It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?
edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.
On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..
While Germany has arrested many thousands of people for online speech, similar to the UK. But the UK gets much more media attention over it.
> Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...
The optics are chilling: yesterday it was door-to-door searches under authoritarian regimes; today it’s device-to-device searches for wrongthink. That isn’t protecting against extremism - it’s repeating it with new tools.
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.
Because that would technically make any present day wiretap illegal too.
So the detail is written in normal law tract...
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.
What does "supremacy class" mean?
False.
> The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.
That is sort of like a supremacy clause, and of course it's valid for the EU.
But that doesn't mean that a Swedish or German etc. court can let that override our basic law. Our basic law is after all the foundation of our law, so if something conflicts with that, it obviously can't be valid.
Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level. Ratification of other Treaties without the sovereignty component is decided upon by the states' national parliaments in all other member states.
Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists.
In the particular, the Seville Declaration recognised the right of Ireland (and all other member states) to decide in accordance with National Constitutions and laws whether and how to participate in any activities under the European Security and Defence Policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Declarations_on_the_Tr...
It's enshrined in German Case Law as 'Identitätsvorbehalt'.
https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/das-europalexikon/30945...
The Polish constitutional court has also ruled that EU law does not supercede national law. Thus, primacy of EU law is wholly rejected in Poland.
https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/07/polish-court-rules-some-...
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.
Doubtful. We on hackernews are staunchly opposed. Most regular people either support or don't care.
In other words, it's very believable. It is incredible how billions of hours have been spent on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and nothing has been learnt. Potentially the best phenomenon in existence at showing that humanity is, after all, so much less intelligent than it believes it is - that even after such a destructive event and so much performative effort at analysis and learning, the key takeaway did not become part of the social psyche whatsoever.
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 "positive" number has recovered from a low in the wake of the Eurozone crisis but is still fallen significantly from the pre-crisis level of around 50%.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by country - The EU's own report suggests very big variations between countries: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/905...
Also, negative and positive feelings are not the same thing as a vote. For example, some people who felt negative about the EU voted remain because they were worried about economic disruption (the government was predicting a severe recession in the event of a leave vote - not after leaving, merely as a result of a vote). I am sure people can think of other examples and both ways, but the point is that "feel negative/positive" and "would vote to leave/remain) are not the same number).
Sure, the eurozone debt crisis of the 2010s was rough for the trust mumbers, taking them down to 33% but they've fully recovered from that.
it seems to be using a different measure (numbers do not match the link I posted) and I cannot see any numbers from 20 years ago.
There is graph from 2012 but that is from the low (if you look at my link).
Have a missed a pre-crisis comparable number in skimming it? If not, then what I see is still a significant decline over the last 20 years in the net positive.
IMO the Eurozone is very likely to have further crises. The architects of the Euro expected a greater degree of fiscal union but that never happened. A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.
> A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.
That's an opinion. You're free to have that opinion, but trust/distrust of the European Union has little to do with that opinion.
France held a referendum on the creation of the EU in 1992, and approved it.
You're thinking of the 2005 referendum, which was about the TCE. The EU already existed before that.
It's easy / tempting to extrapolate from our limited bubble / point of view, but it doesn't tell you anything about a population at large.
And be told to sod off.
From Wikipedia: [0]-"Currently, there is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state."
How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?
It is much easier to break into EU than the local governments, since EU has so much less power, so you have more weird people there.
And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.
[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.
Obviously I'm not expecting that my actions alone are enough to get the outcome I want, but it's difficult not to feel the bite of "if voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." It's just going to be some other paid-for dickface in corporate pockets, every time.
There should't be a discussion at all.
This law proposal is explicitly against the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the allegedly institutions that are supposed to upheld the charter are CJEU, European Commission, FRA, NHRIs, where are they?
That will take time, though, so I guess they are either hoping that some impossibly secure, reliable and unerring technologies emerge in the meantime, or they are prepared for a forever battle with the Court, coming up with ever new adjustments as soon as previous schemes get struck down[1], meanwhile allowing European law enforcement agencies to keep testing, developing and iterating on whatever client-side scanning or other techno-legal approaches they may come up with. I think this was roughly what they — ie, basically a group of a dozen or two law enforcement reps from different member states agencies and ministries along with like one lonely independent information security expert — said themselves in some working group report as part of some kind of Commission roadmap thing presented by von der Leyen not too long ago.
[1] On the data protection side we've already seen this kind of perpetual movement through the years with respect to different “safeguarding” mechanisms made available to enable transfers of personal data to the US without too much hassle, from Safe Harbor through Privacy Shield to the current Data Privacy Framework.
Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data have exemptions for government. The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].
[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...
[2] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/8-protection-per...
They themselves even wrote it in the proposal - "Whilst different in nature and generally speaking less intrusive, the newly created power to issue removal orders in respect of known child sexual abuse material certainly also affects fundamental rights, most notably those of the users concerned relating to freedom of expression and information."
This proposal is de facto a mass communication surveillance of EU citizens.
Exactly as you mentioned every single member state and EU have laws that can for example issues a court order and seize your communication devices if you are braking a law for an investigation, there is no need for EU to have a law that first goes against the very essence of EU, second it also brakes I am pretty sure every single constitution of each different member states.
If this law passes you live in a totalitarian state and there is no excuse for that.
It's Not Who Votes That Counts, It's Who Counts The Votes
- Mogens Jallberg
Regarding your Stalin "quote", please see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/ .
Please inform yourself or you're in danger of letting things happen through your ignorance. The commission is not pushing this. They're acting on instructions from a certain number of elected politicians.
And, you're misleading others when you post stuff like this.
None of us posting in these topics wants this proposal to pass. And in order to fight it, you've got to be correctly informed.
Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it. In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.
The general process is a bit like this, simplified:
- the Council of heads of state appoints the Commission
- the Commission proposes laws
- the Parliament approves laws
- the Council of ministers implements them
- the Court blocks any unconstitutional laws
The problem has been for the longest time that the Commission appointments are not elected, somewhat mired in cronyism, and they keep proposing nonsense laws while the elected parliament can just stand there and vote no while not being able to suggest any legislation we actually need.
But at least when it comes to Chat Control, it is not EU level, it's member states pushing for it and at least for now EU blocking it, so at least for once it is a good thing and the minority of ~8 states can still block it for the majority, block it for all 27 states..
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 short answer is "YOU can't".
Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good about this type of democracy.
Just like in your country's own elections.
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.
Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.
the issue is that they try to push it despite citizen protests, and each time they try people just grow more fatigued.
What do you mean, this can just be reverted it isn't like these laws can't be changed. Currently most people don't vote in EU elections, so you don't need much to affect those even if just 10% hates this proposal and go out to vote it would massively effect the outcome.
Therefore its much harder for unpopular things to persist at EU level than country level so far. Until EU has stable parties that is, but currently there is nothing stable at EU level, a tiny thing can change it all.
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?
The same way you can vote out other politicians in your own country - you can't. Assuming you live in (say) Amsterdam, you have no right or control of who people from other regions of the Netherlands vote for.
How do i vote out representatives if all of them support the measure despite it being unpopular in my country, no matter the faction? That was the case with centralized copyright checking.
EU parliament, and especially EC, are so far removed from any form of accountability, that frankly votes are almost irrelevant - same factions form no matter who's there, and EC runs on rotation.
Lobbying takes prime spot over votes.
EU is sitting in the middle ground between federation and trade union... and we get downsides of both systems.
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.
What makes you think those people would be any less dangerous to your freedom when unbounded by law?
That's very naïve.
Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.
their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...
Especially Germany should know better. If you build two autocratic dictatorships on average per century, maybe start to take care that state powers are restricted.
The US is fully correct in its criticism of Germany regarding freedom of speech and house searches. Sure, on surveillance their arguments would be very weak...
Absolutely nothing positive will be gained by this surveillance, so there isn't even the smallest security benefit. On the contrary.
No way I'm getting into the restrict state powers discussion as that is highly complex and not something that can properly be discussed on an internet forum.
We had that in Germany by extremist autocratic parties and these policies are quite a clear mirror.
"Scanning the communications of everyone" - Might want to let that go through your head again.
It's definitely a disgusting horrible proposal.
So these so called <<right wing extremists>> represent the normal position.
Democratic governments clearly are about addressing community needs and coordinating efforts that require pooled resources (at least). I'm not denying there may be a monopoly on violence. However, in a democratic system, such a monopoly would be voted on, giving the monopoly some legitimacy (not saying it's necessarily moral).
Yet in reality, the US, for example, has the Second Amendment, which grants citizens the right to bear arms and form militias. That doesn't sound like the government has a monopoly on violence.
I guess the weasel word is "legitimate"? But is that legal or moral legitimacy (or something else)? By whose definition and arrived at how?
It feels like such a pithy comment, "a monopoly on legitimate violence", like it's expressing something deep. Yet I get the sense that supporting it requires some contortion of logic and language. Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem self-evident to me at all.
You can start from the Wikipedia page if you're interested[0].
Those who support and push anti-constitutional laws, maybe. All individuals in power, no.
And what would this change?
Ylva Johansson from Social Democrats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson#Surveillance_of...
Peter Hummelgaard from Social Democrats
One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.
Then it's not very democratic to change it.
Short of a direct (referendum based) democracy how do you resolve that?
How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.
> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)
Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.
> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.
> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.
Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.
Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.
For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.
I am going to keep banging this drum because there is too much ignorance on this topic and it harms the fight against it more than helps.
Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.
The state(s) wants to snoop on the peasants' messaging and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.
"Do you want law enforcement to be allowed access to your private messages when investigating child molesters or would you like to listen to folks who put furry teen girls in front of their websites?"
would have results that you certanly wouldn't like. And they'd be democratic.
So perhaps before calling something undemocratic, first make sure that the majority of voters actually agree with you.
"Do you want to be spied on by your government?"
Yes is yes, no is no, anything more comes from evil.
Government "spies" on you for many many things and I think HN "all government is evil" panic isn't really reflected in outlook of EU citizens and won't be looked upon positively by public at large. So again, be careful what you're calling "undemocratic" because that's not the same as "different from my opinion".
I'm generally against all reactionist legislation as an instance "no" stance as well.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
I 100% agree with your position. Chat control is basically an attack on every conversation everywhere because modern social habits are using it like my chat with my neighbors over the fence. It is not the same as mail interception it is much worse.
Politicians can't face consequences from the legal system when they discuss something illegal. They can, and should, face consequences from the voters.
Nothing is perfect, and even having the two pillars above does not guarantee eternal justice (or even that the pillars will remain in place). But we can try to keep remembering and demand better. Sincerely: Good luck, EU.
And who is going to hold them accountable? They make the laws, they're the ones who should know best this is illegal, so if they don't care no one else will. Voters? I live in America so I've lost a lot of faith in people voting for politicians who will protect their rights.
I legitimately have no idea how to fix this type of problem. We spent the better part of the 20th century setting up systems to enable people to thrive and have expanded rights. And now the generations that benefited from all of that want to tear it down and take us back to feudal times with unelected, unaccountable, all-powerful leaders and a nobility class that owns everything and leaving 95% of people live in poverty and sickness. It's like we forgot how to raise strong people with good morals.
> 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...
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
Present evidence that the new laws will be a danger to their fundamental rights and maybe you won't get quite as much support.
Also, that survey shows that there's broad support even though the same people don't believe the new laws will be effective. So... that's pretty stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA (Yes Minster: the unofficial video on-boarding course for UK bureaucrats)
So, in this particular case no EU would be a clear benefit because it would give us time to see the effect on this law on the neighboring countries first, just like we saw with the UK and the OSA.
I am becoming more anti-EU by the day and this is just one more nail in the coffin.
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
I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.
The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.
In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.
I think you have an overly rosy view of the legal landscape in the US in the 1970s.
This has absolutely started happening, albeit not yet on a large-scale, systematic basis. Mahmoud Khalil [0] resided in the US legally when he was detained with the intention to deport.
He passed out written Hezbollah materials. Like with their name, flag and logo on it.
He shouldn't go to jail, but he is no longer welcome in this country.
> 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.
Oh Harry, don't worry! Everyone can happen to have bloated his aunt by an accident!
I like Ludo. He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favour: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.
All in all, he seems to be a scared, stupid sock-puppet of Europol.
I cannot remember who it was, but one British prime minister, when told by intelligence services that they needed greater surveillance powers, told them essentially, that of course they would claim that, and firmly refused.
Politicians now mostly lack the backbone. That does not stop them ignoring expert advice when it is politically inconvenient, of course.
The next thing is, do they know how to rely efficiently on a diverse panel of expert, or do they take only yes-man/lobby-funded experts around them?
On a deeper level, are they accountable of the consequences of their actions when they enforce laws which any mildly skilled person in the field could tell will have disastrous side effects and not any meaningful effect on the (supposedly) intended goal?
What we need is direct democracy, where every apt citizen have a duty to actively engage in the rules applied without caste exception.
Let’s protect children, yes. What about making sure not any stay without a shelve to pass the winter[2]? Destroying the right of private conversation except for the caste which decide to impose that for everyone else is the very exact move to offering children a brighter future.
[1] https://framablog.org/2009/04/02/hadopi-albanel-pare-feu-ope... [2] https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20240919.OBS93798/en-europ...
Unfortunately, I know the answer to that!
> The problem is not they ask experts
I think with with IT they do realise that they do not know. They also believe someone who says something is feasible, or a good solution over someone who says it is not.
We are no longer living in the 2000's. They know. Many are simply evil or have competing interests and want to loose their income/career.
Regarding your parent, "direct democracy" is a euphemism for mob rule.
Anything that pretend to be democracy without imposing active participation of citizen in ruling is an euphemism for some other system which doesn’t dare to present itself for what it is.
Oligarchy is not democracy. Aristocracy is not democracy.
Assimilating the only actual form of democracy to its degenerated ochlocratic form, and pretending that whatever undemocratic political regime that officially brand itself as democratic is so: thus are the two basic strategy of newspeak control. War is peace.
Yes there is a risk with actual democracy. The full truth however is that there are risks of degeneration with any political system. Pseudo-representative systems used in western side have by far cross the threshold of mere theoretical possibility to degenerate into oligarchic plutocracies.
Moreover which caste brandishes the scarecrow of the hypothetical fickle crowd to evict actual democracy? And in support of which system, and what caste will it favor?
The nailing point of democracy is not that it’s perfect and immune of any big issue. The cardinal point of democracy is that people are promised the pains and joys they will self-provide for themselves; so the control feedback loop of changing their own behaviors and rules stay in their power.
# Related resources
The next logical step, after a prosecutor or political push, would be for the Highest Order Courts of Member countries to invalidate evidence collected through such channels for those categories of people.
Politicians who are pushing these laws are having a feeling that bad things can't happen to them. However they are usually prime targets for bad things happening to them, because they are the ones wielding the power - if you can influence the politician, you can control his power.
WhatsApp could still have messages end-to-end encrypted. What they would be mandated to do is for the app to send copies of the messages to WhatsApp for their staff to review the contents.
This obviously breaks the point of end-to-end encryption. Without actually making it illegal for them to use encryption, or add any “backdoor” so it can be reversed.
It’s a weasely way of trying to have their cake and eat it.
What are the protection mechanisms? Are we suppose to hope that the untouchable/s is 100% honest?
It feels uncomfortable to say the least.
Chat Control would always spy on people and thus not be a backdoor.
Its all a scam! No one cares about you.
They are just setting up the new infrastructure to manipulate & control the docile donkeys more effectively (working class)
Unfortunately, they will be successful.
EU rules typically contain carve outs for national security matters too.
This is a bad law, but these carve outs are normal and expected.
Carve outs for politicians are a different matter.
Because you'd be massively adding an attack surface on to National Security elements for no benefit to National Security.
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).
Data to private companies? That baker that remembers your telelphone number that's DANGEROUS. He could sell the info how many breadrolls you buy per week to the FSB or the MSS. Also, we would lose a chance to add extra fines to small and medium companies, and no-one wants that, do we? ⸮
The older I become, the more 'government' - regardless of the colors it is wearing at the time - looks like Thénardier to me.
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.
Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.
> silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth
Does this justify every browser reporting every URL you visit to the government, and implementing a government-controlled blocklist of URLs on the off chance that a criminal might use Chrome for their criminal activity?
Yep, and then the politicians will create laws that outlaw encrypting zip files without a backdoor etc. That's my point, there's no nefarious plot here, it's just dumb laws to solve real problems.
I don't want these laws but they're going to be pushed while everyone is just pushing back on conspiracy grounds. That's not going to win over the average person.
You don't know the plot any more than we do. Whether the current government is nefarious or not is quite irrelevant.
Chat Control is a surveillance and censorship tool that we're being pinkie-promised will only be used "for good". In reality it is a tool which can be repurposed for domestic oppression, political persecution, and crowd control overnight at the government's sole discretion.
> everyone is just pushing back on conspiracy grounds.
That's not a conspiracy, that's just a factual statement about the indiscriminate capabilities of this technology. Governments across the world have a near-100% track record of abusing their power. It's not a matter of "if", it's only a matter of "when".
Otherwise what should we do next? Abolish freedom of speech? You wouldn't be silly enough to believe that the government would imprison you for your political speech, would you? That's conspiratorial thinking.
> That's not going to win over the average person.
Why should we care? If the fact of the matter has been explained to them and they're still gullible enough to give up their most essential civil liberties in exchange for nothing, they're a lost cause and a waste of time.
I don't count on the average village idiot to save the day here, I expect the EU courts to strike the law because it clearly violates the charter of fundamental human rights.
My "reasoning" is firmly rooted in the founding principles of liberal democracies and our legally recognized fundamental rights.
Our previous run-ins with fascism is why they exist, and anyone working to delegitimize them needs to be treated with utmost suspicion.
No, this is not "unfathomably good luck", this is how the system works. Most of crimes are repeated crimes, most of the criminals are serial criminals. People who obey the law, then break it once, then obey it ever since -- are very rare and even if they're not caught I wouldn't care much anyway.
And if you're a normal criminal doing your criminal stuff day after day and year after year you'll make mistakes. One of them will get you caught.
Never in the history of humanity did the law enforcement cast a net that caught 100% of crime, it always had been the game of probabilities, luck and persistence. Steal once and you'll likely walk away. Steal every day to make a living and you'll get caught many times in your lifetime.
But more generally I think one has to account for the power of the default option - with so many criminals posting their crimes on social media and/or their Venmo descriptions, the likelihood of criminals abandoning (say) WhatsApp and coding their own is rather slim.
HTTPS relies on centralised authority. It's right there in the name: Certificate Authority.
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
Here, fixed it for you Mr. Criminal.
It makes no attempt to outlaw encryption. We can still legally use PGP and completely avoid eavesdropping.
What it does mandate is that messaging providers who they will name (think WhatsApp, Signal), will be obliged to have people reviewing the content of all messages sent.
All but the stupidest of criminals will thus work around it, encrypting themselves over the top. While the average Joe gets all their messages read.
I've been trying to argue this point with my government several times (some MPs even replied friendly, so they'd actually read it, but still don't understand or believe it).
People 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]
I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_agai...
So it's also illegal to not know the password?
I've forgotten my own debit card PIN or phone unlock code on a couple occasions.
> (including random data)
Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data. The only hint is the presence of metadata (GPG armor, bootloader password prompt, etc).
This law is catch-all BS designed to persecute people for no other reason.
You can't walk a fucking meter on the streets without being recorded by the nanny state.
Law and order, tuff-on-crime political parties (PVV, VVD, CDA¹) just love the idea of control over citizen's chat messages.
This is not 'because of the EU'. We are part of the EU and influence its policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
"Von der Leyen previously used her phone to award contracts worth several hundred million euros while acting as defense minister of Germany, effectively bypassing public procurement processes. She subsequently deleted all messages from her phone when investigators probed her. While awarding the COVID-19 vaccine contracts worth billions of euros as head of EU commission, she similarly bypassed procurement processes via her phone and withheld messages on it."
How well a ban on signal would be enforced if they don’t comply would be interesting.
I still feel like this will fail to come into effect like all the other times. But we gotta keep eyes on it.
iMessage is not really a thing in Europe. Apple phones are simply not popular enough here for it to be an useful feature. I guess Apple would just disable it for European users.
Thorn is coincidently is also the vendor of Spotlight, software which solves exactly the problem they are lobbying against.
Thiel's Palantir also has overlapping software capabilities and is also raising questions in their work with Europol. [3]
Connecting these dots was the only thing that made sense to me in order to explain why these repeated repackaged proposals keep steam rolling everything despite all the security concerns, unconstitutionality, and general lack of common sense.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/07/18/european-ombudsman-...
[1] https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/200017
[3] https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/dutch-group-calls-f...
> It's like asking to an alcoholic schizo with a history of corruption, who only speaks Russian, and that you are forced by law to feed and host at your place at your own expense, to check your private letters before you're allowed to put them in an envelope.
amelius•4mo 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•4mo 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•4mo 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•4mo ago
Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.
bux93•4mo ago
Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.
amelius•4mo ago
My point is that "this isn't about catching criminals" is the wrong wording.
You don't start a debate by twisting the words of the other party. No matter how right you are. Otherwise you will be seen as a pariah.
varispeed•4mo ago
amelius•4mo ago
If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.
varispeed•4mo ago
The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated goal is statistically self-defeating.
The “catching criminals” line is deliberate gaslighting. It’s crafted to reassure people who don’t understand how these systems work, while the real function is mass surveillance of everyone.
amelius•4mo ago
You're acting like I'm trying to derail the argument. That is not the case.
You are putting a lot of assumptions in your wording. This will not help you.
varispeed•4mo ago
amelius•4mo ago
There is no discussion here other than how to best bring the point across to those who do not agree.
amelius•4mo ago
Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.
p_l•4mo ago
Because ostensibly good people do not want to see the CSAM material, they believe what algorithm/first reporter stated, and ofc nobody "good" wants to let a pedophile go free.
And so the algorithm tries to hang a parent for making photo of skin rash to send to doctor (happened with Google Drive scanning) or a grandparent for having a photo of their toddler grandkids playing in kiddy pool (happened in UK, computer technician happened upon the photo and reported to police, if not for lawyer insisting to actually verify the "CSAM material" the prosecution would not actually ever check what the photo was of)
maybewhenthesun•4mo ago
But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.
Okawari•4mo ago
Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.
Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.
Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.
This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.
Jensson•4mo ago
Chat control does not allow the government to read anyones messages for any reason, so no that is not true.
> Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.
But storing these messages is illegal.
Okawari•4mo ago
I wasn't very clear in my original post always included an assumption that false positives were involved and that messages being stored were a result of that and not all messages being stored at all times.
The images and links that are scanned and is deems potentially problematic will be stored for up to 6 months or until they are deemed unproblematic. There is still a potential 6 month paper trail here, and in politically turbulent times that paper trail could still be damaging retroactively even if the report contains non CSAM.
Nasrudith•4mo ago
Lio•4mo ago
> We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,
https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/REU/spm/1426/index.ht...
What they want is everyone to be watched, all of the time. Crimes will be determined later.