What scares me is how terribly bad we are at dealing with it. This is the weakness that terrorists try to exploit, of course.
We, as a society, seem to posess the emotional intelligence and maturity of a toddler being scared of the monster under the bed but happily following the friendly guy with a van full of candy.
It makes me so sad.
I am much for 3-strikes here.
They don't see themselves as merely human, they consider themselves as our betters. The closest thing to a ruling class with divine mandate we have today. That von der Leyen got her position in spite of election results is only the icing on the cake.
The "enshitification" of the internet makes me laugh.
funny to read something like this as a response to a comment blaming spreading fabricated fear.
The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Most people in most societies are already under this type of surveillance. This is just to tidy up the small loopholes like Signal etc.
The EU doesn’t have a constitution [1], simply enabling treaties [2].
The solution would be in ratifying a constitution.
> am much for 3-strikes here
Careful. A party in power will seek to nullify issues by putting forward and then defeating sham bills.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Consti...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Uni...
I blame people who do know and write internet comments instead of taking action.
How many of you have deleted your Instagram and Facebook accounts? How many of you are still reachable on WhatsApp and iMessage? How many people have you onboarded to Signal? How many people have you taught to sideload?
Seems like only the Greens, The Left and Afd within ID were against that first version of Chat Control.
___
This isn't the case though: the right-wing Identity and Democracy faction is explicitly pro-privacy, digital rights and against Chat Control.
- https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site)
- https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview)
- https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site)
The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.
Now ECR is also sceptical and have expressed concerns, though their voting record on privacy related legislation is more inconsistent, I believe.
At that point you no longer have a legislative body, but an advisory council to whomever it is that decides what votes are and aren’t punishable. (See: Iran, China, the Roman Principate, early parliamentary monarchies.)
You got it right: They do not care. They do not care that privacy, democracy and freedom are taken away from them because they never cared that they had that in the first place. It's the eternal conservative vote that will never consider an alternative regardless of fact.
They vote Republican in the US and CDU here in Germany. Doesn't matter if they vote for a convicted criminal or that they ruin the future of their children and grandchildren. They got theirs, fuck everyone else. Doesn't matter what I do there's a block of at least a third to half the population that is not open to argument, reason or even facts.
Fuck those People!
I could be prosecuted for driving if the result is death of pedestrian for example. I still drive. So why our fucking "servants" are special?
Do you have a source for this?
Can this be concluded by looking at the app traffic?
Amen. I’ve worked on privacy issues in the states. Never again. The overlap between people who care about privacy and those who are too lazy and/or nihilistic to engage with the civic process might as well be perfect.
If you care about this, call your elected. If you won’t, that’s the problem.
More context: this was written back before the first iteration of chat control got turned down by European Parliament, and even links to that revision. A few details has changed since then -- still it's basically the same thing, although now you need to opt in, otherwise you won't be able to send images and videos. Allegedly, it could be passed by European Council tomorrow.
Congratulations, you re-invented the politburo.
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
Like -- ISTM that the relevant property here is the ability of the courts to overturn ordinary legislation for incompatibility with basic human rights provisions. But the EU already has this. the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (which is pretty much a superset of the european convention on human rights) is incorporated into the Lisbon treaty, and all EU legislation must be compatible with it. EU courts have overturned legislation for incompatibility with the CFR, eg Digital Rights Ireland[0].
The collection of member state treaties is for ~all intents and purposes a constitution, just not in a single document, and without the word "constitution" at the top.
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Reasoning: they all have the opportunity to do such.
You want something over democratic control.
Democratically elected representatives are sovereign decision makers. They can vote and decide whatever they want. Constitutions interpreted by high courts can strike laws down only afterwards.
Democracy should lead to stupid laws if people are ignorant, stupid and easily led.
If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago.
"Look how much we care about your privacy!"
And then they scan in a clandestine manner. I do not trust any of these privacy apps, especially if certain people always try to discredit PGP.
Or it was proposed because some MP needed something on his resume. Or they want to tie up the resources of freedom advocates so that they do not work on even bigger issues.
Presumably the three strikes would be for the politicians, e.g. if you have voted in favor of three bills that courts have subsequently found unconstitutional, you're barred from holding office.
<= 14 males per female?
Surely it’s even more skewed than that.
Again, my statement above was poorly worded. This is what I meant by prosecuting for nefarious behavior: It is my belief that government behavior would be better kept in check if elect officials were under constant investigation for criminal acts. Society should have gauntness that their nation is being run by good actors. Those running our country should be legally obligated to be working towards making the society that they serve thrive, not using it as a platform for organized crime, influencing the outcomes of their personal investments, or traitorous behavior like ruining a nations economy to empower another nation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
Admittedly, a narrow one: clearly delineating unconstitutional behaviour and allowing it to be called out.
> collection of member state treaties is for ~all intents and purposes a constitution, just not in a single document
That morass makes it difficult for the public to cleanly digest when something is blatantly unconstitutional. (Britain has a similar problem.)
Would you look at that, everyone who was passing court reform is now barred from office.
You’re looking for a cheat code to effort in government. It doesn’t exist. Power is ephemeral. The person in power is always more powerful than the person who just had it, almost by definition.
I was thinking a webapp of an open source app such as Element (matrix) is a good candidate. Also converse.js, and Movim (xmpp).
Me being Swedish I totally expect to have one Android phone for my eID app, and one with an open source OS for everything else.
It was good while it lasted, making orders on my phone from anywhere in the world. But now I'll have to go home to get my eID device, which is fine.
They’re not. They’re discussing it. Even if they pass it, it’s subject to court review.
I've sent an e-mail to the permanent representative in the country I live in, but I feel particularly blindsided knowing about such a decision on the same day it is voted. And angry for all the people, especially journalist friends, that are out there and unaware of what's going on.
I'm not sure this is what democracy is supposed to feel like, but if it is, it feels like shit.
No they are not. This is nonsense. The charitable interpretation is that you’re confusing the systems on iMessage that can voluntarily detect nudity and report it to you (but not the police or Apple) with the systems being proposed in TFA which have mandatory reporting to provider+police. The uncharitable interpretation is that you’re just making stuff up because it sounds good. Please don’t do either, it makes everyone worse off.
this is an important point, rarely discussed.
Here on HN I noticed a strong adversion for EU and its politician, but I really doubt that here on HN many are aware of the opinions of the general population in EU.
Much worse laws would be in place if we had direct democracy, I am 100% confident that death penalty would be the first big come back, but also stricter immigration laws (intra-EU too) and a generalized increase in the length of penalties for petty crimes, just because people in EU are old and they believe a police state will make them safer.
edit: QED the comments show how people would make the EU a worse place. Lucky us they can't.
They simply took what's in their interest (for example immigration laws, like really EU was flooded by migrants, spoiler: it is not!) and discarded the things they don't think would happen, because people are like that: they do not think of unwanted consequences and when they happen (like the ban of intra-eu immigration, which would most likely happen, being entirely legal and very easy to stop, unlike the illegal immigration from outside the EU) it means that someone else (in this case I assume the progressists, that they would call communists) worked against it because they hate them and hate their people and traditions.
It's incredible how easy it is to prove that trusting the average Joe on long term planning of an entire sub continent leads to catastrophes.
EDIT 2: it's also incredible how disconnected people are on political matters, they have a split brain, that thing that Orwell named doublespeak.
The most extreme libertarians that scream about being deprived of their freedom to have encrypted chats where they exchange swastikas with their friends, are the most conservatives on all the social matters and are the same people that vote the same politicians that then propose the chat control for the sake of the children.
But then the population sees this, still wants court reform (now more than ever) and votes in new politicians to take it up. The new politicians haven't yet voted on anything and so can't be barred this way and the first bill they take up is court reform.
> You’re looking for a cheat code to effort in government.
I'm looking for checks and balances. Something outside of the whims of populism should cause politicians who repeatedly attempt to violate fundamental rights to suffer consequences.
This is obviously merely a short term solution since it should be clear that targeting hosts and developers of non complying solutions would likely be the next step.
Unfortunately this just creates another layer of abstraction and each layer adds myriad perverse incentives for power brokering and abuse.
It’s a very thorny problem that humanity has yet to solve, and is probably unsolvable until we can solve the “power opens opportunities for abuse of those powers “ problem.
The only ideal form of government is the benign and just king, which of course does not exist.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
From that perspective writing a short legal paper quickly that facks up the life of everyone is much more logical than catching criminals. The latter one needs some work, also some brain to do.
This is from 1981.....
https://www.duncancampbell.org/content/big-brother-listening...
In the first phase, every civil servant must use (be affected by) the system, as well as politicians (including their families). Basically everyone who gets a salary or pension paid by normal citizens.
Also, every piece of software used by the government, or providers, which is related to this policy, must be open sourced, and attempts at finding security related issues or bugs in general by anyone must not be considered an illegal activity, but considered a helpful activity.
If they are ok with this for five years, and no unfixable problems or possibilities of misuse are found, then it can be applied to the rest of the population.
After all, one must assume that child predators are also among civil servants and politicians. It would enable the measurement of the success of this policy.
This might work in very small society where said king can be quickly brought to senses if he pisses off enough people. Anything larger is fucked up no atter what we do.
>"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords."
No fuck that
Warren Buffett said something to the effect of: “I prefer to invest in a business that could be run by a monkey, because eventually it will be.”
A similar principle holds for governments. You will eventually (possibly consistently) have a government that is led by incompetent (or corrupt) politicians. How can you structure your system in such a way that their negative effects are minimal?
I'm not convinced that's a relevant issue here. For some parts of EU treaty law, sure, but here the context here is disapplying EU legislation that's incompatible with fundamental human rights. Those parts are all in one document in one treaty: the Charter of Fundamental Rights[0], which was incorporated into the Lisbon treaty.
(besides, whether in the EU, somewhere with a formal constitution like the US, or the UK, the vast majority of the work of figuring out whether something is in breach of treaty / constitutional provisions is always going to be analysing caselaw)
And we don’t know how to fix that. Politics is a spectacle ensuring that we vote for people who are poorly equipped to make the real decisions in a vastly complex system. The people itself are becoming dumber and less cultured.
I am starting to really think that being governed by an AI maybe is not a bad idea as long as no human can control this AI.
> The legal basis to support action in this area is Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The article provides for the establishment of measures to ensure the functioning of the Internal Market.
In other words: in order to trade efficiently in goods and services with each other countries need harmonised regulations. Countries have started to introduce individual laws to combat CSAM. Therefore these inconsistent laws interfere with operation the "internal market". Hence the EU can shut down private speech.
So somehow they twisted streamlining of commerce into termination of individual rights. It's wild to think how far that can be extended, if it can be the basis for this.
It also seems particularly ugly if you actually do frame it within the context that they are claiming: this is not "think of the children". It's actually "think of the commercial profit" - they literally say it themselves.
/s
The power of government + media, both nearly captured by unaccountable interests, has me worried. Does everyone remember the 'soft rollout' of Total Information Awareness back in 2002? There was even a logo for the proposed new government program (US). They have not given up on this for a single minute.
To have someone like Trump, Biden or Boris Johnson I charge would be unthinkable. We are governed by low calibre people that should already be in retirement.
Core of the problem is that talented people no longer go into governance in the West, it’s now low-status career. (You age to consider all career paths, not just becoming president).
In China it’s a high status career, and the results speak for themselves.
Until we have high-calibre, ambitious and talented people go into politics again, we will continue this muddling decline.
I don't think this will make parents stop worrying about their kids being grabbed by strange men, and the danger will be just as present as before.
That said, if they commit illegal acts they should be tried and convicted like any other civilians, if not with a more severe punishment because they are our leaders that set the example.
They abused a similar one in the US constitution (the commerce clause) to rule that growing wheat on your own land for personal consumption counted as "interstate commerce" (Wickard v Filburn) and backdoored into the federal government controling basically everything physical.
There are very few relevant messengers and adoption rate is king, because at the end of the day we want to use these messenger to communicate with people.
Getting people to try out new/different messengers is already a pain. And here every blow against an uncompromised messenger to make them harder to get will lower its usercount and push more people towards the compromised software they can easily get on the store.
Sure I'd say some way of circumventing this will probably remain available for a while, but I'd say it is extremely easy to make this very inconvenient.
After all this isn't about having some way to communicate safely, this is about being able to communicate safely in our daily lives is what I'd say.
2009 Swiss minaret referendum. Amendment to article 72 of the Swiss Federal Constitution reads: "The building of minarets is prohibited."
It's completely nutty to put random token issue into the constitution. Its' just gigantic fuck you for Swiss citizens with ex-Yugoslavi or Turkish roots. It breaks all legal principles and does not work serve its intended purpose of "stopping creeping islamization". They even failed to define term "minaret". Minarets are not required in Islam and fundamentalist Wahabbi/Salafi sects don't even accept them.
All that said, I support 100% the right for the Swiss people to be idiot edgelords. That's what democracy is all about.
That. I get the local newspaper, and I am not sure if I have seen any report of Chat Control at all in the last few weeks.. If it does get mentioned at all, it is usually a 5-10 line paragraph :|
Good
> generalized increase in the length of penalties for petty crimes
Good. If you disagree spend some time in SF.
> death penalty
Debatable
But you're right about the real bad actors, they already don't trust these platforms anyway.
That said, "grooming" in the broadest sense of the word happens on channels like Whatsapp, Instagram, even Pinterest for some reason because it's not blocked as social media by popular wifi filters.
Ex: girl (14) our son was friends with "had sex" with someone who claimed to be 18, but he recorded the interaction and used it to blackmail her to do more / other stuff. I don't know the details but that kinda thing happened via Whatsapp.
Those who wield power today have absolutely and completely forgotten just how brittle power is. They feel absolutely untouchable, and their self-serving remits are absolutely normalised to them.
Which is to say, this trajectory typically ends in violent revolt. You can only continue with edicts if you have complete control over all of the apparatuses of state power, and have a police state. If you rely on the illusion of power (policeman in your head, etc.), as most western democracies do, then a rude awakening awaits.
Demagoguery seems like a wise tactic until you’re upside down on a fence with your balls in your mouth.
So don’t fret. The pendulum will swing a few more times, but the bob will pop off the end of its tether and bounce under the awkward sofa of revolutionary change soon enough.
That's why the EU is structured in such a way that unelected and irresponsible people are given such enormous power over sovereign countries.
Previously, I thought it's about peace in Europe, more freedom for the people, but after such legislation is enacted, the EU is no more than a way to enslave the whole continent and bring it to the state not a single European voted for.
I ask "does that already?", but the way these things work is that they are not allowed to publicly say whether they channel messages to intelligence agencies. If you're doing things that intelligence agencies may find interesting, you already wouldn't be using these services.
This is exactly what happened with the Data Retention Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
First passed: March 15, 2006
Came into force: May 3rd, 2006
The law was introduced in Romania, but a year later the constitutional court struck it down. In 2011 the European Commission sued Romania for not implementing the law and fined them for it. This forced Romania to sign a new law in 2012, which was also declared unconstitutional in 2014.
>On 8 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Directive invalid
And the kicker is that the UK has tried to implement a similar law domestically two more times.
Why not both, if both were on the table? I.e. incentivizing competent people to seek office, while decentralizing power and properly constraining the reach of any single office.
When I am elected God-Emperor, I will banish discussions about apple pie recipes, and all those that have been involved with apple pie recipes and discussion thereof will receive a Stern Talking To by the newly formed Agency of Apple Pie Suppression.
Checks are useful if people mostly vote right, but occasionally make mistakes. If you double down on the mistakes, you get the situation that it would be undemocratic for some rules made 100 years ago to stand in the way of what the majority of the population wants today.
Plus, who knows what are the "interests of the populace". Who can decide that? If the populace votes one way, you saying "they're voting against their interests so they should be prevented from getting what they want" is functionally equivalent to saying "what I want should be done and what others want should not, even if I am in a minority". I know it does not feel that way to you, but try to see it from the perspective of someone who disagrees with you.
In a democracy, the only possible arbiter of what should happen is the majority. Anything else is the tyranny you decry.
Also with protecting the internal market; the UK is interested in importing US produce like chlorinated eggs and chickens, but EU laws said nu uh: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/business/chlorinated-chic...
His platform is notably unambitious and centrist, more so than New Labour, who managed to be in power for thirteen years without introducing gulags.
The idea that the commission or Parliament in any way cares about privacy is nonsense.
The other thing nobody wants to talk about is that it's not always adult creepy men approaching kids, it's the kids themselves that seek out sexual conversations with strangers on the internet.
Sure, this is also the parents responsibility. But even with open phone access, internet filters, etc they will find a way, especially if their school gives them laptops and there's open wifi everywhere.
That's where this is also for. Parents cannot monitor all their children's internet access at all times. Children will resist and find ways around parents' control, as it has always been.
All the various AI, targeted ads,... regulation could be solved with that simple focus. I see arguing about chat control or AI as downstream of the central issue.
If real privacy was the norm with minimal data collection the other issues take care of themselves. I believe the issue is linking the digital world to an individual without their knowledge.
It's downright dangerous when the right does it!
This has made me realize that there is little difference in living in a "free" society compared to "unfree". It didn't get to be that way because of morals or sound reasoning. It ended up that way because of dumb luck in the past that and enough propaganda cemented it. That's it.
Either way, what matters is what you're allowed to do now and in the close future. Bets are off for everything else. Our societies aren't governed by what the right thing to do is.
Try a cooling-off period. Switzerland does it for referendums. Absent a super-majority, a bill needs a certain amount of time between initial and final approval.
The amount of people who would consider selling their house, moving their family and job because they don't like some local policy or its implementation is essentially zero.
This also means the Parliament has no independent power to repeal previous law that it might have regretted passing. It must again wait for the Commission to propose repeal. I can count how many times an unelected administrative bureaucracy has proposed removing its own power on zero hands.
The whole thing strikes me as a sham democracy.
Then again, I am, personally, split: The standards, and process, to become a part of this technocratic body that is the EU are very high, and they will (ostensibly) select amongst the best candidates ...
... might this "technocracy" be an option in today's age of political mediocrity and populism?
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive#Ann...
Look how demotivated and demoralized everyone in the EU is becoming. I really wonder why that is.....
>> Core of the problem is that talented people no longer go into governance in the West, it’s now low-status career.
>> Until we have high-calibre, ambitious and talented people go into politics again, we will continue this muddling decline.
I very much resonate with this. Also, with concerns that the opposite might just be as bad: I could name en European, western country of several dozen million people governed by (downright) a career, borderline pyscho narcisist career politician. How do we keep -that- from happening?
Instead the center of European power banned heretical works with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and executed heretics like Giordano Bruno, Jan Hus, Michael Servetus, Aonio Paleario, and Lucilio Vanini. Even if they were already dead, like John Wycliffe.
The idea that just abandoning a thing with some issues is better than trying to repair it (or even just keep it as is), does not seem quite realistic today. Even the various national politicians who wanted to do a *xit before the UK did this have quietly dropped those ambitions.
Dumb laws exist globally. Don't expect this to go away if tomorrow it was all up to the national governments again. Collectively getting bad laws like these repealed or changed is much more likely though.
You wanna talk about making stuff up? How are you possibly able to say that the iPhone doesn't have clientside backdoors when you don't have any source code to back that claim up? You are the one making stuff up because it sounds good; Apple's concerted efforts to undermine their own security features is well-documented and even exists by Apple's own admission.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
[1] https://itsecurity.blog.fordham.edu/2021/12/08/data-can-be-o...
(but then again, between passing and actual implementation there's a much to unfold)
The EU is a profoundly dysfunctional institution, and one of the main reasons why is the lack of democracy. I say this as a pro-Europe person.
The """parliament""" is a joke. Do you know of any other democratic parliament in the entire world which doesn't have the power to propose laws? I don't.
As people have pointed out, the commission can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing the legislation they want, as they are doing with Chat Control. It only needs to win once, whereas the other side needs to win every time.
"The """parliament""" is a joke. Do you know of any other democratic parliament in the entire world which doesn't have the power to propose laws? I don't." don't matter if we claim ah unchecked EC.
"As people have pointed out, the commission can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing the legislation they want, as they are doing with Chat Control. " EC can't because the parlament, the council and the judges can disagree. As again the EC is not unchecked.
The core governance issue isn't so much about the ability to propose new bills as it is about not being able to function as a true counterbalance. I think if the European Parliament simply had the power to propose repeal of legislation (even if they didn't get the power to initiate legislation), that would go a long way to improving the usefulness of the EP as an institution.
An analog form of this is found in several European countries, so, of course its not unchecked! How could I miss that?
Oh no, I know. Dunning-Krueger!
My bad! Thanks for enlightening me with our perfectly logical argument!
Look in the mirror, see the problem.
(I mean, I'm really going to pretend it is ok: after all, I don't consider USA presidential election to be any more real than "proxy-elections" of appointed secretaries/ministers, and in Russia, where people actually vote for a president and he has a lot of power so it actually matters who is the president, people will claim for various valid reasons that this isn't really a democracy and Putin is more like a king now.)
But being as charitable to that world-view as I can be, EU structure feels way beyond that. Recently I tired to answer myself, how it came to be that I somehow "elected" Ursula von der Leyen? Or rather, how did "we" do it (keeping in mind that "we" as in "majority of voters" usually have different opinion than I do)? I just don't feel any connection. EC President is nominated by Counsel from the set of whoever-they-want (chosen behind the closed doors), and then voted-in by the parliament. AFAIK, the parliament never actually rejected a nominee, and BTW in Ursula's case 327/710 people voted against her, so she barely passed the bar. It somehow coincided that at the time my country's representative on the Counsel was "not really elected" as well, and by the end of my "investigation" I felt totally alienated. There is this European Commission thing, it affects me, I don't affect it. This is just how the world works.
Seriously this law cannot be enforced.
Germany has in fact abolished fundamental rights (i.e. free expression) in response to collective fear and guilt about WW2. It's an unforced own goal, just like the USA did to itself after 9/11. The worst possible response. It harms only those who shouldn't be harmed; German nazis will still be nazis quietly in basements, and everyone else in Germany who isn't a nazi is subject to media censorship. It's nonsense.
If you enable e2ee for iCloud/iCloud Backup, all of your iMessage traffic will still be escrowed, simply from the other end of all of your conversations because they still have iCloud e2ee turned off (because it's off by default).
If the endpoint sends the plaintext post-decryption to the middle transit service (Apple) in a way that is readable to that middle service (iCloud Backups contain complete iMessage history and are encrypted to Apple keys), then it's not e2ee. This is called "plaintext escrow".
Same goes for WhatsApp. It backs up its message history to iCloud or Google Drive, which are, in the usual case (99.9%+ of users) non-e2ee.
Approximately nobody has enabled e2ee for iCloud Backups (and approximately nobody wants to; they'd rather Apple be able to restore their photos and conversations when they've lost their phone and forgotten their password).
Each and every night when plugged in every iPhone by default makes sure that Apple receives an Apple-readable copy of all of the photos and iMessages (or iMessage cross-device sync keys) on the device.
It's not e2ee if the endpoint device escrows the plaintext. Apple and the FBI can read 99%+ of all iMessages in the world in near-realtime.
(This is because, in the usual case, the backup includes the "Messages in iCloud" cross-device endpoint synchronization keys, and Apple of course runs the sync servers that see the encrypted traffic. If you have Messages in iCloud turned off, the backup simply contains all of the iMessages directly, and Apple presumably only gets them once each 24h period when the iCloud Backup runs at night when plugged in and on wifi.)
The only case in which iMessage is e2ee is when both iMessage endpoints either have iCloud disabled, or both iMessage endpoints have iCloud Backup disabled, or both iMessage endpoints have iCloud Advanced Data Protection (backup e2ee) enabled. The moment you add an iPhone not so configured to the iMessage groupchat, the whole thing falls apart, because the defaults are to escrow the plaintext in a non-e2ee fashion.
I talk about that today it's not allowed to abolish democracy which - believe it or not - was allowed and happened 1933.
So, yes. People do relocate when the local government becomes oppressive.
My family is in the US because my great grandparents immigrated here to get out from under the thumb of the UK government. In fact, unless you’re a Native American, you probably have a similar story in your family history.
It will of course be sock puppeted throughout some hapless shmuck, but societies that are not effectively led by superintellignces will quickly become irrelevant footnotes in a sea of strategic superiority.