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6:30 PM · May 10, 2022Twitter for iPhone

This document is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. It is proposing a new mass surveillance system that will read private text messages, not to detect CSAM, but to detect “grooming”. Read for yourself.

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Let me be clear what that means: to detect “grooming” is not simply searching for known CSAM. It isn’t using AI to detect new CSAM, which is also on the table. It’s running algorithms reading your actual text messages to figure out what you’re saying, at scale.

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It is potentially going to do this on encrypted messages that should be private. It won’t be good, and it won’t be smart, and it will make mistakes. But what’s terrifying is that once you open up “machines reading your text messages” for any purpose, there are no limits.

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Here is the document. It is long but worth reading, because it describes the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery ever deployed outside of China and the USSR. Not an exaggeration. alecmuffett.com/alecm/tmp/eu-c

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By legally mandating the construction of these surveillance systems in Europe, the European government will ultimately make these capabilities available to every government.

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Have to give the EU credit for going maximally creepy, and for demanding the existence of technology we don’t really have yet.

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I am so tired. It seems like every time people rally to fight off one bad surveillance proposal, an even more powerful organization pops up to devise a more invasive one. Is there no constituency out there for “just let me be, and don’t spy on my private communications”?

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Monitoring private conversations is “intrusive” but this is an acceptable balance because the algorithms do not “understand” the conversations. Am I losing my mind, did actual thinking human beings write this text?

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I keep reading this document, hoping I’ll reach a page with a giant “

” emoji and an explanation that the whole thing is a practical joke.

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Dear everyone: there is no abuse-resistant technology that can accurately real human conversations “privately”. It does not exist. Maybe in the year 2200 we’ll be able to outsource crime prevention to a benevolent AI: today it is science fiction.

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Highlights, press releases and speeches

Here is today’s official EU Commission press release on the proposal: (h/t

@ProfWoodward

)

ec.europa.eu

Press corner

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Straight-up precursor Minority Report :/

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The media could not be played.

Reload

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do these people really just think that “bad people” are isolated to only non-state non-surveillance-wielding groups

suzuha

@dystopiabreaker

some of the worst abuse i experienced as a child was at the hands of people wielding the type of apparatus described by the EU here.

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That last sentence is a doozy.

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“but the children” is the priority one narrative for surveillance all over the place. The data will be used for anything, once the legal interface is there.

Surgeus

@OverlordSurgeus

"Think of the children" is almost never about the children

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There’s a difference between proposing things that are terrible ideas and proposing things that are impossible. This sounds like the latter?

Jesper Lund

@je5perl