Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
Member states will implement this into national law. So in the case they will need to implement a maximum of one year or more (but not less). The final law as applied by a judge will just read "punishable by a maximum of [i.e.] fourteen months".
It sounds like it's "the maximum penalty must be at least 1 year", as in "your member state can't enact a law where the maximum penalty is less than 1 year".
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
That larger point deserves its own thread. My newest pet peeve is someone jumping into the middle of a conversation with the equivalent of "I don't care about what you're talking about. What I want to talk about is more important".
A little more context: that article 3 paragraph 2.a. was added by parliament (not proposed by the Commission). But paragraph 1 (same article) was altered to this text:
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
The positive intentional act, I guess, is disseminating the material. Proving intent and various ancillary concepts like knowledge, etc, are the bread and butter of prosecutors, so I don't think the act would be as difficult to enforce as you suggest. Sure, there might be corner cases where you can say "oops I forgot to password protect that Dropbox link" but certainly porn websites that don't do age verification will have a hard time arguing their conduct was not intentional.
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
The standard for robust and effective age verification is extremely low, given how I’ve seen anyone do age verification. It’s also pointless if we’re talking about the internet, you are essentially outsourcing your porn production to foreign countries
While this is a specifically awful article, for obvious reasons, I find the idea of encoding specifics on carceral terms into any EU-level directive a bizarre overstep.
Its properly worded, as it is an EU law declaring atandards for national laws and the implementing national law must specify a penalty range where the maximum is at least one year (but can be more).
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
Please don't berate other community members on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. HN is for curious conversation, not battle. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines in future.
Yeah I think you have it backwards. I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn, but social networks regularly fuck teenagers up.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
Even better, do a Google image search for “porn” and turn off filters. You will see pornography hosted by Google’s servers! I can’t understand why, at least in the spirit of these new laws, Google is exempt from age verification.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
If the parents want they can restrict their usage. I prefer to monitor and teach my children how to use technology properly, and that also includes of course sex education because it's not by banning porn sites till they are 18+ that you solve the issue to me, but by educating.
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
I agree. If we have to have age verification laws I'd rather they be applied to social media networks over some size than to porn sites.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
they really want mass surveillance for the plebs even by creating a weak point for enemies. To hell not just with rights but also defence. So any excuse will do.
Well don't I feel like an uninformed dumbass. Talk of standards aside, pornhub apparently includes the following header if you visit it.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
If you value democracy, I suggest not to trust any random website you read. Of course the French left (at least EELV/LFI) is not going to support this. This should be obvious if you know a bit what ideas they are defending (them and the others too), which you should as well if democracy matters to you.
They will eventually come for GrapheneOS too in some way shape or form. Be it regulating hardware attestation being required to use devices, so that only government approved operating systems can be used, or imposing jailtime for possessing devices with capabilities such as GrapheneOS.
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
What impression of PRC social media do you have that makes you think the situation is different there?
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
The left and the right stopped being about liberal values (like traditionally liberal or whatever) at some point, which are the backbone of democratic societies. I don’t see how you can have democracy without the ability to freely communicate. And that means freedom of speech but also the right to anonymity and privacy.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
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That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
Yes, this makes no sense. No way they got 100% of every MPs to agree on this. They never agree on anything. I think the website took the fact that the country supports it and applied that position to each of its MPs.
Nobody would call them "left", especially not during Macron's 2nd term, the Walkers (or whatever is their new moniker) have firmly solidified as liberals in the right-wing sense (rather than in the bottom-wing sense).
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
Why would you expect anything else from the so-called left?
Do you honestly believe only the right want power and control?
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
While I agree with you, this situation is also created by an all-encompassing State that rules every aspect of the French life.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
A little context here since this website is highly misleading:
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
I think that's misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1]. Meaning that the Parliament can neither change nor reverse course - it is completely decided by the Council. All the Parliament can do is limit how fast that course is followed.
Edit: Sorry, what I wrote about the "Council" should have been about the "EU Commission" instead. The Council may in fact have equal power, as you wrote.
[1] Which I think (but was unable to explicitly confirm) extends to removing old legislation. I.e. the Council only has to get its way once, and then we're stuck with a law, unless the Council proposes to remove it. A ratchet.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1].
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
To be clear, I wasn't saying Parliament wouldn't have a say - mainly pointing out that the website's information about MEP's current position on the regulation is incorrect.
IMO this kind of pedantry detracts from the message. We know that the EC is pushing it, but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEPs. Thus a list of MEPs from countries, colour coded by whether or not the country is known to support the position. And optionally a marker for their personal opinion if known.
> but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEP
The European Council is the heads of each member state. They are literally the people elected by each nation state domestically. If they don't represent the people, then that means national democracy is broken (which I agree with in cases like the UK) but I'm making a more general point.
I wasn't talking about the council, but the commission. The acronym confusion is unfortunate.
Point is that these people are very far removed from elections and political consequences. They also seem to be the types who have no idea what "normal" people are like.
Then you have understood even less. The commission act on instructions from the council. The steer for this has come from the member states, not the commission.
It's a very sad state of affairs that when Trump and von der Leyen meet to represent two of the most powerful entities on Earth, one has been democratically legitimised less than a year ago, and the other has never ran in an election in her life.
Came here to say the same thing, confused how a website like this can be made, the people behind it must have not understood how the EU works.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.
If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
No, in the 1980s, dissident voices had platforms. They weren't "mass media" platforms but they definitely had radio shows, periodicals and various publishing channels to disseminate their publications and broadcasts. They were incredibly important in those days, and those sources held some amount of power, in that they could expose a story, and effectively force the rest of the media to cover a subject or event they otherwise would have ignored.
This is worse in every way as it /completely/ locks them out the modern market of ideas that is the internet and ensconces prior restraint into law in a way that violates the civil liberties of every citizen, whether they are the publisher, or the consumer.
We have lost control of the internet. Those who have control intend to turn this world back into a fiefdom with their newfound power. They are otherwise working to keep the rest of the population in fear and distracted. I'm genuinely afraid our past luck will fail to hold out. They've spent 20 years to get to this point. I don't see them giving up.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
In no way do I support this surveillance society, or legislation, but I just wanted to make a casual point. I'm from a country where the internet first came through universities, and I was privileged to be there at the time. Those early days when it was just university students (and other staff) communicating over IRC were, nostalgically, wonderful. And everyone knew who everyone on IRC actually was in real life. Sure, there were the usual flame wars and some trolls, but it felt personal and, just good.
I'd love to go back to those internet days - bit of course I'm aware that is an elitist attitude, because I was part of the "in group" at the time.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
This would just end anonymity for normal people. All of the bots and bad actors will have no problem with comitting a crime because they are literally criminals.
I think they'll pass it into law, and then find it's effectively unenforceable, same as all the other similar laws (the UK is busy discovering that age verification laws promote VPN use that circumvent all enforceability of any UK internet laws).
The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
The notoriously opaque EU institutions would sooner insist on reading your every message than actually be transparent themselves. This is beyond satire.
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
Australia already has this capability and is likely using it for 5 Eyes nations. Questioning the desire to surveil seems on topic when this is pretty much everywhere already.
> In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
In the US, violations of civil rights that are performed by officials (like legislators) can be prosecuted under something called color of law. I think it is rarely done, if ever, but the justice department could do it. Maybe Americans need to start pushing their own representatives to call for such a case in situations where individual rights are violated.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
They probably meant January 6th rebels being pardoned giving the example that extremists that aim at preventing democratic election results from going into effect can do as they want.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
So people should die of pandemix diseases for making sure that personal freedoms are never ever temporarily restricted, got it.
One side seems busy with taking democratic institutions down, I wouldn't be surprised if freedom is next anyway. (well freedom of opinion is already disappearing)
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large.
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
Being temporary and being authoritarian are entirely orthogonal. In general I would imagine that cultures willing to accept temporary authoritarianism for the "right reasons" are more prone to falling to dictators.
Most democraties have provisions for times of exceptional needs and counterpowers against that. Of course that's a weakness but a weakness that's judged better than mass deaths or complete fall of the country.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
I completely agree of course. My reply was simply because I think it's important not to inadvertently conflate things, particularly when the issue is contentious. In this case the concepts of authoritarian and permanency, as well as the concepts of people who deny COVID, people who distrust vaccines, and people who were dissatisfied with the various government mandates.
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
I don't think so? I'll state it again - temporary and authoritarian are orthogonal. Attempting to claim that the lack of permanence demonstrates that the measures weren't authoritarian thus my claim that the two concepts are orthogonal is incorrect is begging the question (at absolute minimum).
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
I'm Italian. On my side, I did what I could do: I emailed Italian politicians explaining why they should reject the proposal. A drop in the ocean, and far from impactful, but if it can change the odds even by an epsilon, why not?
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
I think the UK (and EU) have been at this for a while. The UK pushed for the Data Retention Directive in the EU in the mid 2000s that required ISPs to save all the websites you visit. This was eventually ruled to be illegal, but it was still in force for several years.
Australia too. They've been playing with this for decades. The latest push is similar to the UK: age verification for porn and social media, but watch it expand once introduced.
The Establishment really don't like how they're not in control of what everyone hears or sees any more. It used to be so cozy for them.
Security is worth half a shit these days and Five Eyes can't remotely access everybody's phone without it getting noticed by people. So they need to keep transport insecure.
For over a decade now there’s been a huge global shift toward authoritarianism, and to some extent it’s grassroots. My speculation is that this is a time of unprecedented change and that scares people. We also have aging populations due to lower birth rates and older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics.
At least two decades now, here I remember people talking back then about newly introduced CCTV cameras, and making maps of them so people could avoid the surveillance.
> older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics
Just a friendly reminder that it was millenials who brought us censorship, cancel culture and other totalitarian bs. People who are older today, saw nearly absolute online freedom and miss that, not some "nostalgic reactionary politics".
I would not be surprised if it's the US pressuring everyone else. Thiel is probably salivating to get a deal for Palantir to implement it.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
The pandemic showed that govs can push what they want with minimal resistance and having the public on each other throats. People are also fatigued and isolated more than ever, perfect time to seize total control.
We already tried requiring CP rings to collect ID in the US. It doesn't seem to have worked out the way you're suggesting. It was called the Epstein client list if you're curious.
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
That they exempt politicians is basically admitting that the security problems that detractors bring up is true, and is something that should be used against them.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
This is only the first step in the process. First they will force all messaging/email providers to implement the scanning. Those who refuse or decide to leave the EU as Signal said they would do, would end up being unlisted from Google Play or the Apple (EU) app store.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
> Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
ProtectEU sounds incredibly dark. Do you have a source for the information regarding on-device scanning? I had a look but only found the bureaucrat-speak overview and they didn’t discuss details.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
It doesn't say how AFAIK, although it's been a few months from when I read the original proposal. If I'm not wrong it would delegate that to service providers - the organizations managing the apps, telegram, meta, whatever the name of the foundation for the signal app is ecc
Even if you compile your own version of Signal, will your friends do it too? Will your grandma/grandpa do it as well? It only takes one person in the chain to be compromised by using the "real" app and then all your efforts would be defeated because now your messages have been exposed by this other person unknowingly.
Do phones have trusted execution environments? I suppose you could require the recipient provide attestation that it's running the expected binary. Of course, this is pointless if the hardware manufacturer shares their root keys with the government.
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
Yeah this really annoys me, because it appears to show that any pretense that the law applies to everyone equally is disappearing fast.* If it at least affected politicians you could write it off as "idiotic idea that wasn't thought through in the slightest", but here it's clear that they have some idea how stupid and dangerous the law is, and see themselves as worth exempting from it instead.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
When they locked everything down and forced you to wear masks they already told you who they are. They don't care about your freedom or you as an individual and your rights.
Spot on. They also showed how the constitution means nothing to them because once you win in court they already got what they wanted.
What's more sad is that the general public has also responded that they are OK with this. Dissenters have become to be though of as a problem that needs to be corrected instead of as an indicator that what the government is doing is wrong.
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
I wonder if it'd be possible to fix a lot of these issues by having a constitution with damn near impossibly strict standards for changing it that rely on the entire population agreeing (or close to it)?
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Is there no way to codify a negative right, like “The right of the European people to privacy in their communications and security in their records through encryption shall not be infringed?” Negative rights reserved to the people should be more important than positive laws granting power to the government.
Yes; they could amend the definitely-not-a-constitution (for branding/eurosceptic-appeasement reasons, the EU constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon treaty before adoption). Arguably such a right may exist already and this legislation might find itself on a collision course with the ECJ if it passed (notably the ECJ nuked _another_ intrusive law, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive).
In some ways yes but we've already seen with covid that governments are happy to behave unconstitutionally even when it's clear they will eventually lose in court - by then their targets have already been dragged through the mud.
This rule can really hurt. e.g. Theresa May tried passing a deal to keep the UK in the Customs Union. The speaker wouldn't allow it because the same deal had previously been rejected, even though she now had the support for it in the house.
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
Yeah I have a feeling this thing is gonna be exactly like that. Even if this doesn't pass, they'll just rename and repackage it and try again until everyone gets fatigued enough and doesn't have energy to oppose it anymore
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
Upper class could completly turn off their telescreens, meaning they have partial exemptions at least. For middle class they were always on. Proles had no telescreen because they were considered to lack brains. Even the Party had levels, Inner and Outer, with different rules.
1984 would be incomplete without the hypocrisy of "rules for thee not for me".
What do they gain? The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control. If there was a conspiracy like that would they be acting much differently?
> The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control.
Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".
Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.
But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
The fascist, autocratic impulse is a big in the human firmware and will never go away. We exist constantly balanced on the razor edge precipice because we are capable of little else. Self-governing humans are not a stable system.
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
How exactly are you going to repeal ChatControl or ProtectEU when the same people who lobbied for these proposals/laws are the ones who would have to repeal it? Ursula survived a no confidence vote just a month ago.
the western democracy was lost not with trump/farage etc but with the entrenched liberals who decried democracy redefining it as populism and institutional entrenchment as true democracy. This is fallout from it. The populist movements happened because the liberals who once stood for working class people abandoned the poor and working class. Nobody cared then and some even mocked the working class. Now everyone here/reddit/etc cares because suddenly they are affected and its an issue that they identify with and not just the working class. Good times. You won't be able to do anything. They will walk all over you just like when they walked all over the working class.
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
You cannot fight this with technology. What will you do when they make connecting to instant messager servers without scanning illegal? VPN? They are already going after VPNs.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
Laws generally recognise the sanctity of privacy - for example, so much as looking at someone for too long can be deemed sexual assault in some jurisdictions - yet law makers wish to legislate they be able to view everyone's nudes (and much more)! Weird contradiction.
Hello! I made this website. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
Hello,
it's not working for me, "send emails" fails with:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'selectedMeps')
at Object.showSelectionFeedback (takeAction.js:546:41)
at Object.selectAllRepresentatives (takeAction.js:542:14)
at HTMLButtonElement.onclick ((index):1:13)
So what is the real solution? Meaning the solution that an individual could use themselves, without further coordination, to insulate themselves from this policy. Is it an Android distribution? Jailbreaking? Custom builds?
> would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
Encrypt your data locally before it is uploaded to a service that scans your private communication. This is most likely how the child abusers will do it too. And therefore the law will be ineffective at fighting sharing of child abuse material on the internet.
You ask a valid and clear question, sadly no one yet properly responded :( I'll try: using an app that can communicate without ever connecting to the internet? Such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6748584483
An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.
There is LoRaWAN with tech like Meshtastic which can send messages far further than wifi and bluetooth. Problem is the throughput is pretty limited. Only really useful for text messages within the same city.
Not sure any purely wireless system would scale that well either since every message floods the entire network. Ideally for wireless you just want wireless to the closest grid connected node to connect to the internet.
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
So as a Dutchie that opposes this, is there still something for me to do? The Netherlands opposes this, so... should I sway them to oppose it even more? Not really sure what my role should be.
> Is your government opposing?
→ Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps. Also critical governments need to do more, exert their influence in the Council of the EU and agree on a joint list of necessary fundamental changes to the proposal. Absent such revision they should ask the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal as it stands.
Because people keep believing that there must be a technical solution that will improve security without causing harm. They are just uninformed, IMO.
Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
Don't forget all the other wrong-think like "misgendering" or "immigration" policy where there are many that want you cancelled for having a different opinion. And then of course there is that one group of people who may be criticized since the last big global conflict.
Man am I glad I live in America. Despite everything, it's still the land of the free and the home of the brave. The federal system here means that the majority of weird shit happens at the state level.
The company lobbying for the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn. They have correctly identified that the EU is weak and you can just say "children" and politicians will agree to anything however. Even if it doesn't achieve anything.
The country that had prosecution of political opponents during the Red Scare and patriot act is better? The US is the country that started all this privacy invading BS and is still way ahead on that front.
After all Chat Control hasn't actually passed yet.
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
Ultimately the US government's key escrow fixation largely faded away, and it was never clear whether it would stand up in the courts, but it still shows up from time to time.
It's quite possible that this would conflict with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon treaty) if passed, too; for a prior example see the defunct data retention directive, which was nuked by the ECJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
You might not like this example, but the relatively recent evolution of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, significantly strengthening gun rights, is the result of many impassioned, dedicated groups, lobbying the public and the government for decades.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
It takes a firm believe to still pretend the bill of rights would be adhered to. You have a convicted criminal as president with ties to child traffickers, taking foreign bribes on live TV, scamming voters with crypto, while punishing universities for teaching the wrong things and imprisoning people without due process for having the wrong opinion.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
I'm not convinced the US will even have fair elections a couple of years from now. Do those amendments really matter, when those in power are doing everything they can to break down the rule of law, and turn the country into yet another autocracy?
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
From what I've seen, the US also has a more "rebellious" culture than the EU, for lack of a better term; laws are viewed less as an absolute and the population is far more willing to break them if the consequences are perceived as minor. This is bipartisan; examples that come to mind include: electing a convicted felon, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, and going 10 over the speed limit.
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
> The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
I get that maybe you meant culturally, but Ireland is a member of the EU whereas the UK is no longer. This forces a tighter alignment so makes your point about Ireland redundant.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
This just hammers the opinion that the GDPR was mainly just an EU economic protectionist policy and not actually about protecting privacy of citizens as promised.
I just had this great idea reading this proposed law and the comments and concerns there of… here me out
Lets just put everybody in the world in prison except for the people with net worths over some unattainable threshold… perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. Then we’ll just make everyone work for and take all of it for ourselves. That way we cam destroy their cultures and the genetic lineages and we can just kill all the people we dont like dont agree with especially if theyre skin color is one we dont agree with. The world will be a better place because the clearly superior people will be on top. We can breed the rest of humans and just eat them. We’ll call them eloi and we’ll be the morlocks.
Sure. Fight it. And also Remember this moment next time you're calling people conspiracy theorists because your party politician or mainstream news says so.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Not quite. It would be illegal for Signal to continue operating in the EU if they don’t implement the required scanning functionality. And Signal has already stated that they’d rather leave the EU.
Yes, what is proposed is breaking the end-to-end security model, not breaking the encryption itself.
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
Telegram is not E2EE because it's easier and faster to sync and transmit messages between millions of people. The scale of Telegram groups and channels is massive. Telegram, for a long time, has not complied with law enforcement requests and has made it hard for authorities to get data because of their architecture. You still have Secret Chats for E2EE messaging as an option.
Not sure what your point is. Telegram is not an example when it comes to privacy. Anyone who has access to the server has access to pretty much everything. Nothing can tell you that governments (or bad actors) are not already reading your Telegram messages.
Making it illegal to use "non-compliant" e2ee services and prosecuting those who does. Realistically, they couldn't, but could ban such apps in EU stores, making them less popular.
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
The proposed regulation is about imposing requirements on service providers, as defined by the Digital Services Act, for messaging and other services, effectively requiring them to implement backdoors in their software.
No, but many political figures have proposed banning the distribution/possession/operation of tools (e.g. Signal, Tor) which can be used to circumvent surveillance.
Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
Maximum of at least one year? Is there some kind of award for how nonsensical a law can be?
Member states will implement this into national law. So in the case they will need to implement a maximum of one year or more (but not less). The final law as applied by a judge will just read "punishable by a maximum of [i.e.] fourteen months".
> maximum of one year or more
If the max is one year, it can't be more?
It sounds like it's "the maximum penalty must be at least 1 year", as in "your member state can't enact a law where the maximum penalty is less than 1 year".
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
This is correct. But the larger point is that even 1 minute of jail time for such "crimes" is unacceptable.
That larger point deserves its own thread. My newest pet peeve is someone jumping into the middle of a conversation with the equivalent of "I don't care about what you're talking about. What I want to talk about is more important".
Oh look, now you've got me doing it to you. Drat.
Welcome to Internet Comments.
This is correct. But the larger point is that even though you can put pineapple on a pizza, you still shouldn't.
So it’s a minimum maximum.
The maximum value in each instance must be at least one year.
A little more context: that article 3 paragraph 2.a. was added by parliament (not proposed by the Commission). But paragraph 1 (same article) was altered to this text:
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
The positive intentional act, I guess, is disseminating the material. Proving intent and various ancillary concepts like knowledge, etc, are the bread and butter of prosecutors, so I don't think the act would be as difficult to enforce as you suggest. Sure, there might be corner cases where you can say "oops I forgot to password protect that Dropbox link" but certainly porn websites that don't do age verification will have a hard time arguing their conduct was not intentional.
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
The standard for robust and effective age verification is extremely low, given how I’ve seen anyone do age verification. It’s also pointless if we’re talking about the internet, you are essentially outsourcing your porn production to foreign countries
The standard for robust and effective age verification is a moving target.
Foreign websites will be solved the great EU firewall that will inevitably come "to protect the rule of law" once these legislations are passed.
Foreign countries with less regulations and protections for sex workers and actresses.
While this is a specifically awful article, for obvious reasons, I find the idea of encoding specifics on carceral terms into any EU-level directive a bizarre overstep.
That's not only asinine but also poorly worded. How is this getting approved?
Its properly worded, as it is an EU law declaring atandards for national laws and the implementing national law must specify a penalty range where the maximum is at least one year (but can be more).
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
Ah, that makes sense.
Jup, it's a directive.
[flagged]
Please don't berate other community members on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. HN is for curious conversation, not battle. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I personally support age verification for porn. However, age verification for almost anything else, e.g. Reddit, is a terrible idea.
Yeah I think you have it backwards. I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn, but social networks regularly fuck teenagers up.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
Stupid dumb law.
i'd go even further: since harm of unrestricted access could not be proven, existing restrictions need to be reversed.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
There's porn on reddit though
Even better, do a Google image search for “porn” and turn off filters. You will see pornography hosted by Google’s servers! I can’t understand why, at least in the spirit of these new laws, Google is exempt from age verification.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
Define "porn" then I'll think about what you're proposing to age verify.
Idk age restricting Instagram, TikTok etc. might be good for teenagers mental health.
If the parents want they can restrict their usage. I prefer to monitor and teach my children how to use technology properly, and that also includes of course sex education because it's not by banning porn sites till they are 18+ that you solve the issue to me, but by educating.
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
It’d be good for all mental health. Banning the whole thing is probably a lot more sensible, but then people would have to face their own addictions.
I agree. If we have to have age verification laws I'd rather they be applied to social media networks over some size than to porn sites.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
We already have standards:
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
they really want mass surveillance for the plebs even by creating a weak point for enemies. To hell not just with rights but also defence. So any excuse will do.Well don't I feel like an uninformed dumbass. Talk of standards aside, pornhub apparently includes the following header if you visit it.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
If you value democracy, I suggest not to trust any random website you read. Of course the French left (at least EELV/LFI) is not going to support this. This should be obvious if you know a bit what ideas they are defending (them and the others too), which you should as well if democracy matters to you.
They will eventually come for GrapheneOS too in some way shape or form. Be it regulating hardware attestation being required to use devices, so that only government approved operating systems can be used, or imposing jailtime for possessing devices with capabilities such as GrapheneOS.
It will be a sad day when that comes.
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
The original sin are ad-based social media.
Everyone (except China) failed to regulate that. So now we see overcorrection.
The solution is to regulate Meta and TikTok and YouTube. Until that is on the table we’ll get performative stupidity from both sides.
What impression of PRC social media do you have that makes you think the situation is different there?
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
Looking at the supporting members, this appears to be supported by "both parties" across many many countries, what a sad thing to unite over...
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
The left and the right stopped being about liberal values (like traditionally liberal or whatever) at some point, which are the backbone of democratic societies. I don’t see how you can have democracy without the ability to freely communicate. And that means freedom of speech but also the right to anonymity and privacy.
I think we're just seeing the end game of neoliberalism, which is the fundamental agreement of all modern political parties.
Note that chat control has been a top concern of governments since there were governments.
The Roman Empire banned private clubs, seeing them as a source of revolution.
As the US demonstrated, they were correct.
Consider donating to https://edri.org instead.
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
-----
That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
Not sure what you call the "so-called left", but the actual left (LFI) certainly doesn't support Chat Control
Yes, this makes no sense. No way they got 100% of every MPs to agree on this. They never agree on anything. I think the website took the fact that the country supports it and applied that position to each of its MPs.
probably they call "so-called left" the liberals
Nobody would call them "left", especially not during Macron's 2nd term, the Walkers (or whatever is their new moniker) have firmly solidified as liberals in the right-wing sense (rather than in the bottom-wing sense).
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
Actually no, every MEP doesn't support it, the government's position is attributed to all MEP from the country, which is silly.
Why would you expect anything else from the so-called left? Do you honestly believe only the right want power and control?
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14945805/Online-Saf...
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
what are the arguments?
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
"only about 5% of Catholics in France attend mass regularly, which is roughly 2% of the entire French population"
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
In other words, your claims say more about you than France.
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
While I agree with you, this situation is also created by an all-encompassing State that rules every aspect of the French life.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
>The country is predominantly Catholic
No. Most of the country professes no religion.
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
A little context here since this website is highly misleading:
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
I think that's misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1]. Meaning that the Parliament can neither change nor reverse course - it is completely decided by the Council. All the Parliament can do is limit how fast that course is followed.
Edit: Sorry, what I wrote about the "Council" should have been about the "EU Commission" instead. The Council may in fact have equal power, as you wrote.
[1] Which I think (but was unable to explicitly confirm) extends to removing old legislation. I.e. the Council only has to get its way once, and then we're stuck with a law, unless the Council proposes to remove it. A ratchet.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1].
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
EU Commission: Proposes legislation
EU Parliament: Approves legislation
To be clear, I wasn't saying Parliament wouldn't have a say - mainly pointing out that the website's information about MEP's current position on the regulation is incorrect.
You mean the Council of the EU. The EUCO is a separate body. SCNR.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
IMO this kind of pedantry detracts from the message. We know that the EC is pushing it, but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEPs. Thus a list of MEPs from countries, colour coded by whether or not the country is known to support the position. And optionally a marker for their personal opinion if known.
> but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEP
The European Council is the heads of each member state. They are literally the people elected by each nation state domestically. If they don't represent the people, then that means national democracy is broken (which I agree with in cases like the UK) but I'm making a more general point.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/european-council/
I wasn't talking about the council, but the commission. The acronym confusion is unfortunate.
Point is that these people are very far removed from elections and political consequences. They also seem to be the types who have no idea what "normal" people are like.
Then you have understood even less. The commission act on instructions from the council. The steer for this has come from the member states, not the commission.
It's a very sad state of affairs that when Trump and von der Leyen meet to represent two of the most powerful entities on Earth, one has been democratically legitimised less than a year ago, and the other has never ran in an election in her life.
Came here to say the same thing, confused how a website like this can be made, the people behind it must have not understood how the EU works.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
The whole site has that vibe-coded-website look. I wonder if a lot of the information on the site was essentially hallucinated too.
This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.
If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
No, in the 1980s, dissident voices had platforms. They weren't "mass media" platforms but they definitely had radio shows, periodicals and various publishing channels to disseminate their publications and broadcasts. They were incredibly important in those days, and those sources held some amount of power, in that they could expose a story, and effectively force the rest of the media to cover a subject or event they otherwise would have ignored.
This is worse in every way as it /completely/ locks them out the modern market of ideas that is the internet and ensconces prior restraint into law in a way that violates the civil liberties of every citizen, whether they are the publisher, or the consumer.
We have lost control of the internet. Those who have control intend to turn this world back into a fiefdom with their newfound power. They are otherwise working to keep the rest of the population in fear and distracted. I'm genuinely afraid our past luck will fail to hold out. They've spent 20 years to get to this point. I don't see them giving up.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
In no way do I support this surveillance society, or legislation, but I just wanted to make a casual point. I'm from a country where the internet first came through universities, and I was privileged to be there at the time. Those early days when it was just university students (and other staff) communicating over IRC were, nostalgically, wonderful. And everyone knew who everyone on IRC actually was in real life. Sure, there were the usual flame wars and some trolls, but it felt personal and, just good.
I'd love to go back to those internet days - bit of course I'm aware that is an elitist attitude, because I was part of the "in group" at the time.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
This would just end anonymity for normal people. All of the bots and bad actors will have no problem with comitting a crime because they are literally criminals.
I think they'll pass it into law, and then find it's effectively unenforceable, same as all the other similar laws (the UK is busy discovering that age verification laws promote VPN use that circumvent all enforceability of any UK internet laws).
The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
Crime was spiking in those decades because everyone was getting pumped full of lead. Not because they didn't have anonymous reddit.
people still have a need to speak freely. There are alternatives to the mainstream internet, and maybe we ll be better there
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
This alone tells me which way I should weigh in on this law. They know what they're doing.
The notoriously opaque EU institutions would sooner insist on reading your every message than actually be transparent themselves. This is beyond satire.
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
Australia already has this capability and is likely using it for 5 Eyes nations. Questioning the desire to surveil seems on topic when this is pretty much everywhere already.
> In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
I'm unaware of Sealand[0] engaging in surveillance against its citizen.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
With only one citizen, it would seem that the government of Sealand must necessarily be watching everything he does at all waking hours.
In the US, violations of civil rights that are performed by officials (like legislators) can be prosecuted under something called color of law. I think it is rarely done, if ever, but the justice department could do it. Maybe Americans need to start pushing their own representatives to call for such a case in situations where individual rights are violated.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
The punishment can include the death penalty too.
The price is liberty is eternal vigilance.
Just as you must work each day if you want money, you must oppose tyranny each day if you want liberty.
They will always want more power over you and you will always have to fight them because of that.
Power wants to stay in power.
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
The one where citizens don’t regress into comfortably lazy nihilism as a first response.
The Catholic Church is not for surveillance, afaik.
Join Vatican City!
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent
America has been trashed not by Covid but by the precedence being set that partisan violence can and will be pardoned.
I don't quite understand your point. I also meant covid policies. Not covid itself.
They probably meant January 6th rebels being pardoned giving the example that extremists that aim at preventing democratic election results from going into effect can do as they want.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
Oh no. That's just your typical deranged Democrat vs republic bullshit. Like so many we've had from both sides.
I don't care about either side's excuses to ignore civil rights and freedom.
So people should die of pandemix diseases for making sure that personal freedoms are never ever temporarily restricted, got it.
One side seems busy with taking democratic institutions down, I wouldn't be surprised if freedom is next anyway. (well freedom of opinion is already disappearing)
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large.
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
Being temporary and being authoritarian are entirely orthogonal. In general I would imagine that cultures willing to accept temporary authoritarianism for the "right reasons" are more prone to falling to dictators.
Most democraties have provisions for times of exceptional needs and counterpowers against that. Of course that's a weakness but a weakness that's judged better than mass deaths or complete fall of the country.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
I completely agree of course. My reply was simply because I think it's important not to inadvertently conflate things, particularly when the issue is contentious. In this case the concepts of authoritarian and permanency, as well as the concepts of people who deny COVID, people who distrust vaccines, and people who were dissatisfied with the various government mandates.
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
I don't think so? I'll state it again - temporary and authoritarian are orthogonal. Attempting to claim that the lack of permanence demonstrates that the measures weren't authoritarian thus my claim that the two concepts are orthogonal is incorrect is begging the question (at absolute minimum).
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
yeah, Japan
They don’t really need to surveil their citizens. The indoctrination starts from kindergarden :)
Either that or they can't. They did after all have a minister for cybersecurity that had never used a computer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026
We must be thinking of different Japans then. Related, have you seen the Tokyo police mascot?
Not really, which is a good argument against regimes in general.
I'm Italian. On my side, I did what I could do: I emailed Italian politicians explaining why they should reject the proposal. A drop in the ocean, and far from impactful, but if it can change the odds even by an epsilon, why not?
https://gagliardoni.net/#20250805_chatcontrol
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
Thank you for sharing this, it saved me quite some time and I coincidentally found a great resource (your blog).
I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
If it hasn't been changed, not only politicians but law enforcement officers too would be exempt
This is one of the many abuses by Leo(s), part why I don't love and trust police in italy: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatti_del_G8_di_Genova#p-lan...
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
A lot of actual pedophiles will be exposed if it was used on politicians, we don't want that.
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
There's lobby organisations that try to influence politicians in different countries: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
I think the UK (and EU) have been at this for a while. The UK pushed for the Data Retention Directive in the EU in the mid 2000s that required ISPs to save all the websites you visit. This was eventually ruled to be illegal, but it was still in force for several years.
These guys have been at it for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
Australia too. They've been playing with this for decades. The latest push is similar to the UK: age verification for porn and social media, but watch it expand once introduced.
The Establishment really don't like how they're not in control of what everyone hears or sees any more. It used to be so cozy for them.
Security is worth half a shit these days and Five Eyes can't remotely access everybody's phone without it getting noticed by people. So they need to keep transport insecure.
For over a decade now there’s been a huge global shift toward authoritarianism, and to some extent it’s grassroots. My speculation is that this is a time of unprecedented change and that scares people. We also have aging populations due to lower birth rates and older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics.
At least two decades now, here I remember people talking back then about newly introduced CCTV cameras, and making maps of them so people could avoid the surveillance.
Yes.
It's a tremendous opportunity, presently.
Power is never before so easily gotten.
Fight: Collaborate, Empathize, Reject division.
> older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics
Just a friendly reminder that it was millenials who brought us censorship, cancel culture and other totalitarian bs. People who are older today, saw nearly absolute online freedom and miss that, not some "nostalgic reactionary politics".
I would not be surprised if it's the US pressuring everyone else. Thiel is probably salivating to get a deal for Palantir to implement it.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Palantir CEO interview about the future was straight up "YOU ALL are MEAT. Only I matter."
F that noise.
They are gearing for WW3 and population control.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
Before they could do that, you will see many countries amending their conscription laws.
Now they just need to find a reason to brainwash the general public to sleepwalk into fighting another war.
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
> Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Many of them support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Notable_s...
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
They're afraid of losing their job or being painted as someone who supports terrorists, pedophiles, or other criminals.
The pandemic showed that govs can push what they want with minimal resistance and having the public on each other throats. People are also fatigued and isolated more than ever, perfect time to seize total control.
We already tried requiring CP rings to collect ID in the US. It doesn't seem to have worked out the way you're suggesting. It was called the Epstein client list if you're curious.
This.
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
That they exempt politicians is basically admitting that the security problems that detractors bring up is true, and is something that should be used against them.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
Can't make this shit up.
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
You would get labeled a "potential criminal". See some comment from police labelling Graphene OS users as criminals.
Steganography exists and is undefeatable, though very low bandwith.
It's like any other crime. They cannot stop you from stealing, for example. By doing it, you will not be a lawful citizen.
You mean "an illegal?"
nah they meant unlawful. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unlawful
This is only the first step in the process. First they will force all messaging/email providers to implement the scanning. Those who refuse or decide to leave the EU as Signal said they would do, would end up being unlisted from Google Play or the Apple (EU) app store.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
> Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
ProtectEU sounds incredibly dark. Do you have a source for the information regarding on-device scanning? I had a look but only found the bureaucrat-speak overview and they didn’t discuss details.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
It doesn't say how AFAIK, although it's been a few months from when I read the original proposal. If I'm not wrong it would delegate that to service providers - the organizations managing the apps, telegram, meta, whatever the name of the foundation for the signal app is ecc
Even if you compile your own version of Signal, will your friends do it too? Will your grandma/grandpa do it as well? It only takes one person in the chain to be compromised by using the "real" app and then all your efforts would be defeated because now your messages have been exposed by this other person unknowingly.
Do phones have trusted execution environments? I suppose you could require the recipient provide attestation that it's running the expected binary. Of course, this is pointless if the hardware manufacturer shares their root keys with the government.
> the "real" app
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
Well... "TM Signal" was just in the news. It's close enough I bet it could fool some percentage of otherwise security-conscious users. https://www.wired.com/story/tm-signal-telemessage-plaintext-...
I used Signal as an example.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.
So stop them.
Yeah this really annoys me, because it appears to show that any pretense that the law applies to everyone equally is disappearing fast.* If it at least affected politicians you could write it off as "idiotic idea that wasn't thought through in the slightest", but here it's clear that they have some idea how stupid and dangerous the law is, and see themselves as worth exempting from it instead.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
Rules for thee but not for me.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
When they locked everything down and forced you to wear masks they already told you who they are. They don't care about your freedom or you as an individual and your rights.
Spot on. They also showed how the constitution means nothing to them because once you win in court they already got what they wanted.
What's more sad is that the general public has also responded that they are OK with this. Dissenters have become to be though of as a problem that needs to be corrected instead of as an indicator that what the government is doing is wrong.
Sometimes, very bad things are done in the name of "child protection". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
God fucking damn it not again
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
They only need to succeed one time. People are generally preoccupied with a lot of other things right now, so maybe this is their lucky shot…
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
It exists. Except these mfs will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. Instead they try again and again to gather the votes.
I wonder if it'd be possible to fix a lot of these issues by having a constitution with damn near impossibly strict standards for changing it that rely on the entire population agreeing (or close to it)?
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Is there no way to codify a negative right, like “The right of the European people to privacy in their communications and security in their records through encryption shall not be infringed?” Negative rights reserved to the people should be more important than positive laws granting power to the government.
Yes; they could amend the definitely-not-a-constitution (for branding/eurosceptic-appeasement reasons, the EU constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon treaty before adoption). Arguably such a right may exist already and this legislation might find itself on a collision course with the ECJ if it passed (notably the ECJ nuked _another_ intrusive law, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive).
In some ways yes but we've already seen with covid that governments are happy to behave unconstitutionally even when it's clear they will eventually lose in court - by then their targets have already been dragged through the mud.
This rule can really hurt. e.g. Theresa May tried passing a deal to keep the UK in the Customs Union. The speaker wouldn't allow it because the same deal had previously been rejected, even though she now had the support for it in the house.
They actually did succeed once, with the data retention directive. That got annulled by the CoJEU.
cough Patriot Act cough
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
Yeah I have a feeling this thing is gonna be exactly like that. Even if this doesn't pass, they'll just rename and repackage it and try again until everyone gets fatigued enough and doesn't have energy to oppose it anymore
It's not even a partisan issue; spying on the constituency is one of few issues that has broad bipartisan support.
You could vote for a libertarian, but good luck.
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
Yup.
Having empathy for your neighbor, and working with those whom you disagree, are precursors. This gives power.
Then using power to enact consequences for businesses and governments (the people therein), fixes the problem.
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
Context: https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1114997695267549...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
The exemptions for politicians is straight out of 1984.
They weren’t exempt in 1984.
Upper class could completly turn off their telescreens, meaning they have partial exemptions at least. For middle class they were always on. Proles had no telescreen because they were considered to lack brains. Even the Party had levels, Inner and Outer, with different rules.
1984 would be incomplete without the hypocrisy of "rules for thee not for me".
The arrival of AI has made mass surveillance pass a certain threshold. Now we're just a step away from aristocrat heaven.
Yup super easy to moderate, monitor, and manipulate.
Watchlist? Easy.
Mislead? Easy.
We need to isolate this bad behavior ASAP.
What do they gain? The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control. If there was a conspiracy like that would they be acting much differently?
> The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control.
Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".
Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.
But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
The fascist, autocratic impulse is a big in the human firmware and will never go away. We exist constantly balanced on the razor edge precipice because we are capable of little else. Self-governing humans are not a stable system.
Serfs and lords is pretty stable. But ya I get yr point.
As Juncker, ex president of European Commision said, you keep trying till it passes at some point. Good luck revoking it later…
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
No serious way to enact change? That's not true at all.
How exactly are you going to repeal ChatControl or ProtectEU when the same people who lobbied for these proposals/laws are the ones who would have to repeal it? Ursula survived a no confidence vote just a month ago.
the western democracy was lost not with trump/farage etc but with the entrenched liberals who decried democracy redefining it as populism and institutional entrenchment as true democracy. This is fallout from it. The populist movements happened because the liberals who once stood for working class people abandoned the poor and working class. Nobody cared then and some even mocked the working class. Now everyone here/reddit/etc cares because suddenly they are affected and its an issue that they identify with and not just the working class. Good times. You won't be able to do anything. They will walk all over you just like when they walked all over the working class.
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
People don’t want change.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
People both do and don't want change. Not all change is good and some (most really) should be fought.
> Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
That's a convenient argument for people who want to push unpopular changes.
People don’t want change, yet politicians are pushing sleazy changes left and right.
Change like straws ban and attached caps? Such change, wow.
That are alibi changes because the real necessary changes are too unpopular
Well it's pretty difficult to organize any opposition once they're reading all the messages.
You can keep trying to revoke it until it passes too.
Yeah, right. I wonder if revokers would have same privacy as those who try to pass it…
Who are the organizations fighting chat control which one could support with a donation?
EDRi. https://edri.org/about-us/victories/
Pick any decentralized IM project
You cannot fight this with technology. What will you do when they make connecting to instant messager servers without scanning illegal? VPN? They are already going after VPNs.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
How do you create an environment in which immoral actions become permissible? You legalize them.
Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.
Can you imagine the UK having a vote in all of this? Terrifying.
The chat control bill also has age verification to identify child users.
I think the point was that the law is not in effect just yet.
The EU: proudly defending human rights… unless you're trying to send a private message.
The individual MEPs' positions are wrong, it's not 1:1 with the national government's position as the website suggests.
Laws generally recognise the sanctity of privacy - for example, so much as looking at someone for too long can be deemed sexual assault in some jurisdictions - yet law makers wish to legislate they be able to view everyone's nudes (and much more)! Weird contradiction.
Hello! I made this website. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/preparatory-bo...
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
[2] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/mpo/2025/9/law-e...
[4] https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVIII/EU/26599/imfname...
Thank you for your good work. Yours is the best resource I found for (a) more information and (b) sending mass e-mails to MEPs.
I encourage everyone to at least contact your MEPS, x775's effort makes that part easy.
Hello, it's not working for me, "send emails" fails with:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'selectedMeps') at Object.showSelectionFeedback (takeAction.js:546:41) at Object.selectAllRepresentatives (takeAction.js:542:14) at HTMLButtonElement.onclick ((index):1:13)
Good work. I hope the HN front page didn't cause you too much headache with traffic.
So what is the real solution? Meaning the solution that an individual could use themselves, without further coordination, to insulate themselves from this policy. Is it an Android distribution? Jailbreaking? Custom builds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution probably a solution
A solution that laws like this will make very much harder to pull off if not impossible.
The real solution is to stop the law while it is still being negotiated.
In America our judicial system is sleeping and also overtly supporting anti democratic laws.
If the law was passed, would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
If so, that is the real solution, because it works in all cases.
> would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
Encrypt your data locally before it is uploaded to a service that scans your private communication. This is most likely how the child abusers will do it too. And therefore the law will be ineffective at fighting sharing of child abuse material on the internet.
You ask a valid and clear question, sadly no one yet properly responded :( I'll try: using an app that can communicate without ever connecting to the internet? Such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6748584483
An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.
There is LoRaWAN with tech like Meshtastic which can send messages far further than wifi and bluetooth. Problem is the throughput is pretty limited. Only really useful for text messages within the same city.
Not sure any purely wireless system would scale that well either since every message floods the entire network. Ideally for wireless you just want wireless to the closest grid connected node to connect to the internet.
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
Solution is to move or cause resistance obv
probably worst case side loading tor on android
So as a Dutchie that opposes this, is there still something for me to do? The Netherlands opposes this, so... should I sway them to oppose it even more? Not really sure what my role should be.
See https://www.chatcontrol.eu/#WhatYouCanDo under “Is your government opposing?”.
> Is your government opposing? → Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps. Also critical governments need to do more, exert their influence in the Council of the EU and agree on a joint list of necessary fundamental changes to the proposal. Absent such revision they should ask the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal as it stands.
Just putted it here, for easier reading.
I think the people behind this site did a really good job! Can we donate to them?
Yup, that's where we should spend our energy
Excellent resources section [0] including "Digital technologies as a means of repression and social control" study from European Parliament
[0] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/resources
It's impressive how governments never quit trying to implement this harmful idea.
Because people keep believing that there must be a technical solution that will improve security without causing harm. They are just uninformed, IMO.
Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
nitpick but the number of MEPs is not the same in some countries (Slovakia, Spain and a few more) on the summary card and on the representative list
WTFF. Fight !!
Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Are we so End Stage Growth Economy that EVERY power broker see now as the time to employer (IC)Enforcement?
Gestapo much, anyone?
> Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
Don't forget all the other wrong-think like "misgendering" or "immigration" policy where there are many that want you cancelled for having a different opinion. And then of course there is that one group of people who may be criticized since the last big global conflict.
Thank you for sharing.
Man am I glad I live in America. Despite everything, it's still the land of the free and the home of the brave. The federal system here means that the majority of weird shit happens at the state level.
The company lobbying for the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn. They have correctly identified that the EU is weak and you can just say "children" and politicians will agree to anything however. Even if it doesn't achieve anything.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
The country that had prosecution of political opponents during the Red Scare and patriot act is better? The US is the country that started all this privacy invading BS and is still way ahead on that front.
After all Chat Control hasn't actually passed yet.
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
you cannot enforce law globally online
there's no internet police
You didn't even need the word "online." There's no global police.
This is a list of countries not to visit with tourism money as a foreigner you’re no longer safe.
The EU continues to become a hilariously Soviet nanny state.
Beautiful land and country, but they're destroying their cultures with the third world and seem to just not care about the rights of their citizens.
Test
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
Europe never abandoned the elitist mindset of a ruling elite lording it over the masses.
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtrNXdlraM
Where is the difference to the US, China or the UK?
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
The US, at least, has a Bill of Rights that would make this illegal, it would definitely violate the 4th Amendment and maybe the 1st too.
Hrm. Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Ultimately the US government's key escrow fixation largely faded away, and it was never clear whether it would stand up in the courts, but it still shows up from time to time.
It's quite possible that this would conflict with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon treaty) if passed, too; for a prior example see the defunct data retention directive, which was nuked by the ECJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
You might not like this example, but the relatively recent evolution of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, significantly strengthening gun rights, is the result of many impassioned, dedicated groups, lobbying the public and the government for decades.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
The EU also has laws that make it illegal. It annulled a previous law with some of these provisions, the so-called Data Retention Directive.
> The EU also has laws that make it illegal.
For now.
It takes a firm believe to still pretend the bill of rights would be adhered to. You have a convicted criminal as president with ties to child traffickers, taking foreign bribes on live TV, scamming voters with crypto, while punishing universities for teaching the wrong things and imprisoning people without due process for having the wrong opinion.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
Are you sure you want to make this point?
I'm not convinced the US will even have fair elections a couple of years from now. Do those amendments really matter, when those in power are doing everything they can to break down the rule of law, and turn the country into yet another autocracy?
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
From what I've seen, the US also has a more "rebellious" culture than the EU, for lack of a better term; laws are viewed less as an absolute and the population is far more willing to break them if the consequences are perceived as minor. This is bipartisan; examples that come to mind include: electing a convicted felon, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, and going 10 over the speed limit.
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
> The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
Oh no....
I went deep into this rabbit hole and did a lot of reading on how this org is pushing it's agenda in EU.
I hate this Hollywood idiots with burning passion.
I hope you're right.
The administration and the people will just shrug and move on, like they've done with all the other crap they've shrugged at.
The difference is that PRISM was done as a black op, and this is out in the open.
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
> The UK is politically,
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
> The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
> The latter is also debatable
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
I get that maybe you meant culturally, but Ireland is a member of the EU whereas the UK is no longer. This forces a tighter alignment so makes your point about Ireland redundant.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
>Closer than to the US?
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
The landing page really should have an open graph image! It would help with sharing and promotion.
As disappointing as my national government (NL) has been and still is, at least our MEPs oppose this dragon of a proposal.
This just hammers the opinion that the GDPR was mainly just an EU economic protectionist policy and not actually about protecting privacy of citizens as promised.
I just had this great idea reading this proposed law and the comments and concerns there of… here me out
Lets just put everybody in the world in prison except for the people with net worths over some unattainable threshold… perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. Then we’ll just make everyone work for and take all of it for ourselves. That way we cam destroy their cultures and the genetic lineages and we can just kill all the people we dont like dont agree with especially if theyre skin color is one we dont agree with. The world will be a better place because the clearly superior people will be on top. We can breed the rest of humans and just eat them. We’ll call them eloi and we’ll be the morlocks.
Sure. Fight it. And also Remember this moment next time you're calling people conspiracy theorists because your party politician or mainstream news says so.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
HN applauds this vibe-coded “privacy” site yet condemns decentralized messaging.
States control what’s centralized; incentives ensure they keep doing so.
Protesting it is like arguing with a thermostat—it can’t hear you, and it’s built to tighten control.
As technologists, we have a lot more power than we realise.
(Yes, I’m speaking to the blob, but the Venn overlap of anti-crypto and pro-this seems big.)
>decentralized messaging
This doesn't help, Chat Control scanner run directly on your device. It doesn't matter which chat program you use.
Incorrect
> ... providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content [1]
Even if that were the case, the answer is the Framework phone
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
Genuely curious. What would the problem be if it was vibe-coded? It's an easy to read site that succeeds in communicating what it wants.
there's no problem with it being vibe-coded
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
Can you suggest an alternative action?
Decentralised messaging providers
Can't enforce everyone to scan
What are you going to do? Arrest everyone?
> What are you going to do? Arrest everyone?
Just like in any other authoritarian state, you make examples. People will quickly learn how to self-police (and to turn enemies in).
Maybe accelerating is an option
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Make their job more servant to the public, and less profitable in the near and far term.
Regulate the politicians.
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Signal chat messages to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Sessions chat message sent via TOR to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Genuinely curious. Can those that are in power break this encryption?
They can fine apple and google for offering signal in their app stores, until nobody has it installed.
That doesn’t break your comms today - but later, you replace your phone, can you get a current copy of the app?
Not quite. It would be illegal for Signal to continue operating in the EU if they don’t implement the required scanning functionality. And Signal has already stated that they’d rather leave the EU.
The idea isn't to break encryption, it's to have apps implement client-side scanning "pre-encryption".
> The idea isn't to break encryption
That comes later with ProtectEU.
"Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption"
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Yes, what is proposed is breaking the end-to-end security model, not breaking the encryption itself.
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I like your wording.
I wasn't expressing an opinion in that comment but I do find the whole concept terrible.
Definitely wouldn’t break the encryption itself.
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
Telegram is not E2EE because it's easier and faster to sync and transmit messages between millions of people. The scale of Telegram groups and channels is massive. Telegram, for a long time, has not complied with law enforcement requests and has made it hard for authorities to get data because of their architecture. You still have Secret Chats for E2EE messaging as an option.
Not sure what your point is. Telegram is not an example when it comes to privacy. Anyone who has access to the server has access to pretty much everything. Nothing can tell you that governments (or bad actors) are not already reading your Telegram messages.
Making it illegal to use "non-compliant" e2ee services and prosecuting those who does. Realistically, they couldn't, but could ban such apps in EU stores, making them less popular.
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
The proposed regulation is about imposing requirements on service providers, as defined by the Digital Services Act, for messaging and other services, effectively requiring them to implement backdoors in their software.
Purely P2P communication isn’t affected.
No, but many political figures have proposed banning the distribution/possession/operation of tools (e.g. Signal, Tor) which can be used to circumvent surveillance.
The app that decrypts the message, will have the capability to provide that message, now decrypted, to the government.