Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
We will protect your sensitive personal documents so that only trusted government institutions and ones held to the highest standards of privacy (such as banks) may have access to it.
This is to prevent abuse and identity theft.
Also please upload them to BigBootyXXX.com if you want to have a wank
"The European Commission is developing a harmonized, EU-wide approach to age verification, accompanied by a comprehensive age verification blueprint that is intended to facilitate practical adoption across all Member States and can be customised to the national context. Built upon the robust European Digital Identity Wallet framework, this user-friendly and privacy-preserving age verification solution enables individuals to demonstrate their eligibility for age-restricted online services, such as those restricted to adults, without disclosing more personal information than absolutely necessary"
So basically, the intention is to provide a solution where users do not need an account or to provide their passports to BigBootyXXX.com. The site just asks if this session or user is of legal age and the age verification system will respond with a TRUE/FALSE
Also, public officials like to be exempt because of professional requirements. They delivered the argument for it to be declared illegal violating a few constitutions.
Also because it is an undemocratic technocracy (warranted polemic) and the average citizen cannot sue before the EU judiciary, the national courts have to kill it. Of course such a process will take years...
At the end of the day, "think of the children" has been an ancient rallying cry that’s used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. Often ironic, as you say.
Also banks were one of the most vulnerable. I’ve often wondered why. My first reaction is "because their code comes from coders who only want to work at a bank," but I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps it’s "from people comfortable with lots of bureaucracy". Either way, when I was a pentester, banks were one of our main types of clients, and their code was often bad. So it’s doubly ironic to claim banks are exemplars of how to do privacy.
I consulted with several big banks, and while there are some great developers there, on the whole, the devs were largely passionless and were just there for the job. Many of them actively dislike coding, and it really felt like they were just there for the high pay. I think that type of developer really thrives in a move slow, heavy bureuacracy environment where velocity is not something people care about. The high security can be annoying, but everywhere I went they had enough processes and out-sourcing of security to experts and tools that the average dev didn't really have to think about it. On many teams there would be one person or so who (mostly) understood the area they were responsible for and could deliver quickly, but not every team had somebody like that. One thing that I did think was a positive is that (perhaps because of all these things) is that it was a very low-ego environment, and people were generally open-minded about learning new stuff and/or better ways to do things. Overall I really enjoyed working with the people at banks, despite everything taking longer than you would think it should :-)
Just wanted to say, thanks for the very interesting comment. I consulted at Thompson Reuters, and while they aren’t a bank, your story brought up all kinds of memories. The passionless part really resonated with me, since it was all too obvious whenever the one good developer (who I was thankfully paired with) and I had meetings with the rest of them. There was one guy in charge of the database, which in practice meant any time you wanted to interface with the database you had to ask this guy to do it instead of write any code yourself that even interacts with the database in any way, including just getting data. It meant hours of delays, routinely. During most meetings it would devolve into random tangents about cars. (The good dev was also a car enthusiast, so everyone came to him with all their car issues, much to his annoyance.) And yes, to be fair, it was a little fun and I enjoyed working with most of them. Very low ego, as you say.
What I dislike about these large bureaucracies is that it's not only impersonal to the developers who have to work on it, but also for the customers. Even though software is difficult, I think it's a net positive for society to have 10 to 100 banks with poorer software than a few big banks with great software. I think we often overestimate the benefits of economies of scale. A small bank in a town run by a few locals could handle the town's finances perfectly well without much software if there wouldn't be a whole morass of regulations.
News organization welcome any barrier to social media networks, they are heavily biased on these topics. The "modern" journalist of today doesn't really care about freedom of information either.
Speaking of which, the EU is also working on a "free speech" law for journalists and against them being arbitrarily banned by platforms. One would think this law could easily be extended to everyone since it is not at all trivial to determine who gets these benefits and who doesn't.
Most outlets today are some form of court reporter in one way or another. That trust in media is sinking is quite expected and in many cases reasonable too.
We have this issue massively in Australia too - literally almost 100% of the push to implement a social media ban (where ‘social media’ is anything that an unelected bureaucrat called the ‘eSafety commissioner’ feels like, which, for example, wasn’t going to include YouTube until they changed their mind) came from a single Murdoch newspaper campaign. It just wasn’t a thing anybody else was talking about, and then suddenly it was apparently the most important thing the federal Government could be doing that apparently had to be rushed through in about two weeks with almost no oversight (normally here it can take years to get reform that normal people have been long calling for into Parliament) - honestly it was absolutely bizarre.
I have no hesitation saying that the newspaper that pushed it doesn’t give a single damn about the kids - they have a serious hatred of Meta in particular but also Google. The whole thing was concern trolling because they were angry that they are going to get cut off from the last shakedown they lobbied for (called the media bargaining code).
Member states will implement this into national law. So in the case they will need to implement a maximum of one year or more (but not less). The final law as applied by a judge will just read "punishable by a maximum of [i.e.] fourteen months".
It sounds like it's "the maximum penalty must be at least 1 year", as in "your member state can't enact a law where the maximum penalty is less than 1 year".
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
That larger point deserves its own thread. My newest pet peeve is someone jumping into the middle of a conversation with the equivalent of "I don't care about what you're talking about. What I want to talk about is more important".
You might not like this law (and I'm agnostic on it) but I think the principle that individuals should be held accountable when laws are broken is important. Otherwise we just have token fines and corporate non-compliance because the risks don't outweigh the potential financial benefits.
I think people at Experian should have gone to jail, for example, for their incompetence and negligence in regards data breaches.
The person nominated by that company as their age verification guardian? Or the CEO. Or both. The defence for either could be that they took reasonable steps to know what was going on in their companies or were actively mislead.
This isn’t complicated. If it’s the law companies should comply. Fines won’t make a difference to corporate behaviour but this
Might.
I think that person's title is Designated Patsy. If your idea of justice is them finding someone who's willing to gamble that they won't be called out before their term is up in return for fat paychecks until it happens or they can "move on", I don't think we have compatible senses of justice.
>This isn’t complicated.
Not only is it complicated, it is deliberately complicated expressly for the purpose of making it impossible for justice to occur.
Not sure what exact sentence you're thinking of, but I'd have read the same sentence without "or more" to mean "each member's law should have a max sentence be 1 year" (since the context is describing what each member's law should look like).
I don't think their confusion was on how numerical comparisons work, it was on how a "maximum term of imprisonment" could also come with a minimum duration. In other words, what does a "maximum term" mean if it's not the actual longest time someone could be imprisoned for? Are there lesser terms?
Right. The confusion here is that this document isn't setting some maximum term, it's providing a constraints for multiple implementations of the law - it mandates that whatever maximum term any given country chooses, it must be no less than one year.
Yes, I think we all understand this. The thing which is confusing is why bother specifying a minimum length of one year if you're allowed to have lesser sentences?
As a citizen of an EU country, I am really piss* off that the EU Parliament just gets to set the law in all countries. Do we have independent countries anymore? It does not seem that much different between federal government and states. It feels like occupation.
While this is a specifically awful article, for obvious reasons, I find the idea of encoding specifics on carceral terms into any EU-level directive a bizarre overstep.
In principle, not at all. But there is no way to do this properly at all. No matter how secure the companies that do this say it is, it's another possible vulnerability.
You can't play whack a mole with the internet. People will always find a way to move smut or whatever on the internet. It takes no time at all to spin up more and more sites, and there's a million ways around them (vpns, etc).
All it does it just push people to more and more fringe sites, when moderation is likely to be lax and the content more extreme. Ideally it wouldn't be viewed at all, but it's just how the internet is.
It also sets a terrible precedent for censorship- in the UK, we've already seen, on Reddit for example, subreddits dedicated to quitting addictions being age gated, and it'll only get worse.
The European Commission's proposed interim solution for age verification (ageverification.dev) is actually pretty good vs the shitshow of the US and UK.
It works like this:
1. You contact an age verification provider (e.g., national eID schemes, banks, or mobile operators) and provide proof of identity, which they will verify possibly against government databases or whatever, etc. Once they confirm your age they will issue you with a bunch of Age attestations. At this point you don't even know where you will use these, so that info literally cannot be sent to the provider. The attestations are a JWT-like envelope with a payload conceptually equivalent to `{"nonce": "LARGE_RANDOM_HEX_STRING", "age_over_18":true}`, signed with the provider's public key. (The actual implementation is more complex).
2. This is stored in a local app, which will guarantee each attestation only gets used once (to avoid linking user across relying sites). There is no special authentication of the app in the protocol with the replying site, so you can write your own. The Commission provides an open source reference app. There is a standard protocol for communicating with verification providers, however it is not mandatory, so using the reference app might not support all verification providers, but should support a variety.
3. When you want to visit some site needing age verification, and you already have a verified account, you just sign in, otherwise, that site will use a standardized protocol to request proof from the app. The app will provide just the attestation token. The relying site does not get any info about your identity, other than the attestation token. Plus of course, the relying party must accept any age verification provider approved by the commission, not just its preferred one. The EC's solution also supports the app providing the relying site a Zero-Knowledge Proof of having such a token, which makes it possible for the relying site to learn the user's identity even if colluding with the age verification provider.
Try what exactly? Its illegal to stream movies for free, but there are hundreds if not thousands of illegal streaming sites. How would porn access fair any better at being regulated away?
The standard for robust and effective age verification is extremely low, given how I’ve seen anyone do age verification. It’s also pointless if we’re talking about the internet, you are essentially outsourcing your porn production to foreign countries
A little more context: that article 3 paragraph 2.a. was added by parliament (not proposed by the Commission). But paragraph 1 (same article) was altered to this text:
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
The positive intentional act, I guess, is disseminating the material. Proving intent and various ancillary concepts like knowledge, etc, are the bread and butter of prosecutors, so I don't think the act would be as difficult to enforce as you suggest. Sure, there might be corner cases where you can say "oops I forgot to password protect that Dropbox link" but certainly porn websites that don't do age verification will have a hard time arguing their conduct was not intentional.
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
Also, what what methods of sharing? If a 16 year old shares some porn with some friends and it happens to be on a digital system somewhere, can that kids now go to jail for over a year?
Its properly worded, as it is an EU law declaring atandards for national laws and the implementing national law must specify a penalty range where the maximum is at least one year (but can be more).
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
Yeah I think you have it backwards. I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn, but social networks regularly fuck teenagers up.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
I keep seeing people mentioning credit cards as a mean to verify one's age. My daughter is 11, but she have her own card with her own name since at least one year.
Yes, my bad. It is actually a debit card. She uses it only for roblox right now. My point was to unwrap the secret of where these mystical roblox points came from and also make her feel empowered and independent.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
That's a weird spin on it. Young people are curious. They watch weird porn out of curiosity, the same way they watch gore. Hiding it isn't going to do them any favours. They'll get it from sketchier places instead. I know the generation before mine often went to trashy hookers way underage, with group collected money, to lose their V card, for example.
Where I'm from, it's a pretty common saying that sex is for prestige and a wank is for joy. Of course, a relationship doesn't primarily consist of your stepsister getting stuck in the dryer, running a 10-man train on your loved one, or whatever else. Even kids aren't that stupid.
It can lead to issues with your thing not being attracted to people you don't find attractive, since you're not desperate, but the opposite is, in my opinion, worse. Many good men and women have fallen for dogshit relationships with mediocre sex out of fear of no sex(ual outlet).
> government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution
Why? Porn in magazine or movie form used to be age-restricted. Assume for a moment that was the correct, or at least a reasonable and permissible policy.
Why should it suddenly not be the appropriate policy, only because it's on the internet? Why do you say that laws do not or should not apply when you sprinkle a bit of "internet" over it?
It reminds me of the crypto-bro argument that, don't know, money laundering and tax evasion and offering securities without appropriate disclosure is illegal and tightly regulated, but if you do it with "blockchain", then it is perfectly fine. What sort of mindset is that?
Its the mindset of neckbeards who don't realize its not the 1990’s anymore, that the landscape has changed significantly and people cannot protect themselves let alone their children from it.
Implementation obviously matters and it is indeed a delicate situation, but that does not negate the need for solutions.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
Love it when you make a statement that porn isnt harmful without referencing any studies, and then demand studies for people to prove it is harmful.
You are the one who made the original claim that its not harmful, the burden of proof is on you.
Their side isn't the one trying to ban things. If you want to ban something you have to prove it's harmful. If you don't want to ban something you just have to call out that the other side has to prove it's harmful before they can ban it. It's like how you don't have to prove your innocence against a criminal conviction, merely provoke reasonable doubt (in theory).
"In talking to the subjects, researchers discovered that high exposure to pornography videos apparently resulted in lower responsivity and an increased need for more extreme, specialized or “k+++y” material to become aroused."[1]
This effect can be clearly seen in that pornography websites promote this extreme, vile and obscure content, such as incest, exhibitionism, and even depictions of non-consensual interaction and physical abuse.[2] Obviously, these matters have no place in a healthy relationship, and it's pretty basic psychology that regular consumption of this content causes the normalization of such practices, especially in impressionable teenagers whom do not yet have legitimate experience in healthy, normal relationships.
A majority of adults watches pornography.[3] And we're dealing with a massive loneliness epidemic under younger generations, together with a significant rise in "hook-up culture" over forming serious relationships. Coincidence?
Regarding [1], the study itself mentions that stopping watching porn reverses the effect. In layman's terms: watch enough of it and the novelty wears off, but the sexual drive returns. Hardly a harm, it's what happens with every human activity.
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
Featuring, and promoting, are different things. There's a big difference between Lolita and CSAM, or between Damals war es Friedrich and Mein Kampf.
But, I care about reality, not moral outrage about taboo violations*, so I'd only advocate "do something about [2]" if I believed [2] actually did contribute to a real problem. Combatting ineffective promotion is not on my priorities list. As far as I can tell, [2] is a real problem: though I'm always open to new evidence. (And when people like me take over the world, and it turns out our interventions don't make the problem go away, I like to think I'd have the integrity to reconsider my views in light of that evidence.)
*: That's not to say I don't feel outrage about taboo violations. Some taboos exist for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. (Of course, some need discarding with prejudice, but Chesterton's Fence applies.)
Even better, do a Google image search for “porn” and turn off filters. You will see pornography hosted by Google’s servers! I can’t understand why, at least in the spirit of these new laws, Google is exempt from age verification.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
If the parents want they can restrict their usage. I prefer to monitor and teach my children how to use technology properly, and that also includes of course sex education because it's not by banning porn sites till they are 18+ that you solve the issue to me, but by educating.
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
> Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn?
I think there are good arguments for claiming porn is more harmful than actual sex at that age, or at least some types or porn.
I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
> I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
Without thinking about it too deeply, that does sound reasonable. Was that ever discussed? Why was it not, or was rejected?
It was discussed many years ago. ISPs used to offer it. EE, at least, still offers filtered SIM cards.
Its not in wide use, and I think most people do not know its an option and it has no lobby group pushing for it so I am sure politicians do not know about it.
Most parents do not have the technical skills to effectively limit that usage. The vast majority may not even be aware that software tools and features exist that could limit it. For that matter, I am aware, and the features on most products are insufficient... I shouldn't have to block Youtube at the router-level, but that's about the only thing I can do. Works for the Xbox, which is plugged into ethernet, but it won't work for the iPhone since it just does fallback to cell service. What's to stop the kid from buying some cheap Android device and swapping in their sim, so they can get around Apple's parental controls?
>except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity,
True when we were kids. But bizarrely less true today.
I agree. If we have to have age verification laws I'd rather they be applied to social media networks over some size than to porn sites.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
they really want mass surveillance for the plebs even by creating a weak point for enemies. To hell not just with rights but also defence. So any excuse will do.
Well don't I feel like an uninformed dumbass. Talk of standards aside, pornhub apparently includes the following header if you visit it.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
Please don't berate other community members on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. HN is for curious conversation, not battle. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines in future.
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
If you value democracy, I suggest not to trust any random website you read. Of course the French left (at least EELV/LFI) is not going to support this. This should be obvious if you know a bit what ideas they are defending (them and the others too), which you should as well if democracy matters to you.
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
They will eventually come for GrapheneOS too in some way shape or form. Be it regulating hardware attestation being required to use devices, so that only government approved operating systems can be used, or imposing jailtime for possessing devices with capabilities such as GrapheneOS.
The left and the right stopped being about liberal values (like traditionally liberal or whatever) at some point, which are the backbone of democratic societies. I don’t see how you can have democracy without the ability to freely communicate. And that means freedom of speech but also the right to anonymity and privacy.
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
What impression of PRC social media do you have that makes you think the situation is different there?
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
> In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media
I was frankly going off the kids of business contacts I’ve met. But I’m realising they’re all wealthy—the kids of America’s rich are able to make eye contact, too, because their screen time is tightly regulated.
Yes, this makes no sense. No way they got 100% of every MPs to agree on this. They never agree on anything. I think the website took the fact that the country supports it and applied that position to each of its MPs.
Nobody would call them "left", especially not during Macron's 2nd term, the Walkers (or whatever is their new moniker) have firmly solidified as liberals in the right-wing sense (rather than in the bottom-wing sense).
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
-----
That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
I think it's more apathy than an actual desire for more mass surveillance. People don't care until they are directly, negatively affected. Same as it ever was.
These so called left are as left as original national socialists. They share pretty much same views of state, security, country, media, ... they just want total control.
And that applies to all parties that call themselves left, regardless of a country.
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
It's more a thing like "boomers who can't install stuff in their phones themselves (except for suspicious apps apparently) vs people who actually understand privacy with the normies on the side"
Why would you expect anything else from the so-called left?
Do you honestly believe only the right want power and control?
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
While I agree with you, this situation is also created by an all-encompassing State that rules every aspect of the French life.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
A little context here since this website is highly misleading:
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
To be clear, I wasn't saying Parliament wouldn't have a say - mainly pointing out that the website's information about MEP's current position on the regulation is incorrect.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
I think that's misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1]. Meaning that the Parliament can neither change nor reverse course - it is completely decided by the Council. All the Parliament can do is limit how fast that course is followed.
Edit: Sorry, what I wrote about the "Council" should have been about the "EU Commission" instead. The Council may in fact have equal power, as you wrote.
[1] Which I think (but was unable to explicitly confirm) extends to removing old legislation. I.e. the Council only has to get its way once, and then we're stuck with a law, unless the Council proposes to remove it. A ratchet.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1].
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
Came here to say the same thing, confused how a website like this can be made, the people behind it must have not understood how the EU works.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
IMO this kind of pedantry detracts from the message. We know that the EC is pushing it, but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEPs. Thus a list of MEPs from countries, colour coded by whether or not the country is known to support the position. And optionally a marker for their personal opinion if known.
> but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEP
The European Council is the heads of each member state. They are literally the people elected by each nation state domestically. If they don't represent the people, then that means national democracy is broken (which I agree with in cases like the UK) but I'm making a more general point.
I wasn't talking about the council, but the commission. The acronym confusion is unfortunate.
Point is that these people are very far removed from elections and political consequences. They also seem to be the types who have no idea what "normal" people are like.
Then you have understood even less. The commission act on instructions from the council. The steer for this has come from the member states, not the commission.
So what you're saying is: countries elect politicians in national elections, some of these politicians (typically the prime ministers) form the European Council, they propose a President of the Commission, the ruling government of each country then proposes one unelected Commissioner to join that Commission.
I still think it's fair to say that the Commission does not represent the people. It is many steps removed from the people. Nobody voted for any of them.
According to wikipedia, this point of view makes me a euroskeptic. Which is not something I consider myself to be, I'm a big proponent of cooperation between European countries. But I am certainly very skeptical of unelected government officials deciding on far reaching legislation that infringes upon fundamental liberties. With zero political repurcussions or liability.
It is easy to make any argument you want when this is unscientific. But it is easy to draw a line from the elected heads to state (the governments of the member countries) pushing for this, right through to the elected European Parliament (elected MEPS). The Commission is a civil service, doing the bidding of the Council, and then proposing laws to the elected Parliament.
I can't really picture what a better structure would be. The elected member state governments should always be the ones driving policy. They need a way to get that done outside of their usual national structures and civil servants, so they create the Commission. People also want to feel represented in the final votes so we create the Parliament.
Counterpoint: The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, sits both in the European Commission and in the European Council. And it's UvdL who is the primary driving force for chat control at this point.
You're very naive to think UvdL is the driving force of chat control. If you truly believe that then there is no hope. This is coming from the member nation governments. If you want to oppose it, write to your politicians.
It's a very sad state of affairs that when Trump and von der Leyen meet to represent two of the most powerful entities on Earth, one has been democratically legitimised less than a year ago, and the other has never ran in an election in her life.
This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.
If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
Please don't include it in this conversation. That app is spyware and collects enough metadata on you for actual conversations not to matter, proven by them being bold enough to introduce personalized advertising inside the "e2ee" app
It sounds to me like the Europeans need to have an actual fight (that is with bullets and artillery) with this weird EU pseudo government thing. It sounds like a loss for them to me.
The UK left the EU and is pushing very similar sorts of dangerous nonsense legislation when it comes to the internet, so this is clearly not just a EU thing.
There is no alternative is there. Russia bad for obvious reasons. EU rules getting more and more tight. Lets see what happens with digital euro and forced investing in EU markets. Eu is ruled by gerontocrats and detached leftists. The extreme right is not solution. Most of EU MPs from small countries are literal nobodies, just bench warmers.
Russia is bad as is. Currently, clearly worse than EU. But the problem is, the state of human rights and freedoms in the EU is deteriorating so fast, I'm not sure if it would still be better than Russia in ten years. And in 20 years, China may be the freedom benchmark for the EU.
Of course it will be worse. And EU will not have concentration camps or gulags. But boiling the frog of freedom slowly def is not best outcome. And will more people to anti eu camp. An in the end to east.
The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
No, in the 1980s, dissident voices had platforms. They weren't "mass media" platforms but they definitely had radio shows, periodicals and various publishing channels to disseminate their publications and broadcasts. They were incredibly important in those days, and those sources held some amount of power, in that they could expose a story, and effectively force the rest of the media to cover a subject or event they otherwise would have ignored.
This is worse in every way as it /completely/ locks them out the modern market of ideas that is the internet and ensconces prior restraint into law in a way that violates the civil liberties of every citizen, whether they are the publisher, or the consumer.
We have lost control of the internet. Those who have control intend to turn this world back into a fiefdom with their newfound power. They are otherwise working to keep the rest of the population in fear and distracted. I'm genuinely afraid our past luck will fail to hold out. They've spent 20 years to get to this point. I don't see them giving up.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
This would just end anonymity for normal people. All of the bots and bad actors will have no problem with comitting a crime because they are literally criminals.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
In no way do I support this surveillance society, or legislation, but I just wanted to make a casual point. I'm from a country where the internet first came through universities, and I was privileged to be there at the time. Those early days when it was just university students (and other staff) communicating over IRC were, nostalgically, wonderful. And everyone knew who everyone on IRC actually was in real life. Sure, there were the usual flame wars and some trolls, but it felt personal and, just good.
I'd love to go back to those internet days - bit of course I'm aware that is an elitist attitude, because I was part of the "in group" at the time.
I just missed those days. But what most people miss about it was not necessarily that everyone had their name attached (or easily findable). What people miss about those days is the quality of discussion online. Because it wasn't a random sampling of the population, it was a sampling of the most tech-savvy academics from around the world.
I don't know about you, but I think I prefer the knock-on effects of internet-for-everyone.
I think they'll pass it into law, and then find it's effectively unenforceable, same as all the other similar laws (the UK is busy discovering that age verification laws promote VPN use that circumvent all enforceability of any UK internet laws).
The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
Not a defense of chat control, which I am very much against, but can you really claim that the internet gave "dissident voices" a platform?
Media is arguably even more tightly controlled than in the 1980s, legacy media is owned by a few billionairew, right-wing influencers are all paid hacks, with a lot of them relaying pro-Russia propaganda. Meanwhile, genuine independent journalists are buried under algorithmic nonsense promoting ragebait and hate.
The internet very much failed to deliver a new era of feee speech. Instead, our conversations are now hosted on a few platforms and controlled by the oligarchs that own them, who are able to editorialize out dissenting voices and promote their own disgusting viewpoints.
I'm Italian. On my side, I did what I could do: I emailed Italian politicians explaining why they should reject the proposal. A drop in the ocean, and far from impactful, but if it can change the odds even by an epsilon, why not?
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
Australia already has this capability and is likely using it for 5 Eyes nations. Questioning the desire to surveil seems on topic when this is pretty much everywhere already.
Australia can’t get technical capability notices for anything that matters, maybe some local
trash only. (Don’t use Australian software or products folks).
American tech will tell them to pound sand, and you got another international incident in the media.
> In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
It's consistent when viewed from a perspective of accountability evasion. They don't need to make actual anti free speech laws, because you already don't have free speech without the laws. And by not making the laws, they get to claim they give you free speech.
In the US, violations of civil rights that are performed by officials (like legislators) can be prosecuted under something called color of law. I think it is rarely done, if ever, but the justice department could do it. Maybe Americans need to start pushing their own representatives to call for such a case in situations where individual rights are violated.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
They probably meant January 6th rebels being pardoned giving the example that extremists that aim at preventing democratic election results from going into effect can do as they want.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large.
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
Being temporary and being authoritarian are entirely orthogonal. In general I would imagine that cultures willing to accept temporary authoritarianism for the "right reasons" are more prone to falling to dictators.
Most democraties have provisions for times of exceptional needs and counterpowers against that. Of course that's a weakness but a weakness that's judged better than mass deaths or complete fall of the country.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
I completely agree of course. My reply was simply because I think it's important not to inadvertently conflate things, particularly when the issue is contentious. In this case the concepts of authoritarian and permanency, as well as the concepts of people who deny COVID, people who distrust vaccines, and people who were dissatisfied with the various government mandates.
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
I don't think so? I'll state it again - temporary and authoritarian are orthogonal. Attempting to claim that the lack of permanence demonstrates that the measures weren't authoritarian thus my claim that the two concepts are orthogonal is incorrect is begging the question (at absolute minimum).
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
But temporary authoritarianism to avert a crisis is rarely what people are thinking of when they say authoritarianism.
Ancient Rome would elect dictators to take control for two weeks at a time, because that was the only effective way to control a crisis. It remains a very effective way to control a crisis, but it only works if people can trust the political system because the political system is worth trusting. Especially people have to be able to trust they can unelect that guy (at least by waiting two weeks).
The notoriously opaque EU institutions would sooner insist on reading your every message than actually be transparent themselves. This is beyond satire.
I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
For over a decade now there’s been a huge global shift toward authoritarianism, and to some extent it’s grassroots. My speculation is that this is a time of unprecedented change and that scares people. We also have aging populations due to lower birth rates and older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics.
At least two decades now, here I remember people talking back then about newly introduced CCTV cameras, and making maps of them so people could avoid the surveillance.
> older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics
Just a friendly reminder that it was millenials who brought us censorship, cancel culture and other totalitarian bs. People who are older today, saw nearly absolute online freedom and miss that, not some "nostalgic reactionary politics".
I think millennial cancel culture falls under the "fear of rapid change" heading.
Before the Internet went big and mainstream we were in an era I've heard termed managerial democracy. Big media was able to largely regulate the Overton window. Social activists were able, by getting into big media via the path of the universities, to push things like racism and homophobia out of the Overton window and keep them out. This largely worked, creating the illusion (and I now firmly believe it was an illusion) that these things were dying or dead. I remember growing up in the 90s and thinking racism was something maybe a few old geezers in the South believed. "Sure grandpa, the South will rise again, now lets get you your meds."
Personally I see this as well-intentioned, but that's because I think racism is a low form of primate tribalism.
Then the net came along and made it so any yahoo with a few bucks could post. Couple that with algorithms that tend to elevate controversial (thus engaging) content, and racism and all the other banished isms vaulted back onto the stage. They were never dead IMHO, just out of polite discourse. I didn't realize that growing up but I sure see it now.
Lefty cancel culture was an attempt to repeat the purge of those things from big media with the Internet and it didn't work and couldn't work. I did and still do sympathize but I think it's pissing into a hurricane.
Of course there's plenty of right wing cancel culture too that we're seeing now. That's a different beast. Cancel culture historically is a creature of the right. The left form is probably a brief historical aberration brought about by the conditions I outlined above. I'm hearing lefties admit defeat on this right now, and some question whether it was a good idea to try.
Racism won't be dead until people actually change their hearts and minds. Controlling the discourse just means you don't hear about it.
I think the UK (and EU) have been at this for a while. The UK pushed for the Data Retention Directive in the EU in the mid 2000s that required ISPs to save all the websites you visit. This was eventually ruled to be illegal, but it was still in force for several years.
Australia too. They've been playing with this for decades. The latest push is similar to the UK: age verification for porn and social media, but watch it expand once introduced.
The Establishment really don't like how they're not in control of what everyone hears or sees any more. It used to be so cozy for them.
I would not be surprised if it's the US pressuring everyone else. Thiel is probably salivating to get a deal for Palantir to implement it.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
The pandemic showed that govs can push what they want with minimal resistance and having the public on each other throats. People are also fatigued and isolated more than ever, perfect time to seize total control.
Security is worth half a shit these days and Five Eyes can't remotely access everybody's phone without it getting noticed by people. So they need to keep transport insecure.
We already tried requiring CP rings to collect ID in the US. It doesn't seem to have worked out the way you're suggesting. It was called the Epstein client list if you're curious.
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
That they exempt politicians is basically admitting that the security problems that detractors bring up is true, and is something that should be used against them.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
This is only the first step in the process. First they will force all messaging/email providers to implement the scanning. Those who refuse or decide to leave the EU as Signal said they would do, would end up being unlisted from Google Play or the Apple (EU) app store.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
> Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
ProtectEU sounds incredibly dark. Do you have a source for the information regarding on-device scanning? I had a look but only found the bureaucrat-speak overview and they didn’t discuss details.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
Even if you compile your own version of Signal, will your friends do it too? Will your grandma/grandpa do it as well? It only takes one person in the chain to be compromised by using the "real" app and then all your efforts would be defeated because now your messages have been exposed by this other person unknowingly.
Do phones have trusted execution environments? I suppose you could require the recipient provide attestation that it's running the expected binary. Of course, this is pointless if the hardware manufacturer shares their root keys with the government.
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
I know. It was a pity comment born out of my frustration with certain classes of offenders being labelled as "illegals" while others are granted human-first language like "unlawful citizens."
It wasn't a comment in keeping with the site guidelines but that was rooted in my continuing frustration with the community here denying the dehumanising nature of language like "illegals."
I'm aware of the definition of unlawful but thank you for your effort and apologies for the wasted time.
It doesn't say how AFAIK, although it's been a few months from when I read the original proposal. If I'm not wrong it would delegate that to service providers - the organizations managing the apps, telegram, meta, whatever the name of the foundation for the signal app is ecc
Yeah this really annoys me, because it appears to show that any pretense that the law applies to everyone equally is disappearing fast.* If it at least affected politicians you could write it off as "idiotic idea that wasn't thought through in the slightest", but here it's clear that they have some idea how stupid and dangerous the law is, and see themselves as worth exempting from it instead.
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Is there no way to codify a negative right, like “The right of the European people to privacy in their communications and security in their records through encryption shall not be infringed?” Negative rights reserved to the people should be more important than positive laws granting power to the government.
Yes; they could amend the definitely-not-a-constitution (for branding/eurosceptic-appeasement reasons, the EU constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon treaty before adoption). Arguably such a right may exist already and this legislation might find itself on a collision course with the ECJ if it passed (notably the ECJ nuked _another_ intrusive law, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive).
In some ways yes but we've already seen with covid that governments are happy to behave unconstitutionally even when it's clear they will eventually lose in court - by then their targets have already been dragged through the mud.
This rule can really hurt. e.g. Theresa May tried passing a deal to keep the UK in the Customs Union. The speaker wouldn't allow it because the same deal had previously been rejected, even though she now had the support for it in the house.
I wonder if it'd be possible to fix a lot of these issues by having a constitution with damn near impossibly strict standards for changing it that rely on the entire population agreeing (or close to it)?
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
Yeah I have a feeling this thing is gonna be exactly like that. Even if this doesn't pass, they'll just rename and repackage it and try again until everyone gets fatigued enough and doesn't have energy to oppose it anymore
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
Upper class could completly turn off their telescreens, meaning they have partial exemptions at least. For middle class they were always on. Proles had no telescreen because they were considered to lack brains. Even the Party had levels, Inner and Outer, with different rules.
1984 would be incomplete without the hypocrisy of "rules for thee not for me".
> They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
I wouldn't call login political career or being cancelled and voted out "real repercussions". They can pretty much retire and enjoy the rest of their lives with all the lobby money and EU rents.
Real repercussion would mean prison time and losing their property, but we all know that won't happen anytime soon.
The fascist, autocratic impulse is a big in the human firmware and will never go away. We exist constantly balanced on the razor edge precipice because we are capable of little else. Self-governing humans are not a stable system.
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
How exactly are you going to repeal ChatControl or ProtectEU when the same people who lobbied for these proposals/laws are the ones who would have to repeal it? Ursula survived a no confidence vote just a month ago.
I don't think democracy is perfect, especially in this case. But I come from a very regulated country, and have lived in countries with far less regulation. The comfort that comes knowing that my food is somewhat safe to eat, that I have access to healthcare, that most workers have good working condition with lots of holiday. This all came from regulation and democracy, and it's great. I don't think mistrust of institutions and democracy is the way to go.
The problem is once trust gets too high, government powers get abused and then we get shit like chat control. Which is not democratical. Over time, less trust should bring government back under control and the cycle repeats. Hopefully. If democratical feedback process still works.
Of course it’s nicer to live where you can trust your government to represent your interests. But blind trust just because mistrust is not nice is one of the worst options.
There's absolutely reason to lose faith in the system, I'm just as guilty of that. At the same time, it has helped me to know that in many parts of the world there's been slides into authoritarianism, and in cases where there's been strong push-back its been possible to reverse it. It's when there's no push back that it becomes worse.
Objectively, it's still possible to fight it and democracy is still a good venture for making improvements.
Applied modern democracy and theoretical democracy are two different things. But yes, we should strive to get to a better version of democracy. Instead of just saying democracy BAD.
the western democracy was lost not with trump/farage etc but with the entrenched liberals who decried democracy redefining it as populism and institutional entrenchment as true democracy. This is fallout from it. The populist movements happened because the liberals who once stood for working class people abandoned the poor and working class. Nobody cared then and some even mocked the working class. Now everyone here/reddit/etc cares because suddenly they are affected and its an issue that they identify with and not just the working class. Good times. You won't be able to do anything. They will walk all over you just like when they walked all over the working class.
What do they gain? The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control. If there was a conspiracy like that would they be acting much differently?
> The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control.
Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".
Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.
But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
You cannot fight this with technology. What will you do when they make connecting to instant messager servers without scanning illegal? VPN? They are already going after VPNs.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
As much as we are fighting Chat Control, we also need a plan B. What do we do if EU regime really enact it? Which messengers could we use then? What were the practical alternatives?
Self hosted, decentralized, encrypted, standard based, ... , the only thing that comes to mind is something like delta.chat for texts, which builds upon a standard mail protocol.
Security is always a cat and mouse game, solutions already exist and more will come soon anyway. It's just technology after all.
The problem now is not for the mice, it's a matter of defending basic human rights.
Laws generally recognise the sanctity of privacy - for example, so much as looking at someone for too long can be deemed sexual assault in some jurisdictions - yet law makers wish to legislate they be able to view everyone's nudes (and much more)! Weird contradiction.
So as a Dutchie that opposes this, is there still something for me to do? The Netherlands opposes this, so... should I sway them to oppose it even more? Not really sure what my role should be.
> Is your government opposing?
→ Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps. Also critical governments need to do more, exert their influence in the Council of the EU and agree on a joint list of necessary fundamental changes to the proposal. Absent such revision they should ask the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal as it stands.
Hello! I made this website. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
Hello,
it's not working for me, "send emails" fails with:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'selectedMeps')
at Object.showSelectionFeedback (takeAction.js:546:41)
at Object.selectAllRepresentatives (takeAction.js:542:14)
at HTMLButtonElement.onclick ((index):1:13)
So what is the real solution? Meaning the solution that an individual could use themselves, without further coordination, to insulate themselves from this policy. Is it an Android distribution? Jailbreaking? Custom builds?
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
> would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
Encrypt your data locally before it is uploaded to a service that scans your private communication. This is most likely how the child abusers will do it too. And therefore the law will be ineffective at fighting sharing of child abuse material on the internet.
You ask a valid and clear question, sadly no one yet properly responded :( I'll try: using an app that can communicate without ever connecting to the internet? Such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6748584483
There is LoRaWAN with tech like Meshtastic which can send messages far further than wifi and bluetooth. Problem is the throughput is pretty limited. Only really useful for text messages within the same city.
Not sure any purely wireless system would scale that well either since every message floods the entire network. Ideally for wireless you just want wireless to the closest grid connected node to connect to the internet.
An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.
Because people keep believing that there must be a technical solution that will improve security without causing harm. They are just uninformed, IMO.
Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
When they locked everything down and forced you to wear masks they already told you who they are. They don't care about your freedom or you as an individual and your rights.
Spot on. They also showed how the constitution means nothing to them because once you win in court they already got what they wanted.
What's more sad is that the general public has also responded that they are OK with this. Dissenters have become to be though of as a problem that needs to be corrected instead of as an indicator that what the government is doing is wrong.
sorry, this is stupid. Preventing a pandemic (we failed to prevent a pandemic because large numbers of us deliberately chose not to prevent a pandemic) is not the same as the Nazis.
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
Should I be allowed to go on national news and present irrefutable evidence (AI-generated of course) that the president is a lizard person?
By default, I should, because it's a free country. But what if enough people start believing me that the country falls apart? Should the country let itself fall apart or should it perhaps try to stop the whole thing?
By default, you should be allowed to say that the president is a lizard person, and show your "irrefutable evidence". On national news? Only if you can persuade a national news show that they should (or unless you own a national network).
But if you don't own them, they're not going to show your "proof" (except perhaps as comedy), because they have a reputation they need to maintain. And if you own them, they're still not going to, because they'd lose reputation (and therefore market share), and they'd get sued for slander and lose.
That leaves you showing your "proof" to whoever you can persuade to listen, without going on national news. I'm not sure I see the problem with that.
Yours is a disingenous argument for authoritarianism and censorship.
You or your government of choice are the arbiters of truth and, of course, you wouldn't lie, only your political opponents who invent obvious malicious lies that are an immediate danger.
Your actions are good or mistakes and they don't present immediate dangers, only the criticism of your actions does.
In case my sarcasm wasn't obvious. A resounding rejection of all your propaganda for authoritarianism.
In short: everything and everyone is suspect and need to approved by technocratic superior authorities and zealot private organizations.
Yesterday China, USA, Russia, UK, India etc and today the EU aligning with North Korean style of control on people.
This is a mind boggling recipe for disaster, a worldwide dystopian nightmare coming true with an unprecedented but quite predictable series of consequences.
Next step: compulsory installation of CCTV inside every home?
Man am I glad I live in America. Despite everything, it's still the land of the free and the home of the brave. The federal system here means that the majority of weird shit happens at the state level.
The company lobbying for the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn. They have correctly identified that the EU is weak and you can just say "children" and politicians will agree to anything however. Even if it doesn't achieve anything.
The country that had prosecution of political opponents during the Red Scare and patriot act is better? The US is the country that started all this privacy invading BS and is still way ahead on that front.
After all Chat Control hasn't actually passed yet.
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
> The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
That's because the US has the convenience of owning the megacorporations that control every facet of our lives. The government doesn't need the ability to restrict your speech and monitor you if FAANG happily do it for them.
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
You might not like this example, but the relatively recent evolution of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, significantly strengthening gun rights, is the result of many impassioned, dedicated groups, lobbying the public and the government for decades.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
I think it's hard to end though. It would require basically re-doing the ECHR and probably other EU treaties, and that just isn't going to happen any more than anyone will make amendments to the US constitution.
Ultimately the US government's key escrow fixation largely faded away, and it was never clear whether it would stand up in the courts, but it still shows up from time to time.
It's quite possible that this would conflict with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon treaty) if passed, too; for a prior example see the defunct data retention directive, which was nuked by the ECJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
I'm not convinced the US will even have fair elections a couple of years from now. Do those amendments really matter, when those in power are doing everything they can to break down the rule of law, and turn the country into yet another autocracy?
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
It takes a firm believe to still pretend the bill of rights would be adhered to. You have a convicted criminal as president with ties to child traffickers, taking foreign bribes on live TV, scamming voters with crypto, while punishing universities for teaching the wrong things and imprisoning people without due process for having the wrong opinion.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
From what I've seen, the US also has a more "rebellious" culture than the EU, for lack of a better term; laws are viewed less as an absolute and the population is far more willing to break them if the consequences are perceived as minor. This is bipartisan; examples that come to mind include: electing a convicted felon, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, and going 10 over the speed limit.
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
I get that maybe you meant culturally, but Ireland is a member of the EU whereas the UK is no longer. This forces a tighter alignment so makes your point about Ireland redundant.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
Sure. Fight it. And also Remember this moment next time you're calling people conspiracy theorists because your party politician or mainstream news says so.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
>On 11 May 2022 the European Commission presented a proposal which would make chat control searching mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers and would even apply to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communication services
And scanning end-to-end encrypted is only possible on-device.
And of course the next step is that the EU will mandate that every device needs to implement this scanning, they are very aggressive with this stuff. Framework phone won't help you in this case, this is obviously the next step. That's why we have to fight against it. Reminder that soon online age verification with an app that can only be downloaded from the Play Store and used within a "trusted environment" (e.g. SafetyNet) will be mandatory.
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
This just hammers the opinion that the GDPR was mainly just an EU economic protectionist policy and not actually about protecting privacy of citizens as promised.
GDPR passed, Chat Control didn't (already rejected about 4-5 times but the evil people keep proposing it because re-proposing the same failed law has no cost).
The chat control laws in the UK and USA also passed.
I just had this great idea reading this proposed law and the comments and concerns there of… here me out
Lets just put everybody in the world in prison except for the people with net worths over some unattainable threshold… perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. Then we’ll just make everyone work for and take all of it for ourselves. That way we cam destroy their cultures and the genetic lineages and we can just kill all the people we dont like dont agree with especially if theyre skin color is one we dont agree with. The world will be a better place because the clearly superior people will be on top. We can breed the rest of humans and just eat them. We’ll call them eloi and we’ll be the morlocks.
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Not quite. It would be illegal for Signal to continue operating in the EU if they don’t implement the required scanning functionality. And Signal has already stated that they’d rather leave the EU.
If the one western nation passes this then it's only a matter of time until the other ones do to. At that point Signal "leaving" means they may as well stop doing business. Companies like to say they won't bend the knee if it gets them support now but in the end they always do.
Yes, what is proposed is breaking the end-to-end security model, not breaking the encryption itself.
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
Telegram is not E2EE because it's easier and faster to sync and transmit messages between millions of people. The scale of Telegram groups and channels is massive. Telegram, for a long time, has not complied with law enforcement requests and has made it hard for authorities to get data because of their architecture. You still have Secret Chats for E2EE messaging as an option.
Not sure what your point is. Telegram is not an example when it comes to privacy. Anyone who has access to the server has access to pretty much everything. Nothing can tell you that governments (or bad actors) are not already reading your Telegram messages.
Making it illegal to use "non-compliant" e2ee services and prosecuting those who does. Realistically, they couldn't, but could ban such apps in EU stores, making them less popular.
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
The proposed regulation is about imposing requirements on service providers, as defined by the Digital Services Act, for messaging and other services, effectively requiring them to implement backdoors in their software.
No, but many political figures have proposed banning the distribution/possession/operation of tools (e.g. Signal, Tor) which can be used to circumvent surveillance.
Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
EU is like:
We will protect your sensitive personal documents so that only trusted government institutions and ones held to the highest standards of privacy (such as banks) may have access to it. This is to prevent abuse and identity theft.
Also please upload them to BigBootyXXX.com if you want to have a wank
https://ageverification.dev/
"The European Commission is developing a harmonized, EU-wide approach to age verification, accompanied by a comprehensive age verification blueprint that is intended to facilitate practical adoption across all Member States and can be customised to the national context. Built upon the robust European Digital Identity Wallet framework, this user-friendly and privacy-preserving age verification solution enables individuals to demonstrate their eligibility for age-restricted online services, such as those restricted to adults, without disclosing more personal information than absolutely necessary"
So basically, the intention is to provide a solution where users do not need an account or to provide their passports to BigBootyXXX.com. The site just asks if this session or user is of legal age and the age verification system will respond with a TRUE/FALSE
Have you ever played 20 questions?
Also, public officials like to be exempt because of professional requirements. They delivered the argument for it to be declared illegal violating a few constitutions.
Also because it is an undemocratic technocracy (warranted polemic) and the average citizen cannot sue before the EU judiciary, the national courts have to kill it. Of course such a process will take years...
This is not an argument when ZKPs are actively being worked on and hopefully soon integrated.
There is age verification that preserves privacy.
but lets be real, it's way more profitable to NOT preserve privacy, and there is no way to verify that they will actually implement these controls.
At the end of the day, "think of the children" has been an ancient rallying cry that’s used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. Often ironic, as you say.
Also banks were one of the most vulnerable. I’ve often wondered why. My first reaction is "because their code comes from coders who only want to work at a bank," but I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps it’s "from people comfortable with lots of bureaucracy". Either way, when I was a pentester, banks were one of our main types of clients, and their code was often bad. So it’s doubly ironic to claim banks are exemplars of how to do privacy.
I consulted with several big banks, and while there are some great developers there, on the whole, the devs were largely passionless and were just there for the job. Many of them actively dislike coding, and it really felt like they were just there for the high pay. I think that type of developer really thrives in a move slow, heavy bureuacracy environment where velocity is not something people care about. The high security can be annoying, but everywhere I went they had enough processes and out-sourcing of security to experts and tools that the average dev didn't really have to think about it. On many teams there would be one person or so who (mostly) understood the area they were responsible for and could deliver quickly, but not every team had somebody like that. One thing that I did think was a positive is that (perhaps because of all these things) is that it was a very low-ego environment, and people were generally open-minded about learning new stuff and/or better ways to do things. Overall I really enjoyed working with the people at banks, despite everything taking longer than you would think it should :-)
Just wanted to say, thanks for the very interesting comment. I consulted at Thompson Reuters, and while they aren’t a bank, your story brought up all kinds of memories. The passionless part really resonated with me, since it was all too obvious whenever the one good developer (who I was thankfully paired with) and I had meetings with the rest of them. There was one guy in charge of the database, which in practice meant any time you wanted to interface with the database you had to ask this guy to do it instead of write any code yourself that even interacts with the database in any way, including just getting data. It meant hours of delays, routinely. During most meetings it would devolve into random tangents about cars. (The good dev was also a car enthusiast, so everyone came to him with all their car issues, much to his annoyance.) And yes, to be fair, it was a little fun and I enjoyed working with most of them. Very low ego, as you say.
What I dislike about these large bureaucracies is that it's not only impersonal to the developers who have to work on it, but also for the customers. Even though software is difficult, I think it's a net positive for society to have 10 to 100 banks with poorer software than a few big banks with great software. I think we often overestimate the benefits of economies of scale. A small bank in a town run by a few locals could handle the town's finances perfectly well without much software if there wouldn't be a whole morass of regulations.
News organization welcome any barrier to social media networks, they are heavily biased on these topics. The "modern" journalist of today doesn't really care about freedom of information either.
Speaking of which, the EU is also working on a "free speech" law for journalists and against them being arbitrarily banned by platforms. One would think this law could easily be extended to everyone since it is not at all trivial to determine who gets these benefits and who doesn't.
Most outlets today are some form of court reporter in one way or another. That trust in media is sinking is quite expected and in many cases reasonable too.
We have this issue massively in Australia too - literally almost 100% of the push to implement a social media ban (where ‘social media’ is anything that an unelected bureaucrat called the ‘eSafety commissioner’ feels like, which, for example, wasn’t going to include YouTube until they changed their mind) came from a single Murdoch newspaper campaign. It just wasn’t a thing anybody else was talking about, and then suddenly it was apparently the most important thing the federal Government could be doing that apparently had to be rushed through in about two weeks with almost no oversight (normally here it can take years to get reform that normal people have been long calling for into Parliament) - honestly it was absolutely bizarre.
I have no hesitation saying that the newspaper that pushed it doesn’t give a single damn about the kids - they have a serious hatred of Meta in particular but also Google. The whole thing was concern trolling because they were angry that they are going to get cut off from the last shakedown they lobbied for (called the media bargaining code).
the modern journalist doesn't get to have a say -- big media companies and their editors are calling the shots.
hell, a ton of articles are already ghost written by automated tools, and a lot of "bias" is simply not reporting on certain things.
Maximum of at least one year? Is there some kind of award for how nonsensical a law can be?
Member states will implement this into national law. So in the case they will need to implement a maximum of one year or more (but not less). The final law as applied by a judge will just read "punishable by a maximum of [i.e.] fourteen months".
> maximum of one year or more
If the max is one year, it can't be more?
It sounds like it's "the maximum penalty must be at least 1 year", as in "your member state can't enact a law where the maximum penalty is less than 1 year".
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
This is correct. But the larger point is that even 1 minute of jail time for such "crimes" is unacceptable.
That larger point deserves its own thread. My newest pet peeve is someone jumping into the middle of a conversation with the equivalent of "I don't care about what you're talking about. What I want to talk about is more important".
Oh look, now you've got me doing it to you. Drat.
Welcome to Internet Comments.
The larger point is that being within a community is quite important, whether you realize it or not.
You might not like this law (and I'm agnostic on it) but I think the principle that individuals should be held accountable when laws are broken is important. Otherwise we just have token fines and corporate non-compliance because the risks don't outweigh the potential financial benefits.
I think people at Experian should have gone to jail, for example, for their incompetence and negligence in regards data breaches.
Which people? The responsibility is distributed across hundreds, the decisions that led to the breach were made by committees, etc.
The person nominated by that company as their age verification guardian? Or the CEO. Or both. The defence for either could be that they took reasonable steps to know what was going on in their companies or were actively mislead.
This isn’t complicated. If it’s the law companies should comply. Fines won’t make a difference to corporate behaviour but this Might.
I think that person's title is Designated Patsy. If your idea of justice is them finding someone who's willing to gamble that they won't be called out before their term is up in return for fat paychecks until it happens or they can "move on", I don't think we have compatible senses of justice.
>This isn’t complicated.
Not only is it complicated, it is deliberately complicated expressly for the purpose of making it impossible for justice to occur.
This is correct. But the larger point is that even though you can put pineapple on a pizza, you still shouldn't.
How would you have read it if it said "with a maximum of one year"?
Not sure what exact sentence you're thinking of, but I'd have read the same sentence without "or more" to mean "each member's law should have a max sentence be 1 year" (since the context is describing what each member's law should look like).
So it’s a minimum maximum.
The maximum value in each instance must be at least one year.
"Maximum term" is a specific legal concept, "at least one year" is the numerical constraint.
Or, put another way:
I don't think their confusion was on how numerical comparisons work, it was on how a "maximum term of imprisonment" could also come with a minimum duration. In other words, what does a "maximum term" mean if it's not the actual longest time someone could be imprisoned for? Are there lesser terms?
Right. The confusion here is that this document isn't setting some maximum term, it's providing a constraints for multiple implementations of the law - it mandates that whatever maximum term any given country chooses, it must be no less than one year.
Yes, I think we all understand this. The thing which is confusing is why bother specifying a minimum length of one year if you're allowed to have lesser sentences?
As a citizen of an EU country, I am really piss* off that the EU Parliament just gets to set the law in all countries. Do we have independent countries anymore? It does not seem that much different between federal government and states. It feels like occupation.
you have a throwaway account because you fear dang's censorship and rightly so
dang's censorship? You should see what a typical [dead] comment looks like, it's not dang censoring people who praise emacs while he loves Vim.
While this is a specifically awful article, for obvious reasons, I find the idea of encoding specifics on carceral terms into any EU-level directive a bizarre overstep.
Yes it is and it would be very weird (to say the least) to have a criminal provision in such proposal
Am I insane for being somewhat in favour of this? I think the accessibility of adult content on the internet is a disaster.
In principle, not at all. But there is no way to do this properly at all. No matter how secure the companies that do this say it is, it's another possible vulnerability.
You can't play whack a mole with the internet. People will always find a way to move smut or whatever on the internet. It takes no time at all to spin up more and more sites, and there's a million ways around them (vpns, etc).
All it does it just push people to more and more fringe sites, when moderation is likely to be lax and the content more extreme. Ideally it wouldn't be viewed at all, but it's just how the internet is.
It also sets a terrible precedent for censorship- in the UK, we've already seen, on Reddit for example, subreddits dedicated to quitting addictions being age gated, and it'll only get worse.
The European Commission's proposed interim solution for age verification (ageverification.dev) is actually pretty good vs the shitshow of the US and UK.
It works like this:
1. You contact an age verification provider (e.g., national eID schemes, banks, or mobile operators) and provide proof of identity, which they will verify possibly against government databases or whatever, etc. Once they confirm your age they will issue you with a bunch of Age attestations. At this point you don't even know where you will use these, so that info literally cannot be sent to the provider. The attestations are a JWT-like envelope with a payload conceptually equivalent to `{"nonce": "LARGE_RANDOM_HEX_STRING", "age_over_18":true}`, signed with the provider's public key. (The actual implementation is more complex).
2. This is stored in a local app, which will guarantee each attestation only gets used once (to avoid linking user across relying sites). There is no special authentication of the app in the protocol with the replying site, so you can write your own. The Commission provides an open source reference app. There is a standard protocol for communicating with verification providers, however it is not mandatory, so using the reference app might not support all verification providers, but should support a variety.
3. When you want to visit some site needing age verification, and you already have a verified account, you just sign in, otherwise, that site will use a standardized protocol to request proof from the app. The app will provide just the attestation token. The relying site does not get any info about your identity, other than the attestation token. Plus of course, the relying party must accept any age verification provider approved by the commission, not just its preferred one. The EC's solution also supports the app providing the relying site a Zero-Knowledge Proof of having such a token, which makes it possible for the relying site to learn the user's identity even if colluding with the age verification provider.
>But there is no way to do this properly at all
We have tried nothing and we are all out of ideas?
Try what exactly? Its illegal to stream movies for free, but there are hundreds if not thousands of illegal streaming sites. How would porn access fair any better at being regulated away?
The standard for robust and effective age verification is extremely low, given how I’ve seen anyone do age verification. It’s also pointless if we’re talking about the internet, you are essentially outsourcing your porn production to foreign countries
The standard for robust and effective age verification is a moving target.
Foreign websites will be solved the great EU firewall that will inevitably come "to protect the rule of law" once these legislations are passed.
Foreign countries with less regulations and protections for sex workers and actresses.
A little more context: that article 3 paragraph 2.a. was added by parliament (not proposed by the Commission). But paragraph 1 (same article) was altered to this text:
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
The positive intentional act, I guess, is disseminating the material. Proving intent and various ancillary concepts like knowledge, etc, are the bread and butter of prosecutors, so I don't think the act would be as difficult to enforce as you suggest. Sure, there might be corner cases where you can say "oops I forgot to password protect that Dropbox link" but certainly porn websites that don't do age verification will have a hard time arguing their conduct was not intentional.
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
Also, what what methods of sharing? If a 16 year old shares some porn with some friends and it happens to be on a digital system somewhere, can that kids now go to jail for over a year?
A judge will decide the above. That's how the law works
That's not only asinine but also poorly worded. How is this getting approved?
Its properly worded, as it is an EU law declaring atandards for national laws and the implementing national law must specify a penalty range where the maximum is at least one year (but can be more).
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
Ah, that makes sense.
Jup, it's a directive.
I personally support age verification for porn. However, age verification for almost anything else, e.g. Reddit, is a terrible idea.
Yeah I think you have it backwards. I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn, but social networks regularly fuck teenagers up.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
Stupid dumb law.
I keep seeing people mentioning credit cards as a mean to verify one's age. My daughter is 11, but she have her own card with her own name since at least one year.
A debit card presumably. Anyway I guess the bank knows her age reliably so there's probably a way to use debit cards too.
Yes, my bad. It is actually a debit card. She uses it only for roblox right now. My point was to unwrap the secret of where these mystical roblox points came from and also make her feel empowered and independent.
i'd go even further: since harm of unrestricted access could not be proven, existing restrictions need to be reversed.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
That's a weird spin on it. Young people are curious. They watch weird porn out of curiosity, the same way they watch gore. Hiding it isn't going to do them any favours. They'll get it from sketchier places instead. I know the generation before mine often went to trashy hookers way underage, with group collected money, to lose their V card, for example.
Where I'm from, it's a pretty common saying that sex is for prestige and a wank is for joy. Of course, a relationship doesn't primarily consist of your stepsister getting stuck in the dryer, running a 10-man train on your loved one, or whatever else. Even kids aren't that stupid.
It can lead to issues with your thing not being attracted to people you don't find attractive, since you're not desperate, but the opposite is, in my opinion, worse. Many good men and women have fallen for dogshit relationships with mediocre sex out of fear of no sex(ual outlet).
> where I'm from, it's a pretty common saying that sex is for prestige and a wank is for joy.
!!!
Where are you from?
Balkans, to not dox this acc too much.
Most of it promotes incest. They use the word “step” as a workaround, but everyone knows.
As the other user said, plenty of people stated that porn is harmful but none have actually been able to back up their claims.
> government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution
Why? Porn in magazine or movie form used to be age-restricted. Assume for a moment that was the correct, or at least a reasonable and permissible policy.
Why should it suddenly not be the appropriate policy, only because it's on the internet? Why do you say that laws do not or should not apply when you sprinkle a bit of "internet" over it?
It reminds me of the crypto-bro argument that, don't know, money laundering and tax evasion and offering securities without appropriate disclosure is illegal and tightly regulated, but if you do it with "blockchain", then it is perfectly fine. What sort of mindset is that?
> What sort of mindset is that?
Its the mindset of neckbeards who don't realize its not the 1990’s anymore, that the landscape has changed significantly and people cannot protect themselves let alone their children from it.
Implementation obviously matters and it is indeed a delicate situation, but that does not negate the need for solutions.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
Love it when you make a statement that porn isnt harmful without referencing any studies, and then demand studies for people to prove it is harmful. You are the one who made the original claim that its not harmful, the burden of proof is on you.
> you make a statement that porn isnt harmful
They did not state that porn is not harmful.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
Why should they need to reference a study to show the veracity of that statement?
Their side isn't the one trying to ban things. If you want to ban something you have to prove it's harmful. If you don't want to ban something you just have to call out that the other side has to prove it's harmful before they can ban it. It's like how you don't have to prove your innocence against a criminal conviction, merely provoke reasonable doubt (in theory).
Err yeah because everything is harmful by default...
"In talking to the subjects, researchers discovered that high exposure to pornography videos apparently resulted in lower responsivity and an increased need for more extreme, specialized or “k+++y” material to become aroused."[1]
This effect can be clearly seen in that pornography websites promote this extreme, vile and obscure content, such as incest, exhibitionism, and even depictions of non-consensual interaction and physical abuse.[2] Obviously, these matters have no place in a healthy relationship, and it's pretty basic psychology that regular consumption of this content causes the normalization of such practices, especially in impressionable teenagers whom do not yet have legitimate experience in healthy, normal relationships.
A majority of adults watches pornography.[3] And we're dealing with a massive loneliness epidemic under younger generations, together with a significant rise in "hook-up culture" over forming serious relationships. Coincidence?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5039517/
[2] Just go to one of those websites. I'm not going to do that, neither am I going to link to that here.
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1402222/us-adults-pornog...
Regarding [1], the study itself mentions that stopping watching porn reverses the effect. In layman's terms: watch enough of it and the novelty wears off, but the sexual drive returns. Hardly a harm, it's what happens with every human activity.
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
I'm not sure why legislators aren't trying to address [2], which is the real problem as far as I can tell.
Is it? How many films are there promoting violence, revenge torture, etc? Is "Law Abiding Citizen" acceptable?
Featuring, and promoting, are different things. There's a big difference between Lolita and CSAM, or between Damals war es Friedrich and Mein Kampf.
But, I care about reality, not moral outrage about taboo violations*, so I'd only advocate "do something about [2]" if I believed [2] actually did contribute to a real problem. Combatting ineffective promotion is not on my priorities list. As far as I can tell, [2] is a real problem: though I'm always open to new evidence. (And when people like me take over the world, and it turns out our interventions don't make the problem go away, I like to think I'd have the integrity to reconsider my views in light of that evidence.)
*: That's not to say I don't feel outrage about taboo violations. Some taboos exist for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. (Of course, some need discarding with prejudice, but Chesterton's Fence applies.)
Define "porn" then I'll think about what you're proposing to age verify.
There's porn on reddit though
Even better, do a Google image search for “porn” and turn off filters. You will see pornography hosted by Google’s servers! I can’t understand why, at least in the spirit of these new laws, Google is exempt from age verification.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
Idk age restricting Instagram, TikTok etc. might be good for teenagers mental health.
If the parents want they can restrict their usage. I prefer to monitor and teach my children how to use technology properly, and that also includes of course sex education because it's not by banning porn sites till they are 18+ that you solve the issue to me, but by educating.
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
> Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn?
I think there are good arguments for claiming porn is more harmful than actual sex at that age, or at least some types or porn.
I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
> I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
Without thinking about it too deeply, that does sound reasonable. Was that ever discussed? Why was it not, or was rejected?
It was discussed many years ago. ISPs used to offer it. EE, at least, still offers filtered SIM cards.
Its not in wide use, and I think most people do not know its an option and it has no lobby group pushing for it so I am sure politicians do not know about it.
Most parents do not have the technical skills to effectively limit that usage. The vast majority may not even be aware that software tools and features exist that could limit it. For that matter, I am aware, and the features on most products are insufficient... I shouldn't have to block Youtube at the router-level, but that's about the only thing I can do. Works for the Xbox, which is plugged into ethernet, but it won't work for the iPhone since it just does fallback to cell service. What's to stop the kid from buying some cheap Android device and swapping in their sim, so they can get around Apple's parental controls?
>except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, True when we were kids. But bizarrely less true today.
It’d be good for all mental health. Banning the whole thing is probably a lot more sensible, but then people would have to face their own addictions.
I agree. If we have to have age verification laws I'd rather they be applied to social media networks over some size than to porn sites.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
We already have standards:
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
they really want mass surveillance for the plebs even by creating a weak point for enemies. To hell not just with rights but also defence. So any excuse will do.Well don't I feel like an uninformed dumbass. Talk of standards aside, pornhub apparently includes the following header if you visit it.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
[flagged]
Please don't berate other community members on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. HN is for curious conversation, not battle. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
If you value democracy, I suggest not to trust any random website you read. Of course the French left (at least EELV/LFI) is not going to support this. This should be obvious if you know a bit what ideas they are defending (them and the others too), which you should as well if democracy matters to you.
Can you explain a little why it's obvious? Last time I checked, LFI was for and EELV against.
https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=167712&country=fr
Isn't this for the extension of the temporary measure that allowed providers to volontarily scan messages and which does not break E2E encryption?
Technically it for the version of ChatControl of mid-2024 where it was about adding a backdoor to E2E. I didn't find most recent data.
But the current version isn't "volontarily" (you mean unpaid or self-willed ?), it's mandatory.
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
Note that chat control has been a top concern of governments since there were governments.
The Roman Empire banned private clubs, seeing them as a source of revolution.
As the US demonstrated, they were correct.
They will eventually come for GrapheneOS too in some way shape or form. Be it regulating hardware attestation being required to use devices, so that only government approved operating systems can be used, or imposing jailtime for possessing devices with capabilities such as GrapheneOS.
It will be a sad day when that comes.
The left and the right stopped being about liberal values (like traditionally liberal or whatever) at some point, which are the backbone of democratic societies. I don’t see how you can have democracy without the ability to freely communicate. And that means freedom of speech but also the right to anonymity and privacy.
I think we're just seeing the end game of neoliberalism, which is the fundamental agreement of all modern political parties.
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
The original sin are ad-based social media.
Everyone (except China) failed to regulate that. So now we see overcorrection.
The solution is to regulate Meta and TikTok and YouTube. Until that is on the table we’ll get performative stupidity from both sides.
What impression of PRC social media do you have that makes you think the situation is different there?
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
> In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media
I was frankly going off the kids of business contacts I’ve met. But I’m realising they’re all wealthy—the kids of America’s rich are able to make eye contact, too, because their screen time is tightly regulated.
Looking at the supporting members, this appears to be supported by "both parties" across many many countries, what a sad thing to unite over...
Actually no, every MEP doesn't support it, the government's position is attributed to all MEP from the country, which is silly.
Consider donating to https://edri.org instead.
Not sure what you call the "so-called left", but the actual left (LFI) certainly doesn't support Chat Control
Yes, this makes no sense. No way they got 100% of every MPs to agree on this. They never agree on anything. I think the website took the fact that the country supports it and applied that position to each of its MPs.
probably they call "so-called left" the liberals
Nobody would call them "left", especially not during Macron's 2nd term, the Walkers (or whatever is their new moniker) have firmly solidified as liberals in the right-wing sense (rather than in the bottom-wing sense).
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
-----
That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
I feel like you substituted 'idiot' for 'politician'. It would be quite surprising if regular people wanted more mass surveillance.
But if latter's really the case, then why?
I think it's more apathy than an actual desire for more mass surveillance. People don't care until they are directly, negatively affected. Same as it ever was.
These so called left are as left as original national socialists. They share pretty much same views of state, security, country, media, ... they just want total control.
And that applies to all parties that call themselves left, regardless of a country.
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
Yup
It's more a thing like "boomers who can't install stuff in their phones themselves (except for suspicious apps apparently) vs people who actually understand privacy with the normies on the side"
The establishment right-wing is pro privacy?
Why would you expect anything else from the so-called left? Do you honestly believe only the right want power and control?
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14945805/Online-Saf...
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
what are the arguments?
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
While I agree with you, this situation is also created by an all-encompassing State that rules every aspect of the French life.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
"only about 5% of Catholics in France attend mass regularly, which is roughly 2% of the entire French population"
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
In other words, your claims say more about you than France.
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
>The country is predominantly Catholic
No. Most of the country professes no religion.
I don't think even Chatgpt or Grok could get it this wrong
A little context here since this website is highly misleading:
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
> I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
The Commission is the executive branch, so maybe an equivalent would be the Executive Departments?
To be clear, I wasn't saying Parliament wouldn't have a say - mainly pointing out that the website's information about MEP's current position on the regulation is incorrect.
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
I think that's misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1]. Meaning that the Parliament can neither change nor reverse course - it is completely decided by the Council. All the Parliament can do is limit how fast that course is followed.
Edit: Sorry, what I wrote about the "Council" should have been about the "EU Commission" instead. The Council may in fact have equal power, as you wrote.
[1] Which I think (but was unable to explicitly confirm) extends to removing old legislation. I.e. the Council only has to get its way once, and then we're stuck with a law, unless the Council proposes to remove it. A ratchet.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1].
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
EU Commission: Proposes legislation
EU Parliament: Approves legislation
You mean the Council of the EU. The EUCO is a separate body. SCNR.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
Came here to say the same thing, confused how a website like this can be made, the people behind it must have not understood how the EU works.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
IMO this kind of pedantry detracts from the message. We know that the EC is pushing it, but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEPs. Thus a list of MEPs from countries, colour coded by whether or not the country is known to support the position. And optionally a marker for their personal opinion if known.
> but the EC does not represent the people, that's the job of MEP
The European Council is the heads of each member state. They are literally the people elected by each nation state domestically. If they don't represent the people, then that means national democracy is broken (which I agree with in cases like the UK) but I'm making a more general point.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/european-council/
I wasn't talking about the council, but the commission. The acronym confusion is unfortunate.
Point is that these people are very far removed from elections and political consequences. They also seem to be the types who have no idea what "normal" people are like.
Then you have understood even less. The commission act on instructions from the council. The steer for this has come from the member states, not the commission.
So what you're saying is: countries elect politicians in national elections, some of these politicians (typically the prime ministers) form the European Council, they propose a President of the Commission, the ruling government of each country then proposes one unelected Commissioner to join that Commission.
I still think it's fair to say that the Commission does not represent the people. It is many steps removed from the people. Nobody voted for any of them.
According to wikipedia, this point of view makes me a euroskeptic. Which is not something I consider myself to be, I'm a big proponent of cooperation between European countries. But I am certainly very skeptical of unelected government officials deciding on far reaching legislation that infringes upon fundamental liberties. With zero political repurcussions or liability.
It is easy to make any argument you want when this is unscientific. But it is easy to draw a line from the elected heads to state (the governments of the member countries) pushing for this, right through to the elected European Parliament (elected MEPS). The Commission is a civil service, doing the bidding of the Council, and then proposing laws to the elected Parliament.
I can't really picture what a better structure would be. The elected member state governments should always be the ones driving policy. They need a way to get that done outside of their usual national structures and civil servants, so they create the Commission. People also want to feel represented in the final votes so we create the Parliament.
What would your structure look like?
Counterpoint: The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, sits both in the European Commission and in the European Council. And it's UvdL who is the primary driving force for chat control at this point.
You're very naive to think UvdL is the driving force of chat control. If you truly believe that then there is no hope. This is coming from the member nation governments. If you want to oppose it, write to your politicians.
It's a very sad state of affairs that when Trump and von der Leyen meet to represent two of the most powerful entities on Earth, one has been democratically legitimised less than a year ago, and the other has never ran in an election in her life.
The whole site has that vibe-coded-website look. I wonder if a lot of the information on the site was essentially hallucinated too.
This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.
If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
> "whatsapp"
Please don't include it in this conversation. That app is spyware and collects enough metadata on you for actual conversations not to matter, proven by them being bold enough to introduce personalized advertising inside the "e2ee" app
Also it uploads all your decrypted chats to Google every week.
It sounds to me like the Europeans need to have an actual fight (that is with bullets and artillery) with this weird EU pseudo government thing. It sounds like a loss for them to me.
The UK left the EU and is pushing very similar sorts of dangerous nonsense legislation when it comes to the internet, so this is clearly not just a EU thing.
Many Europeans just wait for the Russia to come and save us from the totalitarian regimes once again.
There is no alternative is there. Russia bad for obvious reasons. EU rules getting more and more tight. Lets see what happens with digital euro and forced investing in EU markets. Eu is ruled by gerontocrats and detached leftists. The extreme right is not solution. Most of EU MPs from small countries are literal nobodies, just bench warmers.
Russia is bad as is. Currently, clearly worse than EU. But the problem is, the state of human rights and freedoms in the EU is deteriorating so fast, I'm not sure if it would still be better than Russia in ten years. And in 20 years, China may be the freedom benchmark for the EU.
Of course it will be worse. And EU will not have concentration camps or gulags. But boiling the frog of freedom slowly def is not best outcome. And will more people to anti eu camp. An in the end to east.
The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
No, in the 1980s, dissident voices had platforms. They weren't "mass media" platforms but they definitely had radio shows, periodicals and various publishing channels to disseminate their publications and broadcasts. They were incredibly important in those days, and those sources held some amount of power, in that they could expose a story, and effectively force the rest of the media to cover a subject or event they otherwise would have ignored.
This is worse in every way as it /completely/ locks them out the modern market of ideas that is the internet and ensconces prior restraint into law in a way that violates the civil liberties of every citizen, whether they are the publisher, or the consumer.
We have lost control of the internet. Those who have control intend to turn this world back into a fiefdom with their newfound power. They are otherwise working to keep the rest of the population in fear and distracted. I'm genuinely afraid our past luck will fail to hold out. They've spent 20 years to get to this point. I don't see them giving up.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
This would just end anonymity for normal people. All of the bots and bad actors will have no problem with comitting a crime because they are literally criminals.
> The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself.
In no way do I support this surveillance society, or legislation, but I just wanted to make a casual point. I'm from a country where the internet first came through universities, and I was privileged to be there at the time. Those early days when it was just university students (and other staff) communicating over IRC were, nostalgically, wonderful. And everyone knew who everyone on IRC actually was in real life. Sure, there were the usual flame wars and some trolls, but it felt personal and, just good.
I'd love to go back to those internet days - bit of course I'm aware that is an elitist attitude, because I was part of the "in group" at the time.
I just missed those days. But what most people miss about it was not necessarily that everyone had their name attached (or easily findable). What people miss about those days is the quality of discussion online. Because it wasn't a random sampling of the population, it was a sampling of the most tech-savvy academics from around the world.
I don't know about you, but I think I prefer the knock-on effects of internet-for-everyone.
I think they'll pass it into law, and then find it's effectively unenforceable, same as all the other similar laws (the UK is busy discovering that age verification laws promote VPN use that circumvent all enforceability of any UK internet laws).
The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
Crime was spiking in those decades because everyone was getting pumped full of lead. Not because they didn't have anonymous reddit.
people still have a need to speak freely. There are alternatives to the mainstream internet, and maybe we ll be better there
Not a defense of chat control, which I am very much against, but can you really claim that the internet gave "dissident voices" a platform?
Media is arguably even more tightly controlled than in the 1980s, legacy media is owned by a few billionairew, right-wing influencers are all paid hacks, with a lot of them relaying pro-Russia propaganda. Meanwhile, genuine independent journalists are buried under algorithmic nonsense promoting ragebait and hate.
The internet very much failed to deliver a new era of feee speech. Instead, our conversations are now hosted on a few platforms and controlled by the oligarchs that own them, who are able to editorialize out dissenting voices and promote their own disgusting viewpoints.
I'm Italian. On my side, I did what I could do: I emailed Italian politicians explaining why they should reject the proposal. A drop in the ocean, and far from impactful, but if it can change the odds even by an epsilon, why not?
https://gagliardoni.net/#20250805_chatcontrol
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
Thank you for sharing this, it saved me quite some time and I coincidentally found a great resource (your blog).
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
Australia already has this capability and is likely using it for 5 Eyes nations. Questioning the desire to surveil seems on topic when this is pretty much everywhere already.
Australia can’t get technical capability notices for anything that matters, maybe some local trash only. (Don’t use Australian software or products folks).
American tech will tell them to pound sand, and you got another international incident in the media.
> In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
It's consistent when viewed from a perspective of accountability evasion. They don't need to make actual anti free speech laws, because you already don't have free speech without the laws. And by not making the laws, they get to claim they give you free speech.
In the US, violations of civil rights that are performed by officials (like legislators) can be prosecuted under something called color of law. I think it is rarely done, if ever, but the justice department could do it. Maybe Americans need to start pushing their own representatives to call for such a case in situations where individual rights are violated.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
The punishment can include the death penalty too.
The price is liberty is eternal vigilance.
Just as you must work each day if you want money, you must oppose tyranny each day if you want liberty.
They will always want more power over you and you will always have to fight them because of that.
I'm unaware of Sealand[0] engaging in surveillance against its citizen.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
With only one citizen, it would seem that the government of Sealand must necessarily be watching everything he does at all waking hours.
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
The one where citizens don’t regress into comfortably lazy nihilism as a first response.
Power wants to stay in power.
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
The Catholic Church is not for surveillance, afaik.
Join Vatican City!
yeah, Japan
They don’t really need to surveil their citizens. The indoctrination starts from kindergarden :)
Either that or they can't. They did after all have a minister for cybersecurity that had never used a computer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026
We must be thinking of different Japans then. Related, have you seen the Tokyo police mascot?
Not really, which is a good argument against regimes in general.
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent
America has been trashed not by Covid but by the precedence being set that partisan violence can and will be pardoned.
I don't quite understand your point. I also meant covid policies. Not covid itself.
They probably meant January 6th rebels being pardoned giving the example that extremists that aim at preventing democratic election results from going into effect can do as they want.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
Many people feel the point of the former was to prevent the latter
> Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large.
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
Being temporary and being authoritarian are entirely orthogonal. In general I would imagine that cultures willing to accept temporary authoritarianism for the "right reasons" are more prone to falling to dictators.
Most democraties have provisions for times of exceptional needs and counterpowers against that. Of course that's a weakness but a weakness that's judged better than mass deaths or complete fall of the country.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
I completely agree of course. My reply was simply because I think it's important not to inadvertently conflate things, particularly when the issue is contentious. In this case the concepts of authoritarian and permanency, as well as the concepts of people who deny COVID, people who distrust vaccines, and people who were dissatisfied with the various government mandates.
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
I don't think so? I'll state it again - temporary and authoritarian are orthogonal. Attempting to claim that the lack of permanence demonstrates that the measures weren't authoritarian thus my claim that the two concepts are orthogonal is incorrect is begging the question (at absolute minimum).
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
But temporary authoritarianism to avert a crisis is rarely what people are thinking of when they say authoritarianism.
Ancient Rome would elect dictators to take control for two weeks at a time, because that was the only effective way to control a crisis. It remains a very effective way to control a crisis, but it only works if people can trust the political system because the political system is worth trusting. Especially people have to be able to trust they can unelect that guy (at least by waiting two weeks).
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
This alone tells me which way I should weigh in on this law. They know what they're doing.
The notoriously opaque EU institutions would sooner insist on reading your every message than actually be transparent themselves. This is beyond satire.
Does it persist when they leave office?
I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
If it hasn't been changed, not only politicians but law enforcement officers too would be exempt
This is one of the many abuses by Leo(s), part why I don't love and trust police in italy: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatti_del_G8_di_Genova#p-lan...
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
A lot of actual pedophiles will be exposed if it was used on politicians, we don't want that.
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
There's lobby organisations that try to influence politicians in different countries: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
For over a decade now there’s been a huge global shift toward authoritarianism, and to some extent it’s grassroots. My speculation is that this is a time of unprecedented change and that scares people. We also have aging populations due to lower birth rates and older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics.
At least two decades now, here I remember people talking back then about newly introduced CCTV cameras, and making maps of them so people could avoid the surveillance.
Yes.
It's a tremendous opportunity, presently.
Power is never before so easily gotten.
Fight: Collaborate, Empathize, Reject division.
> older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics
Just a friendly reminder that it was millenials who brought us censorship, cancel culture and other totalitarian bs. People who are older today, saw nearly absolute online freedom and miss that, not some "nostalgic reactionary politics".
I think millennial cancel culture falls under the "fear of rapid change" heading.
Before the Internet went big and mainstream we were in an era I've heard termed managerial democracy. Big media was able to largely regulate the Overton window. Social activists were able, by getting into big media via the path of the universities, to push things like racism and homophobia out of the Overton window and keep them out. This largely worked, creating the illusion (and I now firmly believe it was an illusion) that these things were dying or dead. I remember growing up in the 90s and thinking racism was something maybe a few old geezers in the South believed. "Sure grandpa, the South will rise again, now lets get you your meds."
Personally I see this as well-intentioned, but that's because I think racism is a low form of primate tribalism.
Then the net came along and made it so any yahoo with a few bucks could post. Couple that with algorithms that tend to elevate controversial (thus engaging) content, and racism and all the other banished isms vaulted back onto the stage. They were never dead IMHO, just out of polite discourse. I didn't realize that growing up but I sure see it now.
Lefty cancel culture was an attempt to repeat the purge of those things from big media with the Internet and it didn't work and couldn't work. I did and still do sympathize but I think it's pissing into a hurricane.
Of course there's plenty of right wing cancel culture too that we're seeing now. That's a different beast. Cancel culture historically is a creature of the right. The left form is probably a brief historical aberration brought about by the conditions I outlined above. I'm hearing lefties admit defeat on this right now, and some question whether it was a good idea to try.
Racism won't be dead until people actually change their hearts and minds. Controlling the discourse just means you don't hear about it.
I think the UK (and EU) have been at this for a while. The UK pushed for the Data Retention Directive in the EU in the mid 2000s that required ISPs to save all the websites you visit. This was eventually ruled to be illegal, but it was still in force for several years.
These guys have been at it for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
Australia too. They've been playing with this for decades. The latest push is similar to the UK: age verification for porn and social media, but watch it expand once introduced.
The Establishment really don't like how they're not in control of what everyone hears or sees any more. It used to be so cozy for them.
I would not be surprised if it's the US pressuring everyone else. Thiel is probably salivating to get a deal for Palantir to implement it.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Palantir CEO interview about the future was straight up "YOU ALL are MEAT. Only I matter."
F that noise.
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
> Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Many of them support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Notable_s...
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
They're afraid of losing their job or being painted as someone who supports terrorists, pedophiles, or other criminals.
The pandemic showed that govs can push what they want with minimal resistance and having the public on each other throats. People are also fatigued and isolated more than ever, perfect time to seize total control.
Security is worth half a shit these days and Five Eyes can't remotely access everybody's phone without it getting noticed by people. So they need to keep transport insecure.
They are gearing for WW3 and population control.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
Before they could do that, you will see many countries amending their conscription laws.
Now they just need to find a reason to brainwash the general public to sleepwalk into fighting another war.
We already tried requiring CP rings to collect ID in the US. It doesn't seem to have worked out the way you're suggesting. It was called the Epstein client list if you're curious.
This.
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
That they exempt politicians is basically admitting that the security problems that detractors bring up is true, and is something that should be used against them.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
Can't make this shit up.
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
This is only the first step in the process. First they will force all messaging/email providers to implement the scanning. Those who refuse or decide to leave the EU as Signal said they would do, would end up being unlisted from Google Play or the Apple (EU) app store.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
> Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
ProtectEU sounds incredibly dark. Do you have a source for the information regarding on-device scanning? I had a look but only found the bureaucrat-speak overview and they didn’t discuss details.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
ProtectRegime
You would get labeled a "potential criminal". See some comment from police labelling Graphene OS users as criminals.
Steganography exists and is undefeatable, though very low bandwith.
Even if you compile your own version of Signal, will your friends do it too? Will your grandma/grandpa do it as well? It only takes one person in the chain to be compromised by using the "real" app and then all your efforts would be defeated because now your messages have been exposed by this other person unknowingly.
Do phones have trusted execution environments? I suppose you could require the recipient provide attestation that it's running the expected binary. Of course, this is pointless if the hardware manufacturer shares their root keys with the government.
> the "real" app
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
I used Signal as an example.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
Well... "TM Signal" was just in the news. It's close enough I bet it could fool some percentage of otherwise security-conscious users. https://www.wired.com/story/tm-signal-telemessage-plaintext-...
It's like any other crime. They cannot stop you from stealing, for example. By doing it, you will not be a lawful citizen.
You mean "an illegal?"
nah they meant unlawful. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unlawful
I know. It was a pity comment born out of my frustration with certain classes of offenders being labelled as "illegals" while others are granted human-first language like "unlawful citizens."
It wasn't a comment in keeping with the site guidelines but that was rooted in my continuing frustration with the community here denying the dehumanising nature of language like "illegals."
I'm aware of the definition of unlawful but thank you for your effort and apologies for the wasted time.
It doesn't say how AFAIK, although it's been a few months from when I read the original proposal. If I'm not wrong it would delegate that to service providers - the organizations managing the apps, telegram, meta, whatever the name of the foundation for the signal app is ecc
Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.
So stop them.
Yeah this really annoys me, because it appears to show that any pretense that the law applies to everyone equally is disappearing fast.* If it at least affected politicians you could write it off as "idiotic idea that wasn't thought through in the slightest", but here it's clear that they have some idea how stupid and dangerous the law is, and see themselves as worth exempting from it instead.
Rules for thee but not for me.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
The EU: proudly defending human rights… unless you're trying to send a private message.
Sometimes, very bad things are done in the name of "child protection". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
God fucking damn it not again
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
They only need to succeed one time. People are generally preoccupied with a lot of other things right now, so maybe this is their lucky shot…
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Is there no way to codify a negative right, like “The right of the European people to privacy in their communications and security in their records through encryption shall not be infringed?” Negative rights reserved to the people should be more important than positive laws granting power to the government.
Yes; they could amend the definitely-not-a-constitution (for branding/eurosceptic-appeasement reasons, the EU constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon treaty before adoption). Arguably such a right may exist already and this legislation might find itself on a collision course with the ECJ if it passed (notably the ECJ nuked _another_ intrusive law, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive).
In some ways yes but we've already seen with covid that governments are happy to behave unconstitutionally even when it's clear they will eventually lose in court - by then their targets have already been dragged through the mud.
This rule can really hurt. e.g. Theresa May tried passing a deal to keep the UK in the Customs Union. The speaker wouldn't allow it because the same deal had previously been rejected, even though she now had the support for it in the house.
I wonder if it'd be possible to fix a lot of these issues by having a constitution with damn near impossibly strict standards for changing it that rely on the entire population agreeing (or close to it)?
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
It exists. Except these mfs will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. Instead they try again and again to gather the votes.
They actually did succeed once, with the data retention directive. That got annulled by the CoJEU.
cough Patriot Act cough
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
Yeah I have a feeling this thing is gonna be exactly like that. Even if this doesn't pass, they'll just rename and repackage it and try again until everyone gets fatigued enough and doesn't have energy to oppose it anymore
It's not even a partisan issue; spying on the constituency is one of few issues that has broad bipartisan support.
You could vote for a libertarian, but good luck.
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
Context: https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1114997695267549...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
The exemptions for politicians is straight out of 1984.
They weren’t exempt in 1984.
Upper class could completly turn off their telescreens, meaning they have partial exemptions at least. For middle class they were always on. Proles had no telescreen because they were considered to lack brains. Even the Party had levels, Inner and Outer, with different rules.
1984 would be incomplete without the hypocrisy of "rules for thee not for me".
> They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
I wouldn't call login political career or being cancelled and voted out "real repercussions". They can pretty much retire and enjoy the rest of their lives with all the lobby money and EU rents.
Real repercussion would mean prison time and losing their property, but we all know that won't happen anytime soon.
Yup.
Having empathy for your neighbor, and working with those whom you disagree, are precursors. This gives power.
Then using power to enact consequences for businesses and governments (the people therein), fixes the problem.
The fascist, autocratic impulse is a big in the human firmware and will never go away. We exist constantly balanced on the razor edge precipice because we are capable of little else. Self-governing humans are not a stable system.
Serfs and lords is pretty stable. But ya I get yr point.
Is it? Every human society has been an incredibly brief enterprise, on the scale of, for example, geologic time.
The arrival of AI has made mass surveillance pass a certain threshold. Now we're just a step away from aristocrat heaven.
Yup super easy to moderate, monitor, and manipulate.
Watchlist? Easy.
Mislead? Easy.
We need to isolate this bad behavior ASAP.
As Juncker, ex president of European Commision said, you keep trying till it passes at some point. Good luck revoking it later…
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
No serious way to enact change? That's not true at all.
How exactly are you going to repeal ChatControl or ProtectEU when the same people who lobbied for these proposals/laws are the ones who would have to repeal it? Ursula survived a no confidence vote just a month ago.
It's not over yet. We can still fight it.
I don't think democracy is perfect, especially in this case. But I come from a very regulated country, and have lived in countries with far less regulation. The comfort that comes knowing that my food is somewhat safe to eat, that I have access to healthcare, that most workers have good working condition with lots of holiday. This all came from regulation and democracy, and it's great. I don't think mistrust of institutions and democracy is the way to go.
The problem is once trust gets too high, government powers get abused and then we get shit like chat control. Which is not democratical. Over time, less trust should bring government back under control and the cycle repeats. Hopefully. If democratical feedback process still works.
Of course it’s nicer to live where you can trust your government to represent your interests. But blind trust just because mistrust is not nice is one of the worst options.
It's not over but sorry - they have lost all my trust. With governments like these who needs enemies?
There's absolutely reason to lose faith in the system, I'm just as guilty of that. At the same time, it has helped me to know that in many parts of the world there's been slides into authoritarianism, and in cases where there's been strong push-back its been possible to reverse it. It's when there's no push back that it becomes worse.
Objectively, it's still possible to fight it and democracy is still a good venture for making improvements.
Applied modern democracy and theoretical democracy are two different things. But yes, we should strive to get to a better version of democracy. Instead of just saying democracy BAD.
the western democracy was lost not with trump/farage etc but with the entrenched liberals who decried democracy redefining it as populism and institutional entrenchment as true democracy. This is fallout from it. The populist movements happened because the liberals who once stood for working class people abandoned the poor and working class. Nobody cared then and some even mocked the working class. Now everyone here/reddit/etc cares because suddenly they are affected and its an issue that they identify with and not just the working class. Good times. You won't be able to do anything. They will walk all over you just like when they walked all over the working class.
People don’t want change.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
People both do and don't want change. Not all change is good and some (most really) should be fought.
> Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
That's a convenient argument for people who want to push unpopular changes.
People don’t want change, yet politicians are pushing sleazy changes left and right.
Change like straws ban and attached caps? Such change, wow.
That are alibi changes because the real necessary changes are too unpopular
Then don’t do any changes. Such BS changes are counter-productive and just a waste of resources.
>Then don’t do any changes. Such BS changes
So there are changes
You can keep trying to revoke it until it passes too.
Yeah, right. I wonder if revokers would have same privacy as those who try to pass it…
Well it's pretty difficult to organize any opposition once they're reading all the messages.
What do they gain? The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control. If there was a conspiracy like that would they be acting much differently?
> The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control.
Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".
Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.
But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
Who are the organizations fighting chat control which one could support with a donation?
EDRi. https://edri.org/about-us/victories/
Kind of answering my own question, but in Germany there seem to be:
https://freiheitsrechte.org/
https://chat-kontrolle.eu/
Can anyone comment on the reputability of these initiatives?
Pick any decentralized IM project
You cannot fight this with technology. What will you do when they make connecting to instant messager servers without scanning illegal? VPN? They are already going after VPNs.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
You don't need to ask anyone to connect to a decentralized IM. This all the way till encryption is banned for personal use.
Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.
Can you imagine the UK having a vote in all of this? Terrifying.
The chat control bill also has age verification to identify child users.
I think the point was that the law is not in effect just yet.
As much as we are fighting Chat Control, we also need a plan B. What do we do if EU regime really enact it? Which messengers could we use then? What were the practical alternatives?
Self hosted, decentralized, encrypted, standard based, ... , the only thing that comes to mind is something like delta.chat for texts, which builds upon a standard mail protocol.
Can we do something better than that?
Security is always a cat and mouse game, solutions already exist and more will come soon anyway. It's just technology after all. The problem now is not for the mice, it's a matter of defending basic human rights.
Laws generally recognise the sanctity of privacy - for example, so much as looking at someone for too long can be deemed sexual assault in some jurisdictions - yet law makers wish to legislate they be able to view everyone's nudes (and much more)! Weird contradiction.
The individual MEPs' positions are wrong, it's not 1:1 with the national government's position as the website suggests.
So as a Dutchie that opposes this, is there still something for me to do? The Netherlands opposes this, so... should I sway them to oppose it even more? Not really sure what my role should be.
See https://www.chatcontrol.eu/#WhatYouCanDo under “Is your government opposing?”.
> Is your government opposing? → Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps. Also critical governments need to do more, exert their influence in the Council of the EU and agree on a joint list of necessary fundamental changes to the proposal. Absent such revision they should ask the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal as it stands.
Just putted it here, for easier reading.
Hello! I made this website. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/preparatory-bo...
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
[2] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/mpo/2025/9/law-e...
[4] https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVIII/EU/26599/imfname...
Hello, it's not working for me, "send emails" fails with:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'selectedMeps') at Object.showSelectionFeedback (takeAction.js:546:41) at Object.selectAllRepresentatives (takeAction.js:542:14) at HTMLButtonElement.onclick ((index):1:13)
Thank you for your good work. Yours is the best resource I found for (a) more information and (b) sending mass e-mails to MEPs.
I encourage everyone to at least contact your MEPS, x775's effort makes that part easy.
Good work. I hope the HN front page didn't cause you too much headache with traffic.
So what is the real solution? Meaning the solution that an individual could use themselves, without further coordination, to insulate themselves from this policy. Is it an Android distribution? Jailbreaking? Custom builds?
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
The real solution is to stop the law while it is still being negotiated.
In America our judicial system is sleeping and also overtly supporting anti democratic laws.
If the law was passed, would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
If so, that is the real solution, because it works in all cases.
> would there still be things you could do to insulate yourself from the effects of the law?
Encrypt your data locally before it is uploaded to a service that scans your private communication. This is most likely how the child abusers will do it too. And therefore the law will be ineffective at fighting sharing of child abuse material on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution probably a solution
A solution that laws like this will make very much harder to pull off if not impossible.
You ask a valid and clear question, sadly no one yet properly responded :( I'll try: using an app that can communicate without ever connecting to the internet? Such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6748584483
There is LoRaWAN with tech like Meshtastic which can send messages far further than wifi and bluetooth. Problem is the throughput is pretty limited. Only really useful for text messages within the same city.
Not sure any purely wireless system would scale that well either since every message floods the entire network. Ideally for wireless you just want wireless to the closest grid connected node to connect to the internet.
An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.
Solution is to move or cause resistance obv
probably worst case side loading tor on android
How do you create an environment in which immoral actions become permissible? You legalize them.
Excellent resources section [0] including "Digital technologies as a means of repression and social control" study from European Parliament
[0] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/resources
It's impressive how governments never quit trying to implement this harmful idea.
Because people keep believing that there must be a technical solution that will improve security without causing harm. They are just uninformed, IMO.
Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
PRIVACY IS A HUMAN RIGHT
When they locked everything down and forced you to wear masks they already told you who they are. They don't care about your freedom or you as an individual and your rights.
Spot on. They also showed how the constitution means nothing to them because once you win in court they already got what they wanted.
What's more sad is that the general public has also responded that they are OK with this. Dissenters have become to be though of as a problem that needs to be corrected instead of as an indicator that what the government is doing is wrong.
sorry, this is stupid. Preventing a pandemic (we failed to prevent a pandemic because large numbers of us deliberately chose not to prevent a pandemic) is not the same as the Nazis.
Sorry but you are an idiot, no one brought up the Nazis except you. It is control in the name of safety one of which destroyed many businesses.
Those who would give up essential safety to obtain a little temporary liberty deserve neither.
Yup, that's where we should spend our energy
nitpick but the number of MEPs is not the same in some countries (Slovakia, Spain and a few more) on the summary card and on the representative list
WTFF. Fight !!
Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Are we so End Stage Growth Economy that EVERY power broker see now as the time to employer (IC)Enforcement?
Gestapo much, anyone?
> Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
Should I be allowed to go on national news and present irrefutable evidence (AI-generated of course) that the president is a lizard person?
By default, I should, because it's a free country. But what if enough people start believing me that the country falls apart? Should the country let itself fall apart or should it perhaps try to stop the whole thing?
By default, you should be allowed to say that the president is a lizard person, and show your "irrefutable evidence". On national news? Only if you can persuade a national news show that they should (or unless you own a national network).
But if you don't own them, they're not going to show your "proof" (except perhaps as comedy), because they have a reputation they need to maintain. And if you own them, they're still not going to, because they'd lose reputation (and therefore market share), and they'd get sued for slander and lose.
That leaves you showing your "proof" to whoever you can persuade to listen, without going on national news. I'm not sure I see the problem with that.
if I own them, they do what I say or they're fired and replaced with someone who does. That's how business ownership works.
Yours is a disingenous argument for authoritarianism and censorship.
You or your government of choice are the arbiters of truth and, of course, you wouldn't lie, only your political opponents who invent obvious malicious lies that are an immediate danger.
Your actions are good or mistakes and they don't present immediate dangers, only the criticism of your actions does.
In case my sarcasm wasn't obvious. A resounding rejection of all your propaganda for authoritarianism.
Can you answer the question?
It's a faulty question. You should you give me a thousand dollars or the country falls apart. Will you?
Give me a thousand dollars. If you don't, the country falls apart!
Disingenous to the core.
Reply to my actual point.
So you can't answer the question?
It's well known that countries collapsing can be a downstream consequence of speech. It very famously happened in Germany, for instance.
Yes, very few people want free speech for their opponents.
They want free speech for what they agree with, or at least think tolerable.
The principle of free speech as a right everyone has, has been lost.
This is a list of countries not to visit with tourism money as a foreigner you’re no longer safe.
The landing page really should have an open graph image! It would help with sharing and promotion.
In short: everything and everyone is suspect and need to approved by technocratic superior authorities and zealot private organizations. Yesterday China, USA, Russia, UK, India etc and today the EU aligning with North Korean style of control on people.
This is a mind boggling recipe for disaster, a worldwide dystopian nightmare coming true with an unprecedented but quite predictable series of consequences. Next step: compulsory installation of CCTV inside every home?
I think the people behind this site did a really good job! Can we donate to them?
I'm at least me what you
Man am I glad I live in America. Despite everything, it's still the land of the free and the home of the brave. The federal system here means that the majority of weird shit happens at the state level.
The company lobbying for the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn. They have correctly identified that the EU is weak and you can just say "children" and politicians will agree to anything however. Even if it doesn't achieve anything.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
I salute you sir, a true PATRIOT. Your PRISMatic view of the world truly knows no bounds.
The country that had prosecution of political opponents during the Red Scare and patriot act is better? The US is the country that started all this privacy invading BS and is still way ahead on that front.
After all Chat Control hasn't actually passed yet.
The more they have to tell you that you're free, and the more they make want to tell other people that you're free, the less free you actually are.
Oh yeah definitely. And the more they tell you something is vanilla ice cream, the more non-vanilla-ice-cream it is. In this moment, you are euphoric.
Thank you for sharing.
Haloo
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
you cannot enforce law globally online
there's no internet police
You didn't even need the word "online." There's no global police.
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
Europe never abandoned the elitist mindset of a ruling elite lording it over the masses.
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtrNXdlraM
Where is the difference to the US, China or the UK?
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
The US, at least, has a Bill of Rights that would make this illegal, it would definitely violate the 4th Amendment and maybe the 1st too.
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
> The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
That's because the US has the convenience of owning the megacorporations that control every facet of our lives. The government doesn't need the ability to restrict your speech and monitor you if FAANG happily do it for them.
Oh no....
I went deep into this rabbit hole and did a lot of reading on how this org is pushing it's agenda in EU.
I hate this Hollywood idiots with burning passion.
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
You might not like this example, but the relatively recent evolution of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, significantly strengthening gun rights, is the result of many impassioned, dedicated groups, lobbying the public and the government for decades.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
The EU also has laws that make it illegal. It annulled a previous law with some of these provisions, the so-called Data Retention Directive.
> The EU also has laws that make it illegal.
For now.
I think it's hard to end though. It would require basically re-doing the ECHR and probably other EU treaties, and that just isn't going to happen any more than anyone will make amendments to the US constitution.
Hrm. Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Ultimately the US government's key escrow fixation largely faded away, and it was never clear whether it would stand up in the courts, but it still shows up from time to time.
It's quite possible that this would conflict with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon treaty) if passed, too; for a prior example see the defunct data retention directive, which was nuked by the ECJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
The administration and the people will just shrug and move on, like they've done with all the other crap they've shrugged at.
I'm not convinced the US will even have fair elections a couple of years from now. Do those amendments really matter, when those in power are doing everything they can to break down the rule of law, and turn the country into yet another autocracy?
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
It takes a firm believe to still pretend the bill of rights would be adhered to. You have a convicted criminal as president with ties to child traffickers, taking foreign bribes on live TV, scamming voters with crypto, while punishing universities for teaching the wrong things and imprisoning people without due process for having the wrong opinion.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
Are you sure you want to make this point?
From what I've seen, the US also has a more "rebellious" culture than the EU, for lack of a better term; laws are viewed less as an absolute and the population is far more willing to break them if the consequences are perceived as minor. This is bipartisan; examples that come to mind include: electing a convicted felon, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, and going 10 over the speed limit.
I hope you're right.
The difference is that PRISM was done as a black op, and this is out in the open.
Since PRISM is widely known now and there have been no real consequences there isn't a meaningful difference.
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
> The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
> The latter is also debatable
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
I get that maybe you meant culturally, but Ireland is a member of the EU whereas the UK is no longer. This forces a tighter alignment so makes your point about Ireland redundant.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
>Closer than to the US?
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
> The UK is politically,
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
The EU continues to become a hilariously Soviet nanny state.
Beautiful land and country, but they're destroying their cultures with the third world and seem to just not care about the rights of their citizens.
As disappointing as my national government (NL) has been and still is, at least our MEPs oppose this dragon of a proposal.
Test
Sure. Fight it. And also Remember this moment next time you're calling people conspiracy theorists because your party politician or mainstream news says so.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
HN applauds this vibe-coded “privacy” site yet condemns decentralized messaging.
States control what’s centralized; incentives ensure they keep doing so.
Protesting it is like arguing with a thermostat—it can’t hear you, and it’s built to tighten control.
As technologists, we have a lot more power than we realise.
(Yes, I’m speaking to the blob, but the Venn overlap of anti-crypto and pro-this seems big.)
>decentralized messaging
This doesn't help, Chat Control scanner run directly on your device. It doesn't matter which chat program you use.
Incorrect
> ... providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content [1]
Even if that were the case, the answer is the Framework phone
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
>On 11 May 2022 the European Commission presented a proposal which would make chat control searching mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers and would even apply to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communication services
And scanning end-to-end encrypted is only possible on-device.
And of course the next step is that the EU will mandate that every device needs to implement this scanning, they are very aggressive with this stuff. Framework phone won't help you in this case, this is obviously the next step. That's why we have to fight against it. Reminder that soon online age verification with an app that can only be downloaded from the Play Store and used within a "trusted environment" (e.g. SafetyNet) will be mandatory.
Genuely curious. What would the problem be if it was vibe-coded? It's an easy to read site that succeeds in communicating what it wants.
there's no problem with it being vibe-coded
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
Can you suggest an alternative action?
Decentralised messaging providers
Can't enforce everyone to scan
What are you going to do? Arrest everyone?
> What are you going to do? Arrest everyone?
Just like in any other authoritarian state, you make examples. People will quickly learn how to self-police (and to turn enemies in).
Maybe accelerating is an option
This just hammers the opinion that the GDPR was mainly just an EU economic protectionist policy and not actually about protecting privacy of citizens as promised.
GDPR passed, Chat Control didn't (already rejected about 4-5 times but the evil people keep proposing it because re-proposing the same failed law has no cost).
The chat control laws in the UK and USA also passed.
9 eyes supersedes the GDPR. 9 eyes has been active for years.
I just had this great idea reading this proposed law and the comments and concerns there of… here me out
Lets just put everybody in the world in prison except for the people with net worths over some unattainable threshold… perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. Then we’ll just make everyone work for and take all of it for ourselves. That way we cam destroy their cultures and the genetic lineages and we can just kill all the people we dont like dont agree with especially if theyre skin color is one we dont agree with. The world will be a better place because the clearly superior people will be on top. We can breed the rest of humans and just eat them. We’ll call them eloi and we’ll be the morlocks.
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Make their job more servant to the public, and less profitable in the near and far term.
Regulate the politicians.
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Signal chat messages to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Sessions chat message sent via TOR to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Genuinely curious. Can those that are in power break this encryption?
They can fine apple and google for offering signal in their app stores, until nobody has it installed.
That doesn’t break your comms today - but later, you replace your phone, can you get a current copy of the app?
Not quite. It would be illegal for Signal to continue operating in the EU if they don’t implement the required scanning functionality. And Signal has already stated that they’d rather leave the EU.
If the one western nation passes this then it's only a matter of time until the other ones do to. At that point Signal "leaving" means they may as well stop doing business. Companies like to say they won't bend the knee if it gets them support now but in the end they always do.
I can download the Signal APK from their site.
The idea isn't to break encryption, it's to have apps implement client-side scanning "pre-encryption".
> The idea isn't to break encryption
That comes later with ProtectEU.
"Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption"
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Yes, what is proposed is breaking the end-to-end security model, not breaking the encryption itself.
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I like your wording.
I wasn't expressing an opinion in that comment but I do find the whole concept terrible.
Definitely wouldn’t break the encryption itself.
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
Telegram is not E2EE because it's easier and faster to sync and transmit messages between millions of people. The scale of Telegram groups and channels is massive. Telegram, for a long time, has not complied with law enforcement requests and has made it hard for authorities to get data because of their architecture. You still have Secret Chats for E2EE messaging as an option.
Not sure what your point is. Telegram is not an example when it comes to privacy. Anyone who has access to the server has access to pretty much everything. Nothing can tell you that governments (or bad actors) are not already reading your Telegram messages.
Making it illegal to use "non-compliant" e2ee services and prosecuting those who does. Realistically, they couldn't, but could ban such apps in EU stores, making them less popular.
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
The proposed regulation is about imposing requirements on service providers, as defined by the Digital Services Act, for messaging and other services, effectively requiring them to implement backdoors in their software.
Purely P2P communication isn’t affected.
No, but many political figures have proposed banning the distribution/possession/operation of tools (e.g. Signal, Tor) which can be used to circumvent surveillance.
The app that decrypts the message, will have the capability to provide that message, now decrypted, to the government.