Notices by Eleanor Saitta (dymaxion@infosec.exchange)

Holy fuck this comment: https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962

@kuba
They're a) US-based, and b) a leftist magazine that I'd expect better from, so hopefully they'll actually listen.

@MotherJones
I went to go read one of your articles, but your EU privacy notice is using the malicious pattern where you have to object to the legitimate interests of hundreds of vendors individually, which is illegal not to mention a pain in the ass. Any chance you could fix it so we can actually read your stuff?

Tech speakers, it's 2023. Stop using moms as your example of a non-technical audience. It's wrong, its not funny, and whatever you were saying, now most of your audience is not thinking about it.

Just use the exec team as an example instead and get on with your life.

To be clear, there are three parts of the work here. First, fundraising and PR for the effort. Second, talking to dozens of individual local archives across the country and negotiating with them about the complex politics of being the scanning don't. Third, arranging the logistics of making the actual scans happen, wrangling volunteer labor to move boxes, and figuring out how to protect material in transit if it can't be scanned on site. This is a lot of time, and needs someone who can commit to it and deliver — and form and manage a team, because it's bigger than one person.

This is Kickstarterable. It's not actually a big ask for the US queer community if the call goes broadly enough.

I cannot do it. I'm not in the US and do not have the time or flexibility to make it happen. Do you know someone doing queer studies work who had the bandwidth? Send them my way. Or just go do it! I don't need to be involved, I just want to know that in 40 years, they won't be able to say we were never here again.

Almost all of the gay, lesbian, and trans history archives in the US and elsewhere are held on paper. There's one relatively small commercial collection that's been digitized, but very little else has. Stonewall? The AIDS crisis? All of it can just burn. It's held by community organizations that are doing well to keep it stored and accessible. They aren't in a position to scan it, and even if they could, they aren't set up to manage hosting data that large numbers of fascists want destroyed in a complex and rapidly-evolving risk environment.

The Internet Archive? They could do it. They can't do it for free, and they're better set up for books than looseleaf, so it's not a perfect fit, but there are few parties better equipped to host it. It's not inaccessibly expensive — at my guess, it would cost somewhere around $75k to scan the entire NYC Gay and Lesbian Center archive, one of the biggest. A couple million could probably handle most of the queer archives in the US.

This doesn't mean they'd be available online — many of these archives have documents that will be sealed for years yet, and online access is politically complex (for good reasons). Metadata is a whole other problem — I'm talking about the kind of scanning process that images the document and gives you a box number it came from, which is horrifying to any serious archivist. But if the alternative is the fire? Yeah, we can actually sort it later.

I've talked about this in smaller contexts, but I haven't found any traction and time is getting short. When the Nazis passed the enabling laws for the book burning on April 8th, 1933 — exactly 90 years ago in 34 days — the first thing they burnt, the same day, were the archives of the largest trans and gay research institute in the world. When they say now that we didn't exist until after the war, the only reason they can get away with it is that they burned all the accumulated evidence.

https://assemblag.es/@hugo/109972631252644527

The EU's proposal to force all service providers to automatically search all content that is either stored or transmitted anywhere in Europe, forward all illegal results to the police, and to block access to all non-European illegal content is expected to be presented to parliament in April. It's currently focused on algorithmic identification of unknown CSAM and of any social interactions that could be child grooming — basically, an AI trying to guess if an image might be child porn or a conversation might be trying to lure a child for sex — but it's unlikely that once the capability exists it won't be expanded to other crimes. The proposal would also force all services to age check their users (which means identifying them) and effectively ban anyone under 18 from interacting with the internet. There are no exceptions for end to end encryption and stored data not being shared is included.

To be clear, this proposal is not going to work. You know how bad chatGPT is? This is trying to solve a much harder problem, one humans struggle with, with much less compute power. What it will do is end all private communication in Europe, waste an amazing amount of police time, and leak a spectacular amount of private material to local police, some of whom — looking at you Hungary and Poland — are more than happy to use it to harass queers and trans people. It is fundamentally incompatible with the basic rights the EU is legally bound to uphold. It's also, in case they care, going to be a nightmare for corporate security and intellectual property control and will create a massive barrier to entry for anyone smaller than Google or Facebook running communication services in Europe.

Please call or write your MEP today and tell them to stop #ChatControl and preserve freedom of expression in Europe.