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by txrx0000·10mo ago·view on hn ↗
Dear citizens of the EU:

If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs.

What are you going to do when the government's interests inevitably drift out of alignment with yours? Start a political movement? You will have the police knocking on your door for criticizing the establishment.

Start a revolution? You have no weapons. You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.

You have neither the pen nor the sword. There is no longer an incentive for the government to serve you, and so it eventually won't.

No amount of protest will recover the freedom you once had. You're heading towards a society where everyone feels oppressed but no one can do anything about it.

13 comments
>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.

One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitively that criminals are still beyond their gavel. In reality, the only individuals who will get spied on are regular people who don't open their terminal just to send a text; exactly the people who should not be spied on in the first place.

When the government realizes this invasive legislature is ineffective, they will probably crack down even harder. After all, what we are willing to accept from rulers has by the looks of it already increased dramatically. I wonder if it at some point it becomes illegal simply to posses encryption software on your personal devices, perhaps even possession of prime numbers that could theoretically be used in modern encryption. How far will the government go to take this illegal math from you?

> Software like PGP is easy to use

Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.

Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.

We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.

One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.

How do you define cryptography? Let's say my files are written in a format that only my software can read. Is it then illegal to distribute said files?
That is so bleak, but doesn't seem unlikely
Both apple and android are teeing their infra up to support deleting apps they don’t like. Windows is moving towards e2e attestation, and Mac is basically already there. Once that’s all done, you just need to enforce hardware manufacturers boot only into ‘trusted’ operating systems. No more Linux. No more unsigned execution. No more encryption.
This is what I think too. There's a huge push around the world for 3 things right now; verified IDs, trusted or attested signatures for software distribution, and monitoring efforts like the one in the article.

The thing people don't seem to realize about the recent Android announcement that they're going to require digital signing for distribution is that it's not about moderating apps. The objective is to make sure developers are forced to disclose their identity when publishing apps because that allows rich companies and individuals to wield the justice system like a weapon. They won't ban something like ReVanced because all they need to do is make sure the system allows others to take legal action against the developers.

The other thing that people don't realize, like some of the sibling comments here, is that using older hardware and tools can only go so far. Normal people aren't going to do that and people that go out of their way to do it are going to be making themselves a target.

There's already a chilling effect in place. All of my teenage relatives were given a mini lecture to absolutely not post about the Charlie Kirk incident on social media and to avoid talking about it in private chat. I still haven't seen an explanation for how the messages in this incident [1] ended up in the hands of authorities.

But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress".

The only way to "protect the children" is through education, not by forcing them to have a digital paper trail for their whole life.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669

Won’t happen.

There is way too much existing deployed systems depending on alternative open source systems, and a mn incentive to use them to keep using old hardware.

And way too strong a strategic incentive not to depend on US tech alone.

Plausible, but then people will use old computers and/or fab their own and/or import from adversarial governments and accept the risk of hardware backdoors.
These people aren't rulers, they're public servants that have mistaken themselves for rulers.
If all of your messages can be read in plaintext, your going to have to transfer you keys some other way and it will be very detectable that you are sending encrypted messages which will be next on the chopping block.
It's already this dystopic, like any medium where people can talk freely gets eventually controlled by corrupt politicians etc.

Anyways, the control of speech isn't only in surveillance, it's ingrained deeply in culture, taboos, education, etc.

I have talked to religious people before, they all exhibited a certain characteristic, you could talk about somethings but you can't touch on other things, their mind won't accept it, so they bug and start saying nonsense.

I've noticed the same thing with most people when it comes to certain subjects, you'd be talking to an educated person with a relatively high IQ and a mind that is capable to think critically in certain domains, yet once you point out something their mind has been trained to deem anti cultural (like for example who controls what), they turn into Agent Smith and they stop listening to reason.

Anyways, this is HN so what I'm saying is that the control of the controllers is already absolute, it's been linearly increasing for years, they'd cause something then tighten their control of us for "our safety", until one day we get enough and some take out the guillotines and others the bald eagle etc. been happening for millenia, if we as a species were able to rebel on authority before s*it absolutely hit the fan, history would've been a lot cleaner.

> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. (...) You have neither the pen nor the sword.

We still have Euros. As long as enough companies and rich folk are more on our side than theirs, the government still has some incentive to serve us.

I know, I know - money and politics, wealth and power, they go together at the high end. But there is the oft forgotten long tail, the rich and powerful at the scale of a city, a neighborhood, a niche market. Those tend to side with communities they live in, and in aggregate they still have plenty of pull with the rulers (which in stable times they use to block all kinds of potentially useful legislation, but still, good to have them come the hard times).

Weapons won't matter all that much anyway, for several reasons:

1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;

2) Citizens here may be significantly less armed, but the same is true of government officials, and even law enforcement is significantly less armed. It kind of evens out, unless military gets involved, but at that point all bets are off - no different than in the US.

3) Firearms have a habit of magically appearing in bulk the moment a revolution starts. When it happens, it's a good indicator you should GTFO somewhere far away, as you're being played by whoever is supplying the weapons to your side.

>1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;

Only because of the immense wealth, freedom and culture brought by generations of struggle and tenacity. If it isn't defended, it can go away quickly, but the current generation probably won't bear the costs. I doubt that Europeans in the 22nd c. will enjoy such a comfortable life, though.

> 2) Citizens here may be significantly less armed, but the same is true of government officials, and even law enforcement is significantly less armed. It kind of evens out, unless military gets involved, but at that point all bets are off - no different than in the US.

I don't think that's a correct comparison. If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm.

I don't think the same can be said for the vast majority of European cities (assuming the military gets involved).

> If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm.

And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would considerably outclass the general population in both intelligence and firepower / strike capabilities.

Soldiers would be on edge and vulnerable, sure, just like in the conflicts of the past few decades, but overall the military would retain a significant advantage.

To say nothing of equipping a guerilla force in the event of a civil war. (Something nobody sane should fantasise about, by the way.)
Russians also had the money until government did not start to take away that from people who had lot of it. When government can confiscate all of the money of a rich person, only those on the side of government will remain rich.
Euros? Fiat currency that can be taxed or diluted. Cash is becoming increasingly difficult to use in a lot of countries.
I watched a Dutch cop discharge his gun into a crowd in 2017 or 2018 and face no consequences, so don't give me that nonsense. The State will kill you if it wants to.
Betting your freedom on the idea that corporations and the wealthy will side with the little guy instead of the powerful because some of them happen to live in the same city as you is, frankly, insane.
Really? There is a reason why Europeans are jokingly called "Europoors".

Even the upper middle class in Europe is poor as hell with barely any savings.

When have companies and rich folk ever been on ANYONE's side but their own?

Your arguments are terribly naive.

> If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government

A little bit off-topic but so called president of the EU is not elected, nor are the figures in so called EU commission :)

EU commission president isn’t directly elected, but neither is the US. President. Voter choose electors who then pick the US president. In EU: voters elect national parties that form groups in the Parliament, which then elects the Commission President.
That's not true. They are elected but not directly by the population but by the representative of each state.
Brexit was an awful thing, BUT it will increase democracy for both parties.

EU needs to be made more democratic or we need to severely limit its power, as its original intent, because the current show is just a farce.

All of the presidents are elected. The bodies electing them are always part of a democratic process. Just because it's indirect doesn't make it less democratic. the president of the commission is even covered twice at it gets nominated by the council and the elected by the parliament. The parliament we voted for, the council are the head of states who might also not come from a direct democratic process.
What is this Brexit talking point? The EU president is elected by the EU parliament/comission, whose members are directly elected by the people.
>you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs.

As a UK citizen, can you explain your reasoning here? We haven't implemented anything like the chat control proposal and while a few politicians have brought up similar ideas, there is a lot of pushback against it.

Two obvious ones come to mind, the UK age verification system laid the groundwork for internet IDs + ~12,000 people per year being arrested for online speech (a number that's grown exponentially) [1]. There's many other examples.

[1] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-social-media-arr...

The UK doesn't have the exact equivalent of chat control yet, but it already arrests people for politically incorrect posts. They're doing things in smaller steps, which is more likely to succeed.
Age verification, while trivial to bypass (for now), has brought you closer to further privacy-invading restrictions. Next, VPNs will be attacked. Then it will be unsigned apps on "untrusted" operating systems.
How many surveillance cameras does your government operate again?

How much do you trust your current government with the extensive surveillance apparatus they have created?

How much do you trust the next government?

What about the government after that?

> you will gradually lose control of your government

Already happened. That this keeps getting put forward is the evidence. Representative democracy, is not a democracy at all.

Sic semper tyrannis.

> Start a revolution? You have no weapons.

LOL. People nowadays don't start revolutions not because of weapons or lack thereof. It's because they're thoroughly entertained and fed; even the entire political circus is a sort of morbid reality show: people tune in to the news to shake their head in disgust at today's latest antics, and will do so tomorrow, because it's all panem et circenses for grown-ups.

The Internet has become the greatest instrument of mass control ever created in the history of the world. It's done. As long people have their Doordash and Netflix, and are too busy working or scrolling instead of thinking deep thoughts, and reading anarchist philosophy, the kings has nothing to fear.

Also, no need to single out the EU. The entire government-as-reality-TV is well and truly an American creation, and your three-letter agencies don't even have to pass any laws to collect information about its citizens. We're all in the same shit, my brother/sister.

You are exactly right. But most people will call you crazy and that you are a tyrant against "democracy" or "rights".
> and reading anarchist philosophy

That's literally how we got here. People got a taste of unmitigated unprecedented freedom online for the last three decades, and found it so gross that they allowed things to swing the other way.

Even one decade ago, the threat of SOPA/PIPA rallied the internet successfully. Just over a decade later, we're at the point of allowing age verification, for morality's sake, without hardly a peep. The cypherpunks are losing, hard, and honestly, deserve failure for how well their utopia turned out.

> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.

Unlike which country? The US I presume? I see very much a lack of any revolutions in the US, and the most resistance done in the past few decades was done by people with no weapons.

I'd say most revolution-like movements of any kind in the US since the Civil War happened without weapons.

Even further, those who have traditionally been most vocal about second amendment rights are currently the biggest cheerleaders for the current authoritarian trend. Quite the plot twist.
> you will gradually lose control of your government

That happened the moment European countries surrendered their sovereignty to EU.

Which of course never happened, as each member country retains full sovereignty in every possible way you can think of, which is actually fully enshrined in the way EU works.
To which citizens are you talking to exactly? There are a few very rich citizens that always had control of the government and clrealy want this bill to pass.

On the other hand there is a majority of other citizens which don't have the economic means, who are the victims of this bill, they never haf control of the government and don't want this bill to pass.

Classless "citizens" don't exist. This is capitalism working as usual. Oh, and get in touch with reality please, there is no country where "citizens" don't have guns, it's just not all the citizens.

Dear citizens of the US:

Please stop funding, allying with and protecting the manufacturers of surveillance tools. Stop exporting Palantir products and importing privacy-destroying devices from businesses like Greyshift and Cellebrite. Insist that the US government stop shielding hackers-for-hire like NSO Group who indiscriminately lease their products for discriminatory and illegal purposes. Stop defending "OEM" control that we have all known is a stand-in for federal steering since the Snowden leaks. Stop marketing E2EE while backdooring server and client hardware for "emergency" purposes.

Do that, and you'll never be accused of hypocrisy again. Signed, a US citizen.

Collective guilt projection is incredibly unfair. What is the average US citizen expected to do in this?

I hereby promise not to buy any weapons systems from Palantir or use Cellebrite if I forget my phone's PIN code. Am I one of the good ones now?

> Start a revolution? You have no weapons.

Always this cope from Americans. A broad revolutionary movement will have sympathisers in the military and police. They can raid the governments armouries. The IRA became infamous for arms raids.

"much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs"

What are you on about, mate?

Get your Bacofoil for this thread.