14
votes
Denmark has been a stalwart supporter of image scanning and chat control to detect child sex abuse material. Now, they hold the keys to make it a reality.
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- Title
- Return of chat control: something is rotten in the state of Denmark
- Published
- Aug 8 2025
- Word count
- 1166 words
Even putting aside the privacy arguments which you really shouldn't, I need these people to think for a moment about how abusable this is if far-right governments get into power.
The US spent two decades giving the executive office too much power, and is now paying the price dearly. You can't make laws assuming you're always going to be the good guy.
I'm opposed on principle to a government deciding something should be running on my device, but I will engage the argument on technological terms.
Image hashing is a highly heuristic process that is, in cryptographic terms, already broken (collisions were found): https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX/issues/1
Most people have WhatsApp automatically save images. A simple attack would be using one of the hashes (which would be stored within the operating systems for privacy) for a preimage attack, which would be sent to someone on WhatsApp, which is then saved to their photos app. The scanning software would then flag that user, allowing further legal action.
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Back to the more vibes-based arguments, I genuinely don't think there's a solution for this that wouldn't be totalitarian in nature. You would have to also eventually ban running open-source operating systems for example since those can simply be compiled by anyone without the requisite snooping (which can be enforced by only allowing sales of Secure Boot-enabled computers.)
That is true, though the pessimistic prediction (and in my opinion pretty likely given the track record of our politicians), is that after a year with this control the law enforcement will say it is ineffective and can easily be bypassed, and then we roll up the next iteration of even more privacy invading monitoring and a path is paved for trying to outlaw encryption for citizens.
This sort of thinking has been going on for decades with Danish politicians. We started with a DNS filter blocking CSAM sites, which was difficult to criticize for its lack of transparency and legal oversight, because the supporters were quick to label people as pedophiles if they did so. Surely enough, after some time the idea started to creep up to use the same filter to block other types of sites such as piracy or unauthorized gambling.
In addition to all this, we are also on a path in Denmark were a giant AI system is supposed to combine all the data that exist on citizens like health records, library uses, social cases, tax record etc. for the supposed monitoring against terrorism. Of course criticism is being labelled as being on the side of terrorists and organized crime.
I have very little faith in our politicians to not constantly pushing the boundary further on further with their surveillance tools. And sadly it seems to be working, as the general public seems to be on board with the notion of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".