Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
Well, the impression of speed is mainly in the head of the headline writers.
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
> Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
While I agree with your point, it's still crucial to raise awareness of Europe's actions. It may be a small step, but it is not insignificant.
Saying "forced" about this is like if someone offered me a job, me reading the offer and saying "can I do a 4-day week?", the company's response being "yes, here's a new contract for you to sign", and describing that second contract as "forced" on me.
TFA mentions "european governments" but this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission or the union. In short it tries to depict a group of old farts as an overreaching snooping authority.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
> this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission
Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.
"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.
The issue is not with the lack of understanding of "process". But sheer frustration because there's nothing you can do as just a citizen. An unelected council of !notAyatollah has decided, and this thing is being pushed at glacier slow pace.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
For democracy and government [1] to work it has to remain small and localised. The US had the right idea by expressly limiting the reach of the federal government to very explicit narrow things mentioned in the constitution (of course this was expanded by unconstitutional means over many governments over many years now but that is getting off topic).
The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.
[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.
I think you misunderstood his post. It's generally un-British to suggest the UK is better in any regard whatsoever. I've no doubt he thinks the UK is just as bad if not worse but in different ways.
In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029.
In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:
Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice
The UK keeps a register of non-crime hate incidents and invests its scarce police resources into harassing, arresting and punishing people for twitter posts.
And also: silently praying in public near an abortion center. The lady in question should have asked the policeman (as he was) "How would you define praying?". At least he'd maybe have paused for an interesting short discussion on semantics and more before for arresting her - as he did.
https://youtu.be/wXURFRSUS9U
Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
The EU Parliament, that has to vote to pass the law. Let's be better at commenting than Libertatea, circa 2010 (or The Daily Mail, for international readers).
How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents?
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
It's important to know that the "new" in the title is entirely made up, it's the same draft as last week when they just ran out of time at the meeting, probably because they were fighting about Ukraine stuff.
They've optimized the packaging away. What's left of it now is a recycled paper tag that reads "because", and then if you scrutinize it further, there is poorly printed, barely readable "we're fascists".
This is "Red Queen" concept, constant battle between society and state (Leviathan).
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
Hard to maintain a balance when the State, by definition, has monopoly over violence, and State interests have the propaganda machine of mass-media on their side; the media with their pathetic justification that "we're only reporting the news!" just repeat and perpetuate bullshit rhetoric.
The real problem is that the State tends to grow like a cancer. When it gets to a point that it lords over tens or hundreds of millions of souls, it's already impossible to control and contain.
The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
I wonder how aware they are of the damage to the EU's reputation that they're continually creating by repeatedly bringing this back
I think this theme of the EU, this lack of taboo against continually bringing unwanted laws until they pass by fatigue, it may well be the death of the institution as a whole. every time they try, every time people hear about it, more and more think worse of the EU, and unlike most western governments, the existence and function of the EU is actually severely vulnerable to what people think of it. no other major government takes as much reputational damage from laws that don't even pass, and the existence of no other major government is as vulnerable to reputational damage as the EU is right now. all it takes is another 1 or 2 major exits and the whole thing will slowly collapse, which is insanely sad
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
After reflecting on this a bit earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion; Palantir and maybe other like minded lobbying clueless politicians. It is a considerable weakness in the way laws are formed and voted on.
I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.
My conspiracy theory is because they’d probably give a lot of contracts to Palantir (see the UK giving NHS to Palantir on a silver platter), and the US basically threatening to annex Greenland recently
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
This is the same way the law in many EU countries mandates ISPs to store communication logs for every internet subscriber for months or longer.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks
Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.
This achieves every goal the original proposal achieved, except the wording is sneakier.
Services are obligated to do risk analysis and take appropriate safety precautions against high risk actions. High risk actions include "anonymous accounts", "uploading media", and of course "encrypted messages".
The moment they catch the next random pedo, every messenger app on their phone will be tasked with explaining why they didn't do enough to stop the pedo. They'd better get their business together next time, because otherwise they might be held liable!
There's no law that says you have to hand over arbitrary data to the police without a warrant but when Telegrams shady owner landed in france, he was locked up until his company pledged to "work together with police better".
Don't be fooled by pretty words, none of this optional stuff is optional for any messenger the government doesn't already have the ability to read along with.
At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen.
All maybe they will not and EU will block signal.
Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake.
We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid.
But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
this is basically how Chinese social media works - liability for 'problematic' user posted content (ambiguously defined by the govt...) is on the technology platforms themselves, so they inevitably have to scan messages / posts, taking a zero risk policy on whatever content type is proscribed.
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
Selfishly, part of me hopes this passes, because it will drive high-IQ people to move out of the EU (I highly recommend Armenia), and the EU is a major economic competitor of my own country.
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
Suddenly it has become normal to scan face in 3D, nonchalantly demand copy of ID and passport, freeze people's money and demand full financial statement arbitrarily. Not only there is no push back but things are becoming more and more restrictive.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.
If you look up comments on fintechs, trading platforms, and even legit banks on reddit and review websites there has been surge of these practices in last maybe 12 months. Basically "all savings and accumulated funds are illegal by default". In the past I only had heard horror stories about Paypal but now this it widespread.
Considering that in concert with all of the above a device has been developed that emulates human speech more convincingly than most humans, I guess it's pretty obvious
Thank you ChrisArchitect. That story was mysteriously (downranked/downmodded/deranked/downweighted) from the front page.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
Note how they exclude themselves. No privacy for the you only for them. We will all become lawbreakers in the near future as the voluntary aspect is enforced.
Step 1: Allow reckless immigration
Step 2: Terrorism and Insecurity obviously
Step 3: People give up their privacy for security
Step 4: Insecurity continues and government safe regardless
What is also funny is that they are doing that at the same time that they are thinking about relaxing requirements on GDPR and things like that that are really beneficial to the citizens on the pretext to make the regulation easier for "innovation".
I have this feeling that I can’t shake off that this is done as the EU political class’ coping mechanism for being absolutely terrified because their whole worldview was shattered overnight:
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
Don't forget the lobbying. Behind every authoritarian move are a group of companies lobbying for these changes. When you work for law and order, there are only so many customers you can sign, so signing new services is the most reliable way to accomplish growth.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's baffling from our perspective, but perhaps not so much if you try to look at it the mindset of its proponents.
It's been sold as "for the children". A very substantial proportion of the population are natural authoritarians, and this is red meat for them. Never mind that "the children" that they profess to be protecting are going to grow up living in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state, this is what authoritarians want for our future, and they see it as not only morally good, but any opposition to it as indefensible.
> The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top.
Dumb and greedy voters, traditional and social media, and electoral interference are known reasons. But it's also a matter of compromise: you vote for a party because you agree with a bunch of their points, but almost certainly not all. Topics like privacy are ignored by the general public, so politicians are hardly held accountable for them.
Some countries have more faith in their institutions than others. Countries with good and reliable institutions, comparatively at least, are easier to convince this won't be abused and is for the greater good. I'm not surprised the Danes have found a faction to support this bullshit.
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
This is such a weird sentiment and I see it often when talking about EU politics. Is this just how the European constituency feels? Just like beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about and no control over?
But going off what I said, I acknowledged this sort of legislation is bad and that a right to privacy is needed. How do you arrive at "beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about"?
All I did was point out the reality right now, even without this legislation.
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive.
Also it is not just in Europe —
digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
Why is this even surprising? Mass surveillance is not a new thing. It's been there since the inception of the internet. This only makes it "official" and is nothing more than a formality. We need to fight back by using decentralized and p2p software
It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information.
It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
What is untrue? You need to verify your identity with Persona to use GPT-5 or GPT 5.1 or a lot of other models.
"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."
I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about
> I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe.
I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that.
It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists.
Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you just send them to Brussels and only need to convince 15 countries to agree to something for it to be approved.
We basically made the system easier to game. And now we are paying the price.
As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:
* Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
* The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
* The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
* That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
* If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
* If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
* This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.
Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Europe is no longer a place that should be considered ideologically compatible with the United States. At best neutral. The US should abandon NATO and downgrade relations with the continent.
It's all relying on US tech and there is strong lobbying coming from the US for such solution. US has already deployed mass surveillance, major difference is they did it without telling citizens.
Obviously you dont know anything about Europe.
In the 90's there was a huge migration of Polish people and you know where they migrated mostly? Spain (and Italy). And you know what?, most of my friends during that moment were from Poland (incredible good and educated people to be honest)
Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
Well, the impression of speed is mainly in the head of the headline writers.
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
> Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
While I agree with your point, it's still crucial to raise awareness of Europe's actions. It may be a small step, but it is not insignificant.
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That's generally how the EU works, they forced Ireland to hold another referenda after the first one rejected the Lisbon treaty
The Irish people demanded concessions, got them.
Saying "forced" about this is like if someone offered me a job, me reading the offer and saying "can I do a 4-day week?", the company's response being "yes, here's a new contract for you to sign", and describing that second contract as "forced" on me.
TFA mentions "european governments" but this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission or the union. In short it tries to depict a group of old farts as an overreaching snooping authority.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
> this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission
Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hummelgaard
This legislation is not proposed by members of parliament, only the commission can draft legislation, the parliament can only approve it.
Are you saying that a neutral observer would not see this as repressive?
"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
Wrong Council, this is about the Council of the European Union (yes the naming is terrible).
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
The process is many things but quick it is not
This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.
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The issue is not with the lack of understanding of "process". But sheer frustration because there's nothing you can do as just a citizen. An unelected council of !notAyatollah has decided, and this thing is being pushed at glacier slow pace.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
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> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works
Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
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If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
For democracy and government [1] to work it has to remain small and localised. The US had the right idea by expressly limiting the reach of the federal government to very explicit narrow things mentioned in the constitution (of course this was expanded by unconstitutional means over many governments over many years now but that is getting off topic).
The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.
[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.
You are a fool if you think the UK is better. I've moved from the EU to the UK and it is worse in every way when it comes to authoritarian measures.
I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.
I think you misunderstood his post. It's generally un-British to suggest the UK is better in any regard whatsoever. I've no doubt he thinks the UK is just as bad if not worse but in different ways.
The UK is perhaps less competent at it's authoritarianism
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I think he meant that as "I live in the UK where this is already bad, yet the EU still ended up worse.".
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I’m not sure how you got there unless you were ready for an argument already.
In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029.
In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
https://www.ft.com/content/886ee83a-02ab-48b6-b557-857a38f30...
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That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice
Power sharing is very rare in the UK. What is more common is a party with a large majority with lots of infighting between factions of their party
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> passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
It did not pass.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand how the system works.
The EU parliament still would have to approve this for it to become legislation.
This is akin to a national government proposing a law, and the congress having to vote for it.
The UK keeps a register of non-crime hate incidents and invests its scarce police resources into harassing, arresting and punishing people for twitter posts.
And also: silently praying in public near an abortion center. The lady in question should have asked the policeman (as he was) "How would you define praying?". At least he'd maybe have paused for an interesting short discussion on semantics and more before for arresting her - as he did. https://youtu.be/wXURFRSUS9U
Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
That might well change:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kn54vj55xo.amp
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Because that's what autocracies in anything but name usually do. Who's going to stop them?
The EU is more of a bureaucracy than a real autocracy. Lots of members with veto powers and the like.
There is a lot wrong with the EU (the system). Opaque power structures, backroom deals, corruption. But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
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The EU Parliament, that has to vote to pass the law. Let's be better at commenting than Libertatea, circa 2010 (or The Daily Mail, for international readers).
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How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents?
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
It's important to know that the "new" in the title is entirely made up, it's the same draft as last week when they just ran out of time at the meeting, probably because they were fighting about Ukraine stuff.
> Child porn?
This, the article says so in the first paragraph. The bullshit justification hasn't change in the last couple of years afaik.
Why change what works?
Well, historically "Won't someone think of the children!" has been the most successful, so they're using that here too.
They've optimized the packaging away. What's left of it now is a recycled paper tag that reads "because", and then if you scrutinize it further, there is poorly printed, barely readable "we're fascists".
Seems to me this is a kind of advanced persistent threat.
You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.
This is "Red Queen" concept, constant battle between society and state (Leviathan).
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/narrow-corridor-acemoglu-liberty-0...
Hard to maintain a balance when the State, by definition, has monopoly over violence, and State interests have the propaganda machine of mass-media on their side; the media with their pathetic justification that "we're only reporting the news!" just repeat and perpetuate bullshit rhetoric.
The real problem is that the State tends to grow like a cancer. When it gets to a point that it lords over tens or hundreds of millions of souls, it's already impossible to control and contain.
The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
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States are responsible for orders of magnitude more innocent human deaths than every "terrorist" group in human history combined.
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What alternative do you propose?
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why are specifically the Danish so obsessed with pushing this through? it always seems to come back to them
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
I wonder how aware they are of the damage to the EU's reputation that they're continually creating by repeatedly bringing this back
I think this theme of the EU, this lack of taboo against continually bringing unwanted laws until they pass by fatigue, it may well be the death of the institution as a whole. every time they try, every time people hear about it, more and more think worse of the EU, and unlike most western governments, the existence and function of the EU is actually severely vulnerable to what people think of it. no other major government takes as much reputational damage from laws that don't even pass, and the existence of no other major government is as vulnerable to reputational damage as the EU is right now. all it takes is another 1 or 2 major exits and the whole thing will slowly collapse, which is insanely sad
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Lobbying.
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
After reflecting on this a bit earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion; Palantir and maybe other like minded lobbying clueless politicians. It is a considerable weakness in the way laws are formed and voted on.
> Palantir and Thorn lobbyists
So, US interests? Which means the NSA?
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The council of the EU operates on a rotating chair model (which gets called Presidency, sometimes Presidency of the EU)
It's currently held by Denmark so it's the Danish delegation that's mostly doing the brokering etc for this semester
I guess it never hurts to try and find alternate ways of placating the US in order to make them get over their Greenland obession.
The US pressured the UK to withdrawn encryption backdoors.
I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.
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Hard to believe any of them actually take that seriously. What a bunch of babies
I was told the proposal the Danes carried forward actually had its roots from Sweden.
Every Chat Control proposal has its roots in Sweden. It originated with Ylva Johansson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson
My conspiracy theory is because they’d probably give a lot of contracts to Palantir (see the UK giving NHS to Palantir on a silver platter), and the US basically threatening to annex Greenland recently
It would be nice to have details:
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
This is the same way the law in many EU countries mandates ISPs to store communication logs for every internet subscriber for months or longer.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
As a first step, after that they will expand it and force to do it effectively boiling the frog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
From the second paragraph in your link:
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
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Business, eh. Maybe it's time to go open source and fully distributed peer-to-peer. Something like Tox[0] or SimpleX[1].
The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next.
But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing.
0. https://tox.chat/
1. https://simplex.chat/
> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.
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Exactly this
But people like to sensationalize stuff
This is less worse than the original proposal
Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private.
(of course personal 1:1 messages should)
This achieves every goal the original proposal achieved, except the wording is sneakier.
Services are obligated to do risk analysis and take appropriate safety precautions against high risk actions. High risk actions include "anonymous accounts", "uploading media", and of course "encrypted messages".
The moment they catch the next random pedo, every messenger app on their phone will be tasked with explaining why they didn't do enough to stop the pedo. They'd better get their business together next time, because otherwise they might be held liable!
There's no law that says you have to hand over arbitrary data to the police without a warrant but when Telegrams shady owner landed in france, he was locked up until his company pledged to "work together with police better".
Don't be fooled by pretty words, none of this optional stuff is optional for any messenger the government doesn't already have the ability to read along with.
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> of course personal 1:1 messages should
And what my undersensationalized friend do you understand by the word chat?
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At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too. How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen. All maybe they will not and EU will block signal. Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
Simplex Chat looks like a decent alternative. It also has the benefit of not needing a phone number or email address.
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> Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
The Signal CEO has repeated that they will rather leave the EU than start doing the scanning.
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Overlay networks + libre and open-source software only (preferrably with reproducible builds).
Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake. We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid. But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Here is what we can do before it is too late:
- Buy a $10-20 LoRa device and setup Meshtastic, Meshcore or Reticulum https://reticulum.network/
- Buy one for a friend
- Run openwrt and consider things like like B.A.T.M.A.N https://www.open-mesh.org/
- Connect and explore yggdrasil https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- Try I2P https://geti2p.net
- Get into a protocol like NNCP https://www.complete.org/nncp/
- Self-host at least a few services you can and care about
- Setup a DNS like https://opennic.org/
- A fair amount of understanding and use of the good parts of crypto/blockchain
- Get out of GMail, Outlook, iCloud, etc.
(there are probably many more)
It is gonna take the governments time to figure out what those things are and how to block and attack them.
Plus you will get more satisfaction and knowledge than with writing HELM charts, web apps or using AI.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
Or Matrix? No experience with it though
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this is basically how Chinese social media works - liability for 'problematic' user posted content (ambiguously defined by the govt...) is on the technology platforms themselves, so they inevitably have to scan messages / posts, taking a zero risk policy on whatever content type is proscribed.
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And all this was done in a highly democratic manner, thanks EU!
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Did you read the article?
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
Democracy means that the people decide.
Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
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Selfishly, part of me hopes this passes, because it will drive high-IQ people to move out of the EU (I highly recommend Armenia), and the EU is a major economic competitor of my own country.
In just a few short weeks we've gone from it losing by a vote to being forced through no questions asked so the question is, who paid them off?
If as journalist or activist this is what you quote:
> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”
From this translation:
https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
All hail the EU Federation for pushing this no matter what. Can't wait to be protected even more by our beloved nanny!
Suddenly it has become normal to scan face in 3D, nonchalantly demand copy of ID and passport, freeze people's money and demand full financial statement arbitrarily. Not only there is no push back but things are becoming more and more restrictive.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.
If you look up comments on fintechs, trading platforms, and even legit banks on reddit and review websites there has been surge of these practices in last maybe 12 months. Basically "all savings and accumulated funds are illegal by default". In the past I only had heard horror stories about Paypal but now this it widespread.
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Considering that in concert with all of the above a device has been developed that emulates human speech more convincingly than most humans, I guess it's pretty obvious
What is obvious? Why they need my messages for the voice speech emulation?
[dupe] 135 comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062777
Thank you ChrisArchitect. That story was mysteriously (downranked/downmodded/deranked/downweighted) from the front page.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
https://hnrankings.info/46062777/
Note how they exclude themselves. No privacy for the you only for them. We will all become lawbreakers in the near future as the voluntary aspect is enforced.
Step 1: Allow reckless immigration Step 2: Terrorism and Insecurity obviously Step 3: People give up their privacy for security Step 4: Insecurity continues and government safe regardless
What is also funny is that they are doing that at the same time that they are thinking about relaxing requirements on GDPR and things like that that are really beneficial to the citizens on the pretext to make the regulation easier for "innovation".
I thought chatcontrol was dropped. What happened?
it's a long process of negotiations, currently in this form it was approved by the council, it'll then go to the parliament
the requirement to backdoor e2e was dropped, and who knows what will eventually remain of the reporting requirements, etc.
of course if a company is processing unencrypted images they might be required to use some service to flag them
...
will we end up in yet another false positive flood? who knows
Unfortunely it was to be expected, the mighty ones would not rest until they managed to make it happen.
Who would have thought?!
Great we need this
I have this feeling that I can’t shake off that this is done as the EU political class’ coping mechanism for being absolutely terrified because their whole worldview was shattered overnight:
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
… so they resort to projecting power internally
Leave EU now and let them ROT.
Done
Here we go again
Why are all politicians so shit? Launch these no-good leeches into the sun.
Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.
Don't forget the lobbying. Behind every authoritarian move are a group of companies lobbying for these changes. When you work for law and order, there are only so many customers you can sign, so signing new services is the most reliable way to accomplish growth.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's baffling from our perspective, but perhaps not so much if you try to look at it the mindset of its proponents.
It's been sold as "for the children". A very substantial proportion of the population are natural authoritarians, and this is red meat for them. Never mind that "the children" that they profess to be protecting are going to grow up living in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state, this is what authoritarians want for our future, and they see it as not only morally good, but any opposition to it as indefensible.
> The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top.
Dumb and greedy voters, traditional and social media, and electoral interference are known reasons. But it's also a matter of compromise: you vote for a party because you agree with a bunch of their points, but almost certainly not all. Topics like privacy are ignored by the general public, so politicians are hardly held accountable for them.
Some countries have more faith in their institutions than others. Countries with good and reliable institutions, comparatively at least, are easier to convince this won't be abused and is for the greater good. I'm not surprised the Danes have found a faction to support this bullshit.
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
Because nobody sane & level headed wants to participate in the circus that is politics
I wonder if being a certain type of politician could be considered a mental health condition
>Why are all politicians so shit
So that you can blame them for your problems.
Mostly because they are people
I'm very curious what people in this thread think is happening now
Do you think Meta, Google and them are not scanning every bit of data hosted on their servers to ensure they're not hosting things they don't want to?
Do you think they don't cooperate with governments to share those findings?
I don't disagree that this push is silly, ineffective, and bad for democracy. We should fight it and fight for the right to privacy.
However, people are acting like we have privacy right now. What evidence is there for that?
It's a massive difference when you consent to scanning by agreeing to the terms of service when you sign up for those services.
It is not direct state imposed laws requiring you to be scanned wherever you are and every service you are using (including ones you built yourself)
This is such a weird sentiment and I see it often when talking about EU politics. Is this just how the European constituency feels? Just like beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about and no control over?
Well I'm Canadian, so...
But going off what I said, I acknowledged this sort of legislation is bad and that a right to privacy is needed. How do you arrive at "beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about"?
All I did was point out the reality right now, even without this legislation.
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive.
Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su...
This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
This is morally indefensible. The process arguments seem beside the point if the product is fascism.
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Why is this even surprising? Mass surveillance is not a new thing. It's been there since the inception of the internet. This only makes it "official" and is nothing more than a formality. We need to fight back by using decentralized and p2p software
It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information. It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
If the govt is to do anything, I would support laws explicitly banning this kind of biometric ID under most circumstances.
This is nonsense, stop spreading FUD.
What is untrue? You need to verify your identity with Persona to use GPT-5 or GPT 5.1 or a lot of other models.
"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."
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I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
> I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
You say that you are apolitical, but you sound like an extremist. What should I believe, what you say you are or what you actually do?
I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about
> I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe.
I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that.
It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists.
Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you just send them to Brussels and only need to convince 15 countries to agree to something for it to be approved.
We basically made the system easier to game. And now we are paying the price.
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As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.
Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Europe is no longer a place that should be considered ideologically compatible with the United States. At best neutral. The US should abandon NATO and downgrade relations with the continent.
You can’t seriously be proposing that the United States respects the privacy of its citizens more.
We have constitutional barriers that would obstruct something like this.
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It's all relying on US tech and there is strong lobbying coming from the US for such solution. US has already deployed mass surveillance, major difference is they did it without telling citizens.
There's no one solid "Europe", there is a bunch of countries that are farther from each other than states in US.
E.g. what do Spain and Poland have in common?
Obviously you dont know anything about Europe. In the 90's there was a huge migration of Polish people and you know where they migrated mostly? Spain (and Italy). And you know what?, most of my friends during that moment were from Poland (incredible good and educated people to be honest)