Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”

As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.

Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.

I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.

In the 2000s a law was passed in Denmark that allowed for extensive logging of internet traffic.

But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).

At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.

Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.