The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)
I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
I'd be curious what would happen if you pointed the relevant authorities at any decently sized store selling manga. There's got to be at least one stereotypical sexualised 4000 year old loli vampire or whatever in there.
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
What's the point of criminalising hand-made pictures? I just don't understand it. I could understand the point of criminalising child porn photos, as producing these photos obviously requires violating other laws (actually not obviously, as you can dress adult actors to look like children, but whatever). But things that are obviously drawn without any involvement of real children, what's wrong with them? Just keep them away from general public (honestly any moderation will do that just fine) and weirdos who wants this stuff will find it and discharge their libido in a peaceful way.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense. It likely encourages pedophilia, meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay. It's similar to the way that regular porn affects the brain. I understand where you're coming from, though and I get your point, but I feel if someone consumes a lot of media of a certain type, they begin to 'embody' that media.
In addition to “drawing”, it’s also the loosely interpreted age that concerns me. Any drawing “deemed under 18” is just as criminalized as the actual crime. While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18, many drawings of lewd acts, adding that the age is freely interpreted by judges… it’s a free field for general oppression.
If those countries have laws against making and consuming pedophile pictures and drawings (or "artwork"), I feel it's perfectly fine for people making and consuming those to be raided, even if they disagree with the law (if people could opt out of all laws they don't agree with, I'mnot sure what would be the point of making laws).
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
> Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
It is concerning to me that there are now international (Western ?) guidelines[1] (2016) and conventions that don't seem to realise the consequences of taking a hard stance on the combination of three of their points :
- a child is any person under the age of 18 years
- including non-explicit sexual activities
- any material that visually depicts a child [engaged in those]
Am I missing something, or have they 'criminalised' a quite large chunk of art ?!?
Then we have these guidelines embedded in automated systems (sometimes with people as 'cogs'), add a pinch of pressure by puritans in power of various stripes, and a decade later we end up with payment networks forcing platforms to kick out artists even when what they are doing is not illegal in their respective jurisdictions !
Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
I was curious and searched to find more context and ... uh, no offense but what on earth have you been doing that you've been tangling with the law over CSAM for at least four years?
Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
I can't really connect what you're saying here. I understand that you think drawing loli (I imagine) shouldn't be classified as pedophelia, but what does the law say?
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
> If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
The cycle of proposing the same surveillance legislation under different names is exhausting. Chat Control, ProtectEU, Going Dark - same invasive proposals, different branding.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services.
This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
"Going Dark" is perhaps the most honest and realistic branding yet, on multiple levels.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
> The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
Chat Control was never the name of the legislation, it’s the name critics successfully gave to the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.
These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
If Mullvad could bother to link to this supposed "Presidency outcome paper" that would be great, after extensive searches on Concilium and eur-lex I have no idea what that is supposed to reference.
> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
In the ancient Greek colony of Locri, any who proposed a new law would do so with a rope around their neck, if the law was voted down, they would get hanged.
Well, Congress renewed the Patriot act so I don't have a lot of faith. Personally I'm starting to think that all of Congress, including aides, should get cycled out all at once periodically so that their internal culture of hating the masses gets broken.
Once social trust (or assibiyah, to use Ibn Khandun's term) in a region collapses, it often returns slowly or not at all. Sadly common pattern in history. I think one could plausibly argue that in this way, Calabria never recovered from the collapse of antiquity, the Gothic wars, and generations spent as a Christian-Muslim war zone.
Intentionally misinformed citizens continued to charge the streets demanding "essential services" like barber shops need to be reopened and to intentionally dismantle and resist against all government protections on public safety during the pandemic (like wearing a mask during an active spreading event), literally while their grandparents and relatives slowly and painfully died on respirators in hospitals largely agreeing with the same notion of covid prevention measures being "pointless". They then attacked the institutions that provided either medical treatments or provided assistance, and continue to promote that culture. Lemmings to a cause they dont understand for a message they know is false.
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
Masks and protocols around them were largely just theatre though. Only very expensive n95 or better type masks, which were properly fitted and handled would actually provide any sort of protection from covid. Even the eventual proponents of masks initially were against the idea as in many ways many of the responses to covid were directed politically, not practically.
When governments push out clearly nonsensical regulations, like you must go to the office even if you can work from home, but you cannot go hiking, yes people do tend to get mad.
And hopefully this gets voted down like all the other laws. Even if it passes, it will probably be repealed or just not enforced within some member nations.
At least this is talked about and discussed... unlike in China, or Russia, or the US's own 20+-years-and-still-going-patriot act.
A reasonable point about the discussion, but I doubt it is a meaningful one. The intention of these international agreements is that they circumvent the laws by moving data out of jurisdiction and have someone else do the surveillance, right? I have to assume that the EU is doing metadata analysis. All the talking is just about bringing it in house.
On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance.
"If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what."
Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
They'll probably take it to court in the regions within the EU where this would be illegal, for example Germany. This is kind of what I meant by this law would be ignored/repealed as it goes against member nations own laws. I would expect there would be a lot of civic push back too. This law hasn't passed before, I'm not confident it will pass this time either. The real issue here is that the EU is not good at handling band faith actors - the same law in different wrapping should not be allowed to persist.
The way to stop it is to introduce a law that does exactly the opposite: that encrypted communication is always protected and should always be protected and that no legislation shall be introduced that weakens these technical guarantees.
That way, it essentially has to do a two step solution, of repealing the previous law that prohibits it, and then introducing their own.
Which VPN provider doesn’t have their addresses flagged? I know a few offer “residential” IP addresses (for quite the premium), but as I understand it, these are a bit of a grey area and are also usually shared, so usually just a matter of time until they’re banned or flagged as proxy/shared/anonymiser.
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I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
Just don't goon.
Do you support robust and mandatory age verification to enforce existing rules on social media websites, like Instagram?
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
- a child is any person under the age of 18 years
- including non-explicit sexual activities
- any material that visually depicts a child [engaged in those]
Am I missing something, or have they 'criminalised' a quite large chunk of art ?!?
[1] https://ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Terminology-gui...
Then we have these guidelines embedded in automated systems (sometimes with people as 'cogs'), add a pinch of pressure by puritans in power of various stripes, and a decade later we end up with payment networks forcing platforms to kick out artists even when what they are doing is not illegal in their respective jurisdictions !
All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
Just like with Brexit, the majority of UK's population voted (and will keep voting) for this.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
50kph is a number.
"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services. This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
Deleted Comment
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Which apply equally to the government?
See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...
We need to make every EU law contiguent on subsequently being adopted by the people - and at a significant majority (say 75% of eligible voters).
Yes that means fewer new laws, which is not a bad thing when the EU people are so detached from their population.
Dead Comment
In any case here's the actual "ProtectEU" text the Comission sent on the first of April which contains most of the text Mullvad is quoting from the "presidency outcome paper": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
As a bonus, here's input report listing the problems that are supposed to be solved: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/05963640...
This is from the introduction:
> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
There's also this one: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/WK-11640-2025-...
The first one appears to be the result of the of the second which called member states to submit their opinions.
Food for thought.
An easy way to solve this is all laws should have an expiration date by default.
Today's Locri is in Calabria, a region in Italy that many consider infested with mafia-like organizations, which is of course sad, but also ironic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaleucus
Dead Comment
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
At least this is talked about and discussed... unlike in China, or Russia, or the US's own 20+-years-and-still-going-patriot act.
On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance.
"If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what."
Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
That way, it essentially has to do a two step solution, of repealing the previous law that prohibits it, and then introducing their own.
Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days