Comment by x775
1 day ago
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
The first level democracy itself is a farce - coalition governments run by parties the majority doesn't want, MP seat allocations under ridiculous non-representative rules, campaign programs and pre-election promises broken all the time, 4 or 5 years of politicians left unchecked with no in-between recourse like referendums and assessments except to vote someone else next year, and that's without taking into account the mega-business interests sponsoring and controlling them.
Once removed even from that, the E.C. second level democracy is beyond a farce.
True but it's a step removed. The MEPs are directly voted in whilst the EC are not, they're "voted in" on account of "voted in" people assigning them to the EC.
I mean nobody argues that the FED governor is voted in, right? In reality a lot of people argue that they're unelected and yet making decisions that affect everyone.
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The commissioners are a few but the people who make the actual bills and policies are clerks and bureaucrats who were never elected neither directly nor indirectly. And while the commissioners do change, the EU bureaucrats never change.
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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.
> You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
What does industry gain from new laws here?
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> Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
That's just more lobbying. Politics needs less money involved, not more.
> we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do
These are literally the same process.
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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".
That's not true. The commission do the bidding of the Council or other elected national ministers. Re-posting my comment: ---
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
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You kind of can, but you get to only vote for the full package i.e. the party which wins the national elections will get to appoint its own commissioner. Most people obviously only care about the domestic issues and likely will not change their vote regardless of what the appointed commissioner thinks or does.
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.
From my understanding Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is somewhat similar to US Constitution & amendments. Both do still allow government to restrict the freedoms granted by those in some situations though I do think the US Constitution does tend to set higher bar on the interference.
There have been EU laws which get struck down because they violated the Charter (e.g. Data Retention Directive).
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The future you fear is already here, sorry.
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
This only makes sense if each representative is getting feedback from their constituents each time they take the new vote..I think
I feel like we do that pretty regularly in the US.
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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.
Italy, the biggest country opposing this, is composed of mainly "conservative" MEPs from FDI. I think you have a very narrow world view.
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Im no conservative, but I thought useres of this site were more intelligent than to throw massive negative stereotypes out about groups of millions of people.
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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.
> This one is EU I think...
You misspelled Palantir.
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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?