Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.
I also think this is just a delay, not a final win. Also, this page hasn't been updated yet: <https://fightchatcontrol.eu/>
I recently heard a political discussion about this topic and was disappointed by the lack of technical competency among the participants. What we're talking about here is the requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications. What could possibly go wrong with that?
What does a "final win" even look like? The powers that want this will simply propose it over and over and over until they win once, and then it's basically law forever. The "against" team needs to win every time, forever.
The EU article #8 of human rights [1] is deliberately loosely defined, both sounding nice at the first glance, while allowing for Chat Control style surveillance.
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his
private and family life, his home and his
correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public
authority with the exercise of this right except
such as is in accordance with the law and is
necessary in a democratic society in the interests
of national security, public safety or the economic
well-being of the country, for the prevention of
disorder or crime, for the protection of health or
morals, or for the protection of the rights and
freedoms of others.
> requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications
I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of some kind of encryption backdoor, but hearing it put like this genuinely horrifies me. Like a vulnerable keylogger on every device.
Is this a good time to plug the creation of chat protocols running over distributed hash tables (DHT) (essentially a decentralized way of creating mini message servers) and with forward security and end-to-end encryption? I made a POF in Rust but I don't have time to dev this right now. (Unless angel investors to help me shift priorities lol...)
Here's whats coming: Devices will be locked down by remote attestation and hardware secure models by the vendors like google, apple and microsoft. Only registered devs will be allowed to make software for those devices. They simply won't run unless the software is backed by a google/Apple/MS signed certificate. They'll make chat software that doesn't run chat control illegal. If you make it, you'll lose your signing certificate and no one will be able to run it. Sure there will be nerds running modified devices with no check but it's about compliance for > 99% of the people. No one you care for will use that software because they won't be able to run any banking software, other chat software, social media apps etc. on their phone if they jailbreak it.
... which then enables Apple/MS/Google to either forbid real encryption, or allow for silently replacing the app on your phone with one that breaks your encryption.
I beg to differ. As long as we have gentlemen like Pavel Durov getting arrested at French airports, it's definitively at technical question. A decentralized and distributed chat protocol with distributed devs and owners would make it impossible to arrest any one individual, and it would make it exceedingly hard to censor such a platform. But you are perhaps a fed? xD
Investigate steganography. Otherwise they will just make using particular applications servicws illegal and selectively enforce it. That's why this problem is not technical
If you need a specialized vacuum to collect shit from the floor, how about... not shitting on the floor in the first place.
> Investigate steganography. Otherwise they will just make using particular applications servicws illegal and selectively enforce it.
This isn't quite accurate. It's hard to ban things that are widely used.
Because of its design, it's very difficult to censor email. You could order some large provider to do it but then people could use a different one. You can get email for free from a provider in another jurisdiction. It's not that hard to start a new one. Trying to ban interoperability with mail servers in other countries would cut you off from the world. It creates a cost for a government that wants to do it, which is a deterrent, and even if they try it's hard to enforce.
That isn't what happens when everyone is using Facebook, because then a sufficiently major government can just order Facebook to do whatever authoritarian thing under threat of criminal penalties and there is no switching to another provider or operating your own Facebook server while still being able to communicate with the people using the existing system.
You want authoritarianism to have legal friction and technological friction against it. They're not alternatives to each other, they're checks and balances.
People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true. It's still up in the air whether you can defeat a law using technical measures, but it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.
Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.
"I can still use GPG" isn't a win condition you seem to think it is. Authoritarian governments will be perfectly happy to let you continue using GPG as long as the remaining 99% of society continues using monitored/censored communication apps.
Conversely, as long as the people they actually want to target (dissidents, journalists, ...) use non-compromised E2EE it's not very useful for NSA/GCHQ etc to harvest info about all the cat videos everyone else is watching.
It won't help you with those specific cases no, but Chat Control would be the perfect tool to monitor and stop the spread of information between regular citizens who are trying to organize against the government, just look at China.
It's not your cat videos they're interested in. When people are protesting against the government it's vitally important that they're able to get information out as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. If the government can slow that momentum down then opposition fizzles out. Chat Control would do a great job in service of that goal, it's large scale crowd control, not a targeted attack.
No disrespect intended, but "it's still technically possible" doesn't matter. We, as enigneers, tend to think in absolutes (after all, something either works or it doesn't). Politicians are perfectly happy with a law that is only 80% effective - they would argue that sometimes people break laws against murder, but that doesn't mean laws against murder should be thrown on the scrapheap.
Most people obey the law most of the time. Doing a technical end-run around the law (a) leaves you with very few people to talk to (b) makes you stick out like a sore thumb, at which point you're vulnerable to the $5 wrench.
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.
> It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
The developers and the FOSS community generally; F-Droid is a good app store for FOSS, but there's no inherent need for app stores in the first place.
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
Right, you need an end-to-end ecosystem. Delivery, ease of use, trustable code and audit, good math, community, financial incentives. Still much more enduring solution than an eternal political battle, IMO.
> it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
I don’t think this protects us. I view the “encryption is maths” position as referring to backdoor keys.
But this time they figured out client-side mandated spyware is a viable way of breaking e2e without contradicting mathematics.
I hate to get dystopian but we can all see where this is going; “Trusted Hardware” is mandated to run your Government ID app and Untrusted Hardware is illegal because it’s only for criminals and terrorists. Your Trusted Device performs client-side content scanning, it’s illegal to install an untrusted app, and all app developers are criminally liable to monitor for Harmful Content on their services.
This is what we are fighting against. They keep trying and they are getting closer to succeeding. And none of this is incompatible with mathematics; it’s a pure rubber-hose attack on the populace.
Its both, ultimately politics is not all-knowing and you can't stamp out all technical solutions.
Like, breaking encryption is just not possible if the encryption is set using a proper algorithm. Governments try, and they try to pass laws, but it's literally impossible. No amount of political will can change that. Ultimately I can write an encryption algorithm or use GPG or something and nobody on Earth, no matter how motivated or how rich, can read what I encrypted, provided I do not let out the key. If I just keep the password in my head, it's impossible.
So, until we invent technology to extract secrets from a human brain, you cannot universally break encryption. Its just not possible. Doesn't matter if 7 billion people worldwide vote for that. Doesn't matter if Elon Musk wants it. Doesn't matter if the FBI, CIA, and the NSA all work together.
It's not a technical problem. Chat Control wasn't about breaking encryption, it would bypass encryption with client-side scanning. It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
It's also not a technical problem because technical solutions (like GPG) already exist. The problem is political (stopping these authoritarian laws) or should that fail, social (convincing people to inconvenience themselves with alternative communication apps that aren't available on app stores)
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
> Another political solution? Not going to happen.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
Huh? Apple absolutely does not want this to happen. That's why it doesn't happen. It's not that they do not have the resources to do it. Not really sure how you think that 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet do not have the resources.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue...
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better.
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math.
They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem.
People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school
It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities.
The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try.
If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts.
And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it.
Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.
> If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative
No! It is not my job to appease your fantasies. It is your job to first and foremost prove that Chat Control will effectively curb child abuse, which proponents of the legislation have completely failed to do. Secondly it is your job to ensure that your solution doesn't break the EU charter of fundamental human rights.
Here is a solution for you: All children must be accompanied by their legal guardian at all times - a child must never leave their sight. Unlike Chat Control, this solution would actually work and prevent all cases of abuse except those perpetrated by the guardians themselves.
> Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
By all means, I support your decision to run government code on all of your devices. Just keep mine and everyone else's out of it.
The Switch has a built in web browser that is "hidden" barely. Ample Youtube videos will show your child how to use it to access instagram, discord, even roblox supposedly.
Does your school not force them to have some sort of laptop? I was using my middle school provided laptop to do things I probably shouldn't have on my parent's network with them none the wiser, and the school not caring what I did, and utterly unable to stop me even if they wanted. In fact, the IT department basically drafted me and a few other students to be repair techs.
I was only superficially technically inclined at the time.
Parents will want control over their 16-18 year olds too, that's kind of a critical time.
"Just don't let them use the internet at all" is a great way to ensure your kid cannot develop any sort of healthy relationship with the internet once they become an age where they can just buy their own stuff, and sets them up nicely to be fresh, naive meat to whoever wants to exploit them.
My family is all experiencing this.
You have simply given parents a lose lose lose lose situation, and then complain when they turn to the only remaining group claiming to offer assistance.
What does that have to do with Chat Control? You need better parental controls offered by iOS, Android, Windows, etc. Chat Control is chiefly about scanning and censoring every private message sent between adults under the guise of stopping the spread of CSAM (trivially defeated by sending encrypted ZIP files or using an alternative non-conforming messaging service).
We’re talking about how the ability for the public to use strong encryption is contingent on laws allowing that.
Normies won’t start using PGP. Normies will use whatever popular app their friends are on.
Those apps can have their encryption made illegal, kicked off stores, and their developers jailed. The thing protecting the developers from this isn’t the strength of their encryption, it’s the laws saying the encryption is legal.
Absolutely true that we need sensible legislation not based in diffuse fears that endagers data security everywhere.
That said, I think doing both is sensible. Always good to have a fallback and feasibility of such surveillance attempts is part of the political discussion. Fait accompli through pervasive encryption, which some politicians might read as perverse encryption.
That said, chat control isn't the only problem. Removing anonymity through age or general ID checks is the other.
If they put a chip in every phone that grabs messages out of memory on their way to be rendered in the UI, it doesn't matter how fancy your backend encryption technology is
The only way to win the argument is to win the argument with the public.
In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls, so even political parties who would otherwise oppose it just stay silent, because the public narrative
You have to shift the narrative. Farage does this - he's finally after 20 years managed to get elected to parliament, he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens, about the same as the nationalists, yet for 20 years he has steered the conversation and got what he wants time after time
The loudest and the weirdest get the most airtime. Not all conversations are golden. He is a lying, opportunistic, self-existence driven ass. Farage is not a reference for how to do things, not even close, not at all!
It is of course unfortunate that a big part of the population is heavily influenceable by almost anything that has some scary perspective, in whatever size, over-considering dangers to opportunities to the extremes (want to eliminate dangers, hopelessly), also can only hear what is too loud, so the real democratic conversations and resulting decisions are distorted a lot. Better focus on improving this, than put a self centered ass on the pedestal to follow!
> he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens
The electoral system has been working against him. At the last general election Reform got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems, yet the result is that they got 5 MPs while the Lib Dems got 72.
The Brexit referendum and the current national polls that put Reform in first place at 27% (YouGov) show that they are not just "steering the conversation". When people's concerns keep being ignored at one point someone will come up to fill this "gap in the market", this is legitimate and how democracy works.
He's had 15 years of success without his vote in a westminster election getting to 15%
Actual election results:
2010: 3%
2015: 13%. He was the only party to endorse leaving the EU in that election.
2016: (52% vote to leave the EU)
2017: retired
2019: 2%
2024: 14%
Yet his prime policy was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2019.
You don't need people to vote for you to get your policies passed. You need people to just believe in what you say, and other politicians will see that and implement them. The most successful politicians see all sides "steal their policies" and implement them. That's assuming your goal is the policy, not the power.
I was under the impression that Faraga was heavily advocating for Brexit and he and his supporters ultimately got what they wanted so at least some people should be really happy that it happened (the ones who went into it with realistic expectations at least).
They should be happy. But the promised utopia didn't arrive, so now Farage is blaming the next thing, "just get rid of the 30k boat arrivals and things will be great".
(There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against)
Once the boats are all blasted to bits or whatever, and things still don't get better, who will be the next person to blame.
Immigration has been a big issue for a very long time and it partly caused the Brexit vote.
To me your reply exemplifies my previous point: You dismiss those concerns. This is what happened with Brexit and this is what has been happening for a long time over immigration. This can only end badly.
> There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against
They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
If they were spending their effort arguing against 95% of immigration, which are people arriving at Heathrow, then I'd be more sympathetic.
People voted for brexit was all about stopping Iraq and Turkey from sending millions of people to the UK. -- I remember the leaflet, I remember the voxpop of people saying "Europe, fair enough, but not from Africa, Syria etc".
People voted for Brexit to stop immigration. It decreased European immigration, but more than replaced it with African and Middle Eastern immigration) because they believed that being in the EU meant. This was inevitable.
They were wrong based on their own beliefs, and its difficult to argue against that viewpoint.
> They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
One major policy was implemented which massively increased immigration, illegal or not, was Brexit. Farage's flagship policy.
People support lots of ideas. I support the idea of everyone getting 1 billion dollars.
Can we do that ethically? No. Of course not. The implementation must necessarily require death and theft.
Age verification is a similar problem. I support the idea of minors not accessing bad data. Okay, cool.
Is there an ethical way to implement that? No, of course not. It would require extreme surveillance and said surveillance would necessarily be used for evil.
I mean, imagine this. New law: children can never smoke law. Great! 100% support! Now you must upload a video of you smoking every time you smoke so the government knows a child isn't smoking. Uh... Not great, very bad.
Its all about how you ask the question: "do you support children never smoking" => 100% support. "Do you support requiring video uploads to the government of every time you smoke" => 0% support.
We're actually asking the same question, it's just a matter of how favorably we show the issue.
Farage only has this traction because he's financed and platformed by interests (Russia, conservative Christian groups in the US, right wing media) that benefit from the division his inflammatory politics creates. This gives him and his party a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other, larger parties with more MPs.
The playbook that was overwhelmingly successful for making Brexit happen is being used again, but this time for immigration.
The fact he got elected as MP only serves to give credibility to his backers' narrative, given that he does not serve his constituency and is too busy schmoozing the US right wing. At one point in time he would have been forced to resign in disgrace for backroom dealing like this (as previous MPs have before).
The bigger issue is that we need to make the EU actually democratic. Start by removing every branch but the European Parliament. That's the only solution.
What you are proposing would amount replacing the current bicameral legislature (with the European Parliament as the lower house and the Council of the EU as the upper house) with a unicameral legislature. That would actually make it easier for bad laws to be passed, especially as the supermajority required in the Council is currently the biggest obstacle for this kind of legislation.
I'll also note that nothing here is per se undemocratic. Both the Parliament and the Council are made up of elected members. The members of the Council (as members of the national governments) are indirectly elected, but elected all the same. Direct election is not a requirement for a democracy (see election of the US president or the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment or the Senate of Canada right now).
That does not mean that there isn't plenty of valid criticism of the EU's current structure, but claiming that it is not "actually democratic" falls far short of a meaningful critique.
Democratic or undemocratic are always subjective terms. For me personally, the level of indirection is a problem. This problem was known since the inception and the reason why the subsidiarity principle was underlined. Sadly, that doesn't seem to apply for important issues like chat control. Imagine accountability on a communal level. We wouldn't even see this crap.
You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.
I agree. Additionally systems where it's really vote for parties and not for people from your region results in elected officials being more loyal to the party than to the people. It would be significantly better if every region voted for their representatives. As it is if you don't belong to a party that gets 5% (or w/e it in your country) you will not be representing your voters even if you win in your area. Who runs in a given region is often decided by a centralized party leadership anyway. The people not only don't get to vote on issues but they can't even elect someone to represent them - just a party official designated to a given region.
Proportionality is always approximate, and you can have proportionality without party votes by having multimember districts with a system like STV, with the degree of proportionality dependent on district size.
Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.
OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.
It is not democratic, as long as the President of the Commission is practically chosen by the European Council and the Parliament only can say yes or no.
And as shown in the last two terms of Von der Leyen, saying no doesn't actually do anything, because the same candidate can be proposed again.
They have their own neighbourhood and rarely mix with the rest of the population. Their Dunbar number (the max. amount of meaningful interpersonal connections that a person can maintain) is fully reached within that inner circle of European power.
Ironically, we managed to re-create a Forbidden City full of mandarins and eunuchs, or a new Versailles, only now they wear modern suits.
Scaling power institutions is always tricky, and this is the main risk.
Good point. At this point I would not be averse to mandating baroque fashion for everyone involved with the EU in that quarter. Also, the yearly trek to Strasbourg shall be made by horse drawn coach (that'll put an end to that wasteful travesty at least).
Eventually it gets on your nerves how much worse the city has to be to cater to the Institutions.
There's something about non-taxed coddled elites eating oysters and drinking champagne at 9AM on a Sunday that makes you a bit of a cynic.
And then, of course, all your friends works for the research companies that get paid a fortune to provide advice to the Eurocrats. But well, your friend has a Bachelor's in Marketing and she's being considered an expert on Soil Research because… eh, the agency is getting paid.
The Bubble is there and you'll be exposed to it. It's not a good Bubble. It's mostly young MBAs and Political Science majors that think they know how to fix everything.
(And some very talented people, of course. It's not all bad.)
It is undemocratic. Voting for only 720 people in the entire EU apparatus once every 5 years, whilst they are part of across-borders parties is not democracy but oligarchy with the illusion of choice.
Elected officials, elected judges and binding referenda would make it democratic.
We did not elect EU leaders. They keep secrets (COVID vaccin deals), they exempt themselves from ChatControl, they are obliged to store their communications yet internally recommend Signal with disappearing messages. Whats democratic about it?
The council is composed of representatives of each state. That means you did not vote for 26 out of the 27 members, and most states don't have special elections for European Council members* -- which means that most of them have not been elected into their Council position.
* the Council of composed of ministers and heads of government. Ministerial posts are distributed among the winning party members in pretty much every country, and only presidential systems have a direct election for their head of government. In constitutional monarchies, the head of government is commonly assigned to the largest party leader, but it's not a directly electable position.
The parliament seats are also apportioned by state. I don't find that a bad idea, living in a small country, and I don't see why the council seats being divided by country is a worse idea than the system in the parliament.
It's federalistic. It's a bit drastic - but I guess no one could imagine one state having 66 times the population as another in 1789. Other federal states compensate for that - for example, in the German Bundesrat, each state gets 3 to 6 seats according to population.
A problem for the US is that /both/ chambers of parliament are skewed that way.
The House is neither proportional (structurally represents parties roughly in proportion to their vote share) nor, what I expect you mean, divided into districts of equal population. The size difference between the smallest and largest districts—RI district 2 and Montana’s at large district—is 1:2 in population. It’s less unequal than the Senate, but its still not equal representation.
And, despite certain bills having to originate in the House, the Senate is more powerful since all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert or the Senate alone (except for electing the President when there is an electoral tie, which the House does but with a voting rule of one-vote-per-state-delegation which gives it the same undemocratic weighting as the Senate has normally.)
> The size difference between the smallest and largest districts—RI district 2 and Montana’s at large district—is 1:2 in population.
Come again? MT and RI have the same approximate population (1.1M) and the same number of representatives (2). I’m talking about the state level here.
> all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert
Right, they act as checks and balances upon one another. Equal-sized representation to give smaller states a way to avoid being steamrolled by the will of the largest states — why would states want to stay in a union where they have no hope of representation? Methinks if Alabama and Mississippi kept everything about themselves politically the same yet were both the size of California and New York you’d probably be of a different mind about the importance of the senate.
> What you are proposing would amount replacing the current bicameral legislature with a unicameral legislature.
Note they wrote "Start by removing...", not "Finish with".
You could remove Council of the EU and then create another "upper house". But its personnel would have to be nominated differently. Perhaps directly elected? But that would be tough.
Re the direct vs indirect election, note that in some countries governments do not have to consist of MPs. Like currently in France, you have a directly elected president who then nominates whoever to be his head of government and ignore the parliament for a while. And that government has a say in the Council. And at that point it's good to answer the question, at which level of indirection can we say there is a deficit of democracy?
Also note that it's quite unusual for a democracy that the 'lower house' (EP) does not have legislative initiative, can't propose laws. Is that a deficit of democracy yet?
Of course I understand it's all because national governments do not want create another centre of power, but the issues are very real.
You are not only being far too generous in your rationalization for how the EU is democratic and representative but are making category mistakes.
The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.
It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.
Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.
Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.
The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.
It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.
For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.
But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.
What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.
America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.
The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.
In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.
As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
I think it's less to make it hard to make laws and more to ensure the primacy of the member states governments over the parliament, but for the same reason you gave. To not become a federation.
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
there will be always inequalities and "blind spots", just look at the US, more homogeneous in many ways, yet still there's no single market for many things (healthcare for example)
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
Agreed, no big changes imminent. I was thinking more about the longer term. I would expect change in 20 or 30 years, and a lot of things could happen to change things even in the next decade (another financial crisis like 2008, another pandemic, wars, etc.).
The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
I think you are right about the aims but I do not think you can be a world power without being unified to the extent that would be a federation.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
And neuter the influence of deep-pocketed lobbying entities - US entities in particular seem to spend a lot of money on influencing EU politics:
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/
yes, the obvious problem is that Apple paid people so in turn they worked to make these meetings happen, HN doesn't pay random people (yet!?) to knock on doors in various EU cities.
the "obvious" solution seems to be to make these meetings open, sure industry wants to push their thing, put it on the calendar, and let civil society delegate someone, and industry pays for that too.
That would lead to turning EU from a union of states into a state in itself. This may be great, but would depower national states.
And it has a major problem: There is no European public. Cultural differences ad language barrier make it hard to follow debates and issues. It is a lot simpler to follow my elected governments behavior.
Also the parliament would lose its style of working. Currently there is cooperation accross parties and a less strict "government vs opposition" than in most other parliaments, which means that MEPs actually got a vote (in the areas where the parliament matters) instead dof being whipped by party leaders.
And then: Most decision power is with the council, which is made of democratically elected governments (if we ignore the Hungary problem ...)
They got 4 languages, not 24. Of those 4 there is one clearly dominant (German) and a clear second. Most debates happen in German.
With it's 24 languages the EU debates have interesting interpretation challenges, as they don't have interpreters for going from any language to any language, but often the translate first into one language (say from Latvian into German) and then some other language (German to Portuguese), which loses a lot of nuance and color from the language.
Also media can cover it better, with few languages and politicians can provide their press statements in those few languages.
And then culture is a lot more similar, which helps to identify the "relevant" topics and way to talk about it.
Parliament needs to approve any meaningful EU legislation anyway. The Commission cannot legislate. The problem isn't that the EU is undemocratic, it's that our elected lawmakers all seem to want to trample our privacy for one reason or another (see: the UK)
The answer is simple. The EU institutions cannot be both directly elected and have executive authority over member states.
The reason is that by doing so one would create a conflict between the "democratic legitimacy" of the EU executive and the "democratic legitimacy" of national parliaments.
In the current model, the member states retain ultimate authority and democratic legitimacy through their delegates to the Council of Ministers.
No, for a time any criticism about EU democracy was brushed away. Especially at the time around Brexit. For obvious reasons. But they are undeniable in theoretical and practical terms. This is why the competence of the EU was restricted at first. Problem is that this restriction did get too loose.
Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.
The highest body of the EU is the Council. Nothing happens without the approval of the Council. In comparison, the Commission is merely the civil service or secretariat, answering to the Council.
Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!
Erm... it's as democratic as it possibly can be when it comes to a union of independend, sovereign states...
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
Democracy is where people, or at least those given full citizenship, have a duty to debate and decide the rules they will be agreeing to follow, directly.
Anything else is green washing.
Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.
Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.
That's what I said yes, by it's very definition, no current contemporary government is a democracy.
I'm not necessarily picky with every word we use informaly. As you noticed with green washing, which here was colloquially used as "bullshit to pretend to be virtuous because manipulating public opinion open some hope to control its behavior".
But when it comes to the official fundamental statement of what the government ruling people is pretending to be, I do expect something more aligned with the first degree interpretation of the words.
Republic means there is no State secret.
Democracy means that citizen rules and decides the laws.
I have the firm conviction that asking better than newspeak level nomenclature is not asking for perfection. That just mere basic honesty.
Consenting that utter lies to serve as base political denomination with the excuse that nothing is perfect is just lazily opening doors to broader harsher lies for those willing to gain carte blanche on exercising political power with a flow of void sentences.
They represent whole of EU, and by EC's words they focus on interests beyond benefit of their own countries so they already have to do that. in theory at least.
Why would any member state give away their sovereignty like that?
EU is setup like it is on purpose. Parliament represents the people, council the member countries and commission EU itself.
The one with most power is the council as nothing really goes though without their (heads of state of the member countries) approval as EU has no legislative powers of its own but instead member countries have to implement the directives.
> The bigger issue is that we need to make the EU actually democratic. Start by removing every branch but the European Parliament. That's the only solution.
For goodness sake, you are sending people on goose chases instead of the real problem.
What happened here falls under the exact definition of representative democracy. There are some politicians from certain nation states pushing for the policy. They request the commission (the civil service type group) to work on the proposals, and then elected MEPs vote on it.
Again and again I have to keep repeating the same message:
This is NOT some random bureaucrats in some EU group deciding they want to push a policy. This is our elected politicians being influenced some some other agency to push chat control. They're pushing it through the EU commission, because that is how it works.
Please people, inform yourselves, or you're going to get this all wrong and fight the wrong fight.
The EU parliament is highly dysfunctional. First look at the number of MEP that have been indicted for corruption. Also in the countries I know, political parties send as MEP their least able politicians that they don’t know what to do and would never be elected if their name was on the ticket. Combine that with the flaws of all the national parliaments and you get a sorry clown show.
The postulate for EU structural reform towards perfection is typical of HN and other nerds drooling over their programming language and frameworks ;) but in real life had been tried with the Lisboa treaty to the extent it was deemed possible, and no-one involved with it wants to reopen the case. I'm also sometimes angry at EU as well, but the reality is there are over twenty member states, with their constitutions, languages, democratic and other traditions such as federalism and minority rules, bilateral treatments, special interests, and backroom deals to take care of. It's a miracle the EU exists at all.
I don't think much abstraction or design is needed. We are looking at the output here and that is chat control. The EU will have to be measured against this output.
The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.
The only solution is to stop the EU level power grab by formally restricting what the EU can do and to make sure member states remain where most of the power lies.
The US have that. The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
> The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.
This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.
This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.
In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.
One key tool of power creep are those very treaties. Let's do one more treaty and had things in the small prints. Of course the member states drafted and agreed to those and that's why pressure should be on governments to stop hand over the keys to Brussels.
That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power and they often overstep their role... We're seeing clearly on issues like Ukraine and, lately Israel.
> Of course the member states drafted and agreed to those and that's why pressure should be on governments to stop hand over the keys to Brussels.
What specific example are you thinking of where additional power was handed to Brussels through an amendment of the treaties?
> That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power...
If you are worried about the executive trying to expand its power (and something that should be kept in check), may I suggest that the US is not actually a great example right now for how to avoid that?
The US has that in theory, just like the limits on the president. But in practice the US has been centralizing power since the start, and the EU has a looooong way to go to come even close.
This feels like a recipe for dysfunction and more paralysis.
The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.
The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.
Plenty of Europeans, including me, disagree with you on the very existence of a "European cause".
"There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states."
I don't want federal EU, many others don't either. At least hold a referendum before running your fix. I suspect that most member countries would vote against being reduced to provinces of a centralized state.
You will be reduced to provinces of a centralized state anyways, seeing the CZ in your name. The only question is if the capital would be Brussels or Moscow.
We don't have the luxury of waiting for endless referenda. The enemy's at the gates.
This sort of false dichotimes was peddled to us in the 1940s already. Choose Berlin or Moscow.
Let us say that I don't consider your prophecy very accurate. Czechia, in some form, exists for about 1100 years. The EU probably won't match that record.
As for the Russians, molon labe, and I wouldn't count on Brussels to help us efficiently in such situations, if they cannot even enforce law in local Arab neighbourhoods.
Even today, the southwestern part of Europe is mostly obsessed with Gaza and I have to remind my Spanish and Italian colleagues that there is an actual shooting war on this very continent.
Czechia was a constituent kingdom in a sui generis hodgepodge monarchy consisting of many kingdoms. Not the same as province.
That said, we gained sovereignty and precisely because we still remember being treated as subordinates, we don't want to lose it again to another hodgepodge.
There won't be a federal EU, live with it. The optimal time for federalists has passed, and people are more distrustful of centralization than ever before. Not just because of naked power grab attempts like Chat Control, which would perfectly fit into China, but not to a continent where multiple constitutions forbid this sort of mass surveillance.
You may find it funny, but people actually fought and died for freedom of their nations, and their legacy won't be disposed of just because the Brussels bosses would find it practical in their quest for more power and money.
The EU is not sovereign. Member countries can just outright ignore EU law (see: Hungary or the former UK) and the only recourses are civil things like issuing declarations, withholding payments, crossing them off treaties, or kicking them out of the EU. There are no EU police that can be involuntarily forced on a country the same way the USA can send armed federal police or military into its states. Doing anything like that would be a declaration of war.
A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.
Yes, sad part it will be implemented and I betting even in worse form than it is proposed... And worst part of it "safety" it for current governing party to destroy any opposition.
My wild guess it will voted for with overwhelming majority using "times changed" argument.
Let's hope it will be implemented in typical "Germany does anything on the computer" fashion where they endlessly debate into a theoretically comprehensive, but impossible to implement solution.
> it will be implemented and I betting even in worse form than it is proposed
That doesn’t seem likely, because every time this fails the new version is compromised from the previous one. For example, in the last revision you would be able to refuse the monitoring but it would mean you would be unable to send files or links. Still bad, but not worse.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
It's also in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). But that has a big loop whole.
Article 8: Right to privacy
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
They could have just left out Article 8. Its a “no interference by a public authority unless it want’s to.”
“Well-being of the country”, “protection of health or morals” are terms that make this statute irrelevant and dependent on the current mood of the EU.
Privacy needs to be an absolute right. Any invasion of privacy of any individual is a violation of their rights and needs to be treated as such with actual repercussions following misconduct.
You need some kind of carve out, otherwise how could you ever make search warrants and court ordered discovery demands legal?
Ultimately it’s the articles depend on the court judges to weigh the rights of the state against the rights of the individuals, when there isn’t a clear and obvious answer provided by the text.
I 100% agree with the right to privacy but the keyword there is arbitrary - if everyone's comms get intercepted that would not be in contravence of the Declaration, as it would be done systematically, i.e. not arbitrarily.
The spirit of the laws is all fine and good but combing through them it's not uncommon to find these little loopholes.
In Germany there is article 10 of the Grundgesetz. While it does allow exceptions (like through a warrant), I wouldn't be surprised that if this law was passed that our constitutional court would deny it based on article 10 (any maybe article 1, that one's important)
There are laws about that already. However they have exceptions (and most people support exceptions. No one expects for example the privacy of ISIS terrorists be respected when they are investigated for terrorism and there are probable cause).
Probable cause is the exception. The police should have to suspect a particular person and then get a warrant approved by a judge and then they can breach privacy. Just like it's always been. They keep pushing for a wider and wider net, though.
This is correct, but also the problem. Various governments and organizations don't want to respect privacy, because they see it as a means of control and profit.
I don't mean this in an antagonistic way, but has anyone clearly articulated a right to privacy in a clear succinct way? Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats
I just find it hard to imagine the right to privacy encoded in to law in a way that would block this. For instance there is a right to privacy in the US, but it's in a completely idiotic way. The 14th Amendment doesn't talk about privacy in any way, and it's some legal contortions and mental gymnastics that are upholding any right to privacy there.
What would pass "clear and succinct" in your opinion? I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right.
Let's take international law[1]. Right to privacy is defined as protection from arbitrary interference with privacy.
Is this definition problematic? Privacy itself has a short definition too: the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public[2].
> I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right
Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define because they're an entirely abstract category relying very much on cultural consensus for their practical definition
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
> Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
> Is this definition problematic?
Yes, very much so. By qualifying that the interference must not be unlawful it essentially makes any interference by law (like what was proposed here in the first place) fine
> privacy, family, home or correspondence
This is very restrictive, for instance there's nothing in it about online storage or your laptop / phone since they're neither your home, family or correspondence
> unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation
This manages to be so unclear that if applied strictly it'd ban any criticism of a politician or anyone else as long as you can construe it as "attacking their reputation"
Exactly, I completely agree with you. This is what baffled me about the parent comment: "Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats".
Compare the right to privacy with other human rights, and I find it as clear and succinct as its counterparts (if not clearer and more succinct in some cases).
At the same time, given the international nature of these laws, I disagree with you on their problematic nature. They are (in my view) meant as a basis of diplomatic debate and not enforcement (which would be impracticable). They are to be complemented by organic law, because on their own they are unenforceable.
> Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define
Actually, not really. Just apply the "desert island" thought experiment to any given "human right." If you're not afforded that "human right" should you wind up on a desert island one day, it's not really a "human right" but rather a "right" that requires state backing to exist (and subject to its whims as you pointed out).
It's simple game theory. If one player (government) has access to private information of all players (citizens), then it's not possible to keep the government from winning, i.e. becoming tyrannical. Losing privacy equals losing liberty.
I think you missed my point entirely. I'm not trying to argue there shouldn't be any privacy or anything like that
That's not my questions at all. My question is, is there some good clear framework for what should and shouldn't be private. B/c otherwise it's kind of some meaningless platitude, like "everyone should be nice to each other"
It's not the end of the fight, but it's great to see that the efforts are working! I sent a handwritten letter to my MPs a few weeks ago about this issue but no answer so far...
They oppose breaking encryption, however, I see no true opposition to on device scanning, which is a bit worrying.
>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]
There is no on-device scanning without compromising privacy. Scanning that can detect child abuse can also detect human rights activists, investigative journalists, and so on. I imagine this technology can be easily used by the government to identify journalists by scanning for material related to their investigation.
On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.
Apple has never supported your privacy though, not really. Spyware company issues spyware, news at 11. They're better than Google, but they're not good.
That is exactly the problem. I still can imagine that they come up with some scheme as a compromise, that particularly targets particularly encrypted group chats along with all kind of server side automatic scanning, that as you mention could be abused at least by intelligence to track non CSAM content. I wonder what other 'compromise' will actually be effectively possible.
"Es sei klar, dass privater, vertraulicher Austausch auch weiterhin privat sein müsse."
"Private communication needs to stay private"
I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.
This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.
I bet what the politicians mean is "we have to make sure our surveillance is safe, like our digital health data, so that no bad actors can tap it". The only one who should be reading your messages is you, the sender, and the government.
I used the online form at fightchatcontrol.eu to send an e-mail to all of my representatives. Of the 90ish contacts, 4 replied – all agreeing to be against the proposal. One of them even mentioned the influx of mails they were receiving about the topic. So that gives me hope.
I know in the US it's very common to write emails or letters to their governor, but still I see it somewhat cynical. Like a popular tweet mattering much more than letters that probably won't be opened at all, and if it is opened I cannot imagine a MP reading all of them, more likely a clerk saying "You've got x citizens sending you letters about y", which would then again be somewhat valuable but I also can't imagine they have clerks opening every letter.
Sometimes making a politician aware that "if you vote for this, it may annoy people" can be enough. Your average politician votes on a _lot_ of things, many of which they know little or nothing about. They will take only a small number of them seriously, and a big factor in what gets taken seriously is what people are moaning about.
The first step really is just getting the politician to think about what they're voting on.
They also don't actually necessarily get _that_ many letters.
> common to write emails or letters to their governor, but still I see it somewhat cynical.
Yes, writing letters to these people is unlikely to help. The only language they speak is in votes. They have to be convinced that they will lose reelection over the issue. A conditional prediction market for their reelection given they vote a certain way would be the most effective tool.
The fight shouldn't have to be fought continuously. If legislation is shot down repeatedly, there should be a delay before it can be brought back again.
Between this and Google locking down Android, one day the only way to get secure communications will be to buy Huawei etc. Thank God for China, bastion of free speech.
In a few decades the only uncensored communication possible will be using LoRa mesh networks smuggled into the west illegally by some human rights activists. Some people will always find a way to organize against our government's latest atrocities and genocides no matter how oppressive it is yet to become.
The unfortunate reality is that a single largest lobbyist for Chat Control in the EU is, ironically, the US, namely the US intel community-affiliated orgs like Thorn, WeProtect, etc. The EU bureaucrats are gullible, and it's no excuse of course, however there's a reason why every time there's a new driver, a new country behind Chat Control proposals. This has been part of coordinated U.S. signals collection strategy. Nobody in Europe stands to gain anything from this besides the US as all tech solutions for this are provided by US companies and agencies alone. The boards of these orgs are crawling with Washington guys, & their activity is limited to foreign countries. Not once have they attempted anything of the sort on US soil.
I reckon that would only serve to play into their hands. There is just enough plausible deniability for conspiracy-theory optics. Moreover, European politicians really hate to be publicly humiliated like that, so it might as well achieve the opposite from desired effect. The Balkan Insight findings, among other journalistic results, were published years ago, and it had little, if any effect. The audience that would resonate with anti-American messaging on the subject are already catalysed contra ChatControl, and the undecided would just read this as conspiracy theory...
Sorry, as a Dane, this weird conspiracy narrative that the US has us by the throats and is forcing us to push this legislation through is garbage.
Our government did this because they love control. A hard hand is what got us through COVID and it's been effective at curtailing a lot of the issues our neighbor to our north has faced with uncontrolled immigration of refugees. Our government has also been pushing through expansion of surveillance capabilities for our police, including predictive policing and expanded facial recognition.
Now kindly stop passing the buck and blame for us. This is on us, on Denmark. We are to blame.
I hate to see my country pushing for this. It has not touched the media at all in Denmark(Highly suspicious that even the gossip and drama medias have not touched the subject) and the public opinion is a hard NO for this type of regulation and invasion of privacy.
I am yet to see anyone actually supporting this from a citizen perspective.
With a warrant from a judge people should be compelled to provide access to their encrypted files or be in contempt of court with all that entails. Anything else is overreach.
You cannot prove the absence of e.g. a Veracrypt hidden volume or similar, though. Even if you honestly give up your key, you could still be either
A) held in contempt of court, if the authorities do not find what they expect for some reason and accuse you of using such techniques or
B) if you specify that such behaviour by law enforcement is overreach, have a clean way out for criminals, codified in law, heavily damaging the impact you may expect of such a law.
Wonderful idea. All I need to is to create an encrypted file with pedo pictures or terrorist plans or just white noise, send a copy to all my enemies, and tip off the authorities.
Yea that's extra fun if someone else sent it then. Government puts them in jail for not having the encryption key for something someone else encrypted.
Maybe, just maybe, (probably not) they learned something from the NSA/FBI (I don't remember) tricking the BSI into helping them with industry espionage against a large Germany company[^1]. and pretty much any technology widely used in chat control would be under tight US control, or Israel which in recent times also isn't exactly know to be a peace seeking reasonable acting country.
[^1]: Which I think was about car companies and pre-trump, pre-disel-gate. Also not the only time where it's known that the US engaged on industry espionage against close allies or Germany specifically.
I think the front lines are not that clear. Zensursula was actually a termed coined because she wanted the German equivalent of the online safety act in Germany back in the days. The 'Stasi 2.0' initiative (data retention at ISPs and online 'raids') was backed by some people in CDU and SPD (current ruling coalition). IMHO online safety (censorship) and chat control (privacy invasion) are different beasts, with different lobby groups as well.
I mainly remember the Zensursula title in connection with the ISP-level DNS-blocking initiative (the Stopsign thing) which was to combat CSAM.
I remember all the nerds going "That's a slippery slope to blocking other stuff as well though", and being dismissed. Now we got the CUII blocking libgen, scihub, piracy sites and as I recently read on HN, russia today(that's not the cuii I'm pretty sure, but same mechanism).
During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.
The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.
German public broadcaster published a commentary last year after Chat Control was blocked saying that "child safety needs to wait" and lamenting that it didn't get through. Absolutely horrifying how much distance the media has from the people.
> It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ...
Unfortunately it's the pyramid of Maslow. It's hard to make people care about something that seems academic when there are much more pressing political problems crushing people and making sure they don't have space to think about anything else.
It's hard to make people care about privacy principles when they can't afford a house anymore.
That too, but my experience was that a huge part of the problem was sheer ignorance.
When informed about those plans, most people actually react with some disgust. But the European Commission was really trying to be low-key around this, and the media usually jump on loud scandals first. Too few journalists are willing to poke around in the huge undercurrent of not-very-public issues and fish for some deadly denizens there.
More publicity definitely helped the freedom's cause here.
I'm against ChatControl like most tech-savy people. But because someone is in favour doesn't mean they are a fascist. Usually they just don't understand why it is a problem.
"If it helps the good guys, I don't see a problem" is easy to say. And if you tell them "yeah but if it helps the good guys, it helps the bad guys", they will simply answer "well, make it such that it doesn't help the bad guys".
The real question to me is, why is Europe and Europeans okay with America and American software companies having access to their logs (encryption can be bypassed take whatsapp for example, do you honestly bellieve that Facebook does not have access to whatever is typed on whatsapp and/or can give it to authorities if necessary?) or discord, which if you are on mobile tells you via a title what the conversation you're having is about, is automatic message scanning not involved there? but the EU and or European countries cannot?
If we go by the idea that America should not either, then go ahead and do something about it, all this seems to me is just some weirdly motivated "activism" that may or may not be originated from the source that actually has access to said data at the moment. I am going to go with the belief that people are not naive and instead they are acting maliciously about this knowing very well that this already occurs, but only for a specific side.
“Next time” is preferable to now. Giving up and bringing others down is not the answer. If you want to give up, that’s your prerogative, but please don’t drag others down with you, you’re working against your own best interests. The thing you said right now is exactly what the bad actors want, don’t play into their hands. Thankfully not everyone has that defeatist attitude, or the law would have passed the first time.
And the proposal has not been worse, it’s more crippled with every attempt. Maybe we can’t stop the problem indefinitely, but we can mitigate the harm. Or maybe we can stop it long enough that the people making these proposals are replaced and we eventually win.
Don’t give up. You don’t have to fight along every one else, but if you’re not actively helping, I humbly ask that you also don’t actively make it worse.
What should actually happen is that adversaries of this policy should challenge those backing chat control to a test. Those backing it get to attempt to make it work for a year in a control environment, and if at the end of that year, they still can't read every message that actors within that control environment send to each-other (which they won't), we abandon the whole thing for good.
"Bad guys" will always find a way around any attempt to stop them communicating privately. And the rest of the population will be left with governments spying on all of our interactions. The fact that this is even getting this far is absurd.
I'd support this if and only if we ran a trial where all public officials had all their messages and emails publicly readable by citizens. Surely the good people adamant on spying on their constituents en-masse has nothing to hide, right?
This is good, but we do need some sort of progress somehow. As that case with the fake drug dealer "privacy-focussed" mobile phone company was crazy, when they had all the messages from Swedish death squads, etc. - https://www.404media.co/watch-inside-the-fbis-secret-phone-c...
Obviously monitoring everyone's messages is making things way too easy for authoritarian dictatorships later on, but there does need to be some progress so these groups can't keep acting with complete impunity.
Happy to see the NL here in opposition to ChatControl! The political climate here is slowly pushing to the right, which I'm not happy about. But there seems to be voices getting louder from the left. So that leaves me with hope!
Even if they did, I am sure this would have been toppled by our constitutional court. You have to know that our police is not allowed to scan number plates of cars entering or leaving the country due to privacy concerns. How on earth would anyone think that lifting our dearly held fundamental right of "mail privacy" is ok?
This isn’t how EU regulation/directives work as they are not laws.
Only way this can come into force in a member country is that country making their own law implementing it. It is at that point that constitutionality should be checked and the law stopped from being implemented.
In the case it is declared unconstitutional, there are two options: take the fight to the eu/amend the law, or change the constitution. The latter is more probable than the former in the political climate of our times. So we are talking at best for some delay in implementing it.
Or just never approve it and ignore any demands eu makes about it.
Just take a look at Orban with Hungary how many years you can keep doing this without anything actually happening.
EU in general works only to the extent that member nations want it to work and finding a concensus is always the first goal and split decisions are heavily discouraged (and pretty much anything that matters needs a supermajority at minimum).
If one of the member nations just goes "ah fuck it I don't like this" EU really does not have many tools to fight it (especially for things that effect internal things in the country not trade between them). This is also why directives like this are very unlikely to ever go through without unanimous support from the council (heads of state of the member nations)
I mean literally at worst EU could keep some of the benefits away from a country over not implemeting some directive (what EU is finally after years thinking about doing to Hungary) but that does not really work with a country like Germany that pays more then it gets as they could just go "fuck it we are not paying our dues then".
Basically unlike in the US where the federal government has police, army, etc to actually enforce its rulings EU has none of those. All it can really do is try to take money away which again does not really work all that well.
These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.
It would probably be toppled by courts, yes. Anyway, meanwhile they already start implementing it, developing the technology and infrastructure they can base on the next time where they basically reintroduce the same illegal laws in a new name. So companies and governments already have to spent huge sums of resources to introduce it and may fall into the sunken-cost fallacy. "If we now already have it we can also use it (for something else)"?
Even if it's EU regulation? My experience is that you get told that EU regulation and international treaties are "above our national democratic/justice system", and that we can't do anything about it.
IANAL - but when EU regulation and national law regarding civil rights conflict then the citizen has the "union set" of all guaranteed rights. Or in other words: A member state can grant additional civil rights (on top of the EU charta) but can't take them away.
Glad that my country (Finland) is also on the correct side of this. Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though. Would've expected more, especially from Estonia.
Sweden and Denmark are some of the main drivers of this proposal. As a Swede I am a bit unclear why as while our politicians are quite pro-survelliance they have spent much more political capital than reasonable.
One possible reason seems to be lobbyism and shady connections to surveillance tech companies and various shady non-profits
> Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”
Literal "Won't anybody think of the children" moment.
The link in the submission is saying that the representatives position is mostly unknown for all the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).
For Finland it says only 3 of 15 have opposed - which is clearly not a majority.
The “assumption” based on government position has no reference to any stated government position (I know for a fact Lithuania have expressed no such opinion, and can’t find anything related to Latvia or Estonia having done so either) - and also “assumes” all representatives (that are from different parties) are aligned, which they most likely aren’t.
(1) 55% of countries [15 atm]
(2) representing 65% of EU population.
If one of the above is not met, a blocking minority (usually) needs >=4 countries to vote against a proposal. Germany voting against CSAR would mean (2) is not met in this case.
"Latin cultures" is a really wild way to put it, when Denmark has been the most prominent promoter of the initiative.
This is a map of the government's positions, not even the parliament much less the public, and therefore a picture of whatever happen to be the parties in charge at the current time.
In Ireland this isn't something the public really even knows was proposed, I highly doubt the public would be in support of this, although can't be sure about it. You would think given the country's history they wouldn't be in favour of government overreach in this way but you never know.
Why would you really need something like that in a non-totalitarian state? Basically, it follows the russian playbook (essentially the same 'language' - safety concerns), but instead of the FSB, who is the beneficiary actor in this case?
Many people working in government wish they were administering a totalitarian state, and would be the beneficiary actors.
Government is a job that self-selects for people who either want safety (non elected jobs) or power (elected jobs) more than anything else, given it pays far less than the private sector. Both the safety people and the power people want to reduce public freedom and the ability to do things.
The only way we keep these people from this is the threat of voting them out of their jobs. But they are more motivated than we are, so they usually win over time.
That's true, but that would be a huge signal of a rejection. What's more - changing such law would be slightly more complex than just introducing the backdor IMHO.
Apparently Italy will support it. This is absolutely infuriating and it will fail miserably. Encryption can't he stopped no matter what law gets out there and any politician voting in favor shows how ignorants they are.
Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.
Why doesn't the EU put effort in paving the way for a more open and free tech world when we rely 100% on propietary technology that comes from the other side of the Atlantic?
> Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.
Encryption cannot be stopped. But Android and iOS can be backdoored. These evil companies lock down our devices, does not allow apps to run without their approval, and selectively push updates from their servers to our devices.
As long as I remember there has been these initiatives in EU. They have been all blocked so far, or turned into something reasonable, but there will always be a new try.
I think many genuinely just want to increase security for their people. Not mass surveillance and orwellian control.
They just don't understand why it's technically not possible to achieve what they want without unacceptable risks.
Similar to the climate change issue: no politician is aiming at having their children die before retirement age from the consequences of climate change. They just don't understand that they are pushing us there (like most of the people, to be fair).
someone has to prove illicit connections to private companies and potentially black markets. the data is guaranteed to end up in the wrong hands which will have a worse impact on the lives of citizens, workers as much as educated ones, and definitely officials; how to better gain dirt on someone if the law supports breaking encryption and they falsely believe their state of the art messaging app is worth more than the skeletons in their closets?
at the least the basic human rights and privacy laws should be on everyones' side ... except rapists, the many kinds of violent abusers, murderers, especially the genocidal kind, drug punchers, and these fuckers roofying kids in clubs and bars just to have sex ... I probably forgot some ... sorry I didn't stay on topic.
As Freud wanted to let us know, the ageing rich are perverts with enough means to hide any crime ... then they made him bend over and invent the Oedipus complex, ffs
the only way for them to create an argument for ChatControl is more terrorism or some fucked up crimes against children so this damn thing is a sure-fire shitstorm with recursive, bad yields.
Just think for a moment how broken the EU model is. You don't want something to pass. Other citizens of your country don't want the thing to pass. Your politicians don't want that thing to pass. Your euro politicians don't want that thing to pass. Yet in the current model that doesn't matter one bit because your SOVEREIGN country may still be overruled by foreign countries and politicians.
It's unbelievable that we have allowed EU to spread into this all encompassing monster that deals with anything but economic cooperation among member countries.
-------------------
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
That is factually untrue. While governments of member states of the EU no longer have a direct veto against proposed EU legislation in many cases, the EU does not claim any sovereignty over member states.
If a member state fails to block a proposal, all that simply means is that the qualified majority[1] of representatives of other member states believes the legislation to be so important that the union would not work without it. Dissenting member states can seek to reverse or temper the legislation later, or simply leave the union - see Brexit. No sovereignty is violated at any point.
> The primacy of European Union law (sometimes referred to as supremacy or precedence of European law[1]) is a legal principle of rule according to higher law establishing precedence of European Union law over conflicting national laws of EU member states.
The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.[2][3][4] For the European Court of Justice, national courts and public officials must disapply a national norm that they consider not to be compliant with the EU law.
The primacy of European Union law applies to member states of the European Union. That is part of what the countries agreed to in order to become a member state. Some countries negotiated opt-outs for specific laws that they felt shouldn't apply to them before joining - and disgruntled member states could attempt the same by threatening to leave.
The only way that the European Union can 'force' compliance of a member state is for the EU Commission (or, exceptionally, the Parliament and Council) to withhold EU funds from that member state. Those funds were never the property of the member state in the first place though - again, no infringement on national sovereignty.
Other inhabitants of my town don't want something to pass. The local politicians of my town don't want something to pass. The politicians I elected to the national government don't want it to pass. Yet that doesn't matter one bit because my town my still be overruled by non-local towns and politicians.
That's literally how any representative democracy work, just at a different level? The Free State of Bavaria could say the same about the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Yet in the current model that doesn't matter one bit
It matters because if it's that important to you then you have a sovereign right to leave the EU and do away with all the rules you don't want
Staying inside of it and accepting primacy of EU law when decisions are lawfully taken following the process you've agreed to of your own country's free will is a choice
If entities comprising the union are not forced to compromise (and compromise by some type of majority is the most logical one), and want to pick and choose, then that is no union. And there can be no union like that.
Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.
I also think this is just a delay, not a final win. Also, this page hasn't been updated yet: <https://fightchatcontrol.eu/>
I recently heard a political discussion about this topic and was disappointed by the lack of technical competency among the participants. What we're talking about here is the requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications. What could possibly go wrong with that?
What does a "final win" even look like? The powers that want this will simply propose it over and over and over until they win once, and then it's basically law forever. The "against" team needs to win every time, forever.
It's always just a delay until the next round with these guys.
Chat control has already been voted down more than once in the past.
They will keep at it until they succeed [1]. The playbook was copied from the tobacco & oil industry and perfected by hollywood.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
> keep at it until they succeed
Is there any EU process to codify principles (e.g. Human Digital Rights) that need to be upheld in future attempts?
The EU article #8 of human rights [1] is deliberately loosely defined, both sounding nice at the first glance, while allowing for Chat Control style surveillance.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...> requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications
I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of some kind of encryption backdoor, but hearing it put like this genuinely horrifies me. Like a vulnerable keylogger on every device.
Just updated.
I mean, could the solution just be for tech-literate people to red-team the shit out of it and show how vulnerable and stupid it is?
Is this a good time to plug the creation of chat protocols running over distributed hash tables (DHT) (essentially a decentralized way of creating mini message servers) and with forward security and end-to-end encryption? I made a POF in Rust but I don't have time to dev this right now. (Unless angel investors to help me shift priorities lol...)
Here's whats coming: Devices will be locked down by remote attestation and hardware secure models by the vendors like google, apple and microsoft. Only registered devs will be allowed to make software for those devices. They simply won't run unless the software is backed by a google/Apple/MS signed certificate. They'll make chat software that doesn't run chat control illegal. If you make it, you'll lose your signing certificate and no one will be able to run it. Sure there will be nerds running modified devices with no check but it's about compliance for > 99% of the people. No one you care for will use that software because they won't be able to run any banking software, other chat software, social media apps etc. on their phone if they jailbreak it.
... which then enables Apple/MS/Google to either forbid real encryption, or allow for silently replacing the app on your phone with one that breaks your encryption.
It’s not. This is a political problem, not a technical one.
I beg to differ. As long as we have gentlemen like Pavel Durov getting arrested at French airports, it's definitively at technical question. A decentralized and distributed chat protocol with distributed devs and owners would make it impossible to arrest any one individual, and it would make it exceedingly hard to censor such a platform. But you are perhaps a fed? xD
Investigate steganography. Otherwise they will just make using particular applications servicws illegal and selectively enforce it. That's why this problem is not technical
If you need a specialized vacuum to collect shit from the floor, how about... not shitting on the floor in the first place.
> Investigate steganography. Otherwise they will just make using particular applications servicws illegal and selectively enforce it.
This isn't quite accurate. It's hard to ban things that are widely used.
Because of its design, it's very difficult to censor email. You could order some large provider to do it but then people could use a different one. You can get email for free from a provider in another jurisdiction. It's not that hard to start a new one. Trying to ban interoperability with mail servers in other countries would cut you off from the world. It creates a cost for a government that wants to do it, which is a deterrent, and even if they try it's hard to enforce.
That isn't what happens when everyone is using Facebook, because then a sufficiently major government can just order Facebook to do whatever authoritarian thing under threat of criminal penalties and there is no switching to another provider or operating your own Facebook server while still being able to communicate with the people using the existing system.
You want authoritarianism to have legal friction and technological friction against it. They're not alternatives to each other, they're checks and balances.
People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true. It's still up in the air whether you can defeat a law using technical measures, but it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.
Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.
"I can still use GPG" isn't a win condition you seem to think it is. Authoritarian governments will be perfectly happy to let you continue using GPG as long as the remaining 99% of society continues using monitored/censored communication apps.
Also you will be easily identified as problematic by your use of GPG/PGP.
VPN's provide privacy by blending your traffic with others. If you stand out...
Conversely, as long as the people they actually want to target (dissidents, journalists, ...) use non-compromised E2EE it's not very useful for NSA/GCHQ etc to harvest info about all the cat videos everyone else is watching.
It won't help you with those specific cases no, but Chat Control would be the perfect tool to monitor and stop the spread of information between regular citizens who are trying to organize against the government, just look at China.
It's not your cat videos they're interested in. When people are protesting against the government it's vitally important that they're able to get information out as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. If the government can slow that momentum down then opposition fizzles out. Chat Control would do a great job in service of that goal, it's large scale crowd control, not a targeted attack.
But it makes the people they want to target very easy to spot - just look at who doesn't watch cat videos. The absence of data is data itself.
Yup, that xckd with 5 dollar wrench applies. You will be on the radar.
No disrespect intended, but "it's still technically possible" doesn't matter. We, as enigneers, tend to think in absolutes (after all, something either works or it doesn't). Politicians are perfectly happy with a law that is only 80% effective - they would argue that sometimes people break laws against murder, but that doesn't mean laws against murder should be thrown on the scrapheap.
Most people obey the law most of the time. Doing a technical end-run around the law (a) leaves you with very few people to talk to (b) makes you stick out like a sore thumb, at which point you're vulnerable to the $5 wrench.
Here's a funny story for you.
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.
> People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true.
It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
> We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal
In the USA free speech rights defeated that law.
> Encryption is just maths.
But nothing in those maths guarantee you the ability to use them legally.
> It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
> entirely feasible strategy
Who will host the code? What App Store will you publish in?
The developers and the FOSS community generally; F-Droid is a good app store for FOSS, but there's no inherent need for app stores in the first place.
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
Right, you need an end-to-end ecosystem. Delivery, ease of use, trustable code and audit, good math, community, financial incentives. Still much more enduring solution than an eternal political battle, IMO.
> it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.
I don’t think this protects us. I view the “encryption is maths” position as referring to backdoor keys.
But this time they figured out client-side mandated spyware is a viable way of breaking e2e without contradicting mathematics.
I hate to get dystopian but we can all see where this is going; “Trusted Hardware” is mandated to run your Government ID app and Untrusted Hardware is illegal because it’s only for criminals and terrorists. Your Trusted Device performs client-side content scanning, it’s illegal to install an untrusted app, and all app developers are criminally liable to monitor for Harmful Content on their services.
This is what we are fighting against. They keep trying and they are getting closer to succeeding. And none of this is incompatible with mathematics; it’s a pure rubber-hose attack on the populace.
Its both, ultimately politics is not all-knowing and you can't stamp out all technical solutions.
Like, breaking encryption is just not possible if the encryption is set using a proper algorithm. Governments try, and they try to pass laws, but it's literally impossible. No amount of political will can change that. Ultimately I can write an encryption algorithm or use GPG or something and nobody on Earth, no matter how motivated or how rich, can read what I encrypted, provided I do not let out the key. If I just keep the password in my head, it's impossible.
So, until we invent technology to extract secrets from a human brain, you cannot universally break encryption. Its just not possible. Doesn't matter if 7 billion people worldwide vote for that. Doesn't matter if Elon Musk wants it. Doesn't matter if the FBI, CIA, and the NSA all work together.
It's not a technical problem. Chat Control wasn't about breaking encryption, it would bypass encryption with client-side scanning. It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
It's also not a technical problem because technical solutions (like GPG) already exist. The problem is political (stopping these authoritarian laws) or should that fail, social (convincing people to inconvenience themselves with alternative communication apps that aren't available on app stores)
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
> Another political solution? Not going to happen.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
> The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
This statement is meaningless. You can’t finance, develop, build, sell, and operate an OS and phone in a vacuum outside the reach of “politics”.
Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware
If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
Huh? Apple absolutely does not want this to happen. That's why it doesn't happen. It's not that they do not have the resources to do it. Not really sure how you think that 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet do not have the resources.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue...
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better.
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math.
They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem.
People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school
It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities.
The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try.
If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts.
And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it.
Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.
> If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative
No! It is not my job to appease your fantasies. It is your job to first and foremost prove that Chat Control will effectively curb child abuse, which proponents of the legislation have completely failed to do. Secondly it is your job to ensure that your solution doesn't break the EU charter of fundamental human rights.
Here is a solution for you: All children must be accompanied by their legal guardian at all times - a child must never leave their sight. Unlike Chat Control, this solution would actually work and prevent all cases of abuse except those perpetrated by the guardians themselves.
> Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
By all means, I support your decision to run government code on all of your devices. Just keep mine and everyone else's out of it.
Children shouldn’t have devices.
They certainly shouldn’t have always online devices capable of accessing social media platforms.
US father of three here and if they’re younger than 15 just hand them a Nintendo switch… if you hand them anything at all.
You will never win the arms race you’ll be fighting- against both your children and the platforms.
Just opt out.
The Switch has a built in web browser that is "hidden" barely. Ample Youtube videos will show your child how to use it to access instagram, discord, even roblox supposedly.
Does your school not force them to have some sort of laptop? I was using my middle school provided laptop to do things I probably shouldn't have on my parent's network with them none the wiser, and the school not caring what I did, and utterly unable to stop me even if they wanted. In fact, the IT department basically drafted me and a few other students to be repair techs.
I was only superficially technically inclined at the time.
Parents will want control over their 16-18 year olds too, that's kind of a critical time.
"Just don't let them use the internet at all" is a great way to ensure your kid cannot develop any sort of healthy relationship with the internet once they become an age where they can just buy their own stuff, and sets them up nicely to be fresh, naive meat to whoever wants to exploit them.
My family is all experiencing this.
You have simply given parents a lose lose lose lose situation, and then complain when they turn to the only remaining group claiming to offer assistance.
What does that have to do with Chat Control? You need better parental controls offered by iOS, Android, Windows, etc. Chat Control is chiefly about scanning and censoring every private message sent between adults under the guise of stopping the spread of CSAM (trivially defeated by sending encrypted ZIP files or using an alternative non-conforming messaging service).
I would like to introduce you to rubber hose cryptography.
That doesn't work well for mass surveillance of regular people.
We’re talking about how the ability for the public to use strong encryption is contingent on laws allowing that.
Normies won’t start using PGP. Normies will use whatever popular app their friends are on.
Those apps can have their encryption made illegal, kicked off stores, and their developers jailed. The thing protecting the developers from this isn’t the strength of their encryption, it’s the laws saying the encryption is legal.
No, it's a good time to start lobbying for positive privacy legislation.
Absolutely true that we need sensible legislation not based in diffuse fears that endagers data security everywhere.
That said, I think doing both is sensible. Always good to have a fallback and feasibility of such surveillance attempts is part of the political discussion. Fait accompli through pervasive encryption, which some politicians might read as perverse encryption.
That said, chat control isn't the only problem. Removing anonymity through age or general ID checks is the other.
If they put a chip in every phone that grabs messages out of memory on their way to be rendered in the UI, it doesn't matter how fancy your backend encryption technology is
The only way to win the argument is to win the argument with the public.
In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls, so even political parties who would otherwise oppose it just stay silent, because the public narrative
You have to shift the narrative. Farage does this - he's finally after 20 years managed to get elected to parliament, he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens, about the same as the nationalists, yet for 20 years he has steered the conversation and got what he wants time after time
The loudest and the weirdest get the most airtime. Not all conversations are golden. He is a lying, opportunistic, self-existence driven ass. Farage is not a reference for how to do things, not even close, not at all!
It is of course unfortunate that a big part of the population is heavily influenceable by almost anything that has some scary perspective, in whatever size, over-considering dangers to opportunities to the extremes (want to eliminate dangers, hopelessly), also can only hear what is too loud, so the real democratic conversations and resulting decisions are distorted a lot. Better focus on improving this, than put a self centered ass on the pedestal to follow!
> he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens
The electoral system has been working against him. At the last general election Reform got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems, yet the result is that they got 5 MPs while the Lib Dems got 72.
The Brexit referendum and the current national polls that put Reform in first place at 27% (YouGov) show that they are not just "steering the conversation". When people's concerns keep being ignored at one point someone will come up to fill this "gap in the market", this is legitimate and how democracy works.
He's had 15 years of success without his vote in a westminster election getting to 15%
Actual election results:
2010: 3%
2015: 13%. He was the only party to endorse leaving the EU in that election.
2016: (52% vote to leave the EU)
2017: retired
2019: 2%
2024: 14%
Yet his prime policy was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2019.
You don't need people to vote for you to get your policies passed. You need people to just believe in what you say, and other politicians will see that and implement them. The most successful politicians see all sides "steal their policies" and implement them. That's assuming your goal is the policy, not the power.
I was under the impression that Faraga was heavily advocating for Brexit and he and his supporters ultimately got what they wanted so at least some people should be really happy that it happened (the ones who went into it with realistic expectations at least).
They should be happy. But the promised utopia didn't arrive, so now Farage is blaming the next thing, "just get rid of the 30k boat arrivals and things will be great".
(There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against)
Once the boats are all blasted to bits or whatever, and things still don't get better, who will be the next person to blame.
Immigration has been a big issue for a very long time and it partly caused the Brexit vote.
To me your reply exemplifies my previous point: You dismiss those concerns. This is what happened with Brexit and this is what has been happening for a long time over immigration. This can only end badly.
> There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against
They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
If they were spending their effort arguing against 95% of immigration, which are people arriving at Heathrow, then I'd be more sympathetic.
People voted for brexit was all about stopping Iraq and Turkey from sending millions of people to the UK. -- I remember the leaflet, I remember the voxpop of people saying "Europe, fair enough, but not from Africa, Syria etc".
People voted for Brexit to stop immigration. It decreased European immigration, but more than replaced it with African and Middle Eastern immigration) because they believed that being in the EU meant. This was inevitable.
They were wrong based on their own beliefs, and its difficult to argue against that viewpoint.
> They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
One major policy was implemented which massively increased immigration, illegal or not, was Brexit. Farage's flagship policy.
> In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls
This couldn't be further from the truth.
People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing, but don't support the implementation at all.
It depends on how you ask the question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI
> > In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls
> This couldn't be further from the truth.
> People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing
So pretty close to the truth then?
No, given that the implementation has already landed, people don't support it.
They support the idea. That's the fundamental problem. If people didn't support the idea then it wouldn't have gone in.
People support lots of ideas. I support the idea of everyone getting 1 billion dollars.
Can we do that ethically? No. Of course not. The implementation must necessarily require death and theft.
Age verification is a similar problem. I support the idea of minors not accessing bad data. Okay, cool.
Is there an ethical way to implement that? No, of course not. It would require extreme surveillance and said surveillance would necessarily be used for evil.
I mean, imagine this. New law: children can never smoke law. Great! 100% support! Now you must upload a video of you smoking every time you smoke so the government knows a child isn't smoking. Uh... Not great, very bad.
Its all about how you ask the question: "do you support children never smoking" => 100% support. "Do you support requiring video uploads to the government of every time you smoke" => 0% support.
We're actually asking the same question, it's just a matter of how favorably we show the issue.
Having public opinion on your side is necessary, but not sufficient. Politicians impose laws that people don't want all the time.
Farage only has this traction because he's financed and platformed by interests (Russia, conservative Christian groups in the US, right wing media) that benefit from the division his inflammatory politics creates. This gives him and his party a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other, larger parties with more MPs.
The playbook that was overwhelmingly successful for making Brexit happen is being used again, but this time for immigration.
The fact he got elected as MP only serves to give credibility to his backers' narrative, given that he does not serve his constituency and is too busy schmoozing the US right wing. At one point in time he would have been forced to resign in disgrace for backroom dealing like this (as previous MPs have before).
The bigger issue is that we need to make the EU actually democratic. Start by removing every branch but the European Parliament. That's the only solution.
What you are proposing would amount replacing the current bicameral legislature (with the European Parliament as the lower house and the Council of the EU as the upper house) with a unicameral legislature. That would actually make it easier for bad laws to be passed, especially as the supermajority required in the Council is currently the biggest obstacle for this kind of legislation.
I'll also note that nothing here is per se undemocratic. Both the Parliament and the Council are made up of elected members. The members of the Council (as members of the national governments) are indirectly elected, but elected all the same. Direct election is not a requirement for a democracy (see election of the US president or the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment or the Senate of Canada right now).
That does not mean that there isn't plenty of valid criticism of the EU's current structure, but claiming that it is not "actually democratic" falls far short of a meaningful critique.
Democratic or undemocratic are always subjective terms. For me personally, the level of indirection is a problem. This problem was known since the inception and the reason why the subsidiarity principle was underlined. Sadly, that doesn't seem to apply for important issues like chat control. Imagine accountability on a communal level. We wouldn't even see this crap.
You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.
I agree. Additionally systems where it's really vote for parties and not for people from your region results in elected officials being more loyal to the party than to the people. It would be significantly better if every region voted for their representatives. As it is if you don't belong to a party that gets 5% (or w/e it in your country) you will not be representing your voters even if you win in your area. Who runs in a given region is often decided by a centralized party leadership anyway. The people not only don't get to vote on issues but they can't even elect someone to represent them - just a party official designated to a given region.
If you’re gonna have districts you gotta have MMP voting with a second party vote to preserve proportional representation
Proportionality is always approximate, and you can have proportionality without party votes by having multimember districts with a system like STV, with the degree of proportionality dependent on district size.
Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.
OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.
You got right to it with the “100 layers of indirection”. I like calling it democratic homeopathy, just with slow arsenic poisoning.
The EU isn't undemocratic, but it feels undemocratic to many, and that's a legitimacy issue worth taking seriously
It is not democratic, as long as the President of the Commission is practically chosen by the European Council and the Parliament only can say yes or no.
And as shown in the last two terms of Von der Leyen, saying no doesn't actually do anything, because the same candidate can be proposed again.
The EU feels undemocratic because it focuses on a lot of legislation that doesn't reflect what people want. It also works on some good stuff.
Over the past decade I went from a big fan to someone very troubled about the political goals of the elites.
And, having lived in Brussels, you can sorta see why they're disconnected from the “will of the people”…
What's the problem with living in Brussels? I'm not European, and very curious about that.
They have their own neighbourhood and rarely mix with the rest of the population. Their Dunbar number (the max. amount of meaningful interpersonal connections that a person can maintain) is fully reached within that inner circle of European power.
Ironically, we managed to re-create a Forbidden City full of mandarins and eunuchs, or a new Versailles, only now they wear modern suits.
Scaling power institutions is always tricky, and this is the main risk.
Good point. At this point I would not be averse to mandating baroque fashion for everyone involved with the EU in that quarter. Also, the yearly trek to Strasbourg shall be made by horse drawn coach (that'll put an end to that wasteful travesty at least).
inglor_cz put it quite well.
Eventually it gets on your nerves how much worse the city has to be to cater to the Institutions.
There's something about non-taxed coddled elites eating oysters and drinking champagne at 9AM on a Sunday that makes you a bit of a cynic.
And then, of course, all your friends works for the research companies that get paid a fortune to provide advice to the Eurocrats. But well, your friend has a Bachelor's in Marketing and she's being considered an expert on Soil Research because… eh, the agency is getting paid.
The Bubble is there and you'll be exposed to it. It's not a good Bubble. It's mostly young MBAs and Political Science majors that think they know how to fix everything.
(And some very talented people, of course. It's not all bad.)
It is undemocratic. Voting for only 720 people in the entire EU apparatus once every 5 years, whilst they are part of across-borders parties is not democracy but oligarchy with the illusion of choice.
Elected officials, elected judges and binding referenda would make it democratic.
We did not elect EU leaders. They keep secrets (COVID vaccin deals), they exempt themselves from ChatControl, they are obliged to store their communications yet internally recommend Signal with disappearing messages. Whats democratic about it?
> We did not elect EU leaders
Did we not?
I voted for the EU parliament. I voted for my government, which forms the council and appoints the commission.
The council is composed of representatives of each state. That means you did not vote for 26 out of the 27 members, and most states don't have special elections for European Council members* -- which means that most of them have not been elected into their Council position.
* the Council of composed of ministers and heads of government. Ministerial posts are distributed among the winning party members in pretty much every country, and only presidential systems have a direct election for their head of government. In constitutional monarchies, the head of government is commonly assigned to the largest party leader, but it's not a directly electable position.
The parliament seats are also apportioned by state. I don't find that a bad idea, living in a small country, and I don't see why the council seats being divided by country is a worse idea than the system in the parliament.
I didn't vote for 649 of my MPs either. These aren't good arguments.
I mean sure. But that's how most democratic systems work?
A Californian did not vote for the Senator from North Carolina.
A Londoner did not vote for the MP from Edinburgh.
A Berliner did not vote for the Bavarian Bundesrat member.
At least the Berliner gets an additional vote for the party so they can get both local and representative national representation.
The Londoner is completely out of luck if their seat is a safe seat but not their party.
Not that German politics isn't pretty hosed too.
The USA senate is another example of something that is not democratic. 2 people per state regardless of population is kinda questionable.
It's federalistic. It's a bit drastic - but I guess no one could imagine one state having 66 times the population as another in 1789. Other federal states compensate for that - for example, in the German Bundesrat, each state gets 3 to 6 seats according to population.
A problem for the US is that /both/ chambers of parliament are skewed that way.
That's why it's balanced with the house of representatives, which is proportional.
The House is neither proportional (structurally represents parties roughly in proportion to their vote share) nor, what I expect you mean, divided into districts of equal population. The size difference between the smallest and largest districts—RI district 2 and Montana’s at large district—is 1:2 in population. It’s less unequal than the Senate, but its still not equal representation.
And, despite certain bills having to originate in the House, the Senate is more powerful since all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert or the Senate alone (except for electing the President when there is an electoral tie, which the House does but with a voting rule of one-vote-per-state-delegation which gives it the same undemocratic weighting as the Senate has normally.)
> The size difference between the smallest and largest districts—RI district 2 and Montana’s at large district—is 1:2 in population.
Come again? MT and RI have the same approximate population (1.1M) and the same number of representatives (2). I’m talking about the state level here.
> all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert
Right, they act as checks and balances upon one another. Equal-sized representation to give smaller states a way to avoid being steamrolled by the will of the largest states — why would states want to stay in a union where they have no hope of representation? Methinks if Alabama and Mississippi kept everything about themselves politically the same yet were both the size of California and New York you’d probably be of a different mind about the importance of the senate.
The House of Representatives has not been proportional since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
The entire nation is held hostage by very few people basically.
> What you are proposing would amount replacing the current bicameral legislature with a unicameral legislature.
Note they wrote "Start by removing...", not "Finish with". You could remove Council of the EU and then create another "upper house". But its personnel would have to be nominated differently. Perhaps directly elected? But that would be tough.
Re the direct vs indirect election, note that in some countries governments do not have to consist of MPs. Like currently in France, you have a directly elected president who then nominates whoever to be his head of government and ignore the parliament for a while. And that government has a say in the Council. And at that point it's good to answer the question, at which level of indirection can we say there is a deficit of democracy?
Also note that it's quite unusual for a democracy that the 'lower house' (EP) does not have legislative initiative, can't propose laws. Is that a deficit of democracy yet?
Of course I understand it's all because national governments do not want create another centre of power, but the issues are very real.
You are not only being far too generous in your rationalization for how the EU is democratic and representative but are making category mistakes.
The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.
It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.
Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.
Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.
The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.
It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.
For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.
But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.
What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.
America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.
The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.
In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.
The EU council is formed by the democratically elected member states. This follows an "upper house" approach used in many european countries.
I'm strongly in favor of giving the parliament the ability to propose laws (directives). Currently only the comission can do that.
As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
Oh I completely agree with all your points
I’m just highlighting inefficiencies and inflexibilities where I see them to start a dialogue
I believe the point of the EU structure is precisely to make it hard to make laws, because the EU was designed to NOT be a federalist system.
I think it's less to make it hard to make laws and more to ensure the primacy of the member states governments over the parliament, but for the same reason you gave. To not become a federation.
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
What is it designed to be? The aim is "ever closer union". right? Every change in the EU treaties inches closer to federalism.
A common currency without a common fiscal policy has already proven not to work well.
there will be always inequalities and "blind spots", just look at the US, more homogeneous in many ways, yet still there's no single market for many things (healthcare for example)
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
> Every change in the EU treaties inches closer to federalism.
The Treaties haven't changed since 2011 or so, and I don't expect any changes in the next decade at the very least.
Agreed, no big changes imminent. I was thinking more about the longer term. I would expect change in 20 or 30 years, and a lot of things could happen to change things even in the next decade (another financial crisis like 2008, another pandemic, wars, etc.).
Personally I'd love to see a more federal EU but it's very unlikely to happen barring some absurdly large crises.
The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
I think you are right about the aims but I do not think you can be a world power without being unified to the extent that would be a federation.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
I think there’s a naming difficulty : the council of the European Union is the upper chamber, while the European council is not !
Do any member states follow the model of only the non directly elected upper house can propose legislation?
And neuter the influence of deep-pocketed lobbying entities - US entities in particular seem to spend a lot of money on influencing EU politics: https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/
Wow, Apple paid 7M for 9 people to have 144 meetings with the EC. I'm in the wrong line of business.
On the other hand, I'm thinking can we find 9 unpaid volunteers on HN to do the same?
yes, the obvious problem is that Apple paid people so in turn they worked to make these meetings happen, HN doesn't pay random people (yet!?) to knock on doors in various EU cities.
the "obvious" solution seems to be to make these meetings open, sure industry wants to push their thing, put it on the calendar, and let civil society delegate someone, and industry pays for that too.
You're assuming the lobbyists keep that money.
What you're thinking of would be illegal, but indeed.
This site even has a disclaimer on the front page that its information is not necessarily accurate. Take it all with a grain of salt.
That would lead to turning EU from a union of states into a state in itself. This may be great, but would depower national states.
And it has a major problem: There is no European public. Cultural differences ad language barrier make it hard to follow debates and issues. It is a lot simpler to follow my elected governments behavior.
Also the parliament would lose its style of working. Currently there is cooperation accross parties and a less strict "government vs opposition" than in most other parliaments, which means that MEPs actually got a vote (in the areas where the parliament matters) instead dof being whipped by party leaders.
And then: Most decision power is with the council, which is made of democratically elected governments (if we ignore the Hungary problem ...)
How does Swiss politics work? They also have multiple languages.
They got 4 languages, not 24. Of those 4 there is one clearly dominant (German) and a clear second. Most debates happen in German.
With it's 24 languages the EU debates have interesting interpretation challenges, as they don't have interpreters for going from any language to any language, but often the translate first into one language (say from Latvian into German) and then some other language (German to Portuguese), which loses a lot of nuance and color from the language.
Also media can cover it better, with few languages and politicians can provide their press statements in those few languages.
And then culture is a lot more similar, which helps to identify the "relevant" topics and way to talk about it.
Parliament needs to approve any meaningful EU legislation anyway. The Commission cannot legislate. The problem isn't that the EU is undemocratic, it's that our elected lawmakers all seem to want to trample our privacy for one reason or another (see: the UK)
Funny how we never hear WHY EU is undemocratic in these posts. It's always this one line dropped in the middle of conversations.
And every time I push a bit the answer seems to be "EU didn't follow my preferred decision". :P
>WHY EU is undemocratic
The answer is simple. The EU institutions cannot be both directly elected and have executive authority over member states.
The reason is that by doing so one would create a conflict between the "democratic legitimacy" of the EU executive and the "democratic legitimacy" of national parliaments.
In the current model, the member states retain ultimate authority and democratic legitimacy through their delegates to the Council of Ministers.
No, for a time any criticism about EU democracy was brushed away. Especially at the time around Brexit. For obvious reasons. But they are undeniable in theoretical and practical terms. This is why the competence of the EU was restricted at first. Problem is that this restriction did get too loose.
Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.
The highest body of the EU is the Council. Nothing happens without the approval of the Council. In comparison, the Commission is merely the civil service or secretariat, answering to the Council.
Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!
> and for almost all issues a veto
Notably ChatControl is not one of them.
Except the Commission and Von Der Leyen keep pushing to assert themselves as an executive branch.
That means removing souvereignty from the member states, and there's no way they're all going to agree on that any time soon.
Erm... it's as democratic as it possibly can be when it comes to a union of independend, sovereign states...
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
Democracy is where people, or at least those given full citizenship, have a duty to debate and decide the rules they will be agreeing to follow, directly.
Anything else is green washing.
Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.
Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.
By your definition there is virtually no democratic entity in this world :)
> Anything else is green washing.
you mean "democracy-washing"? ;)
The world is not perfect. Striving for perfection is futile...
That's what I said yes, by it's very definition, no current contemporary government is a democracy.
I'm not necessarily picky with every word we use informaly. As you noticed with green washing, which here was colloquially used as "bullshit to pretend to be virtuous because manipulating public opinion open some hope to control its behavior".
But when it comes to the official fundamental statement of what the government ruling people is pretending to be, I do expect something more aligned with the first degree interpretation of the words.
Republic means there is no State secret.
Democracy means that citizen rules and decides the laws.
I have the firm conviction that asking better than newspeak level nomenclature is not asking for perfection. That just mere basic honesty.
Consenting that utter lies to serve as base political denomination with the excuse that nothing is perfect is just lazily opening doors to broader harsher lies for those willing to gain carte blanche on exercising political power with a flow of void sentences.
Or just make European Commission be directly elected in such system:
- candidate needs to be proposed in country
- EU wide elections are held, candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country.
- Votes are weighted by amount of seats in EU parliament.
What we have right now does not work at all, EC has 0 responsibility(towards EU citizens) for their own actions and is basically a magical black box.
> candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country
Few people would do the homework of researching hundreds of candidates from other countries.
They represent whole of EU, and by EC's words they focus on interests beyond benefit of their own countries so they already have to do that. in theory at least.
Why would any member state give away their sovereignty like that?
EU is setup like it is on purpose. Parliament represents the people, council the member countries and commission EU itself.
The one with most power is the council as nothing really goes though without their (heads of state of the member countries) approval as EU has no legislative powers of its own but instead member countries have to implement the directives.
> The bigger issue is that we need to make the EU actually democratic. Start by removing every branch but the European Parliament. That's the only solution.
For goodness sake, you are sending people on goose chases instead of the real problem.
What happened here falls under the exact definition of representative democracy. There are some politicians from certain nation states pushing for the policy. They request the commission (the civil service type group) to work on the proposals, and then elected MEPs vote on it.
Again and again I have to keep repeating the same message:
This is NOT some random bureaucrats in some EU group deciding they want to push a policy. This is our elected politicians being influenced some some other agency to push chat control. They're pushing it through the EU commission, because that is how it works.
Please people, inform yourselves, or you're going to get this all wrong and fight the wrong fight.
That would just transfer power from the small countries to the big countries.
The EU parliament is highly dysfunctional. First look at the number of MEP that have been indicted for corruption. Also in the countries I know, political parties send as MEP their least able politicians that they don’t know what to do and would never be elected if their name was on the ticket. Combine that with the flaws of all the national parliaments and you get a sorry clown show.
The postulate for EU structural reform towards perfection is typical of HN and other nerds drooling over their programming language and frameworks ;) but in real life had been tried with the Lisboa treaty to the extent it was deemed possible, and no-one involved with it wants to reopen the case. I'm also sometimes angry at EU as well, but the reality is there are over twenty member states, with their constitutions, languages, democratic and other traditions such as federalism and minority rules, bilateral treatments, special interests, and backroom deals to take care of. It's a miracle the EU exists at all.
I don't think much abstraction or design is needed. We are looking at the output here and that is chat control. The EU will have to be measured against this output.
The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.
The only solution is to stop the EU level power grab by formally restricting what the EU can do and to make sure member states remain where most of the power lies.
The US have that. The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
> The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.
This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.
This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.
In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
One key tool of power creep are those very treaties. Let's do one more treaty and had things in the small prints. Of course the member states drafted and agreed to those and that's why pressure should be on governments to stop hand over the keys to Brussels.
That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power and they often overstep their role... We're seeing clearly on issues like Ukraine and, lately Israel.
> Of course the member states drafted and agreed to those and that's why pressure should be on governments to stop hand over the keys to Brussels.
What specific example are you thinking of where additional power was handed to Brussels through an amendment of the treaties?
> That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power...
If you are worried about the executive trying to expand its power (and something that should be kept in check), may I suggest that the US is not actually a great example right now for how to avoid that?
The US has that in theory, just like the limits on the president. But in practice the US has been centralizing power since the start, and the EU has a looooong way to go to come even close.
This feels like a recipe for dysfunction and more paralysis.
The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.
The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.
"the European cause."
Plenty of Europeans, including me, disagree with you on the very existence of a "European cause".
"There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states."
I don't want federal EU, many others don't either. At least hold a referendum before running your fix. I suspect that most member countries would vote against being reduced to provinces of a centralized state.
You will be reduced to provinces of a centralized state anyways, seeing the CZ in your name. The only question is if the capital would be Brussels or Moscow.
We don't have the luxury of waiting for endless referenda. The enemy's at the gates.
This sort of false dichotimes was peddled to us in the 1940s already. Choose Berlin or Moscow.
Let us say that I don't consider your prophecy very accurate. Czechia, in some form, exists for about 1100 years. The EU probably won't match that record.
As for the Russians, molon labe, and I wouldn't count on Brussels to help us efficiently in such situations, if they cannot even enforce law in local Arab neighbourhoods.
Even today, the southwestern part of Europe is mostly obsessed with Gaza and I have to remind my Spanish and Italian colleagues that there is an actual shooting war on this very continent.
Czechia was an Austrian province until very recently.
Czechia was a constituent kingdom in a sui generis hodgepodge monarchy consisting of many kingdoms. Not the same as province.
That said, we gained sovereignty and precisely because we still remember being treated as subordinates, we don't want to lose it again to another hodgepodge.
There won't be a federal EU, live with it. The optimal time for federalists has passed, and people are more distrustful of centralization than ever before. Not just because of naked power grab attempts like Chat Control, which would perfectly fit into China, but not to a continent where multiple constitutions forbid this sort of mass surveillance.
You may find it funny, but people actually fought and died for freedom of their nations, and their legacy won't be disposed of just because the Brussels bosses would find it practical in their quest for more power and money.
> The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction.
Look at what EU wants to do. I would be glad if nothing got done but unfortunately a lot of their horrible regulations do and Europeans suffer for it.
> The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU.
No.
The EU is not sovereign. Member countries can just outright ignore EU law (see: Hungary or the former UK) and the only recourses are civil things like issuing declarations, withholding payments, crossing them off treaties, or kicking them out of the EU. There are no EU police that can be involuntarily forced on a country the same way the USA can send armed federal police or military into its states. Doing anything like that would be a declaration of war.
A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.
s/the former UK/formerly the UK/
Yes, sad part it will be implemented and I betting even in worse form than it is proposed... And worst part of it "safety" it for current governing party to destroy any opposition.
My wild guess it will voted for with overwhelming majority using "times changed" argument.
Let's hope it will be implemented in typical "Germany does anything on the computer" fashion where they endlessly debate into a theoretically comprehensive, but impossible to implement solution.
> it will be implemented and I betting even in worse form than it is proposed
That doesn’t seem likely, because every time this fails the new version is compromised from the previous one. For example, in the last revision you would be able to refuse the monitoring but it would mean you would be unable to send files or links. Still bad, but not worse.
The game isn't to win once, it’s to keep resisting every watered-down version they throw
What do you mean "we"? Politicians don't care about you and me, and protesting is merely a useful distraction.
Instead of playing defense, I think we need to take positive steps.
Secrecy of Correspondence[1] is something that desperately needs to be extended fully to mobile devices.
Compare how many letters you get vs how many chat messages you send.
Secrecy of (mobile) communications should be recognized as a (natural?) right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
(edit: unbreak formatting)
Agreed that we can just do defense so close to loosing, we need a proper buffer, not just hoping nothing changes.
Unless there is a law that says that the fundamental right to privacy is protected then we're bound to repeat this ordeal every couple of years.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948):
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
It's also in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). But that has a big loop whole.
Article 8: Right to privacy
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
They could have just left out Article 8. Its a “no interference by a public authority unless it want’s to.” “Well-being of the country”, “protection of health or morals” are terms that make this statute irrelevant and dependent on the current mood of the EU.
Privacy needs to be an absolute right. Any invasion of privacy of any individual is a violation of their rights and needs to be treated as such with actual repercussions following misconduct.
You need some kind of carve out, otherwise how could you ever make search warrants and court ordered discovery demands legal?
Ultimately it’s the articles depend on the court judges to weigh the rights of the state against the rights of the individuals, when there isn’t a clear and obvious answer provided by the text.
Coming from an American perspective, this is quite shocking and indistinguishable from parody.
"Everyone has a right to privacy expect for all cases where government decides for any reason for any that it should not apply."
Good to know that search warrants aren't a thing in the United States and anyone within 100 miles of a port can't be arbitrarily searched either.
> Everybody has a right to privacy (except where inconvenient).
I 100% agree with the right to privacy but the keyword there is arbitrary - if everyone's comms get intercepted that would not be in contravence of the Declaration, as it would be done systematically, i.e. not arbitrarily.
The spirit of the laws is all fine and good but combing through them it's not uncommon to find these little loopholes.
Sounds like the European Court of Human Rights would annul it, but you can't be sure.
Are all UN nations bound to this declaration or at least those joining after 1948?
No, human rights and children's rights declarations are ratified individually.
In Germany there is article 10 of the Grundgesetz. While it does allow exceptions (like through a warrant), I wouldn't be surprised that if this law was passed that our constitutional court would deny it based on article 10 (any maybe article 1, that one's important)
There are laws about that already. However they have exceptions (and most people support exceptions. No one expects for example the privacy of ISIS terrorists be respected when they are investigated for terrorism and there are probable cause).
Probable cause is the exception. The police should have to suspect a particular person and then get a warrant approved by a judge and then they can breach privacy. Just like it's always been. They keep pushing for a wider and wider net, though.
This is correct, but also the problem. Various governments and organizations don't want to respect privacy, because they see it as a means of control and profit.
I don't mean this in an antagonistic way, but has anyone clearly articulated a right to privacy in a clear succinct way? Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats
I just find it hard to imagine the right to privacy encoded in to law in a way that would block this. For instance there is a right to privacy in the US, but it's in a completely idiotic way. The 14th Amendment doesn't talk about privacy in any way, and it's some legal contortions and mental gymnastics that are upholding any right to privacy there.
What would pass "clear and succinct" in your opinion? I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right.
Let's take international law[1]. Right to privacy is defined as protection from arbitrary interference with privacy.
Is this definition problematic? Privacy itself has a short definition too: the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public[2].
I don't see what is unclear or verbose here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#International [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
> arbitrary interference with privacy
So if it's non-arbitrary, but systematic and consistent then anything goes?
The linked article has a great anachronism providing protections against
> attacks upon his honor and reputation
haha
> the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public
This is completely divorced from reality.. This is pure fantasy in the digital age...
> I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right
Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define because they're an entirely abstract category relying very much on cultural consensus for their practical definition
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
> Is this definition problematic?
Yes, very much so. By qualifying that the interference must not be unlawful it essentially makes any interference by law (like what was proposed here in the first place) fine
> privacy, family, home or correspondence
This is very restrictive, for instance there's nothing in it about online storage or your laptop / phone since they're neither your home, family or correspondence
> unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation
This manages to be so unclear that if applied strictly it'd ban any criticism of a politician or anyone else as long as you can construe it as "attacking their reputation"
Exactly, I completely agree with you. This is what baffled me about the parent comment: "Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats".
Compare the right to privacy with other human rights, and I find it as clear and succinct as its counterparts (if not clearer and more succinct in some cases).
At the same time, given the international nature of these laws, I disagree with you on their problematic nature. They are (in my view) meant as a basis of diplomatic debate and not enforcement (which would be impracticable). They are to be complemented by organic law, because on their own they are unenforceable.
> Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define
Actually, not really. Just apply the "desert island" thought experiment to any given "human right." If you're not afforded that "human right" should you wind up on a desert island one day, it's not really a "human right" but rather a "right" that requires state backing to exist (and subject to its whims as you pointed out).
The fact you think that qualifies as a "clear" definition is fascinating.
This feels like just a reflexive regurgitation of the distinction between positive and negative rights that has no relevance to the discussion at all
What?
It's simple game theory. If one player (government) has access to private information of all players (citizens), then it's not possible to keep the government from winning, i.e. becoming tyrannical. Losing privacy equals losing liberty.
I think you missed my point entirely. I'm not trying to argue there shouldn't be any privacy or anything like that
That's not my questions at all. My question is, is there some good clear framework for what should and shouldn't be private. B/c otherwise it's kind of some meaningless platitude, like "everyone should be nice to each other"
It shouldn't be a constant uphill battle just to keep basic rights intact
There is one, which is why we keep repeating the ordeal. If there wasn't, Chat Control would have been implemented a decade ago.
It's not the end of the fight, but it's great to see that the efforts are working! I sent a handwritten letter to my MPs a few weeks ago about this issue but no answer so far...
They oppose breaking encryption, however, I see no true opposition to on device scanning, which is a bit worrying.
>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]
Edit: source [0] https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356
There is no on-device scanning without compromising privacy. Scanning that can detect child abuse can also detect human rights activists, investigative journalists, and so on. I imagine this technology can be easily used by the government to identify journalists by scanning for material related to their investigation.
On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.
Some say "Apple got too much shit for on device scanning". I think they didn't get nearly enough.
If you as much as give the "think of the children" crowd an inch, they'll take a mile. And giving them on device scanning was way more than "an inch".
Apple has never supported your privacy though, not really. Spyware company issues spyware, news at 11. They're better than Google, but they're not good.
That is exactly the problem. I still can imagine that they come up with some scheme as a compromise, that particularly targets particularly encrypted group chats along with all kind of server side automatic scanning, that as you mention could be abused at least by intelligence to track non CSAM content. I wonder what other 'compromise' will actually be effectively possible.
"Es sei klar, dass privater, vertraulicher Austausch auch weiterhin privat sein müsse."
"Private communication needs to stay private"
I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.
This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.
I bet what the politicians mean is "we have to make sure our surveillance is safe, like our digital health data, so that no bad actors can tap it". The only one who should be reading your messages is you, the sender, and the government.
I used the online form at fightchatcontrol.eu to send an e-mail to all of my representatives. Of the 90ish contacts, 4 replied – all agreeing to be against the proposal. One of them even mentioned the influx of mails they were receiving about the topic. So that gives me hope.
I know in the US it's very common to write emails or letters to their governor, but still I see it somewhat cynical. Like a popular tweet mattering much more than letters that probably won't be opened at all, and if it is opened I cannot imagine a MP reading all of them, more likely a clerk saying "You've got x citizens sending you letters about y", which would then again be somewhat valuable but I also can't imagine they have clerks opening every letter.
Sometimes making a politician aware that "if you vote for this, it may annoy people" can be enough. Your average politician votes on a _lot_ of things, many of which they know little or nothing about. They will take only a small number of them seriously, and a big factor in what gets taken seriously is what people are moaning about.
The first step really is just getting the politician to think about what they're voting on.
They also don't actually necessarily get _that_ many letters.
> common to write emails or letters to their governor, but still I see it somewhat cynical.
Yes, writing letters to these people is unlikely to help. The only language they speak is in votes. They have to be convinced that they will lose reelection over the issue. A conditional prediction market for their reelection given they vote a certain way would be the most effective tool.
The fight shouldn't have to be fought continuously. If legislation is shot down repeatedly, there should be a delay before it can be brought back again.
Politicians notice when enough people take the time to reach out, especially in such a personal way
Between this and Google locking down Android, one day the only way to get secure communications will be to buy Huawei etc. Thank God for China, bastion of free speech.
Yes, China, the bastion of free speech...
https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world/2025
I know HN takes a dim view on them, but that post was a joke. Of _course_ China isn't a bastion of free speech, that is why the joke is funny.
I think HN has a higher than average number of people who are unable to detect irony or sarcasm.
Due to Poe's law, one can never be sure if such views are expressed genuinely.
Can you elaborate on how Google is locking down Android? I'm not familiar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028
ty
In a few decades the only uncensored communication possible will be using LoRa mesh networks smuggled into the west illegally by some human rights activists. Some people will always find a way to organize against our government's latest atrocities and genocides no matter how oppressive it is yet to become.
But I have nothing to hide! /s
IIRC It's Denmark that keeps pushing for this. Is there anyone here to give more background on that?
The unfortunate reality is that a single largest lobbyist for Chat Control in the EU is, ironically, the US, namely the US intel community-affiliated orgs like Thorn, WeProtect, etc. The EU bureaucrats are gullible, and it's no excuse of course, however there's a reason why every time there's a new driver, a new country behind Chat Control proposals. This has been part of coordinated U.S. signals collection strategy. Nobody in Europe stands to gain anything from this besides the US as all tech solutions for this are provided by US companies and agencies alone. The boards of these orgs are crawling with Washington guys, & their activity is limited to foreign countries. Not once have they attempted anything of the sort on US soil.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44929535
Hmm, maybe the anti-chatControl movement should add some anti-Americanism in it then?
I reckon that would only serve to play into their hands. There is just enough plausible deniability for conspiracy-theory optics. Moreover, European politicians really hate to be publicly humiliated like that, so it might as well achieve the opposite from desired effect. The Balkan Insight findings, among other journalistic results, were published years ago, and it had little, if any effect. The audience that would resonate with anti-American messaging on the subject are already catalysed contra ChatControl, and the undecided would just read this as conspiracy theory...
Sorry, as a Dane, this weird conspiracy narrative that the US has us by the throats and is forcing us to push this legislation through is garbage.
Our government did this because they love control. A hard hand is what got us through COVID and it's been effective at curtailing a lot of the issues our neighbor to our north has faced with uncontrolled immigration of refugees. Our government has also been pushing through expansion of surveillance capabilities for our police, including predictive policing and expanded facial recognition.
Now kindly stop passing the buck and blame for us. This is on us, on Denmark. We are to blame.
>>Return of chat control: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/08/return-of-chat-cont...
I hate to see my country pushing for this. It has not touched the media at all in Denmark(Highly suspicious that even the gossip and drama medias have not touched the subject) and the public opinion is a hard NO for this type of regulation and invasion of privacy. I am yet to see anyone actually supporting this from a citizen perspective.
How come even when the Danish public has no interest in such a thing the Danish politicians keep fixated on this?
US interests are running the show.
They are a proxy for other powers
With a warrant from a judge people should be compelled to provide access to their encrypted files or be in contempt of court with all that entails. Anything else is overreach.
You cannot prove the absence of e.g. a Veracrypt hidden volume or similar, though. Even if you honestly give up your key, you could still be either
A) held in contempt of court, if the authorities do not find what they expect for some reason and accuse you of using such techniques or
B) if you specify that such behaviour by law enforcement is overreach, have a clean way out for criminals, codified in law, heavily damaging the impact you may expect of such a law.
What's the difference between that and an incriminating paper document that the police believe you have hidden somewhere in the vast woods?
Wonderful idea. All I need to is to create an encrypted file with pedo pictures or terrorist plans or just white noise, send a copy to all my enemies, and tip off the authorities.
And what happens when your enemies can't produce the decryption key?
In many countries it's prison time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
Yea that's extra fun if someone else sent it then. Government puts them in jail for not having the encryption key for something someone else encrypted.
No, that's not all you need to do unless your only goal is to harass your enemies and cause inconvenience.
No one should be compelled to aid in their prosecution.
Maybe, just maybe, (probably not) they learned something from the NSA/FBI (I don't remember) tricking the BSI into helping them with industry espionage against a large Germany company[^1]. and pretty much any technology widely used in chat control would be under tight US control, or Israel which in recent times also isn't exactly know to be a peace seeking reasonable acting country.
[^1]: Which I think was about car companies and pre-trump, pre-disel-gate. Also not the only time where it's known that the US engaged on industry espionage against close allies or Germany specifically.
Proud to be a German today, for sure :)
Yay for Dobrindt and vdL losing this fight :)
She is not called Zensursula without a reason.
I think the front lines are not that clear. Zensursula was actually a termed coined because she wanted the German equivalent of the online safety act in Germany back in the days. The 'Stasi 2.0' initiative (data retention at ISPs and online 'raids') was backed by some people in CDU and SPD (current ruling coalition). IMHO online safety (censorship) and chat control (privacy invasion) are different beasts, with different lobby groups as well.
I mainly remember the Zensursula title in connection with the ISP-level DNS-blocking initiative (the Stopsign thing) which was to combat CSAM.
I remember all the nerds going "That's a slippery slope to blocking other stuff as well though", and being dismissed. Now we got the CUII blocking libgen, scihub, piracy sites and as I recently read on HN, russia today(that's not the cuii I'm pretty sure, but same mechanism).
You are right, I had to look it up again : Zugangserschwerungsgesetz [0] But the law did not feature any kind of data collection afaik.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz
Edit: I think I mixed it up with her game censorship [1] (which I guess also contributed to her nick name).
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/von-der-leyen-sofortp...
Yesss.
It seems that public pressure pays off.
During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.
The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.
German public broadcaster published a commentary last year after Chat Control was blocked saying that "child safety needs to wait" and lamenting that it didn't get through. Absolutely horrifying how much distance the media has from the people.
Thank you for doing that nad being a voice for liberty.
> It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ...
Unfortunately it's the pyramid of Maslow. It's hard to make people care about something that seems academic when there are much more pressing political problems crushing people and making sure they don't have space to think about anything else.
It's hard to make people care about privacy principles when they can't afford a house anymore.
That too, but my experience was that a huge part of the problem was sheer ignorance.
When informed about those plans, most people actually react with some disgust. But the European Commission was really trying to be low-key around this, and the media usually jump on loud scandals first. Too few journalists are willing to poke around in the huge undercurrent of not-very-public issues and fish for some deadly denizens there.
More publicity definitely helped the freedom's cause here.
The fascists will continue to bring it back again and again, just like Microsoft TCPA and TPM different name same shit
I'm against ChatControl like most tech-savy people. But because someone is in favour doesn't mean they are a fascist. Usually they just don't understand why it is a problem.
"If it helps the good guys, I don't see a problem" is easy to say. And if you tell them "yeah but if it helps the good guys, it helps the bad guys", they will simply answer "well, make it such that it doesn't help the bad guys".
The real question to me is, why is Europe and Europeans okay with America and American software companies having access to their logs (encryption can be bypassed take whatsapp for example, do you honestly bellieve that Facebook does not have access to whatever is typed on whatsapp and/or can give it to authorities if necessary?) or discord, which if you are on mobile tells you via a title what the conversation you're having is about, is automatic message scanning not involved there? but the EU and or European countries cannot?
If we go by the idea that America should not either, then go ahead and do something about it, all this seems to me is just some weirdly motivated "activism" that may or may not be originated from the source that actually has access to said data at the moment. I am going to go with the belief that people are not naive and instead they are acting maliciously about this knowing very well that this already occurs, but only for a specific side.
Excellent win!
See you next time.
Next time, when the proposal is worse, when less people care, and the methods to stop it no longer exist.
“Next time” is preferable to now. Giving up and bringing others down is not the answer. If you want to give up, that’s your prerogative, but please don’t drag others down with you, you’re working against your own best interests. The thing you said right now is exactly what the bad actors want, don’t play into their hands. Thankfully not everyone has that defeatist attitude, or the law would have passed the first time.
And the proposal has not been worse, it’s more crippled with every attempt. Maybe we can’t stop the problem indefinitely, but we can mitigate the harm. Or maybe we can stop it long enough that the people making these proposals are replaced and we eventually win.
Don’t give up. You don’t have to fight along every one else, but if you’re not actively helping, I humbly ask that you also don’t actively make it worse.
The struggle never stops, that is part of the human condition - you should embrace this endless cycle with confidence instead of cynical defeatism
Dormammu, I've come to bargain
What should actually happen is that adversaries of this policy should challenge those backing chat control to a test. Those backing it get to attempt to make it work for a year in a control environment, and if at the end of that year, they still can't read every message that actors within that control environment send to each-other (which they won't), we abandon the whole thing for good.
"Bad guys" will always find a way around any attempt to stop them communicating privately. And the rest of the population will be left with governments spying on all of our interactions. The fact that this is even getting this far is absurd.
I'd support this if and only if we ran a trial where all public officials had all their messages and emails publicly readable by citizens. Surely the good people adamant on spying on their constituents en-masse has nothing to hide, right?
This is good, but we do need some sort of progress somehow. As that case with the fake drug dealer "privacy-focussed" mobile phone company was crazy, when they had all the messages from Swedish death squads, etc. - https://www.404media.co/watch-inside-the-fbis-secret-phone-c...
Obviously monitoring everyone's messages is making things way too easy for authoritarian dictatorships later on, but there does need to be some progress so these groups can't keep acting with complete impunity.
Happy to see the NL here in opposition to ChatControl! The political climate here is slowly pushing to the right, which I'm not happy about. But there seems to be voices getting louder from the left. So that leaves me with hope!
Even if they did, I am sure this would have been toppled by our constitutional court. You have to know that our police is not allowed to scan number plates of cars entering or leaving the country due to privacy concerns. How on earth would anyone think that lifting our dearly held fundamental right of "mail privacy" is ok?
If this was becoming an EU regulation, constitutional courts can decide to overrun constitution to uphold it (as has happened in the past plenty).
What this implies for the democratic values eu is supposed to represent is an interesting discussion.
This isn’t how EU regulation/directives work as they are not laws.
Only way this can come into force in a member country is that country making their own law implementing it. It is at that point that constitutionality should be checked and the law stopped from being implemented.
In the case it is declared unconstitutional, there are two options: take the fight to the eu/amend the law, or change the constitution. The latter is more probable than the former in the political climate of our times. So we are talking at best for some delay in implementing it.
Or just never approve it and ignore any demands eu makes about it.
Just take a look at Orban with Hungary how many years you can keep doing this without anything actually happening.
EU in general works only to the extent that member nations want it to work and finding a concensus is always the first goal and split decisions are heavily discouraged (and pretty much anything that matters needs a supermajority at minimum).
If one of the member nations just goes "ah fuck it I don't like this" EU really does not have many tools to fight it (especially for things that effect internal things in the country not trade between them). This is also why directives like this are very unlikely to ever go through without unanimous support from the council (heads of state of the member nations)
I mean literally at worst EU could keep some of the benefits away from a country over not implemeting some directive (what EU is finally after years thinking about doing to Hungary) but that does not really work with a country like Germany that pays more then it gets as they could just go "fuck it we are not paying our dues then".
Basically unlike in the US where the federal government has police, army, etc to actually enforce its rulings EU has none of those. All it can really do is try to take money away which again does not really work all that well.
The claim that this can "overrun constitution" has not been true at all which we've seen in examples of other directives.
These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.
It would probably be toppled by courts, yes. Anyway, meanwhile they already start implementing it, developing the technology and infrastructure they can base on the next time where they basically reintroduce the same illegal laws in a new name. So companies and governments already have to spent huge sums of resources to introduce it and may fall into the sunken-cost fallacy. "If we now already have it we can also use it (for something else)"?
Even if it's EU regulation? My experience is that you get told that EU regulation and international treaties are "above our national democratic/justice system", and that we can't do anything about it.
That's how it works.
> Primacy of European Union law
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
IANAL - but when EU regulation and national law regarding civil rights conflict then the citizen has the "union set" of all guaranteed rights. Or in other words: A member state can grant additional civil rights (on top of the EU charta) but can't take them away.
Germany specifically seems to have an out if it comes down to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_la...
Glad that my country (Finland) is also on the correct side of this. Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though. Would've expected more, especially from Estonia.
Sweden and Denmark are some of the main drivers of this proposal. As a Swede I am a bit unclear why as while our politicians are quite pro-survelliance they have spent much more political capital than reasonable.
One possible reason seems to be lobbyism and shady connections to surveillance tech companies and various shady non-profits
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
> Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”
Literal "Won't anybody think of the children" moment.
> Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though
Why do you think the Baltics are in favour? Are there some announcements they have made?
Edit: You were totally right Matt. Brain fart.
Because that’s what the link says.
What link?
The one in this submission? The one that we're commenting on?
The link in the submission is saying that the representatives position is mostly unknown for all the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).
For Finland it says only 3 of 15 have opposed - which is clearly not a majority.
The “assumption” based on government position has no reference to any stated government position (I know for a fact Lithuania have expressed no such opinion, and can’t find anything related to Latvia or Estonia having done so either) - and also “assumes” all representatives (that are from different parties) are aligned, which they most likely aren’t.
How is the blocking minority counted?
8/27=0.296 (29.6%), and I thought it has to be 35% (65% supporters to pass)
A qualified majority needs
(1) 55% of countries [15 atm] (2) representing 65% of EU population.
If one of the above is not met, a blocking minority (usually) needs >=4 countries to vote against a proposal. Germany voting against CSAR would mean (2) is not met in this case.
Source: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/voting-system/...
Austria opposing, meanwhile planning their own version of it nationally lol.
Wish I knew wtf they are cooking up for us
Whatever it is, history is not on your side.
I dont get it, what problem are they trying to solve ? This kind of regulation stirs up a lot of shit and just wastes everyones time.
Funny how the map shows a clear north/south divide (modulo some nordics).
Looks like latin cultures don't really care about being spied on by they governments.
"Latin cultures" is a really wild way to put it, when Denmark has been the most prominent promoter of the initiative.
This is a map of the government's positions, not even the parliament much less the public, and therefore a picture of whatever happen to be the parties in charge at the current time.
ireland and latvia, classic latin shenanigans.
In Ireland this isn't something the public really even knows was proposed, I highly doubt the public would be in support of this, although can't be sure about it. You would think given the country's history they wouldn't be in favour of government overreach in this way but you never know.
* There is absolute ZERO information about this in the news, not even from the privacy authority
* There is little to no faith in our elected officials, especially from _that_ side
* Also people don't seem to care, all invested in the "i have nothing to hide" mentality
Where do Switzerland fall on the map?
Switzerland is not a part of the EU.
"Some nordics" are MOST of the nordics, meaning - all the north though.
Why would you really need something like that in a non-totalitarian state? Basically, it follows the russian playbook (essentially the same 'language' - safety concerns), but instead of the FSB, who is the beneficiary actor in this case?
Many people working in government wish they were administering a totalitarian state, and would be the beneficiary actors.
Government is a job that self-selects for people who either want safety (non elected jobs) or power (elected jobs) more than anything else, given it pays far less than the private sector. Both the safety people and the power people want to reduce public freedom and the ability to do things.
The only way we keep these people from this is the threat of voting them out of their jobs. But they are more motivated than we are, so they usually win over time.
Maybe an ECI (european citizens' initiative) that would burry the thing for good? :)
That's not how laws work. New laws always override old laws so an ECI (or any law) won't ever replace active participation in the res publica
That's true, but that would be a huge signal of a rejection. What's more - changing such law would be slightly more complex than just introducing the backdor IMHO.
> would be slightly more complex than just introducing the backdor
Not really, both things need to be done by a law. So it's the same signal and complexity as just rejecting the law when it's proposed
And the second option at least does away with the pretension of permanence people like to use as an excuse to wash their hands of interest in politics
Apparently Italy will support it. This is absolutely infuriating and it will fail miserably. Encryption can't he stopped no matter what law gets out there and any politician voting in favor shows how ignorants they are.
Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.
Why doesn't the EU put effort in paving the way for a more open and free tech world when we rely 100% on propietary technology that comes from the other side of the Atlantic?
Because USA sends their ambassadors to threaten you if think the free market is free and decide to no longer buy from them.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/
> Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IP...
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Encryption cannot be stopped. But Android and iOS can be backdoored. These evil companies lock down our devices, does not allow apps to run without their approval, and selectively push updates from their servers to our devices.
This is a wet dream for governments.
Just replace politicians with AI. As soon as the systems are reliable.
As long as I remember there has been these initiatives in EU. They have been all blocked so far, or turned into something reasonable, but there will always be a new try.
"Think of the children" will never die.
It's easy to blame EU lobbyism, but as the situation in UK shows, the EU legislative process can also used to save us from ourselves.
That said, how come we haven't seen massive antitrust action against the likes of Google? You only have to follow the money here.
Oh, not just the EU. This sort of thing is about as old as generally available public key encryption. An early example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Honestly, this whole ChatControl proposal reeks of the "think of the children" excuse being used to push through mass surveillance
I think many genuinely just want to increase security for their people. Not mass surveillance and orwellian control.
They just don't understand why it's technically not possible to achieve what they want without unacceptable risks.
Similar to the climate change issue: no politician is aiming at having their children die before retirement age from the consequences of climate change. They just don't understand that they are pushing us there (like most of the people, to be fair).
someone has to prove illicit connections to private companies and potentially black markets. the data is guaranteed to end up in the wrong hands which will have a worse impact on the lives of citizens, workers as much as educated ones, and definitely officials; how to better gain dirt on someone if the law supports breaking encryption and they falsely believe their state of the art messaging app is worth more than the skeletons in their closets?
at the least the basic human rights and privacy laws should be on everyones' side ... except rapists, the many kinds of violent abusers, murderers, especially the genocidal kind, drug punchers, and these fuckers roofying kids in clubs and bars just to have sex ... I probably forgot some ... sorry I didn't stay on topic.
As Freud wanted to let us know, the ageing rich are perverts with enough means to hide any crime ... then they made him bend over and invent the Oedipus complex, ffs
the only way for them to create an argument for ChatControl is more terrorism or some fucked up crimes against children so this damn thing is a sure-fire shitstorm with recursive, bad yields.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
big thanks.
Just think for a moment how broken the EU model is. You don't want something to pass. Other citizens of your country don't want the thing to pass. Your politicians don't want that thing to pass. Your euro politicians don't want that thing to pass. Yet in the current model that doesn't matter one bit because your SOVEREIGN country may still be overruled by foreign countries and politicians.
It's unbelievable that we have allowed EU to spread into this all encompassing monster that deals with anything but economic cooperation among member countries.
-------------------
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
That is factually untrue. While governments of member states of the EU no longer have a direct veto against proposed EU legislation in many cases, the EU does not claim any sovereignty over member states.
If a member state fails to block a proposal, all that simply means is that the qualified majority[1] of representatives of other member states believes the legislation to be so important that the union would not work without it. Dissenting member states can seek to reverse or temper the legislation later, or simply leave the union - see Brexit. No sovereignty is violated at any point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...
> Primacy of European Union law
> The primacy of European Union law (sometimes referred to as supremacy or precedence of European law[1]) is a legal principle of rule according to higher law establishing precedence of European Union law over conflicting national laws of EU member states.
The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.[2][3][4] For the European Court of Justice, national courts and public officials must disapply a national norm that they consider not to be compliant with the EU law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
The primacy of European Union law applies to member states of the European Union. That is part of what the countries agreed to in order to become a member state. Some countries negotiated opt-outs for specific laws that they felt shouldn't apply to them before joining - and disgruntled member states could attempt the same by threatening to leave.
The only way that the European Union can 'force' compliance of a member state is for the EU Commission (or, exceptionally, the Parliament and Council) to withhold EU funds from that member state. Those funds were never the property of the member state in the first place though - again, no infringement on national sovereignty.
Other inhabitants of my town don't want something to pass. The local politicians of my town don't want something to pass. The politicians I elected to the national government don't want it to pass. Yet that doesn't matter one bit because my town my still be overruled by non-local towns and politicians.
This will always be a problem at every level.
Is this a EU thing? Replace Country by municipality, province, state.
That's literally how any representative democracy work, just at a different level? The Free State of Bavaria could say the same about the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Yet in the current model that doesn't matter one bit
It matters because if it's that important to you then you have a sovereign right to leave the EU and do away with all the rules you don't want
Staying inside of it and accepting primacy of EU law when decisions are lawfully taken following the process you've agreed to of your own country's free will is a choice
If entities comprising the union are not forced to compromise (and compromise by some type of majority is the most logical one), and want to pick and choose, then that is no union. And there can be no union like that.