They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
You have to, individually
- find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight.
Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?
Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.
It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.
Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.
From wiki:
> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"
It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.
Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.
Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!
Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.
The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.
Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.
And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.
And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.
I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.
I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.
In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.
Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.
So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:
- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum
- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N
- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)
- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.
- Get some useful skills.
We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.
I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.
One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.
Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.
This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.
I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and any other data collected via surveillance. This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
Peter Hummelgaard basically says yes to every new tool that the police asks for. He also is a staunch advocate of increasing punishment for every type of crime that happens to catch his attention, even in a time where our prison system is in shambles and has way too many inmates. A true authoritarian.
Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge.
Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. And, often, it was more fun to decode the signal than to watch the actual TV schedule.
What is the motivation behind this? Do you have some issue that in Denmark its deemed solvable only through that? Can you provide some context maybe? Is it like cultural thing?
> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.
I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.
Funnily enough. Those in power will commit crimes and get away with it because the same police won't point their surveillance to their bosses or influential people, because it would negatively affect their careers.
Judges will be lenient and prosecutors find ways to give them, if at all community service and an inconsequential fine for the gravest of crimes.
But hey, we absolutely need 1984 like surveillance. A cam in every home, if it's up to these schmucks.
I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to.
And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting myself: You don't speak for all of us.
'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.
The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
Pass a preemptive policing law, 10% outraged, 80% claim "If it makes me safer, I like it. I'm not a criminal after all, I don't have anything to fear."
Pass a law that codifies your nation's most popular religion as something to be promoted and enforced. 10% outraged, 80% cheer it on, because it agrees with their views.
The 80% is illustrative here, but it seems like the people who agree with the above statements are a very solid and overwhelming majority. So why it did take us so much time to creep up to deliberate censorship and surveillance? As someone who was born in the 21st century, the freedom to access and do things on the internet had only ever been on the downhill, any small wins are overwritten by inevitable losses that make things more controlled, more 'safe'.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc
Free speech is only really a thing in the US. Many in the EU love to prosecute and control speech they don't like usually with the vague and legally undefined "hate speech" knock out argument.
This link is full of the usual self-promoting priorities of politicians, and the modern "influencers" who mimic them.
1. Redirects to someone's personal-name Web site.
2. The top heading on the page is their personal name and what seems to be personal logo.
3. Immediately below that logo the navbar entry for "ABOUT ME / CONTACT".
4. The last entry in the navbar is "GET INVOLVED", and the first entry of that menu is "Follow Me".
5. The first entry in the navbar is "WELCOME" and redirects to a page with a huge photo of him, followed by a heading that starts "Patrick Breyer – Digital freedom fighter and former Member of European Parliament for the German and the European Pirate Party" subheading "Europe’s voice of privacy and the free Internet".
6. Then the page below all this has some information.
I think this is one reason that positive revolutions can't happen anymore: the potential leaders/actors see no non-corrupt role models for how to operate. It's a very fuzzy line between self-promotion in service of the mission somehow, and self-promotion in service of power/influence for its own sake.
It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
It's actually scamier than that. They only propose if they know they have enough votes to win. Last time they withdrew when they realized they would lose.
For those who don't know how the EU works - the European Parliament (that can't introduce or repeal laws) is the actually voted in body, and the European Commission (who has the actual control) is appointed by member states but since it is several steps detached from democratic process, it (surprise surprise) often acts anti-democratically...
Yes, there is no stopping it with the current structure and tools. They will push until the people give in. Best to prepare for it's existence and figure out how to use the good old sneaker-net.
But they will keep trying to introduce it until they think they can win a vote. They keep trying to sneak it through and hope the public will either get too tired to keep fighting or can be distracted by other issues.
More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.
I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
Specifically the road to hell (as the saying goes).
It seems to be a problem with the whole 'Western' world - we're all on way with increasing authoritarianism and our leaders wanting to create police states...
I was expecting to find a big CTA button that I could click to sign some message to my representatives. Instead I found a giant wall of text with "ideas on how to take action" followed by a list of points along the lines of "Is your government in favour? Ask for an explanation" OK, ask how? No links, no email addresses... basically it's just a page saying "if you care about this thing do your own homework and find a way to act"
Whoever made that page needs to look into the concept of conversion rate. As it is right now it's basically useless
Argh, red and green colors are not great for accessibility, I had to look hard to find the countries that were opposed/neutral (Poland, Austria and Netherlands, afaict)
NL should be because, at least so far, they've been listening to the experts (many who are ex-colleagues & friends of mine). We have elections later in the year and that can change (although they're looking positive so far).
Note to poster if they happen to see this: as pointed out there's alt text... But it's plain wrong, saying "Countries like Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and the Netherlands are in green, indicating opposition or neutrality" when only the Netherlands, Poland an Austria are opposed; it's probably just been copied from an older version and could use updating.
I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time.
Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .
> What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis
In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway
It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS:
2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08
I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.
If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.
The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?
Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.
He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).
The far right in France doesn’t want ChatControl. In fact I think only the soft left, middle and soft right want ChatControl (and it is not even a consensus for among these groups).
The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.
i know it's included in the toot, but it feels like this thread should have the link to the act now site: https://chatcontrol.eu/
"The EU Commission proposes... ...Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence... ...network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world..."
Aside from the infamous privacy aspects, I'm wondering about the feasibility and the energy cost of running continously ML algos to scan content on a phone.
Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.
Ironically, one comment a legislator made was: if you can quantify the carbon cost of this proposal, they’re much more likely to take it seriously than any arguments about privacy.
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia?
Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!
> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
> It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of that power back is by not participating in their laws - self hosting, use services outside of the jurisdictions where backdoors are mandatory, educating and helping others do the same.
Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.
When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
Nothing can stop the ratchet like progress clamping down on information control. These policies have been war gammed by think tanks decades in advance. The enemy is vast and deep with the control of nearly every nation-state on earth.
The overwhelming majority will be swept into a Neo-Dark Ages where truth is locked away and Dogma rules supreme. For a time the lockdown will be universal and complete but after the system is in place for a time I believe people will find a solution and break off the shackles.
There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.
If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?
You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.
The CSS in the proposal is implemented on an app level, like Whatsapp or Signal does the detection before sending the encrypted message, not at the OS level.
If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.
Same if you encrypt your message and post it in Whatsapp.
Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Easier than asking everyone you know to use GPG
It's not a solution if it passes with "Client-side scanning". Basically a AI bot watching your screen all day.
You're gonna need a whole secure deviant device.
It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.
Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.
If that passes it's over for the european internet, IMO. I would just shut off all personal online devices completely and go banking and work only on a cheap Xiaomi
Technically minded people and criminals will know how to use this technology. The general innocent population will be surveilled. This law is useless at fighting the objective at protecting the children.
Because politicians are not accountable to you and are paid for by lobbyists.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a UK/US only problem. The EU nanny statism isn't a good thing nor is the loss of sovereignty associated with it.
But hey, the left right binary choice strawman made it so that people basically pushed for more gov power no matter what and now it's too late to stop the inertia.
The next time you need to vote against accumulation of power they'll scare you again with extremists, terrorists, drug dealers, children safety, disinformation (which is basically calling for suppression of freespeech and criminalization of wrongthink), etc.
If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.
The thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that some of the worst of worst intolerant discourse is going to be allowed and protected because it's "religious": because we are open, tolerant, societies we are tolerant with intolerance.
If you have a holy book that calls for killing non-believers and taking their wive and daughters as sex slaves: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.
It's shooting the messenger.
Guess what's one of the issue concerning many people in a great many european cities at the moment? People feeling that religious extremism and obscurantism, middle-age style, is making a comeback.
And people are organizing marches all over the EU.
The last thing the EU wants is people on social media organizing themselves and protesting because they don't want the EU to become the next Syria or Somalia: most in the EU do not want the EU to become an intolerant continent.
You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.
It's really sad: I already moved three times, lived over four different countries (all in the EU) and now I'm planning to leave the EU while I still can (not that there are that many great places where I can realistically go).
P.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
Really, we're not allowed to agree with some of the EU's ideas but disagree with others? You demand that we take every policy proposal from the EU as part of a single coherent political philosophy?
If you give the EU a lot of power, which some people in HN are in favour of, they will use it for good and bad. I’d rather they have no power and live without the good things. Those who celebrate the good things are too ignorant to realise that the power they use to do good things will eventually be used to do bad things.
I am not familiar with the charging port debate, but enforcing apps to be open to other developers and prevent addiction and be accessible by people with disabilities are all good things.
However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good.
EU can make good laws, and sometimes EU can make bad laws..,
I think the broader point here is that regulation is a double-edged sword. There's an argument to be made that a body which has the power to impose a particular charging port on your phone also has the power to impose what it would view as 'common sense' chat control and CSAM scanning.
Europe went from many years of regulating cell phones to mostly ensure they don't cause interference or spontaneously combust, to fairly rapidly achieving a normalized position of regulating ports, app stores, and software. (I suppose another way of looking at it is that the EU didn't seem to much mind when Nokia dictated most everyone's charging ports.)
I'm not taking a position on one side or the other on the above, there are compelling arguments for and against both, and millennia of political philosophy has attempted to grapple with the issue of how much power the people should permit the state to have, what those checks and balances should be, and how they should be enforced. Some will reliably naively assert we should only permit well-informed, well-intentioned, good-hearted people to enter into positions of power, but we've seen that play out too many times for it to be considered a viable assumption.
So a discussion worth having is whether existing constraints apply, and if not, what hard constraints can be placed on regulators to limit them from acts like this? We've normalized their ability to regulate the device industry to this degree, and they're overstepping. Does Title II Article 7 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union prevent this? Or is a new solution needed?
Your comment history seems peppered with similar low-effort comments about Europe.
As a European, I have some strong opinions about the state of your country at the moment. Opinions shared by quite a large proportion of your own population actually.
But I manage to refrain from regularly and flippantly insulting entire continents and maintain some self awareness that we all have our own problems.
Doesn't take much effort to point out the truth. And it won't matter that much. When you've inevitably created your next crisis I guess we'll just have to come save you again.
With freedom we will fix our issues. But you guys always cheer as you go through one way doors.
American exceptionalism, US is already more authoritarian than the EU by a wide margin, maybe try to get rid of the "barbarians" you already have in your country before pretending to help others.
They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
Same for any legislation piece.
A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.
Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.
And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.
It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.
"In vain do we fly to the many"...
The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight. Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?
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This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.
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Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.
It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
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Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?
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A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...
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“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”.
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.
Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.
From wiki:
> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"
Campaign donations, per this website:
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
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> It's just the power structure of any representative legislature...
... Under capitalism.
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.
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A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
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Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
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This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.
There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en
You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/
All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space
(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.
Yes, like the Soviet Union.
Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.
https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...
Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.
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Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...
Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
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Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!
Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.
The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.
And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.
"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
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This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.
This is the relevant petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903. The government's response so far is "lol no"
The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.
Why would the politician in question give a shit what you think? They get into office mostly by funding which comes from… guess who?
> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.
1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.
There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.
On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.
So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.
The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.
Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.
And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.
And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.
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I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.
I don’t think people are particularly against this. The kids are imploding and people dont care about a completely open internet as much.
I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.
In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.
Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.
So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:
- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum
- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N
- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)
- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.
- Get some useful skills.
We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.
I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.
One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.
Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.
It's equally difficult to support it, no?
This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.
> an educated populace
Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.
Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025:
Original:
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
Translated to English:
https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...
I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and any other data collected via surveillance. This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
Peter Hummelgaard basically says yes to every new tool that the police asks for. He also is a staunch advocate of increasing punishment for every type of crime that happens to catch his attention, even in a time where our prison system is in shambles and has way too many inmates. A true authoritarian.
Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge.
Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. And, often, it was more fun to decode the signal than to watch the actual TV schedule.
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What is the motivation behind this? Do you have some issue that in Denmark its deemed solvable only through that? Can you provide some context maybe? Is it like cultural thing?
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> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.
I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.
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Funnily enough. Those in power will commit crimes and get away with it because the same police won't point their surveillance to their bosses or influential people, because it would negatively affect their careers.
Judges will be lenient and prosecutors find ways to give them, if at all community service and an inconsequential fine for the gravest of crimes.
But hey, we absolutely need 1984 like surveillance. A cam in every home, if it's up to these schmucks.
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I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to.
And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting myself: You don't speak for all of us.
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'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
I don't like pizza and hot dogs anyway
Entire world seems to be making a pivot to surveillance state :(
The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
Pass a preemptive policing law, 10% outraged, 80% claim "If it makes me safer, I like it. I'm not a criminal after all, I don't have anything to fear."
Pass a law that codifies your nation's most popular religion as something to be promoted and enforced. 10% outraged, 80% cheer it on, because it agrees with their views.
The 80% is illustrative here, but it seems like the people who agree with the above statements are a very solid and overwhelming majority. So why it did take us so much time to creep up to deliberate censorship and surveillance? As someone who was born in the 21st century, the freedom to access and do things on the internet had only ever been on the downhill, any small wins are overwritten by inevitable losses that make things more controlled, more 'safe'.
By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government.
Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations.
If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.
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> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
Simple:
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
written 9 March 1993
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
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Was it really the internet that killed third places?
Among all candidates, it seems the least likely here. It didn't even happen at the same speed the internet grew.
(The issues with monopolized editorial powers are still valid, it's just this one that I think is wrong.)
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My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long
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China has shown the world the way and most countries likes it.
No, people don't like this.
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lmao, like every other major power has been a bastion of free speech until China came up. McCarthyism, what? Politkovskaya, who?
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They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
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And there is no non-violent solution
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc
I wonder how much support it would have if it was called "Speech Control" instead. Probably still a depressing percentage...
It has been given the name "Chat Control" by its detractors, no?
Yeah, it's real name is CSAR.
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Free speech is only really a thing in the US. Many in the EU love to prosecute and control speech they don't like usually with the vague and legally undefined "hate speech" knock out argument.
How much support does it have anyway? Outside of Parliament, I mean.
Full post:
Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!
The vote is THIS October.
Tell your government to #StopChatControl!
Act now: https://chatcontrol.eu
That website is pretty bad. Don't say "act now" with a link when the link has no concrete actions listed.
"Ask your government not to do that" means absolutely nothing.
There should be a list of what people should do step by step based on their country.
This link is full of the usual self-promoting priorities of politicians, and the modern "influencers" who mimic them.
1. Redirects to someone's personal-name Web site.
2. The top heading on the page is their personal name and what seems to be personal logo.
3. Immediately below that logo the navbar entry for "ABOUT ME / CONTACT".
4. The last entry in the navbar is "GET INVOLVED", and the first entry of that menu is "Follow Me".
5. The first entry in the navbar is "WELCOME" and redirects to a page with a huge photo of him, followed by a heading that starts "Patrick Breyer – Digital freedom fighter and former Member of European Parliament for the German and the European Pirate Party" subheading "Europe’s voice of privacy and the free Internet".
6. Then the page below all this has some information.
I think this is one reason that positive revolutions can't happen anymore: the potential leaders/actors see no non-corrupt role models for how to operate. It's a very fuzzy line between self-promotion in service of the mission somehow, and self-promotion in service of power/influence for its own sake.
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With the way the world is I wouldn't be suppressed if it's been infiltrated and is controlled opposition designed to fail.
The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
Are they going to vote on that every year until it passes?
It's actually scamier than that. They only propose if they know they have enough votes to win. Last time they withdrew when they realized they would lose.
Yes, and when it does that's it, forever. Because the EU """parliament""" cannot propose laws, meaning it cannot repeal existing laws either.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher: you have to be lucky every time, we just have to be lucky once.
For those who don't know how the EU works - the European Parliament (that can't introduce or repeal laws) is the actually voted in body, and the European Commission (who has the actual control) is appointed by member states but since it is several steps detached from democratic process, it (surprise surprise) often acts anti-democratically...
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Yes, there is no stopping it with the current structure and tools. They will push until the people give in. Best to prepare for it's existence and figure out how to use the good old sneaker-net.
No, the reason there's an article like this every 6 months is very specifically that it never gets to a vote
But they will keep trying to introduce it until they think they can win a vote. They keep trying to sneak it through and hope the public will either get too tired to keep fighting or can be distracted by other issues.
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More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.
I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
Hell is paved with good intentions.
Specifically the road to hell (as the saying goes).
It seems to be a problem with the whole 'Western' world - we're all on way with increasing authoritarianism and our leaders wanting to create police states...
I followed the link to that .eu website which then redirected me to https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
I was expecting to find a big CTA button that I could click to sign some message to my representatives. Instead I found a giant wall of text with "ideas on how to take action" followed by a list of points along the lines of "Is your government in favour? Ask for an explanation" OK, ask how? No links, no email addresses... basically it's just a page saying "if you care about this thing do your own homework and find a way to act"
Whoever made that page needs to look into the concept of conversion rate. As it is right now it's basically useless
On the other hand, templated mass emails to representatives get filtered out.
Argh, red and green colors are not great for accessibility, I had to look hard to find the countries that were opposed/neutral (Poland, Austria and Netherlands, afaict)
NL should be because, at least so far, they've been listening to the experts (many who are ex-colleagues & friends of mine). We have elections later in the year and that can change (although they're looking positive so far).
Note to poster if they happen to see this: as pointed out there's alt text... But it's plain wrong, saying "Countries like Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and the Netherlands are in green, indicating opposition or neutrality" when only the Netherlands, Poland an Austria are opposed; it's probably just been copied from an older version and could use updating.
It's jarring seeing these proposals after which we like to brag about being better than China on digital rights.
The sad truth is that it's so much easier, cheaper and faster to have these laws than actually doing "police" work.
I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time. Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
Is it clearly against the constitution?
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .
> What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis
In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway
It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS: 2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08 I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.
If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.
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the UK essentially does not have a constitution nor any significant judicial authority over lawmaking
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> Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
tldr: A US based surveillance company called Thorn has been lobbying for this for years.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Chat control & Kutcher: Ombudsman criticizes secrecy https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-Kutcher-Ombudsman-...
A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.
The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
> It's against the German constitution
No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.
I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?
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Just saying "It's unconstitutional" doesn't really cut it. It's a question for the courts to decide (based on the constitution).
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Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.
He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).
The far right in France doesn’t want ChatControl. In fact I think only the soft left, middle and soft right want ChatControl (and it is not even a consensus for among these groups).
The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.
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i know it's included in the toot, but it feels like this thread should have the link to the act now site: https://chatcontrol.eu/
"The EU Commission proposes... ...Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence... ...network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world..."
Aside from the infamous privacy aspects, I'm wondering about the feasibility and the energy cost of running continously ML algos to scan content on a phone.
Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.
Ironically, one comment a legislator made was: if you can quantify the carbon cost of this proposal, they’re much more likely to take it seriously than any arguments about privacy.
Dont worry about it, the house of cards will be propped up with those truck-trailer-nuke-reactors.
Only charging your phones if you have 3+ AI subscriptions and comply with all anti encryption laws of course
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia?
Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!
> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
> It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of that power back is by not participating in their laws - self hosting, use services outside of the jurisdictions where backdoors are mandatory, educating and helping others do the same.
Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.
When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
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Nothing can stop the ratchet like progress clamping down on information control. These policies have been war gammed by think tanks decades in advance. The enemy is vast and deep with the control of nearly every nation-state on earth.
The overwhelming majority will be swept into a Neo-Dark Ages where truth is locked away and Dogma rules supreme. For a time the lockdown will be universal and complete but after the system is in place for a time I believe people will find a solution and break off the shackles.
There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.
If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?
You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.
It doesn't matter what you use. It is your device that will be doing the snooping - i.e. client-side scanning
The CSS in the proposal is implemented on an app level, like Whatsapp or Signal does the detection before sending the encrypted message, not at the OS level.
If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.
Same if you encrypt your message and post it in Whatsapp.
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Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Easier than asking everyone you know to use GPG
It's not a solution if it passes with "Client-side scanning". Basically a AI bot watching your screen all day. You're gonna need a whole secure deviant device.
That is not what the law is about.
It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.
Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.
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Matrix like most decentralized services make it possible to choose the client app. Just pick one outside of EU jurisdiction.
If that passes it's over for the european internet, IMO. I would just shut off all personal online devices completely and go banking and work only on a cheap Xiaomi
Technically minded people and criminals will know how to use this technology. The general innocent population will be surveilled. This law is useless at fighting the objective at protecting the children.
Who would have thought?!
Because politicians are not accountable to you and are paid for by lobbyists.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a UK/US only problem. The EU nanny statism isn't a good thing nor is the loss of sovereignty associated with it.
But hey, the left right binary choice strawman made it so that people basically pushed for more gov power no matter what and now it's too late to stop the inertia.
The next time you need to vote against accumulation of power they'll scare you again with extremists, terrorists, drug dealers, children safety, disinformation (which is basically calling for suppression of freespeech and criminalization of wrongthink), etc.
If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
saying no to AI is a great way to become the third world
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Karl Popper, "The open society and its enemies":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It's all about the paradox of tolerance.
That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.
The thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that some of the worst of worst intolerant discourse is going to be allowed and protected because it's "religious": because we are open, tolerant, societies we are tolerant with intolerance.
If you have a holy book that calls for killing non-believers and taking their wive and daughters as sex slaves: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.
It's shooting the messenger.
Guess what's one of the issue concerning many people in a great many european cities at the moment? People feeling that religious extremism and obscurantism, middle-age style, is making a comeback.
And people are organizing marches all over the EU.
The last thing the EU wants is people on social media organizing themselves and protesting because they don't want the EU to become the next Syria or Somalia: most in the EU do not want the EU to become an intolerant continent.
You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.
It's really sad: I already moved three times, lived over four different countries (all in the EU) and now I'm planning to leave the EU while I still can (not that there are that many great places where I can realistically go).
P.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
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Really, we're not allowed to agree with some of the EU's ideas but disagree with others? You demand that we take every policy proposal from the EU as part of a single coherent political philosophy?
If you give the EU a lot of power, which some people in HN are in favour of, they will use it for good and bad. I’d rather they have no power and live without the good things. Those who celebrate the good things are too ignorant to realise that the power they use to do good things will eventually be used to do bad things.
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Some legislation good, some legislation bad.
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I am not familiar with the charging port debate, but enforcing apps to be open to other developers and prevent addiction and be accessible by people with disabilities are all good things.
However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good.
EU can make good laws, and sometimes EU can make bad laws..,
I think the broader point here is that regulation is a double-edged sword. There's an argument to be made that a body which has the power to impose a particular charging port on your phone also has the power to impose what it would view as 'common sense' chat control and CSAM scanning.
Europe went from many years of regulating cell phones to mostly ensure they don't cause interference or spontaneously combust, to fairly rapidly achieving a normalized position of regulating ports, app stores, and software. (I suppose another way of looking at it is that the EU didn't seem to much mind when Nokia dictated most everyone's charging ports.)
I'm not taking a position on one side or the other on the above, there are compelling arguments for and against both, and millennia of political philosophy has attempted to grapple with the issue of how much power the people should permit the state to have, what those checks and balances should be, and how they should be enforced. Some will reliably naively assert we should only permit well-informed, well-intentioned, good-hearted people to enter into positions of power, but we've seen that play out too many times for it to be considered a viable assumption.
So a discussion worth having is whether existing constraints apply, and if not, what hard constraints can be placed on regulators to limit them from acts like this? We've normalized their ability to regulate the device industry to this degree, and they're overstepping. Does Title II Article 7 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union prevent this? Or is a new solution needed?
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The main lobbying group behind the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Chat control & Kutcher: Ombudsman criticizes secrecy https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-Kutcher-Ombudsman-...
Your comment history seems peppered with similar low-effort comments about Europe.
As a European, I have some strong opinions about the state of your country at the moment. Opinions shared by quite a large proportion of your own population actually.
But I manage to refrain from regularly and flippantly insulting entire continents and maintain some self awareness that we all have our own problems.
I’d strongly encourage you to do the same.
Doesn't take much effort to point out the truth. And it won't matter that much. When you've inevitably created your next crisis I guess we'll just have to come save you again.
With freedom we will fix our issues. But you guys always cheer as you go through one way doors.
American exceptionalism, US is already more authoritarian than the EU by a wide margin, maybe try to get rid of the "barbarians" you already have in your country before pretending to help others.
Aw, Jeez, not this shit again.
ChatControl!--because Orwell was a rabble-rousing fool