Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
I went deep into this rabbit hole and did a lot of reading on how this org is pushing it's agenda in EU.
I hate this Hollywood idiots with burning passion.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
Are you sure you want to make this point?
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
No. Most of the country professes no religion.
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
In other words, your claims say more about you than France.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
Everyone (except China) failed to regulate that. So now we see overcorrection.
The solution is to regulate Meta and TikTok and YouTube. Until that is on the table we’ll get performative stupidity from both sides.
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
The Roman Empire banned private clubs, seeing them as a source of revolution.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
Join Vatican City!
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
America has been trashed not by Covid but by the precedence being set that partisan violence can and will be pardoned.
The one where citizens don’t regress into comfortably lazy nihilism as a first response.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
Just as you must work each day if you want money, you must oppose tyranny each day if you want liberty.
They will always want more power over you and you will always have to fight them because of that.
We need to save the EU from these people!
We could have economic and military cooperation without this circus.
It's not even actually democratic and veto powers of tiny countries like hungary have turned common foreign policy into a joke.
On a serious note, I think EU was a good idea but it has decayed a lot, especially after how the Greek crisis was handled and because of multiple legal design flaws. It needs a big restructuring, otherwise it will continue to decline and be used as a dumping ground for unpopular laws like Chat Control.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
there's no internet police
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
This is one of the many abuses by Leo(s), part why I don't love and trust police in italy: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatti_del_G8_di_Genova#p-lan...
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
Steganography exists and is undefeatable, though very low bandwith.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
Now they just need to find a reason to brainwash the general public to sleepwalk into fighting another war.
It's a tremendous opportunity, presently.
Power is never before so easily gotten.
Fight: Collaborate, Empathize, Reject division.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
F that noise.
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
They're afraid of losing their job or being painted as someone who supports terrorists, pedophiles, or other criminals.
These guys have been at it for a while.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
If so, that is the real solution, because it works in all cases.
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Regulate the politicians.
States control what’s centralized; incentives ensure they keep doing so.
Protesting it is like arguing with a thermostat—it can’t hear you, and it’s built to tighten control.
As technologists, we have a lot more power than we realise.
(Yes, I’m speaking to the blob, but the Venn overlap of anti-crypto and pro-this seems big.)
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
If the max is one year, it can't be more?
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
So this is a pretty practical solution to protect the kids without infringing on adults freedom per se, because even if some adults lose access, as I said, nothing of value is lost.
Privacy is of no value because you decided that porn is bad for me?
Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Are we so End Stage Growth Economy that EVERY power broker see now as the time to employer (IC)Enforcement?
Gestapo much, anyone?
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Sessions chat message sent via TOR to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Genuinely curious. Can those that are in power break this encryption?
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
That doesn’t break your comms today - but later, you replace your phone, can you get a current copy of the app?
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
Purely P2P communication isn’t affected.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/preparatory-bo...
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
[2] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/mpo/2025/9/law-e...
[4] https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVIII/EU/26599/imfname...
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If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
Beautiful land and country, but they're destroying their cultures with the third world and seem to just not care about the rights of their citizens.
https://gagliardoni.net/#20250805_chatcontrol
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
isoprophlex•6h ago
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
ath3nd•6h ago
mantas•6h ago
morkalork•6h ago
Geezus_42•6h ago
thfuran•4h ago
ncr100•4h ago
Having empathy for your neighbor, and working with those whom you disagree, are precursors. This gives power.
Then using power to enact consequences for businesses and governments (the people therein), fixes the problem.
9dev•6h ago
zubspace•6h ago
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
pessimizer•6h ago
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Telemakhos•6h ago
Stevvo•5h ago
CM30•4h ago
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
KennyBlanken•6h ago
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
dlcarrier•5h ago
You could vote for a libertarian, but good luck.
r_lee•1h ago
impossiblefork•5h ago
mantas•6h ago
uncircle•6h ago
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
croes•6h ago
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
mantas•5h ago
Change like straws ban and attached caps? Such change, wow.
calvinmorrison•6h ago
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
charcircuit•6h ago
mantas•5h ago
brikym•2h ago
idiotsecant•6h ago
swayvil•5h ago
swayvil•5h ago
ncr100•4h ago
Watchlist? Easy.
Mislead? Easy.
We need to isolate this bad behavior ASAP.
brikym•2h ago