Has freedom died and I don’t know about it?
Have I been living under a rock?
Are we under a totalitarian regime?
That’s the Thursday mood after watching a few posts on Facebook. The first post that made me aware of this was by Fidias Panayiotou. I didn’t believe it because I know that you can’t break encryption. It’s the usual scare-posts by people who don’t understand tech, I thought.
Then I watched a few MEPs speak in a very concerned manner and again I thought, what’s the big fuss about Chat Control? We have apps that have end-to-end encryption. What are they going to do? These people are definitely concerned because they are unaware of technology.
So I just researched a bit further about Chat Control. And my jaw dropped. I read that they want to mandate scanning inside apps that will read and scan your message before you send it and also after you receive it. The message will be scanned on your phone before you send it and after you receive it. They basically want to redesign the messenger apps or force their creators to implement new code to scan your messages.
Are you telling me they want to legally install a trojan on my phone? A backdoor? They want to bypass encryption by stealing our devices? Where am I? Is this a parallel reality? I thought we had at least some basic democracy around here.
The current position which appears to be a temporary is that end-to-end encrypted messages are excluded. But where is this leading to?
Which messaging company is going to accept the violation of privacy as part of their marketing campaign? That’s hilarious.
Privacy is a fundamental right. You need reasonable suspicion with evidence that someone is acting in an illegal way, before interfering with it. You can’t just mass-surveil everybody. You cannot treat an entire population as suspects.
CSAM is serious. So are many other crimes. But I do not trust the use of CSAM as moral cover for this kind of surveillance architecture. The horror of the crime is being used to make people feel guilty for defending privacy, and I find that deeply suspicious. A noble cause does not justify turning private communication into a permanent inspection zone.
This is why I dislike smartphones. You can’t fully control what’s happening there. They have the operating system so tied up to the vendor and google that you can’t use it the way you like to.
And what will they do for desktop computers? Are they going to log our keystrokes? I hope no messaging app with encryption ever accepts any kind of such control. What happened to being innocent until proven guilty? These regulations assume everyone is guilty.
There is no way the technical community will let them get away with this.