Only material that is clearly child sexual abuse will be searched for and can be detected.
Uh-huh. And how do you search for something specific without decrypting everything first? This is fucking embarrassing.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
348 points (99.7% liked)
Privacy
42174 readers
1128 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Wasn’t the plan for the messenger to scan for explicit material before the messages were sent (and encrypted)?
I'm going off of a article by TechRadar, but essentially: yes. This isn't about breaking encryption as I initially thought, though that seems to have been the goal when the same law was proposed (and rightfully rejected) in 2022. Rather, the new revision is about making encryption utterly pointless through the virtue of scanning all messages on your device, as you suggested. At least that's my read on the situation.
Yup, that's it.
load more comments
(6 replies)
That's a fair clarification but hardly meaningful, and arguably much worse.
"Only the thing we are searching for will be searched for"
How do you know if a message has that content without scanning all messages to begin with?
The fuck? Do they think we are stupid?
Do they think we are stupid?
They definitely do. And they are partly right, for the average person this is enough to stop worrying
The average person wasn't even worried or indeed aware of this to begin with
They do the Kremlin defence, just shit out words without meaning, wrong meaning, correct meaning, more words, and everyone can find their "right" answer.
Here the gullible/tech illiterate can get their "right" answer.
They should just mandate that the child pornographers set the evil bit. It would save the EU leaders the trouble of learning how cryptography works.
EU: We are not going to read your chats or look at your photos, we just stop the CP.
People: so how will you know what chats and photos contain CP?
EU: Just trust me bro...
..... And how will you be able to distinguish between encrypted child pornography and encrypted normal messages?
It's kind of the crux of the matter, so please answer this question
Here is a less radical version
Privacy is not negotiable. It is not a privilege granted by the state, but a fundamental condition of human freedom. Any attempt to undermine encryption, to insert backdoors, or to surveil private communications is not about protecting children, it is about total control.
The invocation of child protection is not neutral. It is a deliberate emotional manipulation, weaponized to silence dissent and shame opposition. If these proposals were truly about helping children, they wouldn’t be attacking the one technology that protects vulnerable people, encryption, including children themselves, activists, journalists, and victims of abuse.
Once the infrastructure for total surveillance is in place, it will never be dismantled without revolution. History is clear: power concedes nothing voluntarily. There will be no going back. The moment we compromise, we lose everything, and we will not get it back without blood.
There is no middle ground between liberty and submission. This is not a policy debate. This is a war for the future of human autonomy. We must reject this system entirely, not tweak it, not reform it, but destroy it at its root. To preserve freedom, we must be absolutely ungovernable.
Once the infrastructure for total surveillance is in place, it will never be dismantled with~~out~~ a revolution.
The entire point of surveillance is that all attempts at revolutions can be thwarted.
Every other time in history, the oppressor has eventually rotted from inside and its carcass thrown overboard.
Over centuries humanity might escape its prison again.
But for the people alive when the prison is built, they will become cattle for the rest of their lives and so will their children.
We might one day build ourselves a prison we can never escape, like farms are for cow.
But if that ever happens, at least there is hope that a very large asteroid will sterilize this planet down to the last spore.
I only pray the infection has not spread to other stars before this happens.
Oh it's easy, anyone talking about "child pornography" is obviously just using manipulative emotional talking points related to children to cloud the discussion. This person has forfeited their right to free speech and has outed themselves as an enemy of self-determination.
You can tell because all the people invoking "think of the children" never actually care about children in their action, except maybe for their children, but not children as an abstract concept.
What they really want is to read your emails, your correspondence, know your plans and your thoughts so they can subjugate you and enslave you for their own benefits. Those people are the enemy of every human and should be treated with less mercy than witches at Salem.
Stop playing their game, they ALWAYS do this and they always brow beat their little transparent evil plans.
You want my answer when they ask "how will you be able to distinguish between encrypted child pornography", you go to the person that asked and punch their clock right the fuck out, take that you fucking dickhead ! And then spit in their face as they go down.
If you care about children how about you don't fucking cut their food ration out of the budget, you horrible ghouls and vampires !
Easy: encrypt CSAM. If the hashes match… Gotta have the encryption key, though. But you mustn't use for decryption. Only encryption
PhotoDNA already exists. But you would have to break end to end encryption on a lot of services to run such server-side checks (as client-side checks are not trustworthy)
serverside checks neither on federated services, or anywhere where the user chooses their server
… And how will you be able to distinguish
I know porn when I see it
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah we all know that's BS. "Child porn only" will become "anything illegal" which will become "whatever we want" and SL"with a warrant" will become "all the time"
DNA testing started out that way, and went exactly as predicted.
The only way it will go indeed
I'm actually starting to think 25/7 monitoring of all digital communications is actually a good idea.
For politicians.
It's the only way to sure they're accountable to the public. This should be the trade off. You enter into politics and literally the only privacy you ever have is when you're in the bathroom.
Every fart, sneeze, cough, every email you send, every text you send on a phone, website you visit, is public record.
there will always be burner phones
Good luck getting one under 24/7 surveillance.
Prisons are full of contraband. I imagine it's just that much easier on the outside.
They always use sex crimes and "the worst of the worst" as an excuse. Always. Then they come after political dissidents and the vulnerable.
"do not read this comment"
The only way to know not to read it is to read it
The wording of that message wiggles around a lot. When you read it again, you realize there can be:
- almost every monitoring of online communications (just not 'general')
- all chat scanning (just no chat 'control')
- everything can be detected (just child abuse will be searched for AND detected)
- sneak peaking at everybody's chats is ok. (But 'detection orders' need a thorough process)
This is the language of some one who knows is guilty
Why doesn't any group of people get that it's OUR devices abd not THEIRS.
Ok listen some of you will have to become politicians & get them life-imprisonment sentences
And this fight will have to be won every single time, while they have to win just once and we'll never get it back ?
It's obviously a rigged game and such a game can only be won by cheating. Cheating so hard no one ever dares to play this game again.
So, maybe it's time to draw post-Europe borders now that european governance has become malignant, I don't believe it can be saved. This always ends up happenning so might as well hit that reset button early while they're not seeing it coming this early.
It will just start with those, then slowly increase their right
This is absolutely a bad idea that shouldn't be implemented. However, everyone who is continuing to push fo the digital spying with the rhetoric like that needs to be checked thoroughly. Statistically, I can almost guarantee that their hard drives is full of child porn and their basements are full of skeletons.
Congrats Commission, you shot yourself once again in the foot.
Can we assassinate these fucks next please?