It seems that public pressure pays off.
During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.
The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.
Unfortunately it's the pyramid of Maslow. It's hard to make people care about something that seems academic when there are much more pressing political problems crushing people and making sure they don't have space to think about anything else.
It's hard to make people care about privacy principles when they can't afford a house anymore.
When informed about those plans, most people actually react with some disgust. But the European Commission was really trying to be low-key around this, and the media usually jump on loud scandals first. Too few journalists are willing to poke around in the huge undercurrent of not-very-public issues and fish for some deadly denizens there.
More publicity definitely helped the freedom's cause here.
She is not called Zensursula without a reason.
I remember all the nerds going "That's a slippery slope to blocking other stuff as well though", and being dismissed. Now we got the CUII blocking libgen, scihub, piracy sites and as I recently read on HN, russia today(that's not the cuii I'm pretty sure, but same mechanism).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz
Edit: I think I mixed it up with her game censorship [1] (which I guess also contributed to her nick name).
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/von-der-leyen-sofortp...
One possible reason seems to be lobbyism and shady connections to surveillance tech companies and various shady non-profits
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Literal "Won't anybody think of the children" moment.
Why do you think the Baltics are in favour? Are there some announcements they have made?
Looks like latin cultures don't really care about being spied on by they governments.
* There is little to no faith in our elected officials, especially from _that_ side
* Also people don't seem to care, all invested in the "i have nothing to hide" mentality
This is a map of the government's positions, not even the parliament much less the public, and therefore a picture of whatever happen to be the parties in charge at the current time.
> Primacy of European Union law
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
What this implies for the democratic values eu is supposed to represent is an interesting discussion.
Only way this can come into force in a member country is that country making their own law implementing it. It is at that point that constitutionality should be checked and the law stopped from being implemented.
See you next time.
My wild guess it will voted for with overwhelming majority using "times changed" argument.
In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls, so even political parties who would otherwise oppose it just stay silent, because the public narrative
You have to shift the narrative. Farage does this - he's finally after 20 years managed to get elected to parliament, he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens, about the same as the nationalists, yet for 20 years he has steered the conversation and got what he wants time after time
This couldn't be further from the truth.
People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing, but don't support the implementation at all.
> This couldn't be further from the truth.
> People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing
So pretty close to the truth then?
It is of course unfortunate that a big part of the population is heavily influenceable by almost anything that has some scary perspective, in whatever size, over-considering dangers to opportunities to the extremes (want to eliminate dangers, hopelessly), also can only hear what is too loud, so the real democratic conversations and resulting decisions are distorted a lot. Better focus on improving this, than put a self centered ass on the pedestal to follow!
The playbook that was overwhelmingly successful for making Brexit happen is being used again, but this time for immigration.
The fact he got elected as MP only serves to give credibility to his backers' narrative, given that he does not serve his constituency and is too busy schmoozing the US right wing. At one point in time he would have been forced to resign in disgrace for backroom dealing like this (as previous MPs have before).
The electoral system has been working against him. At the last general election Reform got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems, yet the result is that they got 5 MPs while the Lib Dems got 72.
The Brexit referendum and the current national polls that put Reform in first place at 27% (YouGov) show that they are not just "steering the conversation". When people's concerns keep being ignored at one point someone will come up to fill this "gap in the market", this is legitimate and how democracy works.
(There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against)
Once the boats are all blasted to bits or whatever, and things still don't get better, who will be the next person to blame.
To me your reply exemplifies my previous point: You dismiss those concerns. This is what happened with Brexit and this is what has been happening for a long time over immigration. This can only end badly.
> There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against
They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
Actual election results:
2010: 3%
2015: 13%. He was the only party to endorse leaving the EU in that election.
2016: (52% vote to leave the EU)
2017: retired
2019: 2%
2024: 14%
Yet his prime policy was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2019.
You don't need people to vote for you to get your policies passed. You need people to just believe in what you say, and other politicians will see that and implement them. The most successful politicians see all sides "steal their policies" and implement them. That's assuming your goal is the policy, not the power.
I'm strongly in favor of giving the parliament the ability to propose laws (directives). Currently only the comission can do that.
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
A common currency without a common fiscal policy has already proven not to work well.
The Treaties haven't changed since 2011 or so, and I don't expect any changes in the next decade at the very least.
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!
Notably ChatControl is not one of them.
The US have that. The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.
Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.
This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.
This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.
In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power and they often overstep their role... We're seeing clearly on issues like Ukraine and, lately Israel.
What specific example are you thinking of where additional power was handed to Brussels through an amendment of the treaties?
> That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power...
If you are worried about the executive trying to expand its power (and something that should be kept in check), may I suggest that the US is not actually a great example right now for how to avoid that?
On the other hand, I'm thinking can we find 9 unpaid volunteers on HN to do the same?
the "obvious" solution seems to be to make these meetings open, sure industry wants to push their thing, put it on the calendar, and let civil society delegate someone, and industry pays for that too.
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
Anything else is green washing.
Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.
Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.
> Anything else is green washing.
you mean "democracy-washing"? ;)
The world is not perfect. Striving for perfection is futile...
I'll also note that nothing here is per se undemocratic. Both the Parliament and the Council are made up of elected members. The members of the Council (as members of the national governments) are indirectly elected, but elected all the same. Direct election is not a requirement for a democracy (see election of the US president or the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment or the Senate of Canada right now).
That does not mean that there isn't plenty of valid criticism of the EU's current structure, but claiming that it is not "actually democratic" falls far short of a meaningful critique.
Over the past decade I went from a big fan to someone very troubled about the political goals of the elites.
And, having lived in Brussels, you can sorta see why they're disconnected from the “will of the people”…
And it has a major problem: There is no European public. Cultural differences ad language barrier make it hard to follow debates and issues. It is a lot simpler to follow my elected governments behavior.
Also the parliament would lose its style of working. Currently there is cooperation accross parties and a less strict "government vs opposition" than in most other parliaments, which means that MEPs actually got a vote (in the areas where the parliament matters) instead dof being whipped by party leaders.
And then: Most decision power is with the council, which is made of democratically elected governments (if we ignore the Hungary problem ...)
And every time I push a bit the answer seems to be "EU didn't follow my preferred decision". :P
I recently heard a political discussion about this topic and was disappointed by the lack of technical competency among the participants. What we're talking about here is the requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.
Why doesn't the EU put effort in paving the way for a more open and free tech world when we rely 100% on propietary technology that comes from the other side of the Atlantic?
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/08/return-of-chat-cont...
"Think of the children" will never die.
That said, how come we haven't seen massive antitrust action against the likes of Google? You only have to follow the money here.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
Article 8: Right to privacy
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
I just find it hard to imagine the right to privacy encoded in to law in a way that would block this. For instance there is a right to privacy in the US, but it's in a completely idiotic way. The 14th Amendment doesn't talk about privacy in any way, and it's some legal contortions and mental gymnastics that are upholding any right to privacy there.
That's not my questions at all. My question is, is there some good clear framework for what should and shouldn't be private. B/c otherwise it's kind of some meaningless platitude, like "everyone should be nice to each other"
Let's take international law[1]. Right to privacy is defined as protection from arbitrary interference with privacy.
Is this definition problematic? Privacy itself has a short definition too: the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public[2].
I don't see what is unclear or verbose here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#International [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
A) held in contempt of court, if the authorities do not find what they expect for some reason and accuse you of using such techniques or
B) if you specify that such behaviour by law enforcement is overreach, have a clean way out for criminals, codified in law, heavily damaging the impact you may expect of such a law.
Government is a job that self-selects for people who either want safety (non elected jobs) or power (elected jobs) more than anything else, given it pays far less than the private sector. Both the safety people and the power people want to reduce public freedom and the ability to do things.
The only way we keep these people from this is the threat of voting them out of their jobs. But they are more motivated than we are, so they usually win over time.
at the least the basic human rights and privacy laws should be on everyones' side ... except rapists, the many kinds of violent abusers, murderers, especially the genocidal kind, drug punchers, and these fuckers roofying kids in clubs and bars just to have sex ... I probably forgot some ... sorry I didn't stay on topic.
As Freud wanted to let us know, the ageing rich are perverts with enough means to hide any crime ... then they made him bend over and invent the Oedipus complex, ffs
the only way for them to create an argument for ChatControl is more terrorism or some fucked up crimes against children so this damn thing is a sure-fire shitstorm with recursive, bad yields.
[^1]: Which I think was about car companies and pre-trump, pre-disel-gate. Also not the only time where it's known that the US engaged on industry espionage against close allies or Germany specifically.
Secrecy of Correspondence[1] is something that desperately needs to be extended fully to mobile devices.
Compare how many letters you get vs how many chat messages you send.
Secrecy of (mobile) communications should be recognized as a (natural?) right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
(edit: unbreak formatting)
It's unbelievable that we have allowed EU to spread into this all encompassing monster that deals with anything but economic cooperation among member countries.
-------------------
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
If a member state fails to block a proposal, all that simply means is that the qualified majority[1] of representatives of other member states believes the legislation to be so important that the union would not work without it. Dissenting member states can seek to reverse or temper the legislation later, or simply leave the union - see Brexit. No sovereignty is violated at any point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...
> The primacy of European Union law (sometimes referred to as supremacy or precedence of European law[1]) is a legal principle of rule according to higher law establishing precedence of European Union law over conflicting national laws of EU member states.
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.[2][3][4] For the European Court of Justice, national courts and public officials must disapply a national norm that they consider not to be compliant with the EU law.
The only way that the European Union can 'force' compliance of a member state is for the EU Commission (or, exceptionally, the Parliament and Council) to withhold EU funds from that member state. Those funds were never the property of the member state in the first place though - again, no infringement on national sovereignty.
This will always be a problem at every level.
timpera•3h ago
riedel•3h ago
>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]
Edit: source [0] https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356
lukan•2h ago
"Private communication needs to stay private"
I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.
This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.
Dilettante_•2h ago
silverliver•2h ago
On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.
ACCount37•1h ago
If you as much as give the "think of the children" crowd an inch, they'll take a mile. And giving them on device scanning was way more than "an inch".
immibis•1h ago
riedel•1h ago
CjHuber•1h ago
HexPhantom•58m ago
addandsubtract•49m ago
port11•36m ago