An investigation uncovers a web of influence in the powerful coalition aligned behind the European Commission’s proposal to scan for child sexual abuse material online, a proposal leading experts say puts rights at risk and will introduce new vulnerabilities by undermining encryption.
Your entire line of thinking hinges on the premise that the politicos (and presumably, whichever oligopolies their do the biddings of) will have their way one way or the other. What you’re saying is, if we don’t make concessions on the client-side scanning and accept some implementation of it, the privacy-respecting tools we have now will be banned.
My question is this: why is any of this inevitable?
None of what’s being proposed here solves any problem. Pedo material can be fought with the legal and technical tools we have now, as demonstrated by the news of entire pedo rings being dismantled, and pedophiles going to jail as a result on a regular basis.
The fact that you’re willing to make compromises on solutions to a fake problem means that you’ve already acknowledged we’ve already lost.
The truth is, if people today were as outraged as people of my generation are over this, this false choice wouldn’t have to be made at all. Things are just fine the way they are today, and you don’t have to give up anything if you don’t assume you’ll have to give something up.
At what point have we gained freedoms and reduced government control over the internet since OpenPGP broke the international ban on cryptography? I only remember a downward curve.
Maybe it’ll take 50 years, maybe it’ll take 5, but I haven’t seen any attempt at all to protect end-to-end encryption by law. There have only been attacks on it. The EU’s upload filter made it into law, intelligence services are gaining more and more power to tap the internet all over the world, and gen-Z’s perception of privacy will let the big corporations win. The boomers and older gen-X’ers who don’t understand the internet are easily swayed with “think of the children” and gen-Z didn’t grow up with the core concept of privacy that previous generations knew.