That has been going on for decades, actually. What has changed is that people are looking at it.

The Patriot Act isn't on equal footing as these Chat Control-esque laws we're seeing. The US government spies on people, sure, but they're not mandating encryption backdoors or trying to outlaw VPNs.

There's also lobbying from "security" companies who are pressuring governments to purchase and install their systems, but they require realtime spying of everyone.

With recent AI advancements, an orwellian hell is all but inevitable. If you (by which i mean the powers that be not you specifically) don't build it then some competing faction will and they'll be in control of it. Its the classic prisoner dilemma.

Governments are never perfect. They are always in a precarious position where they can turn quite harsh quite quickly. I can't speak to each EU nations politics but things have been turning towards the right for a while and they are finally in positions where they can make these demands and get them passed.

It’s a win-win for the politicians and the pensioners that vote them, that believe any nonsense about children safety.

Something I realized recently is how low the approval ratings of European leaders are:

- Macron and Starmer are about 18%

- Mertz is 25% (only 6 months in)

- Von Leyen is 23%

This is ridiculous.

We often perceive Trump as highly unpopular but he is cruising between 40 and 50%, that's double.

So those leaders, according to the numbers, are becoming illegitimate or the system is broken. So we are just waiting for a spark to put the house on fire.

Mass surveillance within your territory is really a weapon against your own population, it is not to catch spies (they are trained to evade them).

Because they look at what happened US, at the rise of popularity of fascism throughout the world (which is mostly perpetuated by key media players under the mask of being "anti-woke"), and basically decide that the people can no longer be trusted.

And they are fully correct.

Ive said this before on here, but the whole idea of privacy from surveillance is not applicable anymore in todays world.

The standard line of arguing is that people should be able to speak the truth free from government knowing about it and trying to silence them. The problem with this

* Most of the "truth" that these people refer to has been literally false propaganda, or ability to say slurs on social media.

* Despite that fact, not a single public media person speaking these lies has been silenced in any way by the government, despite things like patriot act existing in US or equivalent things in EU. The only time people have been silenced in places like UK is when posting extremely out of pocket stuff.

Furthermore people also say that you don't want to give the government the power to do this now because a government that you may not like will want to do this. Well, to no one surprise, the people with this libertarian mindset (and the so called "centrists") overwhelmingly vote right wing, and consequently, right wing runs on a platform of freedom, but when those people get in power, they not only actively tries to silence actual truth and free speech, but also they just don't give a fuck about the law and do what they want anyways.

So as unfortunate as it is, its a much better outcome for the current state of administration in EU to take a more invasive role in policing the populace, because economic growth and stability over long term is worth way more than some idealistic approach based on above. Historically this has shown to be true over and over again, while the latter has shown to result in economic decline. So its wortwhile to sacrifice some personal rights in return for a better future - we already do this to a large extent so this is nothing new.

In terms of applicability to the regular person, please understand that the privacy ship for you has already long sailed. You already can be tracked and analyzed in extreme detail, by really any person or company that is willing to buy advertising data and do correlation. There are companies that literally do this and contract out to the government. Also, you aren't that important enough to care about.

You can publicly list in exchanges despite not being domiciled in the exchange's host country.

For example, Chinese and EU domiciled companies IPOing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) due to a mix of easier access to liquidity and simplified rules and regulations.

Except the metadata I guess.

I've always seen Proton benefits as a moot point because it's not E2E to the other side. You can encrypt all you want but as soon as you actually communicate with anyone (this is the email after all) you are now give all your messages to a third party often times without any encryption at all.

They should be policing their social media heavily.