Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
One of the reasons international human rights law is so worthless in actual practice, is that half of it is framed like this. "Everyone has the right to X, except as duly restricted by law." Cool, so that's not a right at all then.
Ditto the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its 'notwithstanding' clause. (Though they're presently litigating over that, so we'll see what happens!)
Any constitution or human rights instrument full of exemptions, 'emergency powers', 'notwithstanding' clauses, or 'states of exception' is not worth the paper it's written on.
Every contract I have to agree to these days has a "valid until unilaterally invalidated" clause. It feels like we're all just going through the motions.
It doesn’t remove the “right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.” The law cannot be random, it must ensure “fair processing” and be limited to “specific purposes”, and the European Court of Justice as well as the ECHR will decide what constitutes a “legitimate basis” in that context. Furthermore, “Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her”, which ensures transparency of what is being collected.
Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.
Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...
I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
The problem is, in all of those member states, they all have carve outs for "national security."
Germany, for exmaple, has secrecy of correspondence that extends to electronic communications, but allows for "restrictions to protect the free democratic basic order" and outlines when intelligence services can bypass the right to privacy.
Italy, France, and Polan also have similar carve outs.
Having it as a right isn't enough. National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
Rights are never absolute, they always have to be weighed against each other. The weighing can and should be debated, and needs strong protections when put into practice, but demanding an absolute is not reasonable.
I dunno; I think in practice an absolute sometimes shakes out just fine.
In this case, I see no reason that we would want to draft constitutional rights such that we consider a government's actions taken in pursuit of their national security to be, per se, legal — i.e. warranted, unable to be sued over, etc.
Imagine instead, a much weaker right granted to the state: the right to maintain laws or regulations which require/force government or military employees to do things that violate people's rights and/or the law of the land. But with no limit on liability. No grant of warrant. Just the mildest possible form of preservation: technically constitutional; and not immediately de-fanged the first time the Supreme Court gets their hands on it.
So, for example, some state might introduce a new law saying that soldiers can come to your house and confiscate your laptop. And then the head of that state might actually use that law to invade your home and take your laptop.
Given that the law exists, it would be legal for the head-of-state to give this order. And it would also be legal for the soldiers to obey this order (or to put it another way, court-martialable for the soldiers to disobey this order, since it's not an illegal order.)
But the actual thing that happened as a result of this law being followed, would be illegal — criminal theft! — and you would therefore be entitled to sue the state for damages about it.
The courts wouldn't be able to strike down the law; but since obeying the law produces illegal outcomes, you would be able to punish the government each and every time they actually use it!
There is absolutely zero reason why the state shouldn't be expected to "make people whole" for damages it has caused them, each and every time it does something against the people's interest in the name of national security.
And the simplest way to calculate that penalty / make the claiming and distribution of those rewards practical, would be to just not remove liability for these actions taken on behalf of the state, by not granting the state the right to do them in the first place.
"to protect the free democratic basic order", the irony.
It's incredible how even with the current surge of autocracy, most politicians can't see that the surveillance tools they crave for, could come under control of people much worse than them.
And can't see what they could do with them.
I think that many current governments in Europe are convinced that more surveillance will stop the autocratic surge. It's insane that they don't see how this is far from guaranteed, and how it will go if they're wrong.
The deal is that hiring a lawyer is costly and in civil cases each side has to carry his own expenses. These privacy laws keep shifting the focus every time and you need a good legislation for protection no matter what.
Rather than arguing in court whether you did something, you will be arguing whether there is just enough reason to think that you could have based on data harvested on you by big tech.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
The Charter has been used by the courts to shoot down incoming legislation. So, in a way, those pieces of paper mean everything, as without them legislation would pass without the judiciary branch being a check on the Bloc’s powers. Your comment is merely cynical.
In theory these limit the power of the EU, while anything the EU parliament passes can just be undone as easily by a future EU parliament. If you don't believe the EU charter provides any protection, why would you believe an EU law would be any different?
In theory, governments are made up of citizens. In practice, once the citizens are corrupted into corporate shills, they become politicians. They have traded their humanity for business class seats and dining at restaurants that cater to those whose entire personality is talking about their investment portfolio.
Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
Could be a wordplay due to the fact "invigilation" can be translated to and from the Polish word with a _very_ heavy and long connotations to the USSR state surveillance, oppression and abuse.
Surveillance would be a more "modern" (even if more natural or seemingly correct word), without this sort of the implied baggage.
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
They never quit.
They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar.
The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
But it doesn't change the fact of the matter that in English (and not only English! German, too, as demonstrated), these words have different meanings.
I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
And that means only they can support it? This isn't the USA, there's no 2 party system where everything "we" do is good and everything "the other side" does is bad.
I'm not saying only they support it, nor do I believe most groupings in the EU are "good". I'm only saying the ones currently working on overturning the parliament vote are the Conservatives, seeing how they're the ones trying to force a revote.
European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
The "voluntary" scanning is still mass surveillance of private messages. We as technologist tend to rely on technical methods to protect our private data. But non-technical people should also enjoy confidential communication, even if they don't actively protect their conversations.
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
Is that fair? Ireland should surely have a say the same way Germany does in parliament too, if it's affecting Ireland just as much. If one considers countries as units.
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena supprts it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problenatic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?
Are you so obtuse to be unable to figure out that by being like annoying school marms you are just making people start to pay more attention to the populists?
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
One reason to downvote it is because laws having some stability is generally a good thing. It also doesn’t prevent laws being passed that strengthen the right to privacy.
The argument is a too simplistic criticism of the legislative process. And it’s independent from criticizing the actual laws that are attempted to be passed. It applies equally to desirable and undesirable laws.
I am the creator of Fight Chat Control.
Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
Happy to answer any questions.
[0] https://mepwatch.eu/10/vote.html?v=188578
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/OJQ-10-2026-03...
[3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2026-03-...
You're doing God's work mate.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.
The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.
You're a hero
[dead]
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Quoting from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12... :
"Article 7
Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
One of the reasons international human rights law is so worthless in actual practice, is that half of it is framed like this. "Everyone has the right to X, except as duly restricted by law." Cool, so that's not a right at all then.
Ditto the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its 'notwithstanding' clause. (Though they're presently litigating over that, so we'll see what happens!)
Any constitution or human rights instrument full of exemptions, 'emergency powers', 'notwithstanding' clauses, or 'states of exception' is not worth the paper it's written on.
Every contract I have to agree to these days has a "valid until unilaterally invalidated" clause. It feels like we're all just going through the motions.
It doesn’t remove the “right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.” The law cannot be random, it must ensure “fair processing” and be limited to “specific purposes”, and the European Court of Justice as well as the ECHR will decide what constitutes a “legitimate basis” in that context. Furthermore, “Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her”, which ensures transparency of what is being collected.
Last but not least, a number of EU countries enshrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence in their constitution.
Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.
Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...
I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
This exists in a number of EU member states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
The problem is, in all of those member states, they all have carve outs for "national security."
Germany, for exmaple, has secrecy of correspondence that extends to electronic communications, but allows for "restrictions to protect the free democratic basic order" and outlines when intelligence services can bypass the right to privacy.
Italy, France, and Polan also have similar carve outs.
Having it as a right isn't enough. National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
Rights are never absolute, they always have to be weighed against each other. The weighing can and should be debated, and needs strong protections when put into practice, but demanding an absolute is not reasonable.
I dunno; I think in practice an absolute sometimes shakes out just fine.
In this case, I see no reason that we would want to draft constitutional rights such that we consider a government's actions taken in pursuit of their national security to be, per se, legal — i.e. warranted, unable to be sued over, etc.
Imagine instead, a much weaker right granted to the state: the right to maintain laws or regulations which require/force government or military employees to do things that violate people's rights and/or the law of the land. But with no limit on liability. No grant of warrant. Just the mildest possible form of preservation: technically constitutional; and not immediately de-fanged the first time the Supreme Court gets their hands on it.
So, for example, some state might introduce a new law saying that soldiers can come to your house and confiscate your laptop. And then the head of that state might actually use that law to invade your home and take your laptop.
Given that the law exists, it would be legal for the head-of-state to give this order. And it would also be legal for the soldiers to obey this order (or to put it another way, court-martialable for the soldiers to disobey this order, since it's not an illegal order.)
But the actual thing that happened as a result of this law being followed, would be illegal — criminal theft! — and you would therefore be entitled to sue the state for damages about it.
The courts wouldn't be able to strike down the law; but since obeying the law produces illegal outcomes, you would be able to punish the government each and every time they actually use it!
There is absolutely zero reason why the state shouldn't be expected to "make people whole" for damages it has caused them, each and every time it does something against the people's interest in the name of national security.
And the simplest way to calculate that penalty / make the claiming and distribution of those rewards practical, would be to just not remove liability for these actions taken on behalf of the state, by not granting the state the right to do them in the first place.
Change my mind!
That's how human rights abuses are justified though. Every single time. This whole thread is talking about exactly that.
I disagree. A right to privacy not only can be demanded, it should be demanded.
"to protect the free democratic basic order", the irony.
It's incredible how even with the current surge of autocracy, most politicians can't see that the surveillance tools they crave for, could come under control of people much worse than them.
And can't see what they could do with them.
I think that many current governments in Europe are convinced that more surveillance will stop the autocratic surge. It's insane that they don't see how this is far from guaranteed, and how it will go if they're wrong.
The deal is that hiring a lawyer is costly and in civil cases each side has to carry his own expenses. These privacy laws keep shifting the focus every time and you need a good legislation for protection no matter what.
Rather than arguing in court whether you did something, you will be arguing whether there is just enough reason to think that you could have based on data harvested on you by big tech.
Let's parse this a little.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
You know that those pieces of paper mean nothing.
The Charter has been used by the courts to shoot down incoming legislation. So, in a way, those pieces of paper mean everything, as without them legislation would pass without the judiciary branch being a check on the Bloc’s powers. Your comment is merely cynical.
In theory these limit the power of the EU, while anything the EU parliament passes can just be undone as easily by a future EU parliament. If you don't believe the EU charter provides any protection, why would you believe an EU law would be any different?
Thank you for telling them. Governments do not care about anyone.
In theory, governments are made up of citizens. In practice, once the citizens are corrupted into corporate shills, they become politicians. They have traded their humanity for business class seats and dining at restaurants that cater to those whose entire personality is talking about their investment portfolio.
Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
Past laws of this type are:
- The GDPR
- The ePrivacy directive, which is explicitly derogated (sabotaged) by chat control 1.0
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
We can do more than one thing. Do not cede the weapon of lobbying to be used solely by opponents. You can get a lot done by talking to people.
Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sedcms/documents/PRIORITY_INF...
Here is the regulation that will be voted on: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...
Note that the amendment was already amended on 11th March to set expiry to Aug 2027 and to also exclude E2E communications.
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
Do you mean "surveillance" by the word "invigilation" here?
Could be a wordplay due to the fact "invigilation" can be translated to and from the Polish word with a _very_ heavy and long connotations to the USSR state surveillance, oppression and abuse.
Surveillance would be a more "modern" (even if more natural or seemingly correct word), without this sort of the implied baggage.
There a practical reason for this? like more alignment with lobbyists, for whatever financial reasons?
Hungary is governed by a Russia aligned autocrat. This generally does not align with the priorities of the rest of the EU.
Orban is an evil politician, and Fidez is an evil party.
Orban is a Putin asset.
Over the last two decades Hungary reversed course from a democracy joining the west to an authoritarian dictatorship in bed with the Russians.
Hence, everything their government does is the opposite of what a typical European Union member would approve of.
I wonder what it would take to expel them from the EU...
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
So they will pass it until is a yes?
Exactly what happened when Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, they were told to vote again until they voted the "right" way.
Like UI saying "Yes" | "Ask later"
That's literally the entire Microslop Winblows set up screen flow. There's no "no", only "confirm".
Almost happened with Brexit referendum.
Yes. The anchor chain got broken sometime ago. It's still there, but nobody want it anymore.
Heads I win, tails you loose. :(
It takes only one win to remove our rights but once they’re gone you’ll never get them back.
Modern democracy
Wait until you find out it's actually already implemented and they're trying to legitimise it.
The proposal they are voting on is about continuing the current time-limited implementation (voluntary scanning, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232).
This is not about mandatory scanning.
It was one of the things Ylva Johansson infamously said about it, Microsoft and Apple are already doing it so what's the big deal?
Makes me think about this clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhsLq3-ZWE
Or, as is also seen elsewhere, wildly popular ideas simply get curiously stuck.
Either way those elected to supposedly serve are the only ones winning.
They only have to win once. You have to win every time.
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
— Jean-Claude Juncker
They never quit. They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar. The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
It's not now or never. It's now, or the next attempt or the next.
Who is "they"?
That's the key question!
There's a small group of very powerful people that keep pushing this agenda.
Who are those people?
Find out.
Publicize their names. Make their corruption visible and linked to their identity.
In case anyone has an issue with this: Remember! This is what they want! For you! Not for them. Only the plebs.
This isn't a conspiracy... "They" are the EPP, a democratically elected party acting fully in public with their names attached to everything.
[dead]
Just a heads up that this is being posted late in the European evening here, so that will affect who's commenting.
Posted 9:30-11:30pm. Plenty of us awake
It won't all be non-Europeans if that's what you're implying
This is the same EU that blocks and hinders innovation in the name of privacy?
You are aware that EU is not a single country, right? I know American education is third-world levels these days, so unfortunately I have to ask this.
The EU isn’t a single mind. There are a multitude of factions trying to get through all kinds of things.
"for sure"
You can directly call your representatives by looking them up here:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
So EU syill wants to harm children.
Epstein Union
What does this mean for a non-eu citizen communicating with an eu citizen? Is it as simple as using signal/matrix instead of whatsapp/messenger?
The trick here is to make it impossible to do so.
Don’t put your shit in the cloud and use proper E2E secure messaging.
For me the entire idea of the cloud is dead due to exposure like this.
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
It's client side scanning.
You can refuse to use software that does it.
If they force their spyware into Android/iOS you are running out of options.
Gotta get back in time. The Symbian S60/S80 platform will rise again!
Pixel and GrapheneOS or something. Already considering it.
Like others said: this is implemented on operating system level, locally.
There isn't much escape other than using messengers which encrypt the data locally. Geogram radio is doing this.
I’d rather use an older or open source OS without it
That's one of the tricks. The other trick is to vote in universal right for encrypted communication once and for all.
Encryption is mathematics -- making this an issue of freedom not only of speech, but of thought.
That’s the best answer. But you’re up against paid up lobbyists.
The lack of accountability after what was exposed in the Epstein files illustrates that not one in power actually care about kids.
"Save the kids", is just a ploy to run scams.
Fun fact: the parties that want this are actually those who criticise the EU the most
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
God I love politics
But of course it's back.
So much for "digital soverignty".
They aid the truth because the complete slogan was about EU's digital sovereignity. Not really your sovereignity nor mine.
Why's there '?foo=bar' in the URL?
To get around the "dupe" filter, it was trying to mark it as a dupe of a 7 month old post.
It's a web bug
Framing this as the EU's attempt is antieuropean propaganda.
It is the Conservatives attempt. The EU parliament is the entity that shot it down last time.
EU is not a synonym of Europe. EU propagandists don't get to define what Europe means.
Second. Who gave you the right to define antieuropean union propaganda as a sin.
Some people may hate it, some people may love it, other want to change it.
It was created by vote, surely it can be whatever the fuck the way the people want by vote.
EU is a synonym for Europe in colloquial conversation the same way USA is a synonym for America.
Except for in one EU country wherein English is a native language, "America" is a not a country but a very large continent.
Das musst du jetzt aber mal den Amerikanern erklären ;-)
Oder... sie könnten jemanden aus Süd- oder Mittelamerika fragen, was das Wort „Amerika“ für ihn bedeutet.
Entiendo como se sienten los otros Americanos.
But it doesn't change the fact of the matter that in English (and not only English! German, too, as demonstrated), these words have different meanings.
this is just wrong
I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
The vote has literally been scheduled by the EPP, the EU grouping of conservative parties.
And that means only they can support it? This isn't the USA, there's no 2 party system where everything "we" do is good and everything "the other side" does is bad.
I'm not saying only they support it, nor do I believe most groupings in the EU are "good". I'm only saying the ones currently working on overturning the parliament vote are the Conservatives, seeing how they're the ones trying to force a revote.
European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
Exactly. EU legislation is currently far more respecting of privacy than is legislation in the UK or the US.
For various, and unclear, reasons, there is substantial backing to change this.
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
That is true, but this attempt is led by the Conservatives. Not more, not less.
It seems like it is bipartisan to me. Do you have the statistics to back up your claim?
This is how political messaging has worked since I was born.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
The "voluntary" scanning is still mass surveillance of private messages. We as technologist tend to rely on technical methods to protect our private data. But non-technical people should also enjoy confidential communication, even if they don't actively protect their conversations.
> voluntary scanning
What is that? A setting in OS?
To quote the banner on said website:
> The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning.
The vote itself is being forced by the EPP. This article by an MEP has more info: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
This does not mean that only EPP supports the bill, though.
No, but it does mean the attempt is attributable to them.
There are two elements to the EU
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
Is that fair? Ireland should surely have a say the same way Germany does in parliament too, if it's affecting Ireland just as much. If one considers countries as units.
Yeah, it's like saying "USA wants to poison children still!" when a Republican files another deranged bill in their state.
This. There's a very specific group of twisted people that drive this, but equating that with the entire EU is flat out wrong.
They hate us for our freedoms.
A shame the EU is just simulation of democracy.
Best case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Nice website! Sadly, url stays the same across all coutries. I can't send anyone direct link.
ofc, they only need to get it approved once. they will try until they succeed
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522647
does this violate GDPR?
Maybe...in a world where lawmakers didn't put huge exemptions into GDPR for governments and law enforcement etc. Which they did.
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena supprts it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problenatic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
It’s a symptom of authoritarianism rising. It wouldn’t be rising if there wasn’t anyone who supports things like that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
...
n) protecting children
Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?
Are you so obtuse to be unable to figure out that by being like annoying school marms you are just making people start to pay more attention to the populists?
I don't think criticisms of chat-control-like legislation attempts are downvoted here?
This guy has gone on a small anti-EU tirade elsewhere in the thread.
If my experience is anything to go by the answer is 'yes':
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412060
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
One reason to downvote it is because laws having some stability is generally a good thing. It also doesn’t prevent laws being passed that strengthen the right to privacy.
The argument is a too simplistic criticism of the legislative process. And it’s independent from criticizing the actual laws that are attempted to be passed. It applies equally to desirable and undesirable laws.
> Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?
Hey, let's call this "forum control" :)