Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
The EP has the right to make amendments to proposed legislation, its not simply a yes no vote.
In fact what is described as "Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement" is exactly the EP voting to amend the Commission proposal on an extension of existing itermim rules with text that explicitly limits the scope.
The Commission consists of the Member States. So obviously they are also voted-in parties since the government of the Member States is democratically elected
The first level democracy itself is a farce - coalition governments run by parties the majority doesn't want, MP seat allocations under ridiculous non-representative rules, campaign programs and pre-election promises broken all the time, 4 or 5 years of politicians left unchecked with no in-between recourse like referendums and assessments except to vote someone else next year, and that's without taking into account the mega-business interests sponsoring and controlling them.
Once removed even from that, the E.C. second level democracy is beyond a farce.
True but it's a step removed. The MEPs are directly voted in whilst the EC are not, they're "voted in" on account of "voted in" people assigning them to the EC.
I mean nobody argues that the FED governor is voted in, right? In reality a lot of people argue that they're unelected and yet making decisions that affect everyone.
The European Commission represents the interests of the member states, while the European Parliament represent the interests of the citizens. NO LAW CAN PASS without the consent of the citizens directly elected representatives. There is no "pushing through".
If you don't like how you are represented at the commission, then blame your government. It is THEIR representative - not yours.
Also, don't forget that the commission as a whole needs to be approved by a vote at European Parliament - i.e. by the directly elected representatives.
No, the European Council is suppose to represent the interest of the member states. The European Commission is suppose to be the executive of the European Union. Translating to the USA system, it would be like saying that the White House is suppose to represent the USA states. No, It's suppose to represent the interest of Europe as an entity.
Any introduction to democracy explains that the power is separated in the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
The European Parliament is suppose to be the legislative body but can't initiate legislation.
The Commission is suppose to be the executive, but, somehow can also initiate legislation and is not elected directly by the citizens. And the council that, I suppose would be the equivalent to a senate, is not directly elected by the citizens.
And we could talk about how all the important decisions are done in the dark, or how, like in this case, when something is not 'correctly' voted, they just keep bringing it back until it pass, or how they have started to 'sanction' people without judicial supervision.
It's time to open the eyes, because this is not going to improve. The EU 'democracy' is a joke.
No, this is a discussion about the "unelected" European Commission. I haven't mentioned the European Council because it is irrelevant.
The European Commission is formed of representatives of the individual states. They are NOT representatives of the citizens, other than by proxy.
YOUR government can request that THEIR representative raise or support legislation among the commission. If you have a problem with your countries representative at the commission then take that up with your government.
Proposals being "brought back" for discussion in some form is just a part of legislation. It happens EVERYWHERE - not just at the EU level.
Sanctions are proposed through the commission because it is a consensus of state government foreign policy.
How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?
The whole idea with the current structure is that it "meets in the middle" between national sovereignty and citizen representation.
I agree it's not a perfect system, and there is certainly a lot of opportunity for positive change (I would like to have some process for parliament to request legislation from the council. I would like more transparency in what the commission does), but to dismiss it as "undemocratic" makes no sense and is just repeating an uniformed rhetoric.
The fact that you think that the Commission represent the states members instead of the interest of the European Union shows how mess up and contradictory the system is. The Council is the body that represent the state members.
You probably think that, because the commission is composed by representatives of every country, but they are "bound by their oath of office to represent the interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state". That in itself is already contradictory. Those representatives are not elected officials but are the more powerful in the system.
The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. In not sane system, the executive branch is in charge of proposing legislation, because that make the all 'separation of powers' concept useless.
>>"How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?"
Well, or you give the parliament real legislative and budgetary powers or all the system is a farce and you should dissolve it. If you want to keep the interest of individual countries in the process you need another chamber, elected by the people, that would represent the national interests.
Not only the system is undemocratic but it's winning power. The European Council can sanction you because doesn't like what you are saying without any judicial supervision. The budget is used to blackmail countries that don't agree with the commission views. Even the European Central Bank was used for blackmailing Greece in the Debt crisis of 2011. If that's democracy, the word democracy has not meaning anymore.
The EU could be just a bunch of agreements between countries about commerce and freedom of movement. The EU could be a federation of states with proper institutions. What the EU should not be is a superstructure over member countries without proper democratic control. And this is what is now and going worst by the day.
If you are interested in a federation, you could have an American bicameral model, with the senate representing the countries interest (1).
The current path of the EU is, in my opinion, very worrisome. The important issues are decided in close doors. The Commission and the Council feel that they can 'sanction' citizens without judicial supervision. The countries that not play along are blackmailed. The Commission officials feel that they can speak for all Europe when most citizens disagree with what they are saying. They feel that they can block the public discourse that they don't like, and now they want total control of our communications.
So your ideal is the EU as a federation - i.e. the removal of domestic authority.
Can you give concrete examples of these "important issues" that are supposedly being decided behind closed doors?
What sanctions are you talking about that require judicial supervision? Pretty sure all EU states can issue their own sanctions without needing a court to approve them.
How exactly is the Commission blocking public discourse? What are they doing, and where is this happening?
The american system is the last one we should copy. EU is different, its not a nation, it is made up by nations. All your points reads mainly like you don't understand what EU is now and what it to be more like what you imagine it should be.
Also countries can not be blackmailed enough as the Hungary debacle clearly shows.
An empty justification, since a state has no interest apart from its citizen's interests.
I hope you agree that elected representation isn't perfect - there is going to be disalignment, ways in which representatives resemble each other more than they resemble their voters.
This disalignment can only get amplified with every layer of indirect election. It never gets better.
A states interests are long term and strategic. These aren't the same as an aggregation of citizens relatively short term interests, but should absolutely be influenced by them.
I totally agree with what you say about elected representation - but I am also thankful that decisions aren't made through direct democracy given that so many people are often dangerously uninformed and easily manipulated.
This in standard in europe. Most places don't vote for their PM or President either, they're just the leader of the largest party in parliament and chosen by parliament
Eh in a way, I can see both sides of the coin. On one hand if Fed governors didn't have independence, the inflation rate would make Venezuela look like a bastion of economic management. On the other hand, you end up with situations like this where the EC can just keep trying to force in poor policy.
The Fed has a pretty strict and narrow mandate and an even narrower toolset. They can't start coming up and imposing random laws and regulations (outside the banking sector) just because they want to...
The commissioners are a few but the people who make the actual bills and policies are clerks and bureaucrats who were never elected neither directly nor indirectly. And while the commissioners do change, the EU bureaucrats never change.
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda
->
Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does)
->
The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
Less industry, more small coalitions or special interest groups. Any number of things. To name a few factors
- ideaological. They truly believe this is the best choice, or are fixated only on this choice and nothing else. They are putting their money where their mouths are
- financial. Straightforward one. If they need a service to collect ID's and you can get a government contract, that's big, safe, money. Or a politician is bribed and doesn't care either way. Companies find loopholes to sell data and make even more money.
- power. You get a law passed, you get more leverage to being voted into politics, or maintaining your incumbency. You show you can "get things done"
You can always find something. There's always someone profiteering from anything and everything that politicians could possibly do.
Politicians demanding total surveillance and population control? Of course there's an industry or two for that. Are they lobbying for this stuff? Absolutely.
But what's the causality? That's the ideological question.
In my view, it's a bit too convenient to blame all political evils on capitalism. Power is its own aphrodisiac. Bigotry has no prerequisits. Neither does stupidity.
Better advertisement. Like for example this new bill pushed by Facebook in US about age verification by PC. It will create a universally available API of sorts, which any ad corpo can poll and get more private information about PC user.
Same with this Stazi 2.0 shit by EU. I'm sure the data produced will be either directly processed by some corpo having ad interests, or freely gifted to such corpos.
Is it? Stopping is a matter of ground swell support contacting representatives and saying "please don't". Enough people do it to enough receptive reps and they'll vote no.
Passing new ones that "you like" requires lawyers to write laws, get those laws in front of reps, get them to agree to try and pass it, stake some of their reputation on pushing it, get the ground swell to support it -- which might be difficult when the current law is "dont scan messages", you can easily say "hey dont scan anything! support that!" vs "hey scan somethings sometimes", cause many people will call that a slippery slope. I don't see how they are at all the same process.
Stopping legislation means organizing a sufficient number of no votes.
Passing it means organizing a sufficient number of yes votes.
They are the same process and they require exactly the same work. They take place at the exact same moment in time and space, although they are mutually exclusive.
You're free to describe things however you want, but your descriptions won't change the underlying reality.
Yup, just look at the USA. Despite all chambers being under one party, the executive cabinet is still choosing to bypass laws to force stuff. Because waiting for legislation o pass it legally is sill a higher barrier than smashing he rule of law.
> Yup, just look at the USA. Despite all chambers being under one party, the executive cabinet is still choosing to bypass laws to force stuff.
There's still no procedural difference between passing laws by executive fiat, repealing them by executive fiat, or ignoring them by executive fiat. The first of those things is called an "executive order" and the others are called "prosecutorial discretion", and the culture traditionally views authority exercised as an "executive order" negatively while viewing "prosecutorial discretion" positively, but in the implementation, "prosecutorial discretion" is commanded by executive orders (the documents) in the same way that "executive orders" (new legislation from the president) are.
If you want to get a new executive order issued, or an old one rescinded, or an incipient one forgotten, the process is the same (you convince the president) in all of those cases.
> Passing it means organizing a sufficient number of yes votes.
EU Parliament can't propose legislation, only vote on proposals from the Commission. We'd have to convince the Commission to propose a law to prevent themselves from trying to pass this bullshit over and over.
>Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
Maybe because the Commission holds the true power and the commissioners aren't directly elected by the people so you don't have any leverage against the commissioners. You can't just say "behave nicely or we won't support you at the next elections".
That's not true. The commission do the bidding of the Council or other elected national ministers. Re-posting my comment:
---
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
It is true though. He said "directly elected by the people" and they are obviously not. If we are being honest, the system where privileged few select other privileged few among themselves is called oligarchy.
What is true? There are many true statements that are meaningless in the context. The commission isn't elected is true. But understanding how they start working on laws is the context, and key to understanding why that doesn't really matter.
People don't want you to look deeper. They want you only have the most shallow understanding, because that allows them to manipulate more easily.
You kind of can, but you get to only vote for the full package i.e. the party which wins the national elections will get to appoint its own commissioner. Most people obviously only care about the domestic issues and likely will not change their vote regardless of what the appointed commissioner thinks or does.
Also curious, as much as the American amendments are problematic, they do at lease create a hard position on things. We are devolving into a space where I’m genuinely scared that the future will become entirely controlled by big money, and it will be too late to change it.
From my understanding Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is somewhat similar to US Constitution & amendments. Both do still allow government to restrict the freedoms granted by those in some situations though I do think the US Constitution does tend to set higher bar on the interference.
There have been EU laws which get struck down because they violated the Charter (e.g. Data Retention Directive).
Hopefully even if the worst comes to pass and the EU ends up enacting this law there are still the courts on the EU level and then the national governments and courts in countries where this type of surveillance is illegal can still decide to do whatever the want (i.e. national constitutions general take precedence over EU treaty obligations)
> toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
That's not something the "legislators" in the EU parliament can do. It's effectively a consultative body which can either approve or send back the legislation provided to them so the council and commision can find sufficient workarounds...
What would actually help is if a government of a country where this type of Stasi/KGB style surveillance is constitutionally illegal like Germany to speak out and tell the EU (and Denmark which keeps pushing this) that they can go fuck themselves and that they will prosecute any company which is trying to comply with these regulations. (which would be perfectly legal since constitution/basic laws still supersede any type of EU treaty obligations in most countries.
Fair play x775, I'm currently moving lots of EU and UK projects away from US-owned and/or sited infrastructure. There is a huge marketing push from the EU cloud providers to display their sovereign wares. Maybe us Europeans need to make them more aware of how futile it is to move to EU companies if there are laws equal-to or more pernicious than the US CLOUD Act? A dozen large EU tech companies will sadly exert more pressure on EU lawmakers than trying to explain to 500 million normal people how a law that looks like it will protect children is a smokescreen and terrible for civil liberties.
Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.
Sounds a lot like nagging [0] with some trick wording [1] in the nag.
I think the website is missing a dark pattern here, spray-and-pray, which is throwing as many reincarnations of the same thing as possible, hoping one eventually sticks.
Im no conservative, but I thought useres of this site were more intelligent than to throw massive negative stereotypes out about groups of millions of people.
There are luckily not millions of conservative politicians. Those we have right now do already enough damage.
The older ones who resigned when they fucked up, or had a moral compass seamed to have disappeared. Instead we have more and more "MAGA-Style"-Politics
Great work! There is maybe some bug. When you click on one of the 4 "opposing" countries (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland), it scrolls down and then shows that majority of the representatives from the country actually support it. Is that intended? Won't that make people from those countries "relax" even though they might have an impact by contacting their represenatives?
You are a beacon of hope man. Please, please, continue the good fight, we need you.
We keep seeing the establishment resurfacing and imposing this blanket surveillance globally. What's happening in Brazil, the UK, EU, and has already happened in the US with no legislation or via the 5-eyes is scary.
Who are these people pressuring elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats to legislate against their constituents? Who are these lobbyists?
I get that there is a large constituency that wants to control dissidents and the narrative in the name of child abuse - see what's happening in the UK where people get arrested in the thousands for posting comments online.
Abolishing privacy is not the way to protect children. Police work and prosecution is. For reference see the grooming gangs in the UK, the infamous Eps*% case for which everyone is still walking free, and other cases in various EU countries. This is not whataboutism, it's proof that we have not taken the required steps as a western society to combat this. You don't press the nuclear option as your first action.
If it's bot farm meddling that is the true target, then ban bots and get technology to work properly. Creating ID honeypots on poorly protected website operator servers is not the solution.
Call your politicians, call your EU MEPs, call everyone you can. This matters because it's about our future.
Can we start organizing a strike of tech workers already? Pretty please? Just say the word.
Maybe reach out to Signal to implement some kind of one-way channel so you can reach people easily?
We need to put actual pressure on those fascists. Next time they even mention it, we flood the council website with an identical search query, say "Does no mean yes after all?" and if they persist, we strike for couple days.
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
One of the reasons international human rights law is so worthless in actual practice, is that half of it is framed like this. "Everyone has the right to X, except as duly restricted by law." Cool, so that's not a right at all then.
Ditto the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its 'notwithstanding' clause. (Though they're presently litigating over that, so we'll see what happens!)
Any constitution or human rights instrument full of exemptions, 'emergency powers', 'notwithstanding' clauses, or 'states of exception' is not worth the paper it's written on.
Every contract I have to agree to these days has a "valid until unilaterally invalidated" clause. It feels like we're all just going through the motions.
That's why countries like Austria have enshrined the Human Rights Charter into constitutional law, meaning only other law at constitutional rank could potentially conflict with such clauses. You can get your own country to do it, too.
That is in fact the only way most laws work: freedom of movement, except if you’re arrested and detained in accordance with law. Freedom of speech except when you are falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater or slandering someone. In general all rights have exceptions carved out by law. And any way you carve that exception out (eg to cover those convicted of crimes) can be twisted by a legislature or judicial body that wants to act in bad faith.
(That’s not to say laws shouldn’t make a better attempt to circumscribe exceptions)
You're fuzzing the crucial distinction between well defined and narrowly tailored exemptions, which are of course normal, and these exemptions, which are complete blank cheques that effectively neuter the rule they attach to.
No laws are absolute, some laws are more holes than cheese, but a law that says "A government must not punish you for doing X, except in accordance with duly passed criminal laws that make X illegal" is almost entirely pointless. It exists solely to make people feel fuzzy when reading the first half of the sentence, which is the only part you'll ever hear quoted, while not actually impeding anything a government may wish to do to you. This is intentional. Those carte blanche exemptions do not consistently appear across international human rights treaties by some accident.
Even if the law included the literal phrase "Congress shall make no law" or "shall not be infringed", there would still be carve-outs and exceptions deemed acceptable and non-infringing because at the end of the day it's the government, and they'll do what they want, because who exactly is going to stop them?
Think about all the laws that aren't even attempted because they would be struck down. Or all the laws floated, but which don't pass because they'd be struck down. Or the laws modified so they won't be struck down.
I'm with you though - I think a lot of the constitution protections in the US have been watered down over the decades.
It doesn’t remove the “right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.” The law cannot be random, it must ensure “fair processing” and be limited to “specific purposes”, and the European Court of Justice as well as the ECHR will decide what constitutes a “legitimate basis” in that context. Furthermore, “Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her”, which ensures transparency of what is being collected.
Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.
Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...
Secrecy of correspondence doesn't necessarily only apply to physical letters as far as Constitutions go. In Finnish constitution it is defined as "The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable" meaning it also applies to any internet message.
Unfortunately large majority of parties in Finnish Parliament do not really care about that provision and have passed multiple laws which create exceptions to it. They do it via the proper protocol (which is essentially the same as modifying the Constitution itself) so it's technically legal.
Secrecy of correspondence still has exceptions. That's what is always lost in these discussions -- every right of every person is not absolute. Just because you have a right to personal property, doesn't mean you don't have to pay taxes or store nuclear material in your basement. That's the hard part.
But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute. It's a new thing and the balancers can't balance it against other rights of other people, so this happens.
> But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute
As it should be. Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around. Not click a button and have the lives of everyone in the entire world revealed to them.
The ends still have the decryption keys, so the result is the same as with a physical letter: you have to acquire the physical object holding the key material.
No, not any random law. To the extent the relevant law-making is within EU's competence (ie excluding certain areas like national security and similar), the general framework for rules on the processing of personal data has been laid down by the GDPR (and for law enforcement related stuff, a similar Directive[1]), in particular, considerably restricting, limiting and in part downright precluding national law-making within that legislative and policy area, including eg the legal bases available for in-scope processing activities (Art 6 GDPR, also Art 9 for certain sensitive data categories).
Anyway, as far as human/fundamental rights go, the encryption and related issues in Chat Control tend to fall more on the Article 7 side of the Charter[2] like many similar questions related to different forms of (mass) surveillance, secrecy / confidentiality of (electronic) communications, including related national regimes with often diverse jurisdiction-specific histories, etc.
[1] The main difference between a Directive and a Regulation under EU law is that a Directive requires implementation on the national level to work properly (ie national legislation, usually with some room for discretion and details here and there), while a Regulation is directly binding and effective law in member states wholly in itself.
[2] And similar/corresponding language in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the related case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While these are not EU institutions, European human rights law is recognized and applied as constitutional / fundamental rights-level law both by the EU and member state courts.
I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
The problem is, in all of those member states, they all have carve outs for "national security."
Germany, for exmaple, has secrecy of correspondence that extends to electronic communications, but allows for "restrictions to protect the free democratic basic order" and outlines when intelligence services can bypass the right to privacy.
Italy, France, and Polan also have similar carve outs.
Having it as a right isn't enough. National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
Rights are never absolute, they always have to be weighed against each other. The weighing can and should be debated, and needs strong protections when put into practice, but demanding an absolute is not reasonable.
I think the better way to phrase this against both relativism and absolutism is in the following way.
Rights are inherent to human nature, or they are nothing at all. If they could be granted by gov’t, then they can be taken away; they wouldn’t be rights. They allow individuals to fulfill their natural moral duties; you have a right to a good, because you have a prior obligation to pursue it. While the existence of these rights is universal and inalienable, their exercise is not absolute, as they are always limited by justice and the common good of the community. Because these rights are pre-political - they are not legal privileges; the state’s only legitimate role here is to recognize and protect what already exists by nature; any civil law that contradicts them is a perversion of justice rather than a binding law.
So…if privacy is a right (and I would say it is a derivative right, from more basic rights), then it does not follow that its scope is absolutely unrestrained. It’s not difficult to come up with examples where privacy is constrained or abrogated for this reason.
The trouble with broad privacy-violating measures is that they are sweeping in scope and unjustified, making them bad for the common good and a violation of a personal right. It is clearly motivated by technocratic design and desire for control, not the common good and the good of persons. Because it is unjustified, its institution is therefore opposed to reason. It effectively says that no vaild justification need exist. This is a voluntarist, tyrannical order.
The absolutist stance likes to claim that “having justification” is always how rights are violated, but this is wrongheaded. This is tantamount to claiming that we can’t tell a valid justification from an invalid one. But if that were true, then we are in much worse shape than such people suppose. If we cannot discern a valid justification from a bad one, then how can we have the capacity to discern when a right is being violated at all? Furthermore, it is simply not the case as a general political rule that gov’ts will violate rights if those rights are not absolute (which has never been the case anyway). The evidence does not support this thesis. And furthermore, if a gov’t wishes to violate a right, treating it as if it were an absolute doesn’t somehow prevent it from being violated. Some place too much faith in supposed structural elements of gov’t as ways to keep this from happening (like separation of powers), but there is nothing in principle to prevent these branches from cooperating toward such an end.
There are no absolute rights, even in the charter of human rights, which is about as basic as it gets. The reality is that every right, if regarded as absolute, violates another fundamental right, if regarded as absolute.
Take for example Article 3 of the declaration of human rights:
> Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
The article already has a collision set up in itself: You have the right to live in safety. But also, everyone has the right to live in liberty. If taken as an absolute, the right of liberty would prevent incarceration of dangerous individuals, violating the other individuals right to all life in safety.
Similarly, other fundamental rights get curtailed: The freedom of speech is in balance with the right to personal dignity of article one and other rights.
Not acknowledging that even fundamental human rights are in a tension with each other is just ignoring reality and will get you nowhere in a legal discussion.
The discussion is not which right is absolute, it is about how to balance the tension between the various rights. And different societies strike a different balance here.
Take for example the right to freedom and liberty. Lifelong imprisonment without parole as punishment is not a thing in Germany. There’s an instrument that allows the court to keep the perpetrator locked up in case the court considers the individual dangerous, but until 1998, this could not be retroactively be applied. There was a major legal upheaval with multiple rounds to the constitutional court to change that and it took until 2012/2013 to find a legal framework that wasn’t declared unconstitutional. To this day, however, Sicherheitsverwahrung is not a punishment, but a combination of therapy and ensuring the safety of society and it’s subject to regular checks if the conditions for the lockup still exist. The individuals are also not held in prisons, but in nicer facilities.
On the other hand, many US states still have the death penalty and are proud of it.
> The article already has a collision set up in itself
Yeah, because it's a made up self-contradictory notion with absolutely zero basis in reality. It's the people who believe in "rights" who are ignoring reality. Safety? The world is a dangerous place where you can be randomly killed if you take a wrong turn and no amount of "rights" is ever going to change that. Food and shelter? Simple economics are enough to defeat this, there isn't enough for everybody, rationing ensues almost immediately and suddenly you're forced to decide who's most "deserving" of these resources. Privacy? The FVEY get around it by spying on each other and sharing data because foreigners are always fair game. You can name virtually any right and the inherent contradictions in it are plain to see to anyone willing to go outside and see the world for what it actually is instead of what some "charter" says it should be.
It would be infinitely more honest if these governments simply decided to declare you guilty of whatever you're suspected of when they find your encrypted data. That's what they actually want to do. No need to engage in this song and dance about balancing "rights". If they did this, at least people would see things as they are instead of engaging in this constant abstraction in an attempt to rationalize and justify things by saying that you have the "right" to privacy but actually you don't when it's "in the interests of national security" for you to not have it. That sort of double speak is hazardous for my mental health and I'm tired of engaging in it.
So you’re saying there can be no worthwhile privacy protections as long as subpoenas and search warrants exist and it’s physically possible for someone to eavesdrop? I guess we might as well switch everything back to http.
The only worthwhile protections are those provided by mathematics. If you encrypt a message, then you can be sure not even god will read it. When a government gives you "protections" you can be sure of nothing.
I dunno; I think in practice an absolute sometimes shakes out just fine.
In this case, I see no reason that we would want to draft constitutional rights such that we consider a government's actions taken in pursuit of their national security to be, per se, legal — i.e. warranted, unable to be sued over, etc.
Imagine instead, a much weaker right granted to the state: the right to maintain laws or regulations which require/force government or military employees to do things that violate people's rights and/or the law of the land. But with no limit on liability. No grant of warrant. Just the mildest possible form of preservation: technically constitutional; and not immediately de-fanged the first time the Supreme Court gets their hands on it.
So, for example, some state might introduce a new law saying that soldiers can come to your house and confiscate your laptop. And then the head of that state might actually use that law to invade your home and take your laptop.
Given that the law exists, it would be legal for the head-of-state to give this order. And it would also be legal for the soldiers to obey this order (or to put it another way, court-martialable for the soldiers to disobey this order, since it's not an illegal order.)
But the actual thing that happened as a result of this law being followed, would be illegal — criminal theft! — and you would therefore be entitled to sue the state for damages about it. And perhaps, if it was still reporting on Find My or whatever, you might even be entitled to send police to whatever NSA vault your laptop is held in, to go get it back for you. (Where, unlike the state, those police do have a warrant to bust in there to get it. The state can't sue them for damages incurred while they were retrieving the laptop!)
The courts wouldn't be able to strike down the law (the national-security provision allows the state to declare it 'not un-constitutional", remember?); but since obeying the law produces illegal outcomes, you would be able to punish the government each and every time they actually use it. In as many ways as the state caused you and others harm through their actions.
There is absolutely zero reason why the state shouldn't be expected to "make people whole" for damages it has caused them, each and every time it does something against the people's interest in the name of national security.
And the simplest way to calculate that penalty / make the claiming and distribution of those rewards practical, would be to just not remove liability for these actions taken on behalf of the state, by not granting the state the right to do them in the first place. Just put them in the position of any other criminal, and force them to go to court to defend themselves.
"to protect the free democratic basic order", the irony.
It's incredible how even with the current surge of autocracy, most politicians can't see that the surveillance tools they crave for, could come under control of people much worse than them.
And can't see what they could do with them.
I think that many current governments in Europe are convinced that more surveillance will stop the autocratic surge. It's insane that they don't see how this is far from guaranteed, and how it will go if they're wrong.
>National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
This is overly absolutist, or maybe idealistic view. National security and public safety IS more important than individual right to privacy. As an extreme example, if your friend was dying, you had a password to my email, and you knew that you can use information in my inbox to save that person i really hope you would do it.
In general I think that police with a court order should be able to invade someone's privacy (with judge discretion). I mean they can already kick down someone's doors and detain them for several days - checking email doesn't sound too bad compared to it, does it? I think they should also be legally obliged to inform that person in let's say 6 months that they did it.
The problem is that modern world is drastically different than the old world when you needed to physically hunt down letters. Now you can mass scan everyone's emails, siphon terabytes of personal data that stasi could only dream of, and invigilate everyone. This is something that is worth fighting against.
> National security and public safety IS more important than individual right to privacy.
I disagree.
Because as soon as you open the door to governments reading your mail, they will read your mail. They can't help themselves. [0]
The only way of stopping them from doing this to excess is to stop them doing it at all.
The "National Security and Public Safety" thing is what they say to justify it, but that's not what the powers will actually be used for. They will actually be used for far less noble purposes, and possibly actually for evil.
We are actually much more secure if we don't let the government read our mail.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
> This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
Which is... okay? Government gonna government, that's what we pay it to do.
The Charter has been used by the courts to shoot down incoming legislation. So, in a way, those pieces of paper mean everything, as without them legislation would pass without the judiciary branch being a check on the Bloc’s powers. Your comment is merely cynical.
In theory these limit the power of the EU, while anything the EU parliament passes can just be undone as easily by a future EU parliament. If you don't believe the EU charter provides any protection, why would you believe an EU law would be any different?
In theory, governments are made up of citizens. In practice, once the citizens are corrupted into corporate shills, they become politicians. They have traded their humanity for business class seats and dining at restaurants that cater to those whose entire personality is talking about their investment portfolio.
Oh, please, stop this tired ‘victim of corrupt bureaucrats‘ framing.
People have real choice in EP elections. There are parties that will always stand up for citizens’ rights. If they had enough seats, they could have voted this item off the agenda.
Yet, people continue to choose the same conservatives and radical right over and over again, because they are enraged about immigrants and identity politics. Blame the voters.
Why continue with the increased migration that the majority of the population has generally opposed then? One could have avoided those discussion points.
Also what you group as the radical right doesn't tend to be supportive of this idea.
They full well know they are at times at the receiving end of web control legislation and drives atm. Same for 'radical left' groups.
It's the conservatives that at times make some fuzz about migration to draw votes from the former whilst keeping said migration going since it favours some of the companies they (and a load of other established parties) draw support from.
Yes, there's lots of blame to pass around; but the system does reward corporate psychopaths which leaves US citizens having to choose — as South Park aptly put it — between a douche and a turd sandwich.
There is a famous German comedian that invented a figure known as "The Kangaroo". It once said:
"Whether left-wing or right-wing terrorism – I see no difference there."
"Yes, yes," calls the kangaroo, "the ones set foreigners on fire, the others cars. And cars are worse, because it could have been mine. I don't own any foreigners."
Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.
And who exactly do you think elected the 'powers that be'? The issue is that voter turnout for EU parliamentary elections is awful in comparison to national elections, especially among more conservative voters - meaning that the political orientation between the parliament and commission is a little skewed.
Sure, but then you end up with stuff like this happening time and time again. If something doesn't pass the first time, put it through again, and again.
The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
> a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
With a server on the other side of a geopolitical conflict (actual conflict, not a mere discontinuity in legalscape) you trade a risk of the government reading your chats for a risk of the same government (which you don't trust for a good reason) locking you up for treason and espionage.
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
Yeah so this is about CC 1.0 (which already exists)
While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying
The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
Could be a wordplay due to the fact "invigilation" can be translated to and from the Polish word with a _very_ heavy and long connotations to the USSR state surveillance, oppression and abuse.
Surveillance would be a more "modern" (even if more natural or seemingly correct word), without this sort of the implied baggage.
If we are talking about freedom fighters, Polish freedom fighters/struggles are second most influential to me after my own country especially because of Witold Pilecki.
I once wrote a paper about Witold pilecki for my english project for who I consider to be the most influential person or something similar.
I picked Witold pilecki because I had read a book which talked about him and it captured so much of my mind.
For those who don't know, Witold Pilecki is a polish person who was the first and perhaps only person who willingly entered holocaust/auschwitz and then he was the first person to realize all the horrors happening inside, He then used washing machine parts (iirc) to send the signal to the allies, who COULDN'T believe what Pilecki said was happening. The amounts of Atrocities they thought wasn't possible.
When he found out that help wasn't coming, He decided to free himself and He accomplished doing that by taking a job at something bread related who then ends up leaving.
He then married an Polish teacher (iirc) and had kids but after Russia had won over Polish, he was fake trialed and he was falsely accused of treason.
His last words were, "I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy, than fear."
On a personal level, when I was writing that project and this line, I genuinely believe that this might be one of the most influential lines to me that I have ever heard which has genuinely influenced me.
It was during this project that I found Sabaton from trying to research about Witold pilecki and found so many gems that Sabaton is quite part of my music taste now :-)
I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation. I am sure that Poland might have flaws too but I do believe that its history is quite rich and something to be quite proud of.
I am surprised not more people know about Witold Pilecki but I hope I am doing my part raising awareness about that hero.
Within my country, some of the revolutionaries which feel influential on such level to me feel most importantly Bhagat Singh, Subash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad. These are also people who have influenced me.
There is also the story of how an Indian ruler hosted Polish WWII refugees[0] and helped them within his kingdom, which I am not sure if many Polish know.
While I was writing this comment, I discovered a good song about Indian revolutionaries as well which I feel like sharing too: Krantiveer (Revolutionary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXZG0pTxME [Turn the subtitles (on)]
I think my point can be summarized by a quote from Subash chandra bose, that freedom is not given, it is taken.
Thanks for sharing that!
I actually know very little of Pilecki, because I was mostly hearing about him from far-right teachers & I have an allergy to personality cults.
Ironically I've spend a lot of time reading about Gandhi .
But I will read more on him, and also about the 3 revolutionaries you mentioned.
> I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation.
We're in this weird limbo in Poland, all the patriotic stuff has been hijacked by the virtue signaling (far)right and the centrists and left didn't bother to fight for it (even though all the remaining veterans of Warsaw Uprising were protesting the takeover).
I am proud, but it takes an actual effort to remind myself, that a real thing exists below the surface layer of daily politics...
It's sort of sad to see that Pilecki has been used by far-right teachers for their own cult as you mention because Pilecki fought against the fascism of both the german far right (Hitler/Concentration camps) and Russia (Stalin) at the time.
> Ironically I've spend a lot of time reading about Gandhi .
> But I will read more on him, and also about the 3 revolutionaries you mentioned.
Indian revolutionaries can be divided into two parts for the most part, some wanted peaceful changes and some wanted change through actions. The 3 I mentioned are revolutionaries within the second aspect.
I am personally not a big fan of gandhi given his personal history and controversies, but I am a fan of the satyagrah movement and the people who participated in them like gaffar khan,sarojini naidu and our second prime minister, lal bahadur shastri.
Within the satyagrah movement, I am particularly a fan of Shastri Ji as he might've been the humblest prime minister of our country and he was closely linked to the satyagrah movement, when our nation was going through a acute food crisis, he asked his wife while being the PM of the nation to not make food one time (so only 2 times) as he could only urge the people of the nation to do the same if he and his family could do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eauajC1U0X8, Here is one of the rare interviews he did outside of India as he was very focused in the nation himself. This might be the reason that many outsiders dont know him whereas gandhi used to travel quite frequently (as far as I can remember)
I also recommend watching a more personal movie about gandhi and his relation with family called "Gandhi, my father", its available on Youtube for free. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7jcXv5MwMU) which shows the troubled history gandhi had with his son
My thoughts on gandhi are a little nuanced. He was good for the nation in the movements but his personal life was also controversial and its best to view him as such and view both his flaws and positives about peacefulness in a more holistic manner while also taking a look at all the other people within the satyagrah movement like Shastri Ji for example and also people who sacrificed their lives for the nation like Bhagat Singh in hopes for a freed India.
> We're in this weird limbo in Poland, all the patriotic stuff has been hijacked by the virtue signaling (far)right and the centrists and left didn't bother to fight for it (even though all the remaining veterans of Warsaw Uprising were protesting the takeover).
if I have to comment on Indian politics right now, I would say that the media is at its weakest and feels very fake at times that independent channels are usually the ones only left if you want nuance. India's far right feels more religious rather than economical to me because economically, the far right is still having "freebies" but in some sense, they help the poor. Its the middle class which struggles a bit within India (I am from middle class :[ ) but overall, I am a bit happy in how our country is handling its geopolitics (India feels unique in the sense of its a friend of both Iran and Israel, a friend of both Us and russia, our only enemies are probably Pakistan and China and Pakistan is in a bit of quarrel with Afghanistan and isn't so much of a threat as China is, which is realisticly the only genuine threat that I can feel towards India)
It's a very unique country for the most part. I have written quite a lot about India on hackernews, so feel free to search it on algolia[0]
I do feel like India is an land of co-existence with both Human and animals as well. We all have our flaws but our diversity and heritage is truly rich and I hope that India can uplift itself in the future even more.
It is great to hear though of how each of our culture impacts the other. How polish culture/Witold pilecki influences my Morals and how on the other hand you are also interested within the Indian culture while at the same time we are both proud of the base realities of both nations but also realize its flaws and hope to improve nations.
I wish for Poland to have a great future ahead :-)
Edit: I also recommend reading about Lal Bal Pal and the radical movement if you are interested to know about the anti-colonial movement within India as well whose combined with all of the nationalists that I have mentioned within the list ultimately led to the independence of India.
It's simply not possible. EU law has no provisions for kicking a malignant country out. It was simply not foreseen. They can only decide to leave themselves. Which orban will never do because his oligarchs make billions off EU subsidies.
They cannot make them leave the EU, no. But Hungary can be:
- kicked out of the Schengen Treaty
- kicked out of the NATO
- fined under EU breach of contract proceedings
- withheld financial support as long as they do not pay these fines
- forced through customs policy, which is sole EU competence, to stop compensating lost EU support with Chinese money
Honestly, I'd be in full support of some above listed actions if the elections in April show the current will of the Hungarian people misaligned with shared EU values.
They do regularly withhold financial support for them, but it doesn't seem to be too effective, usually they just get it back in return for not crossing the EU on some other topic.
I do think we should make work of kicking them out somehow if Peter Magyar does not win the next elections indeed.
I would like to share here that the author of this site made it very easy to call. If you read this and are in the EU, I urge you to try this.
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!
We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems (which are often the fault of the EU and our socialist, collectivist tendencies)
Lots of places are socialist or collectivist and have a different set of problems, so the argument that EU problems can be solely attributed to that don't make sense.
I'm also not sure "collectivist" is the correct label. We can't describe Japan (and the PRC, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, a couple other SEasian nations) and the EU as both collectivist, considering Japan is the far more extreme version of it (I would say, only Japan is collectivist, not the EU). One or the other needs a different word.
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
Might be a different social circle, but I have not met a single European in my entire life of living in Europe who would blame Donald Trump or the US in general for the problems that we are currently facing. It doesn't take a genius to summarize that trans-continental geopolitics is much more complex than that
I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
I was reading an essay by Kant called “what is Enlightenment?” It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
What Kant, Locke or Hobbes imagined has only little to do with current societal environment. Our politics and structures are global and the age of internet has mixed it even more. The religions and christianity especially tried to control everything was said under their hemisphere by controlling who could print books or distribute them.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
EU is not a government for all EU members. You should look into what EU is and how it works before attacking it. Claiming that it's "ultra national" would mean that all of EU is one nation which shares one ideological, cultural and political sphere. There are 27 EU members with 24 official languages, 20 of those countries are part of the Euro currency zone.
But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.
Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
As an EU citizen, I'm happy that the parliament has once again rejected the proposal, which at least gives credence to the notion that it not just there to rubber-stamp what the commission decides.
But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
As an EU citizen I hate this but I know it‘s a „when?“ not an „if“ topic.
I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.
But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.
Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.
I don't think dismissing anyone as an agitproppist or foreign agent who expresses a dim view of the EU's tendency toward overreach and habit of asking the same question over and over until it's answered "correctly" is fair. Not when McCarthy did it, and not today. And I can promise you that nobody's paying me to post online, anyway!
That's the problem with electing too many people with law background to a parliament: They think it's a Model United Nations session and if they can get things their way despite many real world consequences, they celebrate with joy as our governance becomes literally ungovernable.
I think that’s a real problem now. In our parliament (Czech) almost every politician is a lawyer or a doctor. Almost no other profession is represented.
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
They never quit.
They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar.
The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
what still is important though, is to look into who is meeting with them, lobbying them, and how they profit from what they're doing personally.
this last part may just be my own bias in observing politicians, but I rarely feel like the top politicians in the EU (or any of their member states really) push for things they themselves actually care about or believe is right "for the people".
I'm happy that the Netherlands is still against this. Our currently largest party (D66) was also always pretty strong on privacy. When I contacted them some time back (I think using this initiative), they ensured me that they remained against, but did feel that something must be done (ok fair enough).
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
The same way you can't send money to the best Korea and watch porn on youtube.
There is a long chain of actions that ends with you having e2e on your phone (or what not). At the starts of it there is your physical body living in jurisdiction and transacting with (mostly) other people being somewhat present in the same jurisdiction using government-captured money. There are multiply choke points, controlling which will not result in 100% enforcement, but will make whatever you want to do a huge pain in the ass, so most people will not bother (case in point -- jailbraking). Whoever is left self-selects themselves for selective enforcement.
I am not sure I follow. I can't watch porn on YT because YT decides not to host it. But I can absolutely use a VPN and access porn in a jurisdiction that does not block it. I can also, and in fact do, encrypt my hard drives. Even China can't reliably prevent communication over private encrypted networks or services hosted overseas.
I am not oblivious to the intent behind this push, but even if you focus solely on the technicalities the idea falls apart. Even with only client-side verification this will be a big privacy intrusion. I see current AI's flag prompts for the most stupid reasons for using words that might possibly occur in non-safe contexts too. The human experience is just too complex for a machine to understand.
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
regulation doesn't hinder innovation as long as it is equally enforced on everyone competing in the regulated market. it does hinder powerful and rich individuals from making more profit at the cost of the rights of the average population
Which law are you talking about? Genuine question, because I know about EU laws that are "in the name of privacy" and about those that (arguably) "hinder innovation", but I don't know which one fits both
It seems the vote passed [1], meaning the existing Regulation [(EU) 2021/1232] was _extended_ until August 3 2027, with some amendments to the previous text:
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
It's really hard to not become a euroskeptic, despite being involved with so many EU related things from my youth to now in which I believed wholeheartedly, but this is just... I know - they just need to win once, we need to win every time.
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
Not really. Looking at Polish MPs for example, there's no clear pattern, rather a "healthy" mix from all parties with some random selection of opposing ones.
The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.
Curious how they plan to handle encrypted attachments — scanning has to happen either before encryption (client-side) or after decryption (server-side). If E2EE is preserved end-to-end, there's literally no point in the pipeline where a third party can scan without the client's cooperation. So either E2EE breaks, or the law is unenforceable by design.
Let the damn politicans go first and make all their private messages public. Yes everything from boring I'm stuck in traffic honey over nudes to insider trading and lobbying.
I love this. These are the same people who create think tanks and "international courts" to point fingers at "third world" countries for "authoritarianism," "freedom of speech."
Do your part- photograph your ass every day, send the pictures to your representative and EU parliament member.. they need to know. Volunteer the knowledge they crave.
Few days ago we had a guy explaining to us at the top of hn page that we should migrate data to europe. Sometimes I miss the internet of before mass surveillance abd ads everywhere
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
Being able to make this policy choice in either direction is in fact an example of digital sovereignty. We just don't like what the sovereign has decided this time.
it's probably best to go with client-side encryption and share keys with friends privately. that pretty much fixes all the privacy issues after the initial registration, but maintaining that extension with all the company and their updates is a bit of a headache.
They should just ask the Americans. If you are not a US citizen you have zero rights, and any old creep in Silicon Valley can riffle through your personal information with impunity.
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...
oh no, they had to resign from their government jobs and in a year will work in the private sector as consultants for double the salary, those poor souls :'(
prison, fines, mental asylum, whatever would be an actual consequence.
a bit hyperbolic and reactionary from my side, maybe. but you get the gist.
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena support it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problematic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
An encrypted message has never sexually violated and traumatized a child, but I'd bet good money that many politicians have. So, it's quite apparent what we need to protect children from in my opinion.
Are you suggesting something about powerful pedophiles fucking kids in Caribbean and being carried there through Lolita express? That sounds like a conspiracy right? Right?
United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan
But it doesn't change the fact of the matter that in English (and not only English! German, too, as demonstrated), these words have different meanings.
I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
And that means only they can support it? This isn't the USA, there's no 2 party system where everything "we" do is good and everything "the other side" does is bad.
I'm not saying only they support it, nor do I believe most groupings in the EU are "good". I'm only saying the ones currently working on overturning the parliament vote are the Conservatives, seeing how they're the ones trying to force a revote.
European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
The "voluntary" scanning is still mass surveillance of private messages. We as technologist tend to rely on technical methods to protect our private data. But non-technical people should also enjoy confidential communication, even if they don't actively protect their conversations.
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
Is that fair? Ireland should surely have a say the same way Germany does in parliament too, if it's affecting Ireland just as much. If one considers countries as units.
I get it.. my question wasn't exactly what I meant to ask. I meant isn't there some kind of compensating factor. So that a country with a 100 million doesn't completely and utterly outshine a small country of 4 million, even in the parliament?
Or is the idea that the Council is sufficient to achieve this?
I actually think the Council is more than sufficient to achieve this, we kind of see the opposite problem way more.
Hungary, a country of 9M people, keeps vetoing stuff the rest of the Union wants to do. 450M people, held back by the despot ruling over a tiny fraction of them.
Yes it's fair that it has more to a degree, but North Dakota can't have literally proportional since it will completely swallowed up on Congress. How does this work in the US?
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
And many people here clearly have memory of a goldfish. Chat control (in its different phases) has been brought up and promoted by both conservative\liberal and social democratic factions of the EU parliament. The fact that this time it was EPP that put forward the vote does not mean that just conservatives are the ones pushing for chat control. This is all a fantasy.
Politics is about understanding things in a historical context, not about the last flashy headline and 2-line tweets.
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
>2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:
>by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security.
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
One reason to downvote it is because laws having some stability is generally a good thing. It also doesn’t prevent laws being passed that strengthen the right to privacy.
The argument is a too simplistic criticism of the legislative process. And it’s independent from criticizing the actual laws that are attempted to be passed. It applies equally to desirable and undesirable laws.
In that case the down-voters could have replied with something like that instead of knee-jerk-pressing that down-vote arrow in an attempt to get rid of a dissenting opinion. I would have responded by pointing out that the repeated attempts at pushing through laws which are clearly unwanted by the voting public has no stabilising effect and only undermines the trust in the legislative process. That my argument of 'they can try as often as they wish because they only have to win once while we have to win every time' is not simplistic but realistic.
I would be interested to hear your reasoning behind that statement by the way, in what way is it 'simplistic'? Why should it be acceptable for politicos to keep on attempting to push through unwanted laws while it is clearly not allowed for e.g. commercial entities to keep on pestering you with unwanted offers? Here's the very same EU on the subject [1]:
Persistent unwanted offers
Under EU law, companies may not make persistent and unwanted offers to you by telephone, fax, e mail or any other media suitable for distance selling.
I propose a similar law for politicos:
Persistent unwanted law proposals
Under EU law, politicians may not make persistent attempts to push through law proposals which have been voted down several times before.
The law text needs to make clear that it is not allowed to keep on trying to push through essentially identical law proposals which have been voted down by $X sessions of the EU parliament. After having been voted down $X times there is a mandatory moratorium of $Y years before a similar law can be brought up to the vote again.
> Why should it be acceptable for politicos to keep on attempting to push through unwanted laws
Think about what would happen if it was somehow prohibited to propose “sufficiently similar” laws again. Opposing parties would start gaming that rule by proposing the weakest flawed version possible for a law, so that it is rejected, which will in consequence prevent a better version of it from being admissible for consideration. Factions being in the majority will proactively propose and reject some laws just in case that, in the next legislative period, other factions gain majority. Similarly, minority factions will be discouraged from even proposing any laws, for fear of canceling future chances when they are rejected. Furthermore, who will judge what is “similar enough” to fall under the rule? Politicians will just start playing games to make it just dissimilar enough to go through.
Sometimes you downvote things because they are so obviously amiss that they aren’t even worth discussing. I understand that it can be frustrating if you don’t think they are amiss, but that’s just how it is.
Well, no, that is not a realistic scenario. If a law like the one I propose was in place it would be up to the politicos to make sure their law proposals would be up to snuff before they put them up for a vote in the knowledge that they could not keep on adjusting a line here, changing a word there to finally have it pass. If the proposed law is relatively uncontroversial it will pass the vote. If it is totally abysmal it won't pass. If it is debatable it will be debated. That is the political process as it was meant to be: come up with solutions to problems.
The whole spiel about 'majority' and 'minority' factions is not relevant here, what matters is whether the laws they propose stand a chance of gaining enough votes to pass. Assuming that the parliament is representative of the voter base - and that is a very big assumption - it can be stated that laws which are voted down are voted down because the people - the dèmos in other words - don't want those laws to be passed.
Do you think it is a good thing to have more laws on the books? If so I do not agree. I'd rather have fewer laws, the fewer the better. Regulate those things which need to be regulated, leave the rest to the people. It is up to the people to decide what needs to be regulated, not to those who have based their careers around regulation. There's a big conflict of interest between the needs of the former and those of the latter which has been tipped towards those of the latter in heavily bureaucratic institutions like the EU. I'd like to see the balance tip more towards the needs of the people, not the bureaucrats.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is widespread in Europe. Quality of life has gotten so bad and continuous to decline except for mainly Poland and Hungary.
And what do systems cling to especially in situations like these? Surveillance.
Another massive not so funny joke once again hit Germany the week ago - a smear campaign and hit piece to justify even more censorship.
Germany is going down the drain - and the elite is trying to silence freedom of speech massively while ignoring doing what’s important and what’s right.
Have fun migrating your app to the EU. No one is coming to save you especially not your shitty infrastructure. Energy crisis, and devs think it is a good idea to go for 2% uptime in the near future.
Yes, yes, let's all rally around the free speech haven that is Hungary, which only five short years ago banned "the discussion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, the media, advertising, and other public places."
Let's all take this person extremely seriously, as they are advocating for free speech.
I am the creator of Fight Chat Control.
Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
Happy to answer any questions.
[0] https://mepwatch.eu/10/vote.html?v=188578
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/OJQ-10-2026-03...
[3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2026-03-...
You're doing God's work mate.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.
The EP has the right to make amendments to proposed legislation, its not simply a yes no vote.
In fact what is described as "Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement" is exactly the EP voting to amend the Commission proposal on an extension of existing itermim rules with text that explicitly limits the scope.
The Commission consists of the Member States. So obviously they are also voted-in parties since the government of the Member States is democratically elected
The first level democracy itself is a farce - coalition governments run by parties the majority doesn't want, MP seat allocations under ridiculous non-representative rules, campaign programs and pre-election promises broken all the time, 4 or 5 years of politicians left unchecked with no in-between recourse like referendums and assessments except to vote someone else next year, and that's without taking into account the mega-business interests sponsoring and controlling them.
Once removed even from that, the E.C. second level democracy is beyond a farce.
True but it's a step removed. The MEPs are directly voted in whilst the EC are not, they're "voted in" on account of "voted in" people assigning them to the EC.
I mean nobody argues that the FED governor is voted in, right? In reality a lot of people argue that they're unelected and yet making decisions that affect everyone.
The European Commission represents the interests of the member states, while the European Parliament represent the interests of the citizens. NO LAW CAN PASS without the consent of the citizens directly elected representatives. There is no "pushing through".
If you don't like how you are represented at the commission, then blame your government. It is THEIR representative - not yours.
Also, don't forget that the commission as a whole needs to be approved by a vote at European Parliament - i.e. by the directly elected representatives.
No, the European Council is suppose to represent the interest of the member states. The European Commission is suppose to be the executive of the European Union. Translating to the USA system, it would be like saying that the White House is suppose to represent the USA states. No, It's suppose to represent the interest of Europe as an entity.
Any introduction to democracy explains that the power is separated in the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
The European Parliament is suppose to be the legislative body but can't initiate legislation.
The Commission is suppose to be the executive, but, somehow can also initiate legislation and is not elected directly by the citizens. And the council that, I suppose would be the equivalent to a senate, is not directly elected by the citizens.
And we could talk about how all the important decisions are done in the dark, or how, like in this case, when something is not 'correctly' voted, they just keep bringing it back until it pass, or how they have started to 'sanction' people without judicial supervision.
It's time to open the eyes, because this is not going to improve. The EU 'democracy' is a joke.
No, this is a discussion about the "unelected" European Commission. I haven't mentioned the European Council because it is irrelevant.
The European Commission is formed of representatives of the individual states. They are NOT representatives of the citizens, other than by proxy.
YOUR government can request that THEIR representative raise or support legislation among the commission. If you have a problem with your countries representative at the commission then take that up with your government.
Proposals being "brought back" for discussion in some form is just a part of legislation. It happens EVERYWHERE - not just at the EU level.
Sanctions are proposed through the commission because it is a consensus of state government foreign policy.
How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?
The whole idea with the current structure is that it "meets in the middle" between national sovereignty and citizen representation.
I agree it's not a perfect system, and there is certainly a lot of opportunity for positive change (I would like to have some process for parliament to request legislation from the council. I would like more transparency in what the commission does), but to dismiss it as "undemocratic" makes no sense and is just repeating an uniformed rhetoric.
The fact that you think that the Commission represent the states members instead of the interest of the European Union shows how mess up and contradictory the system is. The Council is the body that represent the state members.
You probably think that, because the commission is composed by representatives of every country, but they are "bound by their oath of office to represent the interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state". That in itself is already contradictory. Those representatives are not elected officials but are the more powerful in the system.
The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. In not sane system, the executive branch is in charge of proposing legislation, because that make the all 'separation of powers' concept useless.
>>"How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?"
Well, or you give the parliament real legislative and budgetary powers or all the system is a farce and you should dissolve it. If you want to keep the interest of individual countries in the process you need another chamber, elected by the people, that would represent the national interests.
Not only the system is undemocratic but it's winning power. The European Council can sanction you because doesn't like what you are saying without any judicial supervision. The budget is used to blackmail countries that don't agree with the commission views. Even the European Central Bank was used for blackmailing Greece in the Debt crisis of 2011. If that's democracy, the word democracy has not meaning anymore.
So your proposal is to remove the input from the individual state governments and make it entirely citizen led?
Wouldn't that make it a government and remove the sovereignty of the individual states?
Not saying thats a bad idea - its just the exact opposite of the usual "undemocratic" rhetoric.
The EU could be just a bunch of agreements between countries about commerce and freedom of movement. The EU could be a federation of states with proper institutions. What the EU should not be is a superstructure over member countries without proper democratic control. And this is what is now and going worst by the day.
If you are interested in a federation, you could have an American bicameral model, with the senate representing the countries interest (1).
The current path of the EU is, in my opinion, very worrisome. The important issues are decided in close doors. The Commission and the Council feel that they can 'sanction' citizens without judicial supervision. The countries that not play along are blackmailed. The Commission officials feel that they can speak for all Europe when most citizens disagree with what they are saying. They feel that they can block the public discourse that they don't like, and now they want total control of our communications.
(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress
So your ideal is the EU as a federation - i.e. the removal of domestic authority.
Can you give concrete examples of these "important issues" that are supposedly being decided behind closed doors?
What sanctions are you talking about that require judicial supervision? Pretty sure all EU states can issue their own sanctions without needing a court to approve them.
How exactly is the Commission blocking public discourse? What are they doing, and where is this happening?
The american system is the last one we should copy. EU is different, its not a nation, it is made up by nations. All your points reads mainly like you don't understand what EU is now and what it to be more like what you imagine it should be.
Also countries can not be blackmailed enough as the Hungary debacle clearly shows.
An empty justification, since a state has no interest apart from its citizen's interests.
I hope you agree that elected representation isn't perfect - there is going to be disalignment, ways in which representatives resemble each other more than they resemble their voters.
This disalignment can only get amplified with every layer of indirect election. It never gets better.
A states interests are long term and strategic. These aren't the same as an aggregation of citizens relatively short term interests, but should absolutely be influenced by them.
I totally agree with what you say about elected representation - but I am also thankful that decisions aren't made through direct democracy given that so many people are often dangerously uninformed and easily manipulated.
> An empty justification, since a state has no interest apart from its citizen's interests.
Sometimes a government only cares about a few citizens, or in some cases one citizen.
>The European Commission represents the interests of the member states, while the European Parliament represent the interests of the citizens.
Both represent the interests of themselves, the unelected bureucracy, and the elites.
This in standard in europe. Most places don't vote for their PM or President either, they're just the leader of the largest party in parliament and chosen by parliament
Wait but the commission is assembled by the PMs / presidents… so it’s elected by people who were elected by people who elect.
Generally a lot of people do vote for the PM i.e. chose the party to vote for based on it's leader(s)
Oh, if unelected officials is the standard, that's fine then. Move along.
[flagged]
The one who uses foul language and personal attacks is the one who always loose. Even if they don't see it themselves, others do notice.
No, but I vote for the Prime Minister. I don't vote for the European Commissioner or the President of the Council.
What's idiotic is presenting these are the same.
You don't vote for Prime Minister. Either Parliament votes for a Prime Minister or your country messed up the translation of President.
You don't de jure vote for a Prime Minister but you de facto do so. Please, don't pretend to be obtuse.
I pay just as much attention to the prime ministerial candidate as the Commission presidential candidate. Both are blatantly obvious per party.
If what you really mean is that you don't follow EU level politics, just say so.
As it should be.
It's good that both the US Fed Reserve Governor and EC appointees didn't have win popularity contests to get there.
You argue that people electing officials who make policies affecting those people is bad?
Very, very bad. Have you seen the quality of politicians today?
Eh in a way, I can see both sides of the coin. On one hand if Fed governors didn't have independence, the inflation rate would make Venezuela look like a bastion of economic management. On the other hand, you end up with situations like this where the EC can just keep trying to force in poor policy.
The Fed has a pretty strict and narrow mandate and an even narrower toolset. They can't start coming up and imposing random laws and regulations (outside the banking sector) just because they want to...
Worth noting they have a strong incentive to grow payroll, which currently stands at 25,000-ish.
The commissioners are a few but the people who make the actual bills and policies are clerks and bureaucrats who were never elected neither directly nor indirectly. And while the commissioners do change, the EU bureaucrats never change.
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
Because we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do. You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
> You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
What does industry gain from new laws here?
Less industry, more small coalitions or special interest groups. Any number of things. To name a few factors
- ideaological. They truly believe this is the best choice, or are fixated only on this choice and nothing else. They are putting their money where their mouths are
- financial. Straightforward one. If they need a service to collect ID's and you can get a government contract, that's big, safe, money. Or a politician is bribed and doesn't care either way. Companies find loopholes to sell data and make even more money.
- power. You get a law passed, you get more leverage to being voted into politics, or maintaining your incumbency. You show you can "get things done"
You can always find something. There's always someone profiteering from anything and everything that politicians could possibly do.
Politicians demanding total surveillance and population control? Of course there's an industry or two for that. Are they lobbying for this stuff? Absolutely.
But what's the causality? That's the ideological question.
In my view, it's a bit too convenient to blame all political evils on capitalism. Power is its own aphrodisiac. Bigotry has no prerequisits. Neither does stupidity.
Better advertisement. Like for example this new bill pushed by Facebook in US about age verification by PC. It will create a universally available API of sorts, which any ad corpo can poll and get more private information about PC user.
Same with this Stazi 2.0 shit by EU. I'm sure the data produced will be either directly processed by some corpo having ad interests, or freely gifted to such corpos.
> Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
That's just more lobbying. Politics needs less money involved, not more.
> we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do
These are literally the same process.
Is it? Stopping is a matter of ground swell support contacting representatives and saying "please don't". Enough people do it to enough receptive reps and they'll vote no.
Passing new ones that "you like" requires lawyers to write laws, get those laws in front of reps, get them to agree to try and pass it, stake some of their reputation on pushing it, get the ground swell to support it -- which might be difficult when the current law is "dont scan messages", you can easily say "hey dont scan anything! support that!" vs "hey scan somethings sometimes", cause many people will call that a slippery slope. I don't see how they are at all the same process.
Stopping legislation means organizing a sufficient number of no votes.
Passing it means organizing a sufficient number of yes votes.
They are the same process and they require exactly the same work. They take place at the exact same moment in time and space, although they are mutually exclusive.
You're free to describe things however you want, but your descriptions won't change the underlying reality.
> You're free to describe things however you want, but your descriptions won't change the underlying reality.
You should be delivering this advice to your nearest mirror.
It's far far easier to tear down than to build.
Yup, just look at the USA. Despite all chambers being under one party, the executive cabinet is still choosing to bypass laws to force stuff. Because waiting for legislation o pass it legally is sill a higher barrier than smashing he rule of law.
> Yup, just look at the USA. Despite all chambers being under one party, the executive cabinet is still choosing to bypass laws to force stuff.
There's still no procedural difference between passing laws by executive fiat, repealing them by executive fiat, or ignoring them by executive fiat. The first of those things is called an "executive order" and the others are called "prosecutorial discretion", and the culture traditionally views authority exercised as an "executive order" negatively while viewing "prosecutorial discretion" positively, but in the implementation, "prosecutorial discretion" is commanded by executive orders (the documents) in the same way that "executive orders" (new legislation from the president) are.
If you want to get a new executive order issued, or an old one rescinded, or an incipient one forgotten, the process is the same (you convince the president) in all of those cases.
> Passing it means organizing a sufficient number of yes votes.
EU Parliament can't propose legislation, only vote on proposals from the Commission. We'd have to convince the Commission to propose a law to prevent themselves from trying to pass this bullshit over and over.
>Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
Maybe because the Commission holds the true power and the commissioners aren't directly elected by the people so you don't have any leverage against the commissioners. You can't just say "behave nicely or we won't support you at the next elections".
That's not true. The commission do the bidding of the Council or other elected national ministers. Re-posting my comment: ---
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
It is true though. He said "directly elected by the people" and they are obviously not. If we are being honest, the system where privileged few select other privileged few among themselves is called oligarchy.
What is true? There are many true statements that are meaningless in the context. The commission isn't elected is true. But understanding how they start working on laws is the context, and key to understanding why that doesn't really matter.
People don't want you to look deeper. They want you only have the most shallow understanding, because that allows them to manipulate more easily.
You kind of can, but you get to only vote for the full package i.e. the party which wins the national elections will get to appoint its own commissioner. Most people obviously only care about the domestic issues and likely will not change their vote regardless of what the appointed commissioner thinks or does.
Also curious, as much as the American amendments are problematic, they do at lease create a hard position on things. We are devolving into a space where I’m genuinely scared that the future will become entirely controlled by big money, and it will be too late to change it.
From my understanding Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is somewhat similar to US Constitution & amendments. Both do still allow government to restrict the freedoms granted by those in some situations though I do think the US Constitution does tend to set higher bar on the interference.
There have been EU laws which get struck down because they violated the Charter (e.g. Data Retention Directive).
Hopefully even if the worst comes to pass and the EU ends up enacting this law there are still the courts on the EU level and then the national governments and courts in countries where this type of surveillance is illegal can still decide to do whatever the want (i.e. national constitutions general take precedence over EU treaty obligations)
The future you fear is already here, sorry.
> toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
That's not something the "legislators" in the EU parliament can do. It's effectively a consultative body which can either approve or send back the legislation provided to them so the council and commision can find sufficient workarounds...
What would actually help is if a government of a country where this type of Stasi/KGB style surveillance is constitutionally illegal like Germany to speak out and tell the EU (and Denmark which keeps pushing this) that they can go fuck themselves and that they will prosecute any company which is trying to comply with these regulations. (which would be perfectly legal since constitution/basic laws still supersede any type of EU treaty obligations in most countries.
Passing legislation is harder. It should absolutely be the goal but it can't be passed if there is already legislation allowing the abuse.
The European """Parliament""" can only reject laws, but not propose new ones.
Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.
The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.
Fair play x775, I'm currently moving lots of EU and UK projects away from US-owned and/or sited infrastructure. There is a huge marketing push from the EU cloud providers to display their sovereign wares. Maybe us Europeans need to make them more aware of how futile it is to move to EU companies if there are laws equal-to or more pernicious than the US CLOUD Act? A dozen large EU tech companies will sadly exert more pressure on EU lawmakers than trying to explain to 500 million normal people how a law that looks like it will protect children is a smokescreen and terrible for civil liberties.
Some interesting reads
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
>let's vote on this proposal
>rejected
>let's vote on it again!
Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.
Sounds a lot like nagging [0] with some trick wording [1] in the nag.
I think the website is missing a dark pattern here, spray-and-pray, which is throwing as many reincarnations of the same thing as possible, hoping one eventually sticks.
[0] https://www.deceptive.design/types/nagging
[1] https://www.deceptive.design/types/trick-wording
Only if you have more votes after it passes, to vote on unpassing it again
This only makes sense if each representative is getting feedback from their constituents each time they take the new vote..I think
I feel like we do that pretty regularly in the US.
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"Conservatives" feel no shame.
But they are first-class in acting like a victim
It's the same thing as with your republicans.
Italy, the biggest country opposing this, is composed of mainly "conservative" MEPs from FDI. I think you have a very narrow world view.
FDI is not in EPP
Im no conservative, but I thought useres of this site were more intelligent than to throw massive negative stereotypes out about groups of millions of people.
There are luckily not millions of conservative politicians. Those we have right now do already enough damage.
The older ones who resigned when they fucked up, or had a moral compass seamed to have disappeared. Instead we have more and more "MAGA-Style"-Politics
Their leadership in my country has done this for a decade, but the conservative approval rating for the president is still in the low 80's at worst.
At what point do we admit that most of a group people are fine with a negative stereotype?
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Great work! There is maybe some bug. When you click on one of the 4 "opposing" countries (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland), it scrolls down and then shows that majority of the representatives from the country actually support it. Is that intended? Won't that make people from those countries "relax" even though they might have an impact by contacting their represenatives?
I swear to god if the UK gives the world yet MORE surveillance state...
This one is EU I think, but yes UK and everyone else needs to actually protect their citizens' rights.
> This one is EU I think...
You misspelled Palantir.
Tolkien had a lot of other catchy names which are yet unused. EU can create it's own Angband or Ungoliant spying corporation :) .
Gorgoroth sounds about right.
Thanks for your work. Just how is it possible for non-EU lobby to make vote a law in EU, and push for it ?
Money.
I've just used it to send email to my representatives (Croatia). Thanks for the effort.
Why this attempt is not treated as terrorism and authors of the proposals are not arrested?
Chat Controls fulfil the definition of terrorism wholly.
You're a hero
You are a beacon of hope man. Please, please, continue the good fight, we need you.
We keep seeing the establishment resurfacing and imposing this blanket surveillance globally. What's happening in Brazil, the UK, EU, and has already happened in the US with no legislation or via the 5-eyes is scary.
Who are these people pressuring elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats to legislate against their constituents? Who are these lobbyists?
I get that there is a large constituency that wants to control dissidents and the narrative in the name of child abuse - see what's happening in the UK where people get arrested in the thousands for posting comments online.
Abolishing privacy is not the way to protect children. Police work and prosecution is. For reference see the grooming gangs in the UK, the infamous Eps*% case for which everyone is still walking free, and other cases in various EU countries. This is not whataboutism, it's proof that we have not taken the required steps as a western society to combat this. You don't press the nuclear option as your first action.
If it's bot farm meddling that is the true target, then ban bots and get technology to work properly. Creating ID honeypots on poorly protected website operator servers is not the solution.
Call your politicians, call your EU MEPs, call everyone you can. This matters because it's about our future.
Can we start organizing a strike of tech workers already? Pretty please? Just say the word.
Maybe reach out to Signal to implement some kind of one-way channel so you can reach people easily?
We need to put actual pressure on those fascists. Next time they even mention it, we flood the council website with an identical search query, say "Does no mean yes after all?" and if they persist, we strike for couple days.
Is there any point in fighting it given that they will rename, repackage and resubmit the legislation in mere days if it doesn't pass?
Don't get me wrong: my blood boils reading those legislations, but rationally I don't see a path to victory here.
How can people support your work?
So... if we all care so much about shooting down the bad idea, why is nobody proposing opposite legislation: a bill enshrining a right to private communications, such that bills like this one would become impossible to even table?
Is it just that there's no "privacy lobby" interested in getting even one lawyer around to sit down and write it up?
Or is there at least one such bill floating around, but no EU member state has been willing to table it for discussion?
Quoting from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12... :
"Article 7
Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Article 8
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."
It clearly states here in 2 “consent of the person concerned OR some other legitimate basis laid down the law”, any random law will trump personal consent
One of the reasons international human rights law is so worthless in actual practice, is that half of it is framed like this. "Everyone has the right to X, except as duly restricted by law." Cool, so that's not a right at all then.
Ditto the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its 'notwithstanding' clause. (Though they're presently litigating over that, so we'll see what happens!)
Any constitution or human rights instrument full of exemptions, 'emergency powers', 'notwithstanding' clauses, or 'states of exception' is not worth the paper it's written on.
Every contract I have to agree to these days has a "valid until unilaterally invalidated" clause. It feels like we're all just going through the motions.
That's why countries like Austria have enshrined the Human Rights Charter into constitutional law, meaning only other law at constitutional rank could potentially conflict with such clauses. You can get your own country to do it, too.
That is in fact the only way most laws work: freedom of movement, except if you’re arrested and detained in accordance with law. Freedom of speech except when you are falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater or slandering someone. In general all rights have exceptions carved out by law. And any way you carve that exception out (eg to cover those convicted of crimes) can be twisted by a legislature or judicial body that wants to act in bad faith.
(That’s not to say laws shouldn’t make a better attempt to circumscribe exceptions)
You're fuzzing the crucial distinction between well defined and narrowly tailored exemptions, which are of course normal, and these exemptions, which are complete blank cheques that effectively neuter the rule they attach to.
No laws are absolute, some laws are more holes than cheese, but a law that says "A government must not punish you for doing X, except in accordance with duly passed criminal laws that make X illegal" is almost entirely pointless. It exists solely to make people feel fuzzy when reading the first half of the sentence, which is the only part you'll ever hear quoted, while not actually impeding anything a government may wish to do to you. This is intentional. Those carte blanche exemptions do not consistently appear across international human rights treaties by some accident.
And then they laugh at naïve engineers who express hopes that laws can be a proper formal system.
Even if the law included the literal phrase "Congress shall make no law" or "shall not be infringed", there would still be carve-outs and exceptions deemed acceptable and non-infringing because at the end of the day it's the government, and they'll do what they want, because who exactly is going to stop them?
The supreme court, often though not always.
Think about all the laws that aren't even attempted because they would be struck down. Or all the laws floated, but which don't pass because they'd be struck down. Or the laws modified so they won't be struck down.
I'm with you though - I think a lot of the constitution protections in the US have been watered down over the decades.
It doesn’t remove the “right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.” The law cannot be random, it must ensure “fair processing” and be limited to “specific purposes”, and the European Court of Justice as well as the ECHR will decide what constitutes a “legitimate basis” in that context. Furthermore, “Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her”, which ensures transparency of what is being collected.
Last but not least, a number of EU countries enshrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence in their constitution.
Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.
Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...
Secrecy of correspondence doesn't necessarily only apply to physical letters as far as Constitutions go. In Finnish constitution it is defined as "The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable" meaning it also applies to any internet message.
Unfortunately large majority of parties in Finnish Parliament do not really care about that provision and have passed multiple laws which create exceptions to it. They do it via the proper protocol (which is essentially the same as modifying the Constitution itself) so it's technically legal.
Secrecy of correspondence still has exceptions. That's what is always lost in these discussions -- every right of every person is not absolute. Just because you have a right to personal property, doesn't mean you don't have to pay taxes or store nuclear material in your basement. That's the hard part.
But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute. It's a new thing and the balancers can't balance it against other rights of other people, so this happens.
> But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute
As it should be. Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around. Not click a button and have the lives of everyone in the entire world revealed to them.
>Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around.
What you describe is clearly not the only possible policy choice.
The opposite doom scenario isn't either.
Based on the past experience, government gonna do their government stuff
The ends still have the decryption keys, so the result is the same as with a physical letter: you have to acquire the physical object holding the key material.
The result is not the same as a physical letter, as you can intercept those covertly (which is resource constrained)
No, not any random law. To the extent the relevant law-making is within EU's competence (ie excluding certain areas like national security and similar), the general framework for rules on the processing of personal data has been laid down by the GDPR (and for law enforcement related stuff, a similar Directive[1]), in particular, considerably restricting, limiting and in part downright precluding national law-making within that legislative and policy area, including eg the legal bases available for in-scope processing activities (Art 6 GDPR, also Art 9 for certain sensitive data categories).
Anyway, as far as human/fundamental rights go, the encryption and related issues in Chat Control tend to fall more on the Article 7 side of the Charter[2] like many similar questions related to different forms of (mass) surveillance, secrecy / confidentiality of (electronic) communications, including related national regimes with often diverse jurisdiction-specific histories, etc.
[1] The main difference between a Directive and a Regulation under EU law is that a Directive requires implementation on the national level to work properly (ie national legislation, usually with some room for discretion and details here and there), while a Regulation is directly binding and effective law in member states wholly in itself.
[2] And similar/corresponding language in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the related case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While these are not EU institutions, European human rights law is recognized and applied as constitutional / fundamental rights-level law both by the EU and member state courts.
I feel we need something much more strongly worded to protect our mail, paper or electronic, messages and other communications from being read, not just “respect”.
This exists in a number of EU member states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
The problem is, in all of those member states, they all have carve outs for "national security."
Germany, for exmaple, has secrecy of correspondence that extends to electronic communications, but allows for "restrictions to protect the free democratic basic order" and outlines when intelligence services can bypass the right to privacy.
Italy, France, and Polan also have similar carve outs.
Having it as a right isn't enough. National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
Rights are never absolute, they always have to be weighed against each other. The weighing can and should be debated, and needs strong protections when put into practice, but demanding an absolute is not reasonable.
Then they're not "rights". They're just things that you get if and when the government feels like it.
I disagree. A right to privacy not only can be demanded, it should be demanded.
I think the better way to phrase this against both relativism and absolutism is in the following way.
Rights are inherent to human nature, or they are nothing at all. If they could be granted by gov’t, then they can be taken away; they wouldn’t be rights. They allow individuals to fulfill their natural moral duties; you have a right to a good, because you have a prior obligation to pursue it. While the existence of these rights is universal and inalienable, their exercise is not absolute, as they are always limited by justice and the common good of the community. Because these rights are pre-political - they are not legal privileges; the state’s only legitimate role here is to recognize and protect what already exists by nature; any civil law that contradicts them is a perversion of justice rather than a binding law.
So…if privacy is a right (and I would say it is a derivative right, from more basic rights), then it does not follow that its scope is absolutely unrestrained. It’s not difficult to come up with examples where privacy is constrained or abrogated for this reason.
The trouble with broad privacy-violating measures is that they are sweeping in scope and unjustified, making them bad for the common good and a violation of a personal right. It is clearly motivated by technocratic design and desire for control, not the common good and the good of persons. Because it is unjustified, its institution is therefore opposed to reason. It effectively says that no vaild justification need exist. This is a voluntarist, tyrannical order.
The absolutist stance likes to claim that “having justification” is always how rights are violated, but this is wrongheaded. This is tantamount to claiming that we can’t tell a valid justification from an invalid one. But if that were true, then we are in much worse shape than such people suppose. If we cannot discern a valid justification from a bad one, then how can we have the capacity to discern when a right is being violated at all? Furthermore, it is simply not the case as a general political rule that gov’ts will violate rights if those rights are not absolute (which has never been the case anyway). The evidence does not support this thesis. And furthermore, if a gov’t wishes to violate a right, treating it as if it were an absolute doesn’t somehow prevent it from being violated. Some place too much faith in supposed structural elements of gov’t as ways to keep this from happening (like separation of powers), but there is nothing in principle to prevent these branches from cooperating toward such an end.
Any "right" that is not absolute is a worthless fairy tale. Compromise is the root of all evil.
There are no absolute rights, even in the charter of human rights, which is about as basic as it gets. The reality is that every right, if regarded as absolute, violates another fundamental right, if regarded as absolute.
Take for example Article 3 of the declaration of human rights:
> Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
The article already has a collision set up in itself: You have the right to live in safety. But also, everyone has the right to live in liberty. If taken as an absolute, the right of liberty would prevent incarceration of dangerous individuals, violating the other individuals right to all life in safety.
Similarly, other fundamental rights get curtailed: The freedom of speech is in balance with the right to personal dignity of article one and other rights.
Not acknowledging that even fundamental human rights are in a tension with each other is just ignoring reality and will get you nowhere in a legal discussion.
The discussion is not which right is absolute, it is about how to balance the tension between the various rights. And different societies strike a different balance here.
Take for example the right to freedom and liberty. Lifelong imprisonment without parole as punishment is not a thing in Germany. There’s an instrument that allows the court to keep the perpetrator locked up in case the court considers the individual dangerous, but until 1998, this could not be retroactively be applied. There was a major legal upheaval with multiple rounds to the constitutional court to change that and it took until 2012/2013 to find a legal framework that wasn’t declared unconstitutional. To this day, however, Sicherheitsverwahrung is not a punishment, but a combination of therapy and ensuring the safety of society and it’s subject to regular checks if the conditions for the lockup still exist. The individuals are also not held in prisons, but in nicer facilities.
On the other hand, many US states still have the death penalty and are proud of it.
> The article already has a collision set up in itself
Yeah, because it's a made up self-contradictory notion with absolutely zero basis in reality. It's the people who believe in "rights" who are ignoring reality. Safety? The world is a dangerous place where you can be randomly killed if you take a wrong turn and no amount of "rights" is ever going to change that. Food and shelter? Simple economics are enough to defeat this, there isn't enough for everybody, rationing ensues almost immediately and suddenly you're forced to decide who's most "deserving" of these resources. Privacy? The FVEY get around it by spying on each other and sharing data because foreigners are always fair game. You can name virtually any right and the inherent contradictions in it are plain to see to anyone willing to go outside and see the world for what it actually is instead of what some "charter" says it should be.
It would be infinitely more honest if these governments simply decided to declare you guilty of whatever you're suspected of when they find your encrypted data. That's what they actually want to do. No need to engage in this song and dance about balancing "rights". If they did this, at least people would see things as they are instead of engaging in this constant abstraction in an attempt to rationalize and justify things by saying that you have the "right" to privacy but actually you don't when it's "in the interests of national security" for you to not have it. That sort of double speak is hazardous for my mental health and I'm tired of engaging in it.
So you’re saying there can be no worthwhile privacy protections as long as subpoenas and search warrants exist and it’s physically possible for someone to eavesdrop? I guess we might as well switch everything back to http.
The only worthwhile protections are those provided by mathematics. If you encrypt a message, then you can be sure not even god will read it. When a government gives you "protections" you can be sure of nothing.
That's how human rights abuses are justified though. Every single time. This whole thread is talking about exactly that.
I dunno; I think in practice an absolute sometimes shakes out just fine.
In this case, I see no reason that we would want to draft constitutional rights such that we consider a government's actions taken in pursuit of their national security to be, per se, legal — i.e. warranted, unable to be sued over, etc.
Imagine instead, a much weaker right granted to the state: the right to maintain laws or regulations which require/force government or military employees to do things that violate people's rights and/or the law of the land. But with no limit on liability. No grant of warrant. Just the mildest possible form of preservation: technically constitutional; and not immediately de-fanged the first time the Supreme Court gets their hands on it.
So, for example, some state might introduce a new law saying that soldiers can come to your house and confiscate your laptop. And then the head of that state might actually use that law to invade your home and take your laptop.
Given that the law exists, it would be legal for the head-of-state to give this order. And it would also be legal for the soldiers to obey this order (or to put it another way, court-martialable for the soldiers to disobey this order, since it's not an illegal order.)
But the actual thing that happened as a result of this law being followed, would be illegal — criminal theft! — and you would therefore be entitled to sue the state for damages about it. And perhaps, if it was still reporting on Find My or whatever, you might even be entitled to send police to whatever NSA vault your laptop is held in, to go get it back for you. (Where, unlike the state, those police do have a warrant to bust in there to get it. The state can't sue them for damages incurred while they were retrieving the laptop!)
The courts wouldn't be able to strike down the law (the national-security provision allows the state to declare it 'not un-constitutional", remember?); but since obeying the law produces illegal outcomes, you would be able to punish the government each and every time they actually use it. In as many ways as the state caused you and others harm through their actions.
There is absolutely zero reason why the state shouldn't be expected to "make people whole" for damages it has caused them, each and every time it does something against the people's interest in the name of national security.
And the simplest way to calculate that penalty / make the claiming and distribution of those rewards practical, would be to just not remove liability for these actions taken on behalf of the state, by not granting the state the right to do them in the first place. Just put them in the position of any other criminal, and force them to go to court to defend themselves.
Change my mind!
"to protect the free democratic basic order", the irony.
It's incredible how even with the current surge of autocracy, most politicians can't see that the surveillance tools they crave for, could come under control of people much worse than them.
And can't see what they could do with them.
I think that many current governments in Europe are convinced that more surveillance will stop the autocratic surge. It's insane that they don't see how this is far from guaranteed, and how it will go if they're wrong.
>National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.
This is overly absolutist, or maybe idealistic view. National security and public safety IS more important than individual right to privacy. As an extreme example, if your friend was dying, you had a password to my email, and you knew that you can use information in my inbox to save that person i really hope you would do it.
In general I think that police with a court order should be able to invade someone's privacy (with judge discretion). I mean they can already kick down someone's doors and detain them for several days - checking email doesn't sound too bad compared to it, does it? I think they should also be legally obliged to inform that person in let's say 6 months that they did it.
The problem is that modern world is drastically different than the old world when you needed to physically hunt down letters. Now you can mass scan everyone's emails, siphon terabytes of personal data that stasi could only dream of, and invigilate everyone. This is something that is worth fighting against.
> National security and public safety IS more important than individual right to privacy.
I disagree.
Because as soon as you open the door to governments reading your mail, they will read your mail. They can't help themselves. [0]
The only way of stopping them from doing this to excess is to stop them doing it at all.
The "National Security and Public Safety" thing is what they say to justify it, but that's not what the powers will actually be used for. They will actually be used for far less noble purposes, and possibly actually for evil.
We are actually much more secure if we don't let the government read our mail.
[0] In the UK, anti-terrorist laws passed in the post-9/11 haze of "national security and public safety" are routinely used for really, really, minor offences: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anti-terror...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7369543.stm
Let's parse this a little.
Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.
You would have liked to see wording like:
* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."
* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."
and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.
> This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.
Which is... okay? Government gonna government, that's what we pay it to do.
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You know that those pieces of paper mean nothing.
The Charter has been used by the courts to shoot down incoming legislation. So, in a way, those pieces of paper mean everything, as without them legislation would pass without the judiciary branch being a check on the Bloc’s powers. Your comment is merely cynical.
In theory these limit the power of the EU, while anything the EU parliament passes can just be undone as easily by a future EU parliament. If you don't believe the EU charter provides any protection, why would you believe an EU law would be any different?
Thank you for telling them. Governments do not care about anyone.
In theory, governments are made up of citizens. In practice, once the citizens are corrupted into corporate shills, they become politicians. They have traded their humanity for business class seats and dining at restaurants that cater to those whose entire personality is talking about their investment portfolio.
Oh, please, stop this tired ‘victim of corrupt bureaucrats‘ framing.
People have real choice in EP elections. There are parties that will always stand up for citizens’ rights. If they had enough seats, they could have voted this item off the agenda.
Yet, people continue to choose the same conservatives and radical right over and over again, because they are enraged about immigrants and identity politics. Blame the voters.
Why continue with the increased migration that the majority of the population has generally opposed then? One could have avoided those discussion points.
Also what you group as the radical right doesn't tend to be supportive of this idea. They full well know they are at times at the receiving end of web control legislation and drives atm. Same for 'radical left' groups.
It's the conservatives that at times make some fuzz about migration to draw votes from the former whilst keeping said migration going since it favours some of the companies they (and a load of other established parties) draw support from.
Yes, there's lots of blame to pass around; but the system does reward corporate psychopaths which leaves US citizens having to choose — as South Park aptly put it — between a douche and a turd sandwich.
There is a famous German comedian that invented a figure known as "The Kangaroo". It once said:
"Whether left-wing or right-wing terrorism – I see no difference there."
"Yes, yes," calls the kangaroo, "the ones set foreigners on fire, the others cars. And cars are worse, because it could have been mine. I don't own any foreigners."
Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.
It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.
The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.
(I mentioned this in another comment)
Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.
And who exactly do you think elected the 'powers that be'? The issue is that voter turnout for EU parliamentary elections is awful in comparison to national elections, especially among more conservative voters - meaning that the political orientation between the parliament and commission is a little skewed.
Sure, but then you end up with stuff like this happening time and time again. If something doesn't pass the first time, put it through again, and again.
The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.
Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).
The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.
Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.
Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.
I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?
Past laws of this type are:
- The GDPR
- The ePrivacy directive, which is explicitly derogated (sabotaged) by chat control 1.0
If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.
Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.
> a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.
With a server on the other side of a geopolitical conflict (actual conflict, not a mere discontinuity in legalscape) you trade a risk of the government reading your chats for a risk of the same government (which you don't trust for a good reason) locking you up for treason and espionage.
>... without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.
How is that supposed to work with e2e encrypted chats?
There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.
You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.
We can do more than one thing. Do not cede the weapon of lobbying to be used solely by opponents. You can get a lot done by talking to people.
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Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sedcms/documents/PRIORITY_INF...
Here is the regulation that will be voted on: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...
Note that the amendment was already amended on 11th March to set expiry to Aug 2027 and to also exclude E2E communications.
Yeah so this is about CC 1.0 (which already exists)
While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying
The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)
If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...
Do you mean "surveillance" by the word "invigilation" here?
Could be a wordplay due to the fact "invigilation" can be translated to and from the Polish word with a _very_ heavy and long connotations to the USSR state surveillance, oppression and abuse.
Surveillance would be a more "modern" (even if more natural or seemingly correct word), without this sort of the implied baggage.
It's not a wordplay. Poles usually make a mistake because "invigilation" sounds english enough to them and just assume it is an english word.
Yes it was my mistake, exactly the case you've described.
If we are talking about freedom fighters, Polish freedom fighters/struggles are second most influential to me after my own country especially because of Witold Pilecki.
I once wrote a paper about Witold pilecki for my english project for who I consider to be the most influential person or something similar.
I picked Witold pilecki because I had read a book which talked about him and it captured so much of my mind.
For those who don't know, Witold Pilecki is a polish person who was the first and perhaps only person who willingly entered holocaust/auschwitz and then he was the first person to realize all the horrors happening inside, He then used washing machine parts (iirc) to send the signal to the allies, who COULDN'T believe what Pilecki said was happening. The amounts of Atrocities they thought wasn't possible.
When he found out that help wasn't coming, He decided to free himself and He accomplished doing that by taking a job at something bread related who then ends up leaving.
He then married an Polish teacher (iirc) and had kids but after Russia had won over Polish, he was fake trialed and he was falsely accused of treason.
His last words were, "I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy, than fear."
On a personal level, when I was writing that project and this line, I genuinely believe that this might be one of the most influential lines to me that I have ever heard which has genuinely influenced me.
It was during this project that I found Sabaton from trying to research about Witold pilecki and found so many gems that Sabaton is quite part of my music taste now :-)
Sabaton- Inmate 4859: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pc1oSYXlUQ (This song is about Witold Pilecki)
Sabaton Uprising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzeNBRbWXpI (Another Polish warsaw related song that I found after I had discovered Sabaton from the Inmate 4859 song)
I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation. I am sure that Poland might have flaws too but I do believe that its history is quite rich and something to be quite proud of.
I am surprised not more people know about Witold Pilecki but I hope I am doing my part raising awareness about that hero.
Within my country, some of the revolutionaries which feel influential on such level to me feel most importantly Bhagat Singh, Subash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad. These are also people who have influenced me.
There is also the story of how an Indian ruler hosted Polish WWII refugees[0] and helped them within his kingdom, which I am not sure if many Polish know.
While I was writing this comment, I discovered a good song about Indian revolutionaries as well which I feel like sharing too: Krantiveer (Revolutionary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXZG0pTxME [Turn the subtitles (on)]
I think my point can be summarized by a quote from Subash chandra bose, that freedom is not given, it is taken.
[0]: https://indianexpress.com/article/research/the-good-maharaja...
Thanks for sharing that! I actually know very little of Pilecki, because I was mostly hearing about him from far-right teachers & I have an allergy to personality cults.
Ironically I've spend a lot of time reading about Gandhi .
But I will read more on him, and also about the 3 revolutionaries you mentioned.
> I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation.
We're in this weird limbo in Poland, all the patriotic stuff has been hijacked by the virtue signaling (far)right and the centrists and left didn't bother to fight for it (even though all the remaining veterans of Warsaw Uprising were protesting the takeover).
I am proud, but it takes an actual effort to remind myself, that a real thing exists below the surface layer of daily politics...
It's sort of sad to see that Pilecki has been used by far-right teachers for their own cult as you mention because Pilecki fought against the fascism of both the german far right (Hitler/Concentration camps) and Russia (Stalin) at the time.
> Ironically I've spend a lot of time reading about Gandhi .
> But I will read more on him, and also about the 3 revolutionaries you mentioned.
Indian revolutionaries can be divided into two parts for the most part, some wanted peaceful changes and some wanted change through actions. The 3 I mentioned are revolutionaries within the second aspect.
I am personally not a big fan of gandhi given his personal history and controversies, but I am a fan of the satyagrah movement and the people who participated in them like gaffar khan,sarojini naidu and our second prime minister, lal bahadur shastri.
Within the satyagrah movement, I am particularly a fan of Shastri Ji as he might've been the humblest prime minister of our country and he was closely linked to the satyagrah movement, when our nation was going through a acute food crisis, he asked his wife while being the PM of the nation to not make food one time (so only 2 times) as he could only urge the people of the nation to do the same if he and his family could do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eauajC1U0X8, Here is one of the rare interviews he did outside of India as he was very focused in the nation himself. This might be the reason that many outsiders dont know him whereas gandhi used to travel quite frequently (as far as I can remember)
I also recommend watching a more personal movie about gandhi and his relation with family called "Gandhi, my father", its available on Youtube for free. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7jcXv5MwMU) which shows the troubled history gandhi had with his son
My thoughts on gandhi are a little nuanced. He was good for the nation in the movements but his personal life was also controversial and its best to view him as such and view both his flaws and positives about peacefulness in a more holistic manner while also taking a look at all the other people within the satyagrah movement like Shastri Ji for example and also people who sacrificed their lives for the nation like Bhagat Singh in hopes for a freed India.
> We're in this weird limbo in Poland, all the patriotic stuff has been hijacked by the virtue signaling (far)right and the centrists and left didn't bother to fight for it (even though all the remaining veterans of Warsaw Uprising were protesting the takeover).
if I have to comment on Indian politics right now, I would say that the media is at its weakest and feels very fake at times that independent channels are usually the ones only left if you want nuance. India's far right feels more religious rather than economical to me because economically, the far right is still having "freebies" but in some sense, they help the poor. Its the middle class which struggles a bit within India (I am from middle class :[ ) but overall, I am a bit happy in how our country is handling its geopolitics (India feels unique in the sense of its a friend of both Iran and Israel, a friend of both Us and russia, our only enemies are probably Pakistan and China and Pakistan is in a bit of quarrel with Afghanistan and isn't so much of a threat as China is, which is realisticly the only genuine threat that I can feel towards India)
It's a very unique country for the most part. I have written quite a lot about India on hackernews, so feel free to search it on algolia[0]
I do feel like India is an land of co-existence with both Human and animals as well. We all have our flaws but our diversity and heritage is truly rich and I hope that India can uplift itself in the future even more.
It is great to hear though of how each of our culture impacts the other. How polish culture/Witold pilecki influences my Morals and how on the other hand you are also interested within the Indian culture while at the same time we are both proud of the base realities of both nations but also realize its flaws and hope to improve nations.
I wish for Poland to have a great future ahead :-)
(https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Edit: I also recommend reading about Lal Bal Pal and the radical movement if you are interested to know about the anti-colonial movement within India as well whose combined with all of the nationalists that I have mentioned within the list ultimately led to the independence of India.
There a practical reason for this? like more alignment with lobbyists, for whatever financial reasons?
Hungary is governed by a Russia aligned autocrat. This generally does not align with the priorities of the rest of the EU.
Over the last two decades Hungary reversed course from a democracy joining the west to an authoritarian dictatorship in bed with the Russians.
Hence, everything their government does is the opposite of what a typical European Union member would approve of.
I wonder what it would take to expel them from the EU...
It's simply not possible. EU law has no provisions for kicking a malignant country out. It was simply not foreseen. They can only decide to leave themselves. Which orban will never do because his oligarchs make billions off EU subsidies.
If it were it would have happened already.
They cannot make them leave the EU, no. But Hungary can be:
- kicked out of the Schengen Treaty
- kicked out of the NATO
- fined under EU breach of contract proceedings
- withheld financial support as long as they do not pay these fines
- forced through customs policy, which is sole EU competence, to stop compensating lost EU support with Chinese money
Honestly, I'd be in full support of some above listed actions if the elections in April show the current will of the Hungarian people misaligned with shared EU values.
They do regularly withhold financial support for them, but it doesn't seem to be too effective, usually they just get it back in return for not crossing the EU on some other topic.
I do think we should make work of kicking them out somehow if Peter Magyar does not win the next elections indeed.
EU2: the no-Hungary club
It's not possible with the current rules. Ultimately if every EU country other than Turkey wants them out, what are they going to do?
Turkey isn't EU.
No, they could have been but Erdogan made that impossible, sadly.
Order is on the verge of breakdown I wouldn't be surprised if they just lose their voice/get kicked out.
Trump etc are tearing down international order. The ramifications of this will be decades long.
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Orban is a Putin asset.
Orban is an evil politician, and Fidez is an evil party.
The proposal was rejected: https://chaos.social/@maxim/116294966670838045
307 vs 306, for god's sake
One.... more... time! So close!
I would like to share here that the author of this site made it very easy to call. If you read this and are in the EU, I urge you to try this.
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
Please help.
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1162053712243153...
And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!
We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems (which are often the fault of the EU and our socialist, collectivist tendencies)
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
Speak for yourself. I don’t even think Trump is to blame for all the US’s problems (he’s a symptom of a much larger system), let alone the EU’s.
I also mentioned others outside the EU and US, as does the link I posted.
Furthermore, I don’t think I personally know anyone from the EU who blames “all our many problems” on the US.
more like, Europeans have a habit of making "Orange Man Bad" criticisms to deflect from criticism of the EU. But yeah you're on the right lines.
> socialist, collectivist tendencies
Lots of places are socialist or collectivist and have a different set of problems, so the argument that EU problems can be solely attributed to that don't make sense.
I'm also not sure "collectivist" is the correct label. We can't describe Japan (and the PRC, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, a couple other SEasian nations) and the EU as both collectivist, considering Japan is the far more extreme version of it (I would say, only Japan is collectivist, not the EU). One or the other needs a different word.
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
Might be a different social circle, but I have not met a single European in my entire life of living in Europe who would blame Donald Trump or the US in general for the problems that we are currently facing. It doesn't take a genius to summarize that trans-continental geopolitics is much more complex than that
Freedom of speech is not a European value.
Based on what?
https://rsf.org/en/index
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
I was reading an essay by Kant called “what is Enlightenment?” It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
What Kant, Locke or Hobbes imagined has only little to do with current societal environment. Our politics and structures are global and the age of internet has mixed it even more. The religions and christianity especially tried to control everything was said under their hemisphere by controlling who could print books or distribute them.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
this seems like a very delusional take to me
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws. that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
Privacy (from state surveillance) and freedoms of speech are very different issues.
But they are both issues where Americans have greater protections than Europeans.
EU is not a government for all EU members. You should look into what EU is and how it works before attacking it. Claiming that it's "ultra national" would mean that all of EU is one nation which shares one ideological, cultural and political sphere. There are 27 EU members with 24 official languages, 20 of those countries are part of the Euro currency zone.
But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.
Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.
Yes the correct name would be "super/supra" national instead of ultra national
>You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
Yes, but who isn't? Not the other side of the pond for sure.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
Thanks for the luck, it got rejected by a single vote, lmao
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189574
As an EU citizen, I'm happy that the parliament has once again rejected the proposal, which at least gives credence to the notion that it not just there to rubber-stamp what the commission decides.
But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
As an EU citizen I hate this but I know it‘s a „when?“ not an „if“ topic.
I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.
But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.
Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.
The EU has always been focused on harming its citizens. This is nothing new, very on brand actually. It's not like we have a choice lol.
Sounds like russian troll talking point.
I don't think dismissing anyone as an agitproppist or foreign agent who expresses a dim view of the EU's tendency toward overreach and habit of asking the same question over and over until it's answered "correctly" is fair. Not when McCarthy did it, and not today. And I can promise you that nobody's paying me to post online, anyway!
Do you always take baseless claims at face value?
Yawn
> The EU has always been focused on harming its citizens.
Insanely bonkers take. What sources do you have for this?
Being German lol
That's the problem with electing too many people with law background to a parliament: They think it's a Model United Nations session and if they can get things their way despite many real world consequences, they celebrate with joy as our governance becomes literally ungovernable.
I think that’s a real problem now. In our parliament (Czech) almost every politician is a lawyer or a doctor. Almost no other profession is represented.
So they will pass it until is a yes?
Exactly what happened when Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, they were told to vote again until they voted the "right" way.
Like UI saying "Yes" | "Ask later"
That's literally the entire Microslop Winblows set up screen flow. There's no "no", only "confirm".
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Almost happened with Brexit referendum.
Heads I win, tails you loose. :(
It takes only one win to remove our rights but once they’re gone you’ll never get them back.
Modern democracy
Wait until you find out it's actually already implemented and they're trying to legitimise it.
The proposal they are voting on is about continuing the current time-limited implementation (voluntary scanning, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232).
This is not about mandatory scanning.
It was one of the things Ylva Johansson infamously said about it, Microsoft and Apple are already doing it so what's the big deal?
Makes me think about this clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhsLq3-ZWE
Or, as is also seen elsewhere, wildly popular ideas simply get curiously stuck.
Either way those elected to supposedly serve are the only ones winning.
Yes. The anchor chain got broken sometime ago. It's still there, but nobody want it anymore.
They only have to win once. You have to win every time.
Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:
“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.
If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”
— Jean-Claude Juncker
There is a lot of people who will nod and agree with that statement, as long as the decisions are one's that they agree with.
They never quit. They just waited for something else to dominate the news, so they could fly it under the radar. The war started, so, they felt it was now or never.
It's not now or never. It's now, or the next attempt or the next.
Who is "they"?
That's the key question!
There's a small group of very powerful people that keep pushing this agenda.
Who are those people?
Find out.
Publicize their names. Make their corruption visible and linked to their identity.
In case anyone has an issue with this: Remember! This is what they want! For you! Not for them. Only the plebs.
Bureaucratic systems have a internal logic by themselves that goes beyond the agenda of individual actors.
The first goal of every bureaucracy is to guarantee its survival and power, all other goals are downstream this first goal.
This isn't a conspiracy... "They" are the EPP, a democratically elected party acting fully in public with their names attached to everything.
what still is important though, is to look into who is meeting with them, lobbying them, and how they profit from what they're doing personally.
this last part may just be my own bias in observing politicians, but I rarely feel like the top politicians in the EU (or any of their member states really) push for things they themselves actually care about or believe is right "for the people".
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I'm happy that the Netherlands is still against this. Our currently largest party (D66) was also always pretty strong on privacy. When I contacted them some time back (I think using this initiative), they ensured me that they remained against, but did feel that something must be done (ok fair enough).
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
The same way you can't send money to the best Korea and watch porn on youtube.
There is a long chain of actions that ends with you having e2e on your phone (or what not). At the starts of it there is your physical body living in jurisdiction and transacting with (mostly) other people being somewhat present in the same jurisdiction using government-captured money. There are multiply choke points, controlling which will not result in 100% enforcement, but will make whatever you want to do a huge pain in the ass, so most people will not bother (case in point -- jailbraking). Whoever is left self-selects themselves for selective enforcement.
I am not sure I follow. I can't watch porn on YT because YT decides not to host it. But I can absolutely use a VPN and access porn in a jurisdiction that does not block it. I can also, and in fact do, encrypt my hard drives. Even China can't reliably prevent communication over private encrypted networks or services hosted overseas.
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Monitoring and influencing majority is enough for having power over citizens. Real criminals will use other unmonitored channels, of course.
I am not oblivious to the intent behind this push, but even if you focus solely on the technicalities the idea falls apart. Even with only client-side verification this will be a big privacy intrusion. I see current AI's flag prompts for the most stupid reasons for using words that might possibly occur in non-safe contexts too. The human experience is just too complex for a machine to understand.
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
This is the same EU that blocks and hinders innovation in the name of privacy?
When you say "hinders innovation" do you mean "doesn't maximize shareholder value" ?
regulation doesn't hinder innovation as long as it is equally enforced on everyone competing in the regulated market. it does hinder powerful and rich individuals from making more profit at the cost of the rights of the average population
Which law are you talking about? Genuine question, because I know about EU laws that are "in the name of privacy" and about those that (arguably) "hinder innovation", but I don't know which one fits both
At time of writing, I was thinking of GDPR.
The EU isn’t a single mind. There are a multitude of factions trying to get through all kinds of things.
You are aware that EU is not a single country, right? I know American education is third-world levels these days, so unfortunately I have to ask this.
4 Member States Opposing
23 Member States Supporting
0 Member States Undecided
"for sure"
If you consider who is monitoring us, it's obvious that this is for the benefit of those in power.
It seems the vote passed [1], meaning the existing Regulation [(EU) 2021/1232] was _extended_ until August 3 2027, with some amendments to the previous text:
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2026-007...
That should completely change the regulation from mass surveillance to targeted wiretapping with a warrant.
It can fail 100 times and it won't count, and the one time this surveillance legislation passes it will become law. Thanks EU, nice show of democracy.
Just a heads up that this is being posted late in the European evening here, so that will affect who's commenting.
Posted 9:30-11:30pm. Plenty of us awake
It won't all be non-Europeans if that's what you're implying
Just a lower percentage than you'd expect on a Europe-focused topic, is what I was trying to imply :)
It's really hard to not become a euroskeptic, despite being involved with so many EU related things from my youth to now in which I believed wholeheartedly, but this is just... I know - they just need to win once, we need to win every time.
Great that MPs are apparently exempt from the scanning. As if there aren’t enough high profile menaces in power.
Either include everyone, or accept it’s an awful idea for security and exempt everyone.
Fun fact: the parties that want this are actually those who criticise the EU the most
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
God I love politics
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
"would"
The party that wants this the most is EPP - you can't be more pro-EU than that.
Not really. Looking at Polish MPs for example, there's no clear pattern, rather a "healthy" mix from all parties with some random selection of opposing ones.
The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.
Curious how they plan to handle encrypted attachments — scanning has to happen either before encryption (client-side) or after decryption (server-side). If E2EE is preserved end-to-end, there's literally no point in the pipeline where a third party can scan without the client's cooperation. So either E2EE breaks, or the law is unenforceable by design.
I agree its unenforceable by design unless they control the OS
DONT forget that this legislation is the result of a Lobby of META
You can directly call your representatives by looking them up here:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
Let the damn politicans go first and make all their private messages public. Yes everything from boring I'm stuck in traffic honey over nudes to insider trading and lobbying.
So EU syill wants to harm children.
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The US doesn't even have to ask, people already give AI providers all their data and full control over all their devices.
Why's there '?foo=bar' in the URL?
To get around the "dupe" filter, it was trying to mark it as a dupe of a 7 month old post.
It's a web bug
I love this. These are the same people who create think tanks and "international courts" to point fingers at "third world" countries for "authoritarianism," "freedom of speech."
Hypocrisy par supreme
Nice website! Sadly, url stays the same across all coutries. I can't send anyone direct link.
Do your part- photograph your ass every day, send the pictures to your representative and EU parliament member.. they need to know. Volunteer the knowledge they crave.
results here: https://portal.assisteu.eu/european_parliament/plenary/votes...
You can find how present MEPs voted
There are 10 votings (not only one), some adopted and some rejected, I am not sure what that means, maybe someone can elaborate.
The new definition of democracy and freedom is: - censoreship - propaganda - ban of oppositions (anti globalist, conservative parties) - NO privacy
What do you have to hide except for a couple possible Nudey pics
Yeah that didn't take long. Of course they keep pushing it. I knew the big 'win' of the 11th was a bit premature and overcelebrated.
The dark forces behind all this set to gain a lot of profits once it passes :(
Few days ago we had a guy explaining to us at the top of hn page that we should migrate data to europe. Sometimes I miss the internet of before mass surveillance abd ads everywhere
What does this mean for a non-eu citizen communicating with an eu citizen? Is it as simple as using signal/matrix instead of whatsapp/messenger?
so much for 'democracy'
keep voting until you get the right answer
at least EU are voting I suppose. some governments just go ahead and mass-surveil illegally
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
...
n) protecting children
So much for "digital soverignty".
Being able to make this policy choice in either direction is in fact an example of digital sovereignty. We just don't like what the sovereign has decided this time.
They aid the truth because the complete slogan was about EU's digital sovereignity. Not really your sovereignity nor mine.
They only need to win once, while the public has to fight back every time. Incredibly demotivating
it's probably best to go with client-side encryption and share keys with friends privately. that pretty much fixes all the privacy issues after the initial registration, but maintaining that extension with all the company and their updates is a bit of a headache.
But of course it's back.
They should just ask the Americans. If you are not a US citizen you have zero rights, and any old creep in Silicon Valley can riffle through your personal information with impunity.
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...
Good news, we held out strong!
ofc, they only need to get it approved once. they will try until they succeed
I honestly think these lawmakers have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes - it's not possible to implement what they are proposing.
The lack of accountability after what was exposed in the Epstein files illustrates that not one in power actually care about kids.
"Save the kids", is just a ploy to run scams.
What are you hoping to happen regarding the Epstein files? The few politicians in the EU that were named in the Epstein files did resign.
> did resign
oh no, they had to resign from their government jobs and in a year will work in the private sector as consultants for double the salary, those poor souls :'(
prison, fines, mental asylum, whatever would be an actual consequence.
a bit hyperbolic and reactionary from my side, maybe. but you get the gist.
Imagine the outrage if this happened in the US instead because it's in Europe there's just a bunch of apologists here.
The longer I live I think US citizens just have the highest standards for both morals and life expectations.
Meanwhile Europe is happy to get anything.
> Imagine the outrage if this happened in the US instead
There’d be bunch of fat fucks who will write screeds on the internet but won’t get off their fat ass to do anything about it?
I absolutely don't understand how anyone can support this in the context of rising authoritarianism. Even people in my country which are talking about this phenomena support it. I strongly suspect that they do absolutely know shit about why it's problematic.
I wonder if they would support that every of paper mail would be opened and checked. I strongly doubt that.
It’s a symptom of authoritarianism rising. It wouldn’t be rising if there wasn’t anyone who supports things like that.
That I would understand, but these policies are supported by most liberal politics from my country and opposed by some populists or "strong hand" politicians. I somehow understand that various russian agents are against that, because that can theoretically be used against them but these liberal democrats are somewhat mystery for me.
Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.
So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.
Because they fall for the "Its for protecting the Children" Bullshit
An encrypted message has never sexually violated and traumatized a child, but I'd bet good money that many politicians have. So, it's quite apparent what we need to protect children from in my opinion.
Are you suggesting something about powerful pedophiles fucking kids in Caribbean and being carried there through Lolita express? That sounds like a conspiracy right? Right?
They want to do what US Big Tech already is doing
Y'all are bunch of hypocrites
Framing this as the EU's attempt is antieuropean propaganda.
It is the Conservatives attempt. The EU parliament is the entity that shot it down last time.
EU is not a synonym of Europe. EU propagandists don't get to define what Europe means.
Second. Who gave you the right to define antieuropean union propaganda as a sin.
Some people may hate it, some people may love it, other want to change it.
It was created by vote, surely it can be whatever the fuck the way the people want by vote.
EU is a synonym for Europe in colloquial conversation the same way USA is a synonym for America.
European countries not part of EU:
United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan
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this is just wrong
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Das musst du jetzt aber mal den Amerikanern erklären ;-)
Oder... sie könnten jemanden aus Süd- oder Mittelamerika fragen, was das Wort „Amerika“ für ihn bedeutet.
Entiendo como se sienten los otros Americanos.
But it doesn't change the fact of the matter that in English (and not only English! German, too, as demonstrated), these words have different meanings.
I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.
So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".
The vote has literally been scheduled by the EPP, the EU grouping of conservative parties.
And that means only they can support it? This isn't the USA, there's no 2 party system where everything "we" do is good and everything "the other side" does is bad.
It means they, the EPP, are the driving force behind the current effort.
I'm not saying only they support it, nor do I believe most groupings in the EU are "good". I'm only saying the ones currently working on overturning the parliament vote are the Conservatives, seeing how they're the ones trying to force a revote.
European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.
Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?
The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.
The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).
The "voluntary" scanning is still mass surveillance of private messages. We as technologist tend to rely on technical methods to protect our private data. But non-technical people should also enjoy confidential communication, even if they don't actively protect their conversations.
> voluntary scanning
What is that? A setting in OS?
Service could voluntary opt-out, like Pavel Durov did.
To quote the banner on said website:
> The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning.
The vote itself is being forced by the EPP. This article by an MEP has more info: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
This does not mean that only EPP supports the bill, though.
No, but it does mean the attempt is attributable to them.
There are two elements to the EU
The Council, which is headed by the government of each member state in equal measure - similar to the Senate in the US
And Parliament, which are directly elected by the people, with each member state having representitives in proportion to their population, so Germany has far more than Ireland. This is similar to Congress.
Now this site says Germany supports it, but then says that MEPS
> 49 oppose, 47 in favor (45 confirmed, 2 presumed based on government stance)
I would thus infer that the "most member states" refer to the national governments (that were elected by their population) position and not the direct MEP position.
However a quick look at the json it's loading and I can't see
Now as the parliament has blocked it, a grouping, the "EPP" (Think Ronald Reagan type republicans) is trying to use their influence to bring it back to a vote.
> "The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament's NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy."
Is that fair? Ireland should surely have a say the same way Germany does in parliament too, if it's affecting Ireland just as much. If one considers countries as units.
That's the whole idea, the parliament doesn't.
The Council is the representation of the countries. The Parliament of the people.
I get it.. my question wasn't exactly what I meant to ask. I meant isn't there some kind of compensating factor. So that a country with a 100 million doesn't completely and utterly outshine a small country of 4 million, even in the parliament?
Or is the idea that the Council is sufficient to achieve this?
I actually think the Council is more than sufficient to achieve this, we kind of see the opposite problem way more.
Hungary, a country of 9M people, keeps vetoing stuff the rest of the Union wants to do. 450M people, held back by the despot ruling over a tiny fraction of them.
Is it fair that California has more congresspeople than North Dakota?
Parliament is the unit which represent the people
Council (which is 1 country 1 vote) is what represents the countries.
Yes it's fair that it has more to a degree, but North Dakota can't have literally proportional since it will completely swallowed up on Congress. How does this work in the US?
Why shouldn't it be swallowed up? Why should a persons vote in North Dakota be much more powerful than one in California?
Exactly. EU legislation is currently far more respecting of privacy than is legislation in the UK or the US.
For various, and unclear, reasons, there is substantial backing to change this.
In the UK, Apple is now blocking users from using any web browser to access "non-PG" content unless the user submits to privacy violating age verification. Apple blocks you at the OS level, making VPNs useless.
Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".
If you’re against the EU you’re with Hungary and if you’re with Hungary, you’re with Orban and Putin: an enemy of democracy
What?
It seems like it is bipartisan to me. Do you have the statistics to back up your claim?
This is how political messaging has worked since I was born.
Yeah, it's like saying "USA wants to poison children still!" when a Republican files another deranged bill in their state.
The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.
That is true, but this attempt is led by the Conservatives. Not more, not less.
Many people here seem to have great difficulty with reading comprehension
And many people here clearly have memory of a goldfish. Chat control (in its different phases) has been brought up and promoted by both conservative\liberal and social democratic factions of the EU parliament. The fact that this time it was EPP that put forward the vote does not mean that just conservatives are the ones pushing for chat control. This is all a fantasy.
Politics is about understanding things in a historical context, not about the last flashy headline and 2-line tweets.
They are the ones pushing for it right now.
And other all-time big brain ideas like Upload-Filters for copyright enforcement, or privatising the water sector also came from them.
This. There's a very specific group of twisted people that drive this, but equating that with the entire EU is flat out wrong.
Who are those people?
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522647
It’s now EOD Thursday. What was the conclusion of the vote?
(not shown on the chat control website as far as I can tell)
Reminder: it's not the “EU”, it's the PPE (the union of conservative European parties), and the national governments.
Those are Conservatives from EPP group, not some "The EU". Let's be literal.
Let's also be honest, the social democrats are backing this as well.
private messages are unrecorded audio and private photos come out of instant cameras. Good luck scanning that.
The trick here is to make it impossible to do so.
Don’t put your shit in the cloud and use proper E2E secure messaging.
For me the entire idea of the cloud is dead due to exposure like this.
People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.
I’ve been eternally surprised at how non technical people work around problems. I mean I have a totally technology illiterate family member who worked out how to torrent films and watch them and install ublock and Firefox.
>People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this.
Criminals in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
It's client side scanning.
You can refuse to use software that does it.
If they force their spyware into Android/iOS you are running out of options.
Pixel and GrapheneOS or something. Already considering it.
Then guess what, criminals will use Linux phones running semi-custom apps for their encrypted business while honest citizens will be spied on.
Gotta get back in time. The Symbian S60/S80 platform will rise again!
Like others said: this is implemented on operating system level, locally.
There isn't much escape other than using messengers which encrypt the data locally. Geogram radio is doing this.
I’d rather use an older or open source OS without it
That's one of the tricks. The other trick is to vote in universal right for encrypted communication once and for all.
Encryption is mathematics -- making this an issue of freedom not only of speech, but of thought.
That’s the best answer. But you’re up against paid up lobbyists.
why are the epsteinists so obsessed with destroying our freedoms and privacy?
does this violate GDPR?
>GDPR Article 2 Material scope
>2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:
>by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security.
Maybe...in a world where lawmakers didn't put huge exemptions into GDPR for governments and law enforcement etc. Which they did.
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I don't think criticisms of chat-control-like legislation attempts are downvoted here?
This guy has gone on a small anti-EU tirade elsewhere in the thread.
If my experience is anything to go by the answer is 'yes':
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412060
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
That comment was quickly voted down. It is unclear whether this was the usual "don't like this person so I'll downvote all his last posts" or targeted at my statement on how these proposals keep on popping up no matter how often the people - in Greek that spells 'δημόσιο' or 'dèmosio', the root of 'democracy' - have made clear they don't want it.
One reason to downvote it is because laws having some stability is generally a good thing. It also doesn’t prevent laws being passed that strengthen the right to privacy.
The argument is a too simplistic criticism of the legislative process. And it’s independent from criticizing the actual laws that are attempted to be passed. It applies equally to desirable and undesirable laws.
In that case the down-voters could have replied with something like that instead of knee-jerk-pressing that down-vote arrow in an attempt to get rid of a dissenting opinion. I would have responded by pointing out that the repeated attempts at pushing through laws which are clearly unwanted by the voting public has no stabilising effect and only undermines the trust in the legislative process. That my argument of 'they can try as often as they wish because they only have to win once while we have to win every time' is not simplistic but realistic.
I would be interested to hear your reasoning behind that statement by the way, in what way is it 'simplistic'? Why should it be acceptable for politicos to keep on attempting to push through unwanted laws while it is clearly not allowed for e.g. commercial entities to keep on pestering you with unwanted offers? Here's the very same EU on the subject [1]:
Persistent unwanted offers
Under EU law, companies may not make persistent and unwanted offers to you by telephone, fax, e mail or any other media suitable for distance selling.
I propose a similar law for politicos:
Persistent unwanted law proposals
Under EU law, politicians may not make persistent attempts to push through law proposals which have been voted down several times before.
The law text needs to make clear that it is not allowed to keep on trying to push through essentially identical law proposals which have been voted down by $X sessions of the EU parliament. After having been voted down $X times there is a mandatory moratorium of $Y years before a similar law can be brought up to the vote again.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
> Why should it be acceptable for politicos to keep on attempting to push through unwanted laws
Think about what would happen if it was somehow prohibited to propose “sufficiently similar” laws again. Opposing parties would start gaming that rule by proposing the weakest flawed version possible for a law, so that it is rejected, which will in consequence prevent a better version of it from being admissible for consideration. Factions being in the majority will proactively propose and reject some laws just in case that, in the next legislative period, other factions gain majority. Similarly, minority factions will be discouraged from even proposing any laws, for fear of canceling future chances when they are rejected. Furthermore, who will judge what is “similar enough” to fall under the rule? Politicians will just start playing games to make it just dissimilar enough to go through.
Sometimes you downvote things because they are so obviously amiss that they aren’t even worth discussing. I understand that it can be frustrating if you don’t think they are amiss, but that’s just how it is.
Well, no, that is not a realistic scenario. If a law like the one I propose was in place it would be up to the politicos to make sure their law proposals would be up to snuff before they put them up for a vote in the knowledge that they could not keep on adjusting a line here, changing a word there to finally have it pass. If the proposed law is relatively uncontroversial it will pass the vote. If it is totally abysmal it won't pass. If it is debatable it will be debated. That is the political process as it was meant to be: come up with solutions to problems.
The whole spiel about 'majority' and 'minority' factions is not relevant here, what matters is whether the laws they propose stand a chance of gaining enough votes to pass. Assuming that the parliament is representative of the voter base - and that is a very big assumption - it can be stated that laws which are voted down are voted down because the people - the dèmos in other words - don't want those laws to be passed.
Do you think it is a good thing to have more laws on the books? If so I do not agree. I'd rather have fewer laws, the fewer the better. Regulate those things which need to be regulated, leave the rest to the people. It is up to the people to decide what needs to be regulated, not to those who have based their careers around regulation. There's a big conflict of interest between the needs of the former and those of the latter which has been tipped towards those of the latter in heavily bureaucratic institutions like the EU. I'd like to see the balance tip more towards the needs of the people, not the bureaucrats.
> Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?
Hey, let's call this "forum control" :)
Let’s migrate our apps to the EU!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is widespread in Europe. Quality of life has gotten so bad and continuous to decline except for mainly Poland and Hungary.
And what do systems cling to especially in situations like these? Surveillance.
Another massive not so funny joke once again hit Germany the week ago - a smear campaign and hit piece to justify even more censorship.
Germany is going down the drain - and the elite is trying to silence freedom of speech massively while ignoring doing what’s important and what’s right.
Have fun migrating your app to the EU. No one is coming to save you especially not your shitty infrastructure. Energy crisis, and devs think it is a good idea to go for 2% uptime in the near future.
It is so ridiculous.
Yes, yes, let's all rally around the free speech haven that is Hungary, which only five short years ago banned "the discussion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, the media, advertising, and other public places."
Let's all take this person extremely seriously, as they are advocating for free speech.
They hate us for our freedoms.
A shame the EU is just simulation of democracy.
Best case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...