Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
The EP has the right to make amendments to proposed legislation, its not simply a yes no vote.
In fact what is described as "Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement" is exactly the EP voting to amend the Commission proposal on an extension of existing itermim rules with text that explicitly limits the scope.
The Commission consists of the Member States. So obviously they are also voted-in parties since the government of the Member States is democratically elected
I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
> toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
That's not something the "legislators" in the EU parliament can do. It's effectively a consultative body which can either approve or send back the legislation provided to them so the council and commision can find sufficient workarounds...
What would actually help is if a government of a country where this type of Stasi/KGB style surveillance is constitutionally illegal like Germany to speak out and tell the EU (and Denmark which keeps pushing this) that they can go fuck themselves and that they will prosecute any company which is trying to comply with these regulations. (which would be perfectly legal since constitution/basic laws still supersede any type of EU treaty obligations in most countries.
>Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
Maybe because the Commission holds the true power and the commissioners aren't directly elected by the people so you don't have any leverage against the commissioners. You can't just say "behave nicely or we won't support you at the next elections".
Also curious, as much as the American amendments are problematic, they do at lease create a hard position on things. We are devolving into a space where I’m genuinely scared that the future will become entirely controlled by big money, and it will be too late to change it.
Fair play x775, I'm currently moving lots of EU and UK projects away from US-owned and/or sited infrastructure. There is a huge marketing push from the EU cloud providers to display their sovereign wares. Maybe us Europeans need to make them more aware of how futile it is to move to EU companies if there are laws equal-to or more pernicious than the US CLOUD Act? A dozen large EU tech companies will sadly exert more pressure on EU lawmakers than trying to explain to 500 million normal people how a law that looks like it will protect children is a smokescreen and terrible for civil liberties.
Great work! There is maybe some bug. When you click on one of the 4 "opposing" countries (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland), it scrolls down and then shows that majority of the representatives from the country actually support it. Is that intended? Won't that make people from those countries "relax" even though they might have an impact by contacting their represenatives?
Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.
Sounds a lot like nagging [0] with some trick wording [1] in the nag.
I think the website is missing a dark pattern here, spray-and-pray, which is throwing as many reincarnations of the same thing as possible, hoping one eventually sticks.
You are a beacon of hope man. Please, please, continue the good fight, we need you.
We keep seeing the establishment resurfacing and imposing this blanket surveillance globally. What's happening in Brazil, the UK, EU, and has already happened in the US with no legislation or via the 5-eyes is scary.
Who are these people pressuring elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats to legislate against their constituents? Who are these lobbyists?
I get that there is a large constituency that wants to control dissidents and the narrative in the name of child abuse - see what's happening in the UK where people get arrested in the thousands for posting comments online.
Abolishing privacy is not the way to protect children. Police work and prosecution is. For reference see the grooming gangs in the UK, the infamous Eps*% case for which everyone is still walking free, and other cases in various EU countries. This is not whataboutism, it's proof that we have not taken the required steps as a western society to combat this. You don't press the nuclear option as your first action.
If it's bot farm meddling that is the true target, then ban bots and get technology to work properly. Creating ID honeypots on poorly protected website operator servers is not the solution.
Call your politicians, call your EU MEPs, call everyone you can. This matters because it's about our future.
Can we start organizing a strike of tech workers already? Pretty please? Just say the word.
Maybe reach out to Signal to implement some kind of one-way channel so you can reach people easily?
We need to put actual pressure on those fascists. Next time they even mention it, we flood the council website with an identical search query, say "Does no mean yes after all?" and if they persist, we strike for couple days.
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.
And who exactly do you think elected the 'powers that be'? The issue is that voter turnout for EU parliamentary elections is awful in comparison to national elections, especially among more conservative voters - meaning that the political orientation between the parliament and commission is a little skewed.
The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
Yeah so this is about CC 1.0 (which already exists)
While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying
The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
If we are talking about freedom fighters, Polish freedom fighters/struggles are second most influential to me after my own country especially because of Witold Pilecki.
I once wrote a paper about Witold pilecki for my english project for who I consider to be the most influential person or something similar.
I picked Witold pilecki because I had read a book which talked about him and it captured so much of my mind.
For those who don't know, Witold Pilecki is a polish person who was the first and perhaps only person who willingly entered holocaust/auschwitz and then he was the first person to realize all the horrors happening inside, He then used washing machine parts (iirc) to send the signal to the allies, who COULDN'T believe what Pilecki said was happening. The amounts of Atrocities they thought wasn't possible.
When he found out that help wasn't coming, He decided to free himself and He accomplished doing that by taking a job at something bread related who then ends up leaving.
He then married an Polish teacher (iirc) and had kids but after Russia had won over Polish, he was fake trialed and he was falsely accused of treason.
His last words were, "I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy, than fear."
On a personal level, when I was writing that project and this line, I genuinely believe that this might be one of the most influential lines to me that I have ever heard which has genuinely influenced me.
It was during this project that I found Sabaton from trying to research about Witold pilecki and found so many gems that Sabaton is quite part of my music taste now :-)
I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation. I am sure that Poland might have flaws too but I do believe that its history is quite rich and something to be quite proud of.
I am surprised not more people know about Witold Pilecki but I hope I am doing my part raising awareness about that hero.
Within my country, some of the revolutionaries which feel influential on such level to me feel most importantly Bhagat Singh, Subash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad. These are also people who have influenced me.
There is also the story of how an Indian ruler hosted Polish WWII refugees[0] and helped them within his kingdom, which I am not sure if many Polish know.
While I was writing this comment, I discovered a good song about Indian revolutionaries as well which I feel like sharing too: Krantiveer (Revolutionary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXZG0pTxME [Turn the subtitles (on)]
I think my point can be summarized by a quote from Subash chandra bose, that freedom is not given, it is taken.
I would like to share here that the author of this site made it very easy to call. If you read this and are in the EU, I urge you to try this.
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!
We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems (which are often the fault of the EU and our socialist, collectivist tendencies)
EU is not a government for all EU members. You should look into what EU is and how it works before attacking it. Claiming that it's "ultra national" would mean that all of EU is one nation which shares one ideological, cultural and political sphere. There are 27 EU members with 24 official languages, 20 of those countries are part of the Euro currency zone.
But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.
Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.
As an EU citizen, I'm happy that the parliament has once again rejected the proposal, which at least gives credence to the notion that it not just there to rubber-stamp what the commission decides.
But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
As an EU citizen I hate this but I know it‘s a „when?“ not an „if“ topic.
I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.
But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.
Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.
That's the problem with electing too many people with law background to a parliament: They think it's a Model United Nations session and if they can get things their way despite many real world consequences, they celebrate with joy as our governance becomes literally ungovernable.
I think that’s a real problem now. In our parliament (Czech) almost every politician is a lawyer or a doctor. Almost no other profession is represented.
I'm happy that the Netherlands is still against this. Our currently largest party (D66) was also always pretty strong on privacy. When I contacted them some time back (I think using this initiative), they ensured me that they remained against, but did feel that something must be done (ok fair enough).
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
I am not oblivious to the intent behind this push, but even if you focus solely on the technicalities the idea falls apart. Even with only client-side verification this will be a big privacy intrusion. I see current AI's flag prompts for the most stupid reasons for using words that might possibly occur in non-safe contexts too. The human experience is just too complex for a machine to understand.
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
They never quit.
They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar.
The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
It seems the vote passed [1], meaning the existing Regulation [(EU) 2021/1232] was _extended_ until August 3 2027, with some amendments to the previous text:
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
The same way you can't send money to the best Korea and watch porn on youtube.
There is a long chain of actions that ends with you having e2e on your phone (or what not). At the starts of it there is your physical body living in jurisdiction and transacting with (mostly) other people being somewhat present in the same jurisdiction using government-captured money. There are multiply choke points, controlling which will not result in 100% enforcement, but will make whatever you want to do a huge pain in the ass, so most people will not bother (case in point -- jailbraking). Whoever is left self-selects themselves for selective enforcement.
I am not sure I follow. I can't watch porn on YT because YT decides not to host it. But I can absolutely use a VPN and access porn in a jurisdiction that does not block it. I can also, and in fact do, encrypt my hard drives. Even China can't reliably prevent communication over private encrypted networks or services hosted overseas.
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
Curious how they plan to handle encrypted attachments — scanning has to happen either before encryption (client-side) or after decryption (server-side). If E2EE is preserved end-to-end, there's literally no point in the pipeline where a third party can scan without the client's cooperation. So either E2EE breaks, or the law is unenforceable by design.
regulation doesn't hinder innovation as long as it is equally enforced on everyone competing in the regulated market. it does hinder powerful and rich individuals from making more profit at the cost of the rights of the average population
Which law are you talking about? Genuine question, because I know about EU laws that are "in the name of privacy" and about those that (arguably) "hinder innovation", but I don't know which one fits both
The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.
Do your part- photograph your ass every day, send the pictures to your representative and EU parliament member.. they need to know. Volunteer the knowledge they crave.
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
Not really. Looking at Polish MPs for example, there's no clear pattern, rather a "healthy" mix from all parties with some random selection of opposing ones.
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
it's probably best to go with client-side encryption and share keys with friends privately. that pretty much fixes all the privacy issues after the initial registration, but maintaining that extension with all the company and their updates is a bit of a headache.
They should just ask the Americans. If you are not a US citizen you have zero rights, and any old creep in Silicon Valley can riffle through your personal information with impunity.
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...
It's really hard to not become a euroskeptic, despite being involved with so many EU related things from my youth to now in which I believed wholeheartedly, but this is just... I know - they just need to win once, we need to win every time.
Let the damn politicans go first and make all their private messages public. Yes everything from boring I'm stuck in traffic honey over nudes to insider trading and lobbying.
oh no, they had to resign from their government jobs and in a year will work in the private sector as consultants for double the salary, those poor souls :'(
prison, fines, mental asylum, whatever would be an actual consequence.
a bit hyperbolic and reactionary from my side, maybe. but you get the gist.
I love this. These are the same people who create think tanks and "international courts" to point fingers at "third world" countries for "authoritarianism," "freedom of speech."
Being able to make this policy choice in either direction is in fact an example of digital sovereignty. We just don't like what the sovereign has decided this time.
Few days ago we had a guy explaining to us at the top of hn page that we should migrate data to europe. Sometimes I miss the internet of before mass surveillance abd ads everywhere
I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
>2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:
>by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security.
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena support it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problematic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
An encrypted message has never sexually violated and traumatized a child, but I'd bet good money that many politicians have. So, it's quite apparent what we need to protect children from in my opinion.
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is widespread in Europe. Quality of life has gotten so bad and continuous to decline except for mainly Poland and Hungary.
And what do systems cling to especially in situations like these? Surveillance.
Another massive not so funny joke once again hit Germany the week ago - a smear campaign and hit piece to justify even more censorship.
Germany is going down the drain - and the elite is trying to silence freedom of speech massively while ignoring doing what’s important and what’s right.
Have fun migrating your app to the EU. No one is coming to save you especially not your shitty infrastructure. Energy crisis, and devs think it is a good idea to go for 2% uptime in the near future.
Yes, yes, let's all rally around the free speech haven that is Hungary, which only five short years ago banned "the discussion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, the media, advertising, and other public places."
Let's all take this person extremely seriously, as they are advocating for free speech.
I am the creator of Fight Chat Control.
Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
Happy to answer any questions.
[0] https://mepwatch.eu/10/vote.html?v=188578
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/OJQ-10-2026-03...
[3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2026-03-...
You're doing God's work mate.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
The EP has the right to make amendments to proposed legislation, its not simply a yes no vote.
In fact what is described as "Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement" is exactly the EP voting to amend the Commission proposal on an extension of existing itermim rules with text that explicitly limits the scope.
The Commission consists of the Member States. So obviously they are also voted-in parties since the government of the Member States is democratically elected
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I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
Because we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do. You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
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> toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
That's not something the "legislators" in the EU parliament can do. It's effectively a consultative body which can either approve or send back the legislation provided to them so the council and commision can find sufficient workarounds...
What would actually help is if a government of a country where this type of Stasi/KGB style surveillance is constitutionally illegal like Germany to speak out and tell the EU (and Denmark which keeps pushing this) that they can go fuck themselves and that they will prosecute any company which is trying to comply with these regulations. (which would be perfectly legal since constitution/basic laws still supersede any type of EU treaty obligations in most countries.
Passing legislation is harder. It should absolutely be the goal but it can't be passed if there is already legislation allowing the abuse.
>Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
Maybe because the Commission holds the true power and the commissioners aren't directly elected by the people so you don't have any leverage against the commissioners. You can't just say "behave nicely or we won't support you at the next elections".
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The European """Parliament""" can only reject laws, but not propose new ones.
Also curious, as much as the American amendments are problematic, they do at lease create a hard position on things. We are devolving into a space where I’m genuinely scared that the future will become entirely controlled by big money, and it will be too late to change it.
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Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.
The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.
Fair play x775, I'm currently moving lots of EU and UK projects away from US-owned and/or sited infrastructure. There is a huge marketing push from the EU cloud providers to display their sovereign wares. Maybe us Europeans need to make them more aware of how futile it is to move to EU companies if there are laws equal-to or more pernicious than the US CLOUD Act? A dozen large EU tech companies will sadly exert more pressure on EU lawmakers than trying to explain to 500 million normal people how a law that looks like it will protect children is a smokescreen and terrible for civil liberties.
Some interesting reads
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
Great work! There is maybe some bug. When you click on one of the 4 "opposing" countries (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland), it scrolls down and then shows that majority of the representatives from the country actually support it. Is that intended? Won't that make people from those countries "relax" even though they might have an impact by contacting their represenatives?
>let's vote on this proposal
>rejected
>let's vote on it again!
Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.
Sounds a lot like nagging [0] with some trick wording [1] in the nag.
I think the website is missing a dark pattern here, spray-and-pray, which is throwing as many reincarnations of the same thing as possible, hoping one eventually sticks.
[0] https://www.deceptive.design/types/nagging
[1] https://www.deceptive.design/types/trick-wording
Only if you have more votes after it passes, to vote on unpassing it again
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"Conservatives" feel no shame.
But they are first-class in acting like a victim
It's the same thing as with your republicans.
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I swear to god if the UK gives the world yet MORE surveillance state...
This one is EU I think, but yes UK and everyone else needs to actually protect their citizens' rights.
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I've just used it to send email to my representatives (Croatia). Thanks for the effort.
Thanks for your work. Just how is it possible for non-EU lobby to make vote a law in EU, and push for it ?
Money.
You are a beacon of hope man. Please, please, continue the good fight, we need you.
We keep seeing the establishment resurfacing and imposing this blanket surveillance globally. What's happening in Brazil, the UK, EU, and has already happened in the US with no legislation or via the 5-eyes is scary.
Who are these people pressuring elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats to legislate against their constituents? Who are these lobbyists?
I get that there is a large constituency that wants to control dissidents and the narrative in the name of child abuse - see what's happening in the UK where people get arrested in the thousands for posting comments online.
Abolishing privacy is not the way to protect children. Police work and prosecution is. For reference see the grooming gangs in the UK, the infamous Eps*% case for which everyone is still walking free, and other cases in various EU countries. This is not whataboutism, it's proof that we have not taken the required steps as a western society to combat this. You don't press the nuclear option as your first action.
If it's bot farm meddling that is the true target, then ban bots and get technology to work properly. Creating ID honeypots on poorly protected website operator servers is not the solution.
Call your politicians, call your EU MEPs, call everyone you can. This matters because it's about our future.
You're a hero
Can we start organizing a strike of tech workers already? Pretty please? Just say the word.
Maybe reach out to Signal to implement some kind of one-way channel so you can reach people easily?
We need to put actual pressure on those fascists. Next time they even mention it, we flood the council website with an identical search query, say "Does no mean yes after all?" and if they persist, we strike for couple days.
Is there any point in fighting it given that they will rename, repackage and resubmit the legislation in mere days if it doesn't pass?
Don't get me wrong: my blood boils reading those legislations, but rationally I don't see a path to victory here.
Why this attempt is not treated as terrorism and authors of the proposals are not arrested?
Chat Controls fulfil the definition of terrorism wholly.
How can people support your work?
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Quoting from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12... :
"Article 7
Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
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I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
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Let's parse this a little.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
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You know that those pieces of paper mean nothing.
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Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
(I mentioned this in another comment)
Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.
And who exactly do you think elected the 'powers that be'? The issue is that voter turnout for EU parliamentary elections is awful in comparison to national elections, especially among more conservative voters - meaning that the political orientation between the parliament and commission is a little skewed.
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The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
Past laws of this type are:
- The GDPR
- The ePrivacy directive, which is explicitly derogated (sabotaged) by chat control 1.0
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
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>... without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
How is that supposed to work with e2e encrypted chats?
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
We can do more than one thing. Do not cede the weapon of lobbying to be used solely by opponents. You can get a lot done by talking to people.
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Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sedcms/documents/PRIORITY_INF...
Here is the regulation that will be voted on: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...
Note that the amendment was already amended on 11th March to set expiry to Aug 2027 and to also exclude E2E communications.
Yeah so this is about CC 1.0 (which already exists)
While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying
The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
If we are talking about freedom fighters, Polish freedom fighters/struggles are second most influential to me after my own country especially because of Witold Pilecki.
I once wrote a paper about Witold pilecki for my english project for who I consider to be the most influential person or something similar.
I picked Witold pilecki because I had read a book which talked about him and it captured so much of my mind.
For those who don't know, Witold Pilecki is a polish person who was the first and perhaps only person who willingly entered holocaust/auschwitz and then he was the first person to realize all the horrors happening inside, He then used washing machine parts (iirc) to send the signal to the allies, who COULDN'T believe what Pilecki said was happening. The amounts of Atrocities they thought wasn't possible.
When he found out that help wasn't coming, He decided to free himself and He accomplished doing that by taking a job at something bread related who then ends up leaving.
He then married an Polish teacher (iirc) and had kids but after Russia had won over Polish, he was fake trialed and he was falsely accused of treason.
His last words were, "I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy, than fear."
On a personal level, when I was writing that project and this line, I genuinely believe that this might be one of the most influential lines to me that I have ever heard which has genuinely influenced me.
It was during this project that I found Sabaton from trying to research about Witold pilecki and found so many gems that Sabaton is quite part of my music taste now :-)
Sabaton- Inmate 4859: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pc1oSYXlUQ (This song is about Witold Pilecki)
Sabaton Uprising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzeNBRbWXpI (Another Polish warsaw related song that I found after I had discovered Sabaton from the Inmate 4859 song)
I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation. I am sure that Poland might have flaws too but I do believe that its history is quite rich and something to be quite proud of.
I am surprised not more people know about Witold Pilecki but I hope I am doing my part raising awareness about that hero.
Within my country, some of the revolutionaries which feel influential on such level to me feel most importantly Bhagat Singh, Subash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad. These are also people who have influenced me.
There is also the story of how an Indian ruler hosted Polish WWII refugees[0] and helped them within his kingdom, which I am not sure if many Polish know.
While I was writing this comment, I discovered a good song about Indian revolutionaries as well which I feel like sharing too: Krantiveer (Revolutionary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXZG0pTxME [Turn the subtitles (on)]
I think my point can be summarized by a quote from Subash chandra bose, that freedom is not given, it is taken.
[0]: https://indianexpress.com/article/research/the-good-maharaja...
Do you mean "surveillance" by the word "invigilation" here?
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There a practical reason for this? like more alignment with lobbyists, for whatever financial reasons?
Hungary is governed by a Russia aligned autocrat. This generally does not align with the priorities of the rest of the EU.
Over the last two decades Hungary reversed course from a democracy joining the west to an authoritarian dictatorship in bed with the Russians.
Hence, everything their government does is the opposite of what a typical European Union member would approve of.
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Orban is a Putin asset.
Orban is an evil politician, and Fidez is an evil party.
I would like to share here that the author of this site made it very easy to call. If you read this and are in the EU, I urge you to try this.
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
Please help.
The proposal was rejected: https://chaos.social/@maxim/116294966670838045
307 vs 306, for god's sake
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1162053712243153...
And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!
We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems (which are often the fault of the EU and our socialist, collectivist tendencies)
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Freedom of speech is not a European value.
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EU is not a government for all EU members. You should look into what EU is and how it works before attacking it. Claiming that it's "ultra national" would mean that all of EU is one nation which shares one ideological, cultural and political sphere. There are 27 EU members with 24 official languages, 20 of those countries are part of the Euro currency zone.
But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.
Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.
Yes the correct name would be "super/supra" national instead of ultra national
>You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
Yes, but who isn't? Not the other side of the pond for sure.
As an EU citizen, I'm happy that the parliament has once again rejected the proposal, which at least gives credence to the notion that it not just there to rubber-stamp what the commission decides.
But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
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As an EU citizen I hate this but I know it‘s a „when?“ not an „if“ topic.
I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.
But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.
Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.
The EU has always been focused on harming its citizens. This is nothing new, very on brand actually. It's not like we have a choice lol.
Sounds like russian troll talking point.
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> The EU has always been focused on harming its citizens.
Insanely bonkers take. What sources do you have for this?
That's the problem with electing too many people with law background to a parliament: They think it's a Model United Nations session and if they can get things their way despite many real world consequences, they celebrate with joy as our governance becomes literally ungovernable.
I think that’s a real problem now. In our parliament (Czech) almost every politician is a lawyer or a doctor. Almost no other profession is represented.
I'm happy that the Netherlands is still against this. Our currently largest party (D66) was also always pretty strong on privacy. When I contacted them some time back (I think using this initiative), they ensured me that they remained against, but did feel that something must be done (ok fair enough).
So they will pass it until is a yes?
Exactly what happened when Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, they were told to vote again until they voted the "right" way.
Like UI saying "Yes" | "Ask later"
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Almost happened with Brexit referendum.
Heads I win, tails you loose. :(
It takes only one win to remove our rights but once they’re gone you’ll never get them back.
Modern democracy
Wait until you find out it's actually already implemented and they're trying to legitimise it.
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Or, as is also seen elsewhere, wildly popular ideas simply get curiously stuck.
Either way those elected to supposedly serve are the only ones winning.
Yes. The anchor chain got broken sometime ago. It's still there, but nobody want it anymore.
They only have to win once. You have to win every time.
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
— Jean-Claude Juncker
There is a lot of people who will nod and agree with that statement, as long as the decisions are one's that they agree with.
I am not oblivious to the intent behind this push, but even if you focus solely on the technicalities the idea falls apart. Even with only client-side verification this will be a big privacy intrusion. I see current AI's flag prompts for the most stupid reasons for using words that might possibly occur in non-safe contexts too. The human experience is just too complex for a machine to understand.
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
They never quit. They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar. The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
It's not now or never. It's now, or the next attempt or the next.
Who is "they"?
That's the key question!
There's a small group of very powerful people that keep pushing this agenda.
Who are those people?
Find out.
Publicize their names. Make their corruption visible and linked to their identity.
In case anyone has an issue with this: Remember! This is what they want! For you! Not for them. Only the plebs.
Bureaucratic systems have a internal logic by themselves that goes beyond the agenda of individual actors.
The first goal of every bureaucracy is to guarantee its survival and power, all other goals are downstream this first goal.
This isn't a conspiracy... "They" are the EPP, a democratically elected party acting fully in public with their names attached to everything.
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It seems the vote passed [1], meaning the existing Regulation [(EU) 2021/1232] was _extended_ until August 3 2027, with some amendments to the previous text:
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2026-007...
That should completely change the regulation from mass surveillance to targeted wiretapping with a warrant.
If you consider who is monitoring us, it's obvious that this is for the benefit of those in power.
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
The same way you can't send money to the best Korea and watch porn on youtube.
There is a long chain of actions that ends with you having e2e on your phone (or what not). At the starts of it there is your physical body living in jurisdiction and transacting with (mostly) other people being somewhat present in the same jurisdiction using government-captured money. There are multiply choke points, controlling which will not result in 100% enforcement, but will make whatever you want to do a huge pain in the ass, so most people will not bother (case in point -- jailbraking). Whoever is left self-selects themselves for selective enforcement.
I am not sure I follow. I can't watch porn on YT because YT decides not to host it. But I can absolutely use a VPN and access porn in a jurisdiction that does not block it. I can also, and in fact do, encrypt my hard drives. Even China can't reliably prevent communication over private encrypted networks or services hosted overseas.
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Monitoring and influencing majority is enough for having power over citizens. Real criminals will use other unmonitored channels, of course.
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
Curious how they plan to handle encrypted attachments — scanning has to happen either before encryption (client-side) or after decryption (server-side). If E2EE is preserved end-to-end, there's literally no point in the pipeline where a third party can scan without the client's cooperation. So either E2EE breaks, or the law is unenforceable by design.
I agree its unenforceable by design unless they control the OS
This is the same EU that blocks and hinders innovation in the name of privacy?
When you say "hinders innovation" do you mean "doesn't maximize shareholder value" ?
regulation doesn't hinder innovation as long as it is equally enforced on everyone competing in the regulated market. it does hinder powerful and rich individuals from making more profit at the cost of the rights of the average population
Which law are you talking about? Genuine question, because I know about EU laws that are "in the name of privacy" and about those that (arguably) "hinder innovation", but I don't know which one fits both
At time of writing, I was thinking of GDPR.
The EU isn’t a single mind. There are a multitude of factions trying to get through all kinds of things.
You are aware that EU is not a single country, right? I know American education is third-world levels these days, so unfortunately I have to ask this.
4 Member States Opposing
23 Member States Supporting
0 Member States Undecided
"for sure"
Great that MPs are apparently exempt from the scanning. As if there aren’t enough high profile menaces in power.
Either include everyone, or accept it’s an awful idea for security and exempt everyone.
It can fail 100 times and it won't count, and the one time this surveillance legislation passes it will become law. Thanks EU, nice show of democracy.
The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.
results here: https://portal.assisteu.eu/european_parliament/plenary/votes...
You can find how present MEPs voted
There are 10 votings (not only one), some adopted and some rejected, I am not sure what that means, maybe someone can elaborate.
Just a heads up that this is being posted late in the European evening here, so that will affect who's commenting.
Posted 9:30-11:30pm. Plenty of us awake
It won't all be non-Europeans if that's what you're implying
Just a lower percentage than you'd expect on a Europe-focused topic, is what I was trying to imply :)
The new definition of democracy and freedom is: - censoreship - propaganda - ban of oppositions (anti globalist, conservative parties) - NO privacy
DONT forget that this legislation is the result of a Lobby of META
Do your part- photograph your ass every day, send the pictures to your representative and EU parliament member.. they need to know. Volunteer the knowledge they crave.
Fun fact: the parties that want this are actually those who criticise the EU the most
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
God I love politics
The party that wants this the most is EPP - you can't be more pro-EU than that.
Not really. Looking at Polish MPs for example, there's no clear pattern, rather a "healthy" mix from all parties with some random selection of opposing ones.
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
"would"
You can directly call your representatives by looking them up here:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
So EU syill wants to harm children.
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Why's there '?foo=bar' in the URL?
To get around the "dupe" filter, it was trying to mark it as a dupe of a 7 month old post.
It's a web bug
Yeah that didn't take long. Of course they keep pushing it. I knew the big 'win' of the 11th was a bit premature and overcelebrated.
The dark forces behind all this set to gain a lot of profits once it passes :(
What does this mean for a non-eu citizen communicating with an eu citizen? Is it as simple as using signal/matrix instead of whatsapp/messenger?
They only need to win once, while the public has to fight back every time. Incredibly demotivating
it's probably best to go with client-side encryption and share keys with friends privately. that pretty much fixes all the privacy issues after the initial registration, but maintaining that extension with all the company and their updates is a bit of a headache.
Good news, we held out strong!
It’s now EOD Thursday. What was the conclusion of the vote?
(not shown on the chat control website as far as I can tell)
But of course it's back.
Imagine the outrage if this happened in the US instead because it's in Europe there's just a bunch of apologists here.
The longer I live I think US citizens just have the highest standards for both morals and life expectations.
Meanwhile Europe is happy to get anything.
> Imagine the outrage if this happened in the US instead
There’d be bunch of fat fucks who will write screeds on the internet but won’t get off their fat ass to do anything about it?
They should just ask the Americans. If you are not a US citizen you have zero rights, and any old creep in Silicon Valley can riffle through your personal information with impunity.
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...
It's really hard to not become a euroskeptic, despite being involved with so many EU related things from my youth to now in which I believed wholeheartedly, but this is just... I know - they just need to win once, we need to win every time.
The US doesn't even have to ask, people already give AI providers all their data and full control over all their devices.
Let the damn politicans go first and make all their private messages public. Yes everything from boring I'm stuck in traffic honey over nudes to insider trading and lobbying.
The lack of accountability after what was exposed in the Epstein files illustrates that not one in power actually care about kids.
"Save the kids", is just a ploy to run scams.
What are you hoping to happen regarding the Epstein files? The few politicians in the EU that were named in the Epstein files did resign.
> did resign
oh no, they had to resign from their government jobs and in a year will work in the private sector as consultants for double the salary, those poor souls :'(
prison, fines, mental asylum, whatever would be an actual consequence.
a bit hyperbolic and reactionary from my side, maybe. but you get the gist.
Nice website! Sadly, url stays the same across all coutries. I can't send anyone direct link.
I love this. These are the same people who create think tanks and "international courts" to point fingers at "third world" countries for "authoritarianism," "freedom of speech."
Hypocrisy par supreme
So much for "digital soverignty".
Being able to make this policy choice in either direction is in fact an example of digital sovereignty. We just don't like what the sovereign has decided this time.
They aid the truth because the complete slogan was about EU's digital sovereignity. Not really your sovereignity nor mine.
Those are Conservatives from EPP group, not some "The EU". Let's be literal.
Let's also be honest, the social democrats are backing this as well.
so much for 'democracy'
keep voting until you get the right answer
at least EU are voting I suppose. some governments just go ahead and mass-surveil illegally
Few days ago we had a guy explaining to us at the top of hn page that we should migrate data to europe. Sometimes I miss the internet of before mass surveillance abd ads everywhere
Framing this as the EU's attempt is antieuropean propaganda.
It is the Conservatives attempt. The EU parliament is the entity that shot it down last time.
EU is not a synonym of Europe. EU propagandists don't get to define what Europe means.
Second. Who gave you the right to define antieuropean union propaganda as a sin.
Some people may hate it, some people may love it, other want to change it.
It was created by vote, surely it can be whatever the fuck the way the people want by vote.
EU is a synonym for Europe in colloquial conversation the same way USA is a synonym for America.
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I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
The vote has literally been scheduled by the EPP, the EU grouping of conservative parties.
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European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
Exactly. EU legislation is currently far more respecting of privacy than is legislation in the UK or the US.
For various, and unclear, reasons, there is substantial backing to change this.
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
This is how political messaging has worked since I was born.
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
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To quote the banner on said website:
> The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning.
The vote itself is being forced by the EPP. This article by an MEP has more info: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
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There are two elements to the EU
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
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It seems like it is bipartisan to me. Do you have the statistics to back up your claim?
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
That is true, but this attempt is led by the Conservatives. Not more, not less.
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Yeah, it's like saying "USA wants to poison children still!" when a Republican files another deranged bill in their state.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
If you’re against the EU you’re with Hungary and if you’re with Hungary, you’re with Orban and Putin: an enemy of democracy
This. There's a very specific group of twisted people that drive this, but equating that with the entire EU is flat out wrong.
Who are those people?
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522647
I honestly think these lawmakers have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes - it's not possible to implement what they are proposing.
They want to do what US Big Tech already is doing
Y'all are bunch of hypocrites
ofc, they only need to get it approved once. they will try until they succeed
The trick here is to make it impossible to do so.
Don’t put your shit in the cloud and use proper E2E secure messaging.
For me the entire idea of the cloud is dead due to exposure like this.
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
>People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this.
Criminals in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
It's client side scanning.
You can refuse to use software that does it.
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That's one of the tricks. The other trick is to vote in universal right for encrypted communication once and for all.
Encryption is mathematics -- making this an issue of freedom not only of speech, but of thought.
That’s the best answer. But you’re up against paid up lobbyists.
does this violate GDPR?
>GDPR Article 2 Material scope
>2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:
>by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security.
Maybe...in a world where lawmakers didn't put huge exemptions into GDPR for governments and law enforcement etc. Which they did.
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
...
n) protecting children
Reminder: it's not the “EU”, it's the PPE (the union of conservative European parties), and the national governments.
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena support it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problematic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
It’s a symptom of authoritarianism rising. It wouldn’t be rising if there wasn’t anyone who supports things like that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
Because they fall for the "Its for protecting the Children" Bullshit
An encrypted message has never sexually violated and traumatized a child, but I'd bet good money that many politicians have. So, it's quite apparent what we need to protect children from in my opinion.
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why are the epsteinists so obsessed with destroying our freedoms and privacy?
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I don't think criticisms of chat-control-like legislation attempts are downvoted here?
This guy has gone on a small anti-EU tirade elsewhere in the thread.
If my experience is anything to go by the answer is 'yes':
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412060
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
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> Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?
Hey, let's call this "forum control" :)
They hate us for our freedoms.
A shame the EU is just simulation of democracy.
Best case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Let’s migrate our apps to the EU!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is widespread in Europe. Quality of life has gotten so bad and continuous to decline except for mainly Poland and Hungary.
And what do systems cling to especially in situations like these? Surveillance.
Another massive not so funny joke once again hit Germany the week ago - a smear campaign and hit piece to justify even more censorship.
Germany is going down the drain - and the elite is trying to silence freedom of speech massively while ignoring doing what’s important and what’s right.
Have fun migrating your app to the EU. No one is coming to save you especially not your shitty infrastructure. Energy crisis, and devs think it is a good idea to go for 2% uptime in the near future.
It is so ridiculous.
Yes, yes, let's all rally around the free speech haven that is Hungary, which only five short years ago banned "the discussion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, the media, advertising, and other public places."
Let's all take this person extremely seriously, as they are advocating for free speech.