The Private Conversation
from folke_arbetsson@lemmy.world to privacy@lemmy.ml on 05 Oct 01:15
https://lemmy.world/post/36896813

The Private Conversation

The Threat Against the Cornerstone of Democracy and the Individual’s

Right to Choose Who Listens

Introduction

“Chat Control 2.0” is once again on the table, and one can’t help but wonder why our politicians are so eager to outlaw private conversation between citizens. This is not the first open letter written about this legislative proposal. Many people far more technically competent than I have addressed lawmakers and voiced strong criticism against it, often with detailed and well-reasoned arguments. Yet these arguments have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Since our elected representatives seem unwilling to listen to the experts, I am instead turning to you, the people, the very ones who will be affected. Time is short, but our democratic rights are not yet lost. We have had democracy for a very short time, as little as a few decades in some parts of Europe, The fact that it is so poorly protected, especially by those who are supposed to be its champions, is deeply tragic. Sitting in democracy’s front hall, they now cast their votes in the name of self-interest rather than in the name of the people. Let me make one thing absolutely clear right from the start: this legislative proposal uses children merely as a costume to conceal its true nature, to open up Sweden’s and the EU’s citizens to mass surveillance.

Perverse Argumentation

Every objection to the proposal is met with the same response: “We just want to protect the children.” This line is used to force opponents into a defensive position, where their moral intentions are questioned, instead of engaging them in a proper, mature debate. It is, quite simply, a deceitful form of argument. Consider this: If someone were to oppose locking all children in isolation without human contact until the age of 18, on the grounds that it would “protect them” from online harm or exploitation, one could respond with: “So you don’t want to protect the children?” Most of us would recognize how absurd that is. Just because someone opposes total isolation of children doesn’t mean they wish them harm.

Questionable Motivation and False Pretenses

Let’s take a closer look at two specific paragraphs from the proposal currently on the EU agenda, soon to be voted on. (2) “Those providers often being the only ones in a position to prevent or combat such abuse.” It has always been, and will continue to be, parents who are primarily in the position to prevent their children from coming to harm online. The widespread apathy toward digital literacy among parents and the general public, ongoing since the late 1990s, bears much of the blame for why adults today are so detached from what their children do on their devices and on the internet. Even today, in one of the world’s most digital societies, people still toss around phrases like, “I’m not good with technology,” “I’m technically incompetent,” or “I’m from the wrong generation to understand the internet.” But this isn’t a funny joke. Humanity sent people to the moon in 1969, radar was invented in 1904, and the internet has been publicly available for 30 years. Technology is not new. Of course, there should be moderation on platforms where children are expected to frequently interact, but to claim that technology companies are the only ones in a position to prevent harm to children online is an admission of impotence. It reveals, quite clearly, the staggering technical ignorance of those who support this proposal. If these lawmakers truly wanted to protect children from exploitation, and if this proposal wasn’t just a Trojan horse for mass surveillance, then why don’t they instead propose things like:

-Requiring parents to become digitally literate.

-Providing more resources to schools.

-Laws regulating children’s unsupervised use of the internet and smartphones.

-Support services for families and children targeted by grooming or online exploitation.

Or even active police protection for every child.

Why not? Because that would cost money! The cost of implementing this proposal will be astronomical, but that’s fine, because as a bonus, they’ll gain the ability to monitor the population. That is apparently priceless, unlike a child’s innocence, to which they’ve clearly assigned a monetary value. Of course, I care deeply about our children and want them to be safe. But I cannot leave my children alone in Sarek National Park and then claim that the only ones who could have prevented them from getting hurt were the park rangers, and therefore, the rangers must have the right to listen in on everyone hiking in the wilderness.

The Return of the Class Society

(12a) “In the light of the more limited risk of their use for the purpose of child sexual abuse and the need to preserve confidential information, including classified information, information covered by professional secrecy and trade secrets, electronic communications services that are not publicly available… should be excluded from the scope of this Regulation…” First, one must ask: how do the authors of this proposal even know how much CSAM (child sexual abuse material) passes through or within corporate internal communication systems? Moreover, they openly acknowledge here that there is a need to preserve confidentiality between two parties for communication that is not childporn.

But apparently, the individual citizen is not deemed worthy of this right. Companies, like feudal lords above the serfs, are placed above the individual. The proposal even carves out exemptions for what it calls “Bodies of Authority,” hammering home the vision of a return to a class-based society across Europe, where rights are stripped from ordinary citizens and reserved only for the so-called elite. There’s an even darker implication here. Let’s unpack it logically: • Lawmakers claim that encrypted communication is used by pedophiles to share child pornography. • Yet they want scanning to apply only to individual citizens, while they themselves are exempt. • Meaning: politicians want to retain the ability to freely share images and videos on the very platforms they describe as being “used” (and note they changed the wording from misused to used) for child pornography.

So, the only logical conclusion is that those who wrote, support, or vote for this law must either be pedophiles themselves, or wish to create an environment where such material can flow freely within the political and corporate elite, away from public scrutiny. Do I seriously believe all supporters of the bill are pedophiles? No. Most are likely just useful idiots serving those who stand to gain power or money from it. But history is filled with examples of immoral people seeking positions of authority precisely because those positions lack oversight, so they can indulge their perverse desires at others’ expense.

Returning to paragraph 12a, its wording “in the light of the more limited risk” essentially says: a certain acceptable amount of child pornography is tolerable, as long as corporate interests and trade secrets remain unharmed. In fact, if you read the paragraph literally, it implies that even a group like “The Berlin men who touch Boys. Inc.” could legally create a private organization and share child abuse material among themselves without oversight. Let me repeat this clearly: this law’s only purpose is to lay the groundwork for a new class-based society, one in which the individual is perpetually considered suspicious and therefore must be watched by the elite to maintain order. We cannot allow our elected officials to elevate themselves into a higher social class, standing above ordinary citizens.

A Tiger Without Teeth

We can ask more questions about this obsessive desire for surveillance. Suppose the law passes and comes into force. Let’s even ignore that only massive corporations will have the resources to implement this fantastical solution, and that it will not immediately expand into direct monitoring of all communication. Do these technically infantile politicians truly believe that criminals won’t adapt? That they won’t find new ways, like TOR, which already exists? But of course, they can’t touch TOR, because many national security agencies depend on it for their own secret communications and operations. I would even dare to say that the lawmakers probably don’t understand that it’s entirely possible for motivated and skilled groups to communicate secretly, in plain sight, online, using data that is neccesarily random. A law like this will be like pouring wine on a goose: a complete waste of money, leaving only an angry goose, and the total decay of democracy, of course.

The Unspoken Consequences

The proposal suggests that one or several technical systems (never explained in detail) will automatically scan all images and videos shared between private individuals, to detect known illegal material, but also to identify new, previously unknown material. First, this is not technically feasible today, not securely or reliably. Second, it means that this “AI,” which must be a generative model trained on known illegal material, will by definition be capable of generating new child pornography itself if the model is inverted. In other words, EU lawmakers want to build a child-porn-generating AI model trained on EU’s combined police databases. Now imagine you send a picture of your toddler playing in the bath, or smiling on a changing table, to their grandparents. A completely normal, innocent family photo. Would you want an unknown third party to have access to that image? Or for it to be absorbed into a generative AI that could then produce child pornography based on it? The supposed safety of such a system would rely entirely on the hope that no ill-intentioned individuals ever gain access. But no system is secure. Remember the Swedish Miljödata Data leak? Now imagine that instead of that data, it was all your private photos from every chat with your family, partner, and friends, open for anyone to search.

Clean Flour in the Wrong Bag

As historian Wilhelm Agrell once said: “Clean flour in the wrong bag; even the most innocent are caught in the machinery of a surveillance society, and this is nothing new.” He tells the story of April 29, 1978, when a carpenter named Torsten Leander parked his car at a schoolyard in Norrköping, not knowing that the area was reserved for attendees of a cultural association’s annual meeting. It wasn’t an offense, but a local security agent recorded all license plates, and Leander’s name ended up in secret police files. He had done nothing wrong, merely been unlucky enough to get caught in one of the Cold War’s invisible surveillance nets. It is not up to individuals to prove their innocence. Our justice system was never meant to work that way. Now imagine that same innocent family photo to the grandparents. If the automated scanner falsely flags it as child sexual abuse material, what happens? Studies show that AI-based image and facial recognition systems vary wildly in accuracy, sometimes over 90%, but in other cases as low as 36%. I wouldn’t board a plane with a pilot that inconsistent. Yet in this case, you could be wrongly branded a pedophile. Good luck clearing your name, even if the investigation is dropped.

The Broken Trust

If this law passes, the foundation of a new class society will be cemented. Along with it, public trust will be irreparably broken. How could we ever again trust our representatives, knowing that they so easily and ruthlessly discard our civil and human rights in the name of self-interest?

Final Words

I sincerely hope that you, the reader, found parts of this text absurd, because the truth is, the law being proposed is absurd. Under the banner of “think of the children,” it seeks to dismantle the very foundations of a democratic society. We cannot allow democracy to become a fleeting curiosity, a relic in the history books. Capacity takes time to build, but motivation can change overnight. We need only look across the Atlantic to see how quickly democracy can be dismantled. Laws once made with good intentions are now used to suppress free speech and democratic values. I know it’s tedious to read EU legislation and proposals, but these 209 pages could be what cements European democracy as nothing more than a historical chapter. The flour in your bag may be clean today, but who knows how it will be judged tomorrow? Today it’s legal to criticize your government. Tomorrow, it might not be.

, Folke Arbetsson

#privacy