> “The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer. “They seem to fear that even military secrets without any link to child sexual abuse could end up in the US at any time. The confidentiality of government communications is certainly important, but the same must apply to the protection of business and of course citizens communications, including the spaces that victims of abuse themselves need for secure exchanges and therapy. We know that most of the chats leaked by today’s voluntary snooping algorithms are of no relevance to the police, for example family photos or consensual sexting. It is outrageous that the EU interior ministers themselves do not want to suffer the consequences of the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption that they are imposing on us.”

EU ministers want to exempt themselves (https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...)

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kevincox 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fact that they will only pass this law if they exclude themselves from it should be enough to reject the idea without any further consideration.

And of course if you do still consider further it only gets worse.

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BSDobelix 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What about industrial espionage? Is a technician of Rheinmetal/Dassault/Thales also exempt?

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numpad0 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, the list of exempts is the list of defense contractor employees, and the negative list of non-exempts subtracted from the list of everyone is list of high-value targets.

The locations where exempts are gathered, locations where there are high commerce traffic and/or verified sent-in data, but no sent-out data, or abnormally low traffic altogether, those are all high-value targets as well.

No matter how you slice it, they're creating a list of airstrike targets and means to aid literal foreign spies. If the affected locations and people are as obvious and well guarded as the US DoD headquarters and uniformed guys there, fine, otherwise, they're just creating doors in the wall exclusively open for "enemy" uses.

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throw_a_grenade 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They probably have internal chat systems (cough matrix cough) that don't go above 50 M MAU which afaik is the threshold of applicability of this law. So this particular is a non-issue, unfortunately.

But then it begs the question, why politicians feel the need to use public (>50MMAU) chat systems to conduct the protected (official) business?

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BSDobelix 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>But then it begs the question, why politicians feel the need to use public (>50MMAU) chat systems to conduct the protected (official) business?

It also begs the question why CSAM "distributors" would use those ;)

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throw_a_grenade 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Because they don't know better (see also: criminals are stupid).

I think politicians should not be stupid and isolate their official business from the private one. (That would be ideal, anyway).

	▲	Phemist 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Stupid criminals disproportionally get caught. Selective pressure on the intelligence of criminals will cause them to become more intelligent. You now need even more draconian legislation to disproportionally keep catching the intelligence-wise lowest quantile of criminals.

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rgblambda 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd like to know how that exemption would even work in practice. Many politicians happily use WhatsApp etc. on their personal devices with no VPN for official business.

Maybe when they see private conversations with their colleagues being leaked because someone stupidly used their personal account, they'll see the light.

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thw_9a83c 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> EU ministers want to exempt themselves

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

..and this was allegedly Orwell's allegory for the Soviet Union. Are we there yet?

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martin-t 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not about people's safety, it's about politicians' safety. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331829

Of course they don't need to spy on themselves. The goal is to stop targeted attacks against politicians and any attempts to overthrow the government. The government is uniquely unlikely to overthrow itself.

	▲	TehCorwiz 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Empirically that’s absurd. The US is currently undergoing an internal struggle that’s exemplified by the agents of change being part of the government AND dangerously hostile to opposition.