Wow, no mentions of banana.

I'm bit more sympathetic to this type of argument than most of HN. Looking at what happens in The Wire, you need a judge to allow the wiretap, right? It's not just a willy-nilly cops-can-see-anything system, right? Though it has happened from time to time that since stuff is digital, people have taken a peek when they weren't supposed to. For instance, there was a case over the summer where someone was looking up people in the Danish CPR database, unauthorized.

But I also think this won't be the same as wiretapping. That was based on an old telephone system that was very much tied to the technology of that time. In particular, it wasn't encrypted, being just a straight up analog circuit. The bad guys couldn't do much other than use code words, or security by obscurity.

With digital, anyone can encrypt, and the cost of decryption is super high. I'm not sure what Snowden said about it, but I think it's fair to say that very few messages could be decrypted.

So what will happen? We will all send our decrypted chat messages to the man, and the bad guys will just write their own chat app, which will be encrypted. Nothing illegal will ever happen on the public channels, which from time to time will have some idiot looking at his ex-girlfriend's messages, while the drug lords just write encrypted messages that probably aren't even recognized as chat text.

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testdelacc1 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the Wire the police couldn't directly access phone conversations despite them being digital because phone companies needed to see a warrant before handing over any data. That would presumably be the case here as well, communication providers would have to service warrants.

Is it possible for this to be abused? Almost certainly.

Do I think this is a good idea? No I do not.

Despite me mentioning it 10 times, I can mention it once more. I'd prefer communications to remain private. I'm only pointing out ways it hurts society, and why police would like to return to the status quo ante where they could obtain a warrant to surveil criminals.

	▲	sensanaty 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's not how chat control is set up to work though. The extremely problematic aspect here is the use of unspecified "AI monitoring systems" wholescale on every single message that passes through your device which AUTOMATICALLY flags detections and raises it to the authorities. Oh, also the breaking of cryptography which, I just cannot believe these morons are still trying to fighr for... https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

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jacobgorm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A huge part of the problem in Sweden, and overflowing to Denmark, is that teenagers are getting hired as hitmen via open channels, told to install Signal, and then communications go dark. If these teenage would be-hitmen had to first roll their own high grade crypto before they could apply, the supply would be reduced.