone else's competency?

cannot emphasize this enough. Workarounds were always tolerated because they silenced the potential competition until the frivolous features that people did it for (namely customization) were all available by default, closing the door for what Apple actually hated (side-loading). They are expert software politicians, just look what they do with the EU's open-ecosystem demands

What is progressive about rampant decontextualized chat? I read these anti-control statements by what appear to be tech zombies who know nothing about the tech being promoted. LLMs/ML are based on faulty, Western units that are about defining reality in individualistic, material terms, lacking interdependence and relying on arbitrariness to destroy that chance for shared experiences.

If governments are leery of LLMs for the wrong or right reason and the industry and technology lacks any kind of grasp of what it is and what the inputs are, then BOTH are wrong and the tech needs dismantling.

If the decontextualizing of communication is epidemic, as it appears to be in Chat, then the industry has failed not grasping the first thing about the technology.

>If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities

okay, but how do you prevent me from intercepting that communication.

Or even running my own copy of the local model and determing ahead of time whether it will trip the alarm. If the attacker has access to the model, they can effectively make a GAN to modify images to get past the filter.

> In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode.

From Wikipedia. They can’t have their cake. You are breaking the concept of information into smaller steps (e.g. message) when that is against the definition.

Another example of such degenerate-encryption would be having messages "end-to-end" encrypted, but a copy of the key is kept by a service-provider or even sent in advance to a government agency.

People usually mean "end to end encryption" in these situations, and by adding a third "end" to the system, you bypass the whole point of end to end encryption.

The fact that it instead applies to 99.999% of the population is not exactly irrelevant

No, this is not corporate lobbying responsible. Stop giving your beloved politicians an out and acknowledge they do not have your best interests at heart, only a thirst for power.

The buck stops with the politicians signing this into law.

Ban targeted advertising, let social media companies die.

>>> A leak of the state's private key(s) could be devastating.

Preventing this leak is what's technologically impossible. A leak includes when the government that's keeping the keys decides to start abusing their access to the data.

When people say it is impossible, they clearly mean it is impossible to do in a way that isn’t entirely broken by losing one key. You know this and please don’t pretend that you don’t. When competent cryptographers say the word impossible it has a very clear definition.

> It is perfectly possible to encrypt a message such that two different keys can decrypt it. There is nothing in modern encryption that makes that impossible.

Not really, any more than it's possible to write a message that says the same thing whether you read it in English or Swahili. You might be able to do it once as a novelty, but the approach won't generalize.

There are multiple-recipient schemes, but they don't rely on using two different keys to decrypt the same message. Instead, you encrypt the message (once) using a (single) symmetric key, and you prepend a bunch of different messages saying "the symmetric key is xxxxxxxxxxx", one for each intended recipient. Those are encrypted with keys specific to each recipient, and each recipient has to attempt to decrypt them all and select the one that decrypted successfully.

The paper you link appears to be discussing an entirely different problem: its definition of a "multi-recipient encryption scheme" does not contemplate sending the same message to several different recipients:

> There are n receivers, numbered 1, ..., n. Each receiver i has generated for itself a secret decryption key sk_i and corresponding public encryption key pk_i. The sender now applies a multi-recipient encryption algorithm to pk_1, ..., pk_n and messages M_1, ..., M_n to obtain ciphertexts C_1, ..., C_n.

> Each receiver i can apply to sk_i and C_i a decryption algorithm that recovers M_i.

> We refer to the primitive enabling this type of encryption as a multi-recipient encryption scheme (MRES).

Note that there is no requirement for anyone other than recipient i to be able to understand message M_i. As described, all encryption schemes are multi-recipient encryption schemes, because you can just consider each message M_k individually and encrypt it to recipient k using a single-recipient scheme.

Depending on meaning of "safe". They all need to comply with law enforcement data requests.

Chat control opens an additional data channel where messages are sent through, if the detection algorithm finds something suspicious. It effectively makes encryption useless, because someone else, who shouldn't be part of your conversation, is also able to read your messages.

>>Why do you assume something like that? Do you actually know the arguments that the parties in favor of this kind of regulation are presenting? And can you dismiss them based on objective facts?

The moment anyone brings up the whole "just put a backdoor in that only we can access" despite years of people who actually know better saying that's not possible, is the moment when any further arguments become moot and not worth any further engagement or assumptions of good intention.

That's the single argument all these stupid "chat control" like proposals are based on.

I'm not assuming anything, I work in software development. In this industry we spend ungodly amounts of time and resources to attempt to keep data safe, and create systems like the ones proposed to flag and handle malicious activity of many kinds. I think I know quite well how hard it is, and how easy it is to get it wrong, with potentially very real consequences.

The only things being handwavingly dismissed are the collateral damage, side effects, very real risks, and concerns about the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

> Why do you assume something like that?

This is very easy to answer. Just look up what all the responses were, for all the times this kind of stuff was proposed.

After the 10th time you assume good intentions and they still try to do the wrong thing, are you a fool or a helpful patsy?