Hundreds of academics and engineers and non-profit organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, as well as the Council of Europe, believe that the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) would mean sacrificing confidentiality on the internet, and that this price is unaffordable for democracies.
The European Data Protection Supervisor, who is preparing a statement on this for late October, has said that it could become the basis for the de facto widespread and indiscriminate scanning of all EU communications. The proposed regulation, often referred to by critics as Chat Control, holds companies that provide communication services responsible for ensuring that unlawful material does not circulate online. If, after undergoing a risk assessment, it is determined that they are a channel for pedophiles, these services will have to implement automatic screening.
The mastermind behind the billboards and newspaper exhortations calling on Apple to detect pedophile material on iCloud is, reportedly, a non-profit organization called Heat Initiative, which is part of a crusade against the encryption of communications known in the U.S. as Crypto Wars. This movement has gone from fighting against terrorism to combating the spread of online child pornography to request the end of encrypted messages, the last great pocket of privacy left on the internet. “It is significant that the U.S., the European Union and the United Kingdom are simultaneously processing regulations that, in practice, will curtail encrypted communications. It seems like a coordinated effort,” says Diego Naranjo, head of public policies at the digital rights non-profit EDRi.
My hypothesis is that “enshittification” isn’t just happening to internet services, but to everything. Prices are going up, and quality is going down at an accelerating pace; the majority of the inflation in the past ~4 years has been due to corporations simply raising prices and blaming it on “the economy”, executive compensation and stock buybacks have gotten completely out of hand (even compared to what’s been going on in the past 30 years) while wages stay at the same level – meaning that everybody except the 1% is getting paid less due to the cost of living skyrocketing.
Honestly it feels like the ruling class has realized that the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan very soon and is scrambling to maximize their wealth and making sure everybody else is worse off so people don’t have too much time to think about what’s going on. Plus they know that increasing inequality will drive people to vote for populists, and right-wing populists are invariably pro-plutocracy despite what they claim to be (and left-wing populists are vastly less popular nowadays, although not completely extinct as eg. Slovakia recently showed)