It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?
It is also part of the Treaty of Lisbon via the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is the closest thing to a constitutional level law for the EU.
Not that this has ever stopped anybody.
Sometimes yes.
> I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights.
What are a country's fundamental constitutional rights can be "dynamically adjusted" depending on the political wishes. :-(
> With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.
Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
but not for chat control but another things, they have going much worse
There were similar problems in areas other than privacy and encryption, or indeed technology.
UK's one is easily avoided.
But reality is that NONE of those options should be even considered.
Exactly. There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
Europeans in general like or is indifferent towards the EU.
My observations are different.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1360333/euroscepticism-e...
The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?
Edit: there was a copypaste of voting requirements here, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/voting-ri.... This is apparently wrong; you can also vote if you're not residing in the EU, only EU citizen. (I thought this was the case, and that link not saying that made me suspicious.) How it is possible that they've put up incorrect information on voting rights, I have no clue.
Actual reference, this time legal text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Any person who, on the reference date:
(a) is a citizen of the Union within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 8 (1) of the Treaty;
(b) is not a national of the Member State of residence, but satisfies the same conditions in respect of the right to vote and to stand as a candidate as that State imposes by law on its own nationals,
shall have the right to vote […]
So either citizenship or residency is sufficient.
This can only be done indirectly.
Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.
So the answer is "you can't".
It's p-hacking democracy. If a proposal has 5% chance of passing just resubmit it twenty times under different names with minor variations.
It wastes time that lawmakers could spend on proposals that the public actually want.
How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.
If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.
But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.
> Jeanne Dillschneider, Green Party spokesperson on the committee, wrote to netzpolitik.org about her impression of the meeting: "The CDU/CSU, in particular, has often shown in the past how little the protection of fundamental digital rights means to them. I fear the same thing will happen now, even more so, with the CDU/CSU-led Ministry of the Interior." She therefore considers it "all the more crucial whether the Ministry of Justice upholds our fundamental digital rights during this legislative period."
> "I'm cautiously hopeful that some colleagues from the coalition parties apparently share my criticism of chat control," Dillschneider continues. "The question now will be whether they can actually bring themselves to reject chat control. However, I'm not particularly optimistic here."
> Dillschneider's committee colleague, Vogtschmidt, wants to ensure that the Bundestag is forced to take a position on the issue beyond statements made in committee meetings. This is permitted by Article 23 of the Basic Law, which allows parliament to adopt European policy statements. The government must then consider these in negotiations. Vogtschmidt believes: "Now I think chat control will have to be brought back to the Bundestag plenary session to raise awareness of this monstrous danger among a wider public. I will work towards this in the coming days!"
And, come to think of it, I don't like all the decisions taken by the departement either. Surely things will work great when my street is responsible for the electrical grid, immigration or international commerce.
And when I say "my street", I obviously mean "my half of the street". I'm not against odd-numbered houses "per se", but, you know...
Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.
Source: I write dystopias on the subject. https://w.ouzu.im
What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk
> Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes;
If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?
If they have it all figured out, this exception should not be necessary. The reality is that it isn't secure as they are creating backdoors in the encryption, and they will flag many communications incorrectly. That means a lot of legal private communications will leak, and/or will be reviewed by the EU that they have absolutely no business looking into.
It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.
I also wonder about the business implications. I don't think we can pass compliance if we communicate over channels that are not encrypted. We might not be able to do business internationally anymore as our communications will be scanned and reviewed by the EU.
Security is just the scapegoat excuse.
Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.
"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).
It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology.
silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.
The politicians are lay people, and only have one tool in their toolbox: laws. So every solution is a legal one.
"Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN." Solution? Create a law requiring VPNs to be registered to a user with their address. There's no conspiracy here - it's simple cause and effect. This is a contrived worst case example because this level of accountability? is not currently proposed.
I would prefer other solutions, but these solutions are firstly much easier for the politicians to understand and also much cheaper to implement and see results.
If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.
People often forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.
> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]
amelius•57m ago
I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.
varispeed•46m ago
Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.
pcrh•37m ago
Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.
I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).
aleph_minus_one•20m ago
Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.
bux93•4m ago
Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.