The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).
I don’t think the average American voter “genuinely” thinks that they’re on a Blues Brothers-style mission from god to deliver liberalism and freedom to the world. I would be surprised if that’s even a minority view among voters.
The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.
Can you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members?
EU is less of a dictatorship and more of a technocracy. Where they rely heavily on experts to define policy rather than a democratic system. As you said:
> Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative
The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear.
It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.
In practice it is. The whole idea of technocracy comes with a bunch of levers you can easily exploit with a bit of power and money (not just external corporations or donors, but internal like intelligence agencies). As long as you make an appearance of following the process of evidence being collected and experts being involved. And there is never a careful process to check if it was actually done right after the fact. Just the usual political election risk which is even more obscured by the extra layers of descion making and consultancies. It's just democracy with less public accountability. Particularly, with as I said, how it's implemented in practice (rather than technocracy on paper).
Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.
This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.
The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)
The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).
There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.
There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").
But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.
Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.
The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.
I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.
The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.
Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.
This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.
Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.
The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.
That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.
So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.
And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.
> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?
Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).
There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head idiotic and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down.
The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.
> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.
The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.
Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.
That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.
I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.
Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?
They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone.
Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change.
It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention.
There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.
I don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).
This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
And, of course, no thought is given to the implications this could have in conjunction with the next Orban. Europe is aligning against Russia as a threat, while at the same time shooting itself in the foot by disabling basic rights like privacy with absolutely no memory of how much more basic lack of privacy (enabled by Facebook) was leveraged with relatively simple tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...) to help Brexit happen (effectively breaking Europe apart).
This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
There will always be extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.
The problem is quite simple: people swing more to one side or another if their voices are not heard.
The current boogeyman is the growth of the far-right in Europe. But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
> But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
I believe there are more nuances to this, then simply blaming it on immigration policies.
There are a lot of variables in place for why far right movements are and have been on the rise in the EU. And I certainly believe the issues could've been handled better by each member state.
Yes, immigration is a serious problem. Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants.
After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live. The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to. So, I do not see immigration as "a problem".
Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
Far-right mostly uses migrants as an easy scapegoats for any problem. In many countries I have seen migrants taken advantage of (worse work condition, employers not paying taxes, no healthcare provided, children have worse education, no insurance, etc).
I wouldn't even mind if they would be honest about what they claim (being nationalist), but I don't see any right wing party talking seriously about programs to encourage natality, reduce poverty or improve education. Blaming a generic category for your problems rarely solves said problems.
So, for me the boogeyman is talking about superfluous generic topics rather than solutions to problems I see: education, natality, energy, industry.
With all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less.
This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.
More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies
Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:
…
· A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
· A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.
This is pushing for encryption backdoors in eurocrat speech: lawful access to data, roadmap, impact assesment, updating rules.
"Law enforcement need lawful ways to enter a home"
"See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.
The lawful way for law enforcement to enter a home is to get a search warrant (or whatever the EU equivalent is) and show it to the owner, who then lets them in because that's what the law requires. No need for law enforcement to even worry about the lock. If the owner doesn't let them in when they have a search warrant, they're violating the law, and sure, they can technically keep the doors locked and refuse to open them, but it's only a matter of time before they'll end up giving in one way or another.
But if law enforcement wants to be lazy, they can say, look, this whole search warrant business is so tedious, and even then it might take time before the owner capitulates, so why not just pass a law that requires all locks to have backdoors in them so we can open them? Then we can just let ourselves into someone's home whenever we feel like it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave a bona fide need to do so in order to protect the public.
The latter is what the EU Commission is trying to do.
> "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".
It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.
It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.
> It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
Same idea, yeah. One of the issues with "TSA-approved" locks is that the corresponding keys are widely available. We should not expect a government backdoor key to be secured any better than that.
Maybe. I think that strengthening laws that force servers to be more diligent would be unpopular (especially with this crowd), but it's a lot different from forcing backdoors.
The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.
This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.
You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.
The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.
And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!
There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.
Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me? I’m afraid that I, as a good person and father, am going to be punished for not letting them read my private messages. I’m afraid for my future in the EU.
> Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me?
Depends on where you live. If for example you live in the UK, they will jail you until you pony up the PIN to your phone and any other passwords they want from you. Don't know how it is other countries.
No one really cares about your individual comms. The goal of legislation like this is to ensure that E2E chat apps are no longer distributed on the app stores, so even if a tiny amount of nerds like us might use them among ourselves, they are no longer relevant socially.
The problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members).
There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.
It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.
There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".
While I don't mind privacy, I care much more about other topics, like, for example, education. The right wing party in the country I vote in, when it got into power (not for long thankfully) managed to slash 1 billion of education!
The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.
If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of:
- Russian trolls
- US trolls
- Chinese trolls
Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.
It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.
r/europe represents Europeans about as accurately as r/politics represents Americans. it's a heavily curated consent manufacturing outlet. what you see there is what its political commissars allow to be seen.
Here we see something posted from 18 months ago as if it's happening today. In the intervening time, the democracy rejected the proposal. So what is this post if not fearmongering by some kind of troll?
Like far right isn't going to vote in mass surveillance the moment they have any chance. (Not disputing that there are other frustrations that are fuelling the rise of far right, correct or not. But isn't one of those)
Indeed. This is also why we should resist getting locked further into the Apple/Google duopoly. In such closed systems it will be straightforward to require backdoors. Much harder if we have general-purpose computers that we can run our own software on.
This is from 2025. I don't know why someone has seen fit to repost it again in 2026.... I'm guessing they didn't look at the date.
And lots of people here are spouting FUD.
In the ensuing period, the EU took expert advice later in 2025, and as they say in an update a few months later in June 2025[1]:
The High-Level Group recommended taking a cautious approach to designing solutions for lawful access to systems, whereby industry should not be asked to integrate systems that are likely to weaken encryption in a generalised or systemic way for all users of a service. Lawful access to data must remain targeted and limited to specific communications on a case-by-case basis.
As a general rule, any solutions should be implemented based on clear standards that are developed with input from all stakeholders, including industry representatives, data protection, privacy and cybersecurity experts, and law enforcement practitioners. However, caution is warranted when dealing with encryption, as underlined by the High-Level Group.
So there is ZERO EVIDENCE that the EU are "pushing for encryption backdoor".
It is instead quite clear from the above that the experts are on "our" side AND the EU are listening to them.
Instead, all these publications are just a reflection of a democratic process of discussing modern threats. The documents clearly mention "terrorism, organised crime, online fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse, online sexual extortion, ransomware".
So it is only fair and reasonable that politicians should be discussing ways to counter these threats. And quite honestly they would not be doing their job if someone did not MENTION "encryption" and ask "the question" to the experts and other stakeholders.
The fact they are DISCUSSING "encryption" does not automatically mean they want to backdoor it.
I know it is alien to people in the US under the present administration, but this is how proper politics works. You openly discuss issues of the day, you seek opinions from stakeholders and experts, rinse and repeat until you make a decision (or not). The present US administration could do with learning a thing or two. ;)
When I was young and naive I voted to remain in the EU in the brexit referendum. Since then I’ve learned a few things and realise the EU is not an institution to be affiliated with politically. In terms of what we did with the opportunity we had - we totally dropped the ball.
It’s just so disappointing how the EU is still so popular across Europe.
Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS.
It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well.
IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
There are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block.
In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.
Been using matrix for years now. Even operating a server for a small community. It is slightly more involved for regular users though so that is not the best but otherwise works.
Setting up your own federated instance is quite simple, there is an Ansible playbook around to make it even easier. You could even isolate it and have it only for your org.
From what I know there is some traction to get it adopted in a bunch of agencies eu-wide.
I loathe how difficult Matrix is for normal people though. It's a nightmare to find a client, get an account, connect to your server, set up push notifications, and then navigate to a chat, much less set up encryption.
Fine for us, my mom is never managing.
Hopefully if it gets more mainstream some of these things get smoothed out, because it's nice once it's working.
Huh, I guess that works. I never considered it as a Signal replacement. It always seemed closer to an IRC (and I guess Discord and maybe Slack) replacement to me. But yeah I do believe it has end to end encryption for individual communication as well.
FWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't.
A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.
The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.
So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.
As someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it.
We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.
There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.
Let them learn their lesson. As soon as it comes together it will be taken over by the first AI to crack it and then they will be pwned and have to learn the hard way. No child, spoiled, stupid or otherwise will learn hard lessons without experiencing pain.
Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
So "Think of the children" did not work and now they go about it with "Fear the Russians" or "Fear the Chinese" or whatever boogieman they're looking at creating.
From the article: "The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented." - so a revival of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra?
The question that I have: what do they fear so much they spend so much time and effort trying to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption for private communications?
Politicians are quick to criticize when Russia does it, but I guess it's okay because it's Europe. They have magic cheese that can only be bought from one island in Greece........
I'm still mourning the pre gdpr Internet. Now productivity took a hit for cookie theater.
The lobbyists are working hard again to abuse every EU citizen. This is quite typical of the fake commission here - not voted in by the people, not working for the people. An alien organisation that constantly wants to expand the EU and increase taxes to self-finance itself.
I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin.
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.
The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
Only a fascist like totalitarian government would keep pushing for more and control and les freedoms.
Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.
I'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.
It has nothing to with EU itseld and a lot of to do with far right trying to turn people against EU. EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk. They want to push it over the line and break down.
Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet".
That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.
It's also got to do with the structures, that make the governing body of the EU, if it lets bought politicians again and again push hostile agendas, against the will of the people inside the EU, and inching ever closer to that, which we don't want to become.
From a comment further up: 'If you don't know, the unfortunate way the EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.'.
> with far right trying to turn people against EU.
The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.
Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.
> now EU is fascist.
Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...
The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.
In an earlier one about Iceland and EU, people criticizing EU were downvoted, called russian bots or far-right. I don't expect much difference here.
Chat control and ProtectEU are certainly not the last totalitarian measures EU will invent, there will be more. And I find it interesting that people still defend EU without any hesitation.
Now I think the initial trade union was great and a necessary counter weight when competing with larger economies and countries. But it rather quickly evolving into something that is less concerned about the citizens, and more about staying in power.
I live in Scandinavia, and I’m sad to say, but most progressive legislation comes from the EU.
Our national government only legislates on populist issues. Racist laws, more surveillance, less oversight of cops and authorities, bans on big dogs and burkahs etc. - either symbolic issues that affect very few people in reality or mostly just limiting freedom and civil rights, never expanding on it.
I don’t like that we have many unelected technocrats and the corruption sucks, but the EU changes my life for the better. I honestly can’t say that about our national governments over the past two decades.
It's not that, it's calling the EU a dictatorship, meanwhile the US has genuinely slipped out of the liberal democracy rankings to a electoral democracy (the same as Hungary last year) and seems to be on the path to full blown oligarchy. There is genuine concern here about this bill but it's not the elephant in the room. The EU hasn't threatened to invade a NATO country, isn't initiating trade wars with close allies and seemingly done a 180 on foreign policy in the past 2 years.
Last year, there many seemed to have major concerns about Hungary but again it was pointed out that things could be turned around. I don't see how the US is doing to turn this around.
The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).
The United States is religious against kings and genuinely thinks they have a holy mission of humans right, freedom, democracy, and liberalism.
Obviously this doesn't always happen, but there's only an extremely small minority that think otherwise.
Maybe put me in the otherwise camp. Disappointed democracy produced Trump. Maybe we need a technocracy to defend the world from China.
I don’t think the average American voter “genuinely” thinks that they’re on a Blues Brothers-style mission from god to deliver liberalism and freedom to the world. I would be surprised if that’s even a minority view among voters.
The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.
Can you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members?
EU is less of a dictatorship and more of a technocracy. Where they rely heavily on experts to define policy rather than a democratic system. As you said:
> Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative
The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear.
It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.
The word for what you just described is not technocracy…
In practice it is. The whole idea of technocracy comes with a bunch of levers you can easily exploit with a bit of power and money (not just external corporations or donors, but internal like intelligence agencies). As long as you make an appearance of following the process of evidence being collected and experts being involved. And there is never a careful process to check if it was actually done right after the fact. Just the usual political election risk which is even more obscured by the extra layers of descion making and consultancies. It's just democracy with less public accountability. Particularly, with as I said, how it's implemented in practice (rather than technocracy on paper).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO...
You can. The way this works is via something called money. Or more generally, financial incentives, kickbacks, you name it.
Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).
Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.
Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat
This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.
The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)
The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).
There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.
The more democratic the EU the less sovereign legitimacy countries have. That's the tension that makes Euroskeptic parties oppose reforms.
There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").
But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
What kind of loss of power are you referring to?
Look to the Westminster system for the true solution to the Commission’s lack of accountability.
Let the MEPs of each country vote on who amongst them will sit on the Commission.
because it is a perfect tool for all governments to 'wash' unpopular political bills that would be a political suicide in local politics.
You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it.
That is also true - national countries sabotage any reform.
Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.
I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.
Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.
The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.
I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.
The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.
Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.
This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.
Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.
The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.
That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.
So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.
And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.
This is not exactly, both french and dutch referenda were
> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?
There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).
There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.
Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).
"ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.
Chat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it.
For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.
This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.
There's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes.
There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head idiotic and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down.
The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.
I still dont understand how a thing that passes this way has any legitimacy? Cant the EU just not allow it to be enforced?
The wild part is that both the United States and China will get the decryption. There's too much money and corruption in the world.
Maybe local(European states) won't care as long as they can use it against their people in their feifdom.
> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.
The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.
Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.
That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.
> In reality, they want to be dictators.
Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.
Very funny if it weren't so true!
I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.
Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?
They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone. Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change. It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention.
There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.
Why would you create such a blatant red herring?
I don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).
That is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants.
Secret Hitler(the boardgame) fan?
Wait, Hilter made a boardgame? I'm... curious. (Looks around with apprehension)
"Secret Hitler" is a social deduction game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Hitler). You can find various games of it on YouTube.
Who picks the comissioners are the national governments.
It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap.
It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down.
This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
I agree, but to be fair, the US constitution is set of limitations on democracy from beginning to end, and I do support that document.
The U.S. constitution would be a much better constitution for the EU than what we have now.
But the US doesn't follow it.
And, of course, no thought is given to the implications this could have in conjunction with the next Orban. Europe is aligning against Russia as a threat, while at the same time shooting itself in the foot by disabling basic rights like privacy with absolutely no memory of how much more basic lack of privacy (enabled by Facebook) was leveraged with relatively simple tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...) to help Brexit happen (effectively breaking Europe apart).
This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
Europe has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.
There will always be extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.
The problem is quite simple: people swing more to one side or another if their voices are not heard.
The current boogeyman is the growth of the far-right in Europe. But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
> But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
I believe there are more nuances to this, then simply blaming it on immigration policies. There are a lot of variables in place for why far right movements are and have been on the rise in the EU. And I certainly believe the issues could've been handled better by each member state.
Yes, immigration is a serious problem. Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants.
After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live. The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to. So, I do not see immigration as "a problem".
Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
> Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
How far do you want to go back?
I don't think Spain or Sweden are very responsible for most of the Middle Eastern woes. If anything, blame the US.
Far-right mostly uses migrants as an easy scapegoats for any problem. In many countries I have seen migrants taken advantage of (worse work condition, employers not paying taxes, no healthcare provided, children have worse education, no insurance, etc).
I wouldn't even mind if they would be honest about what they claim (being nationalist), but I don't see any right wing party talking seriously about programs to encourage natality, reduce poverty or improve education. Blaming a generic category for your problems rarely solves said problems.
So, for me the boogeyman is talking about superfluous generic topics rather than solutions to problems I see: education, natality, energy, industry.
With all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less.
This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.
Meanwhile the latest gen ai agents are able to crack everything not nailed down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301
Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm
Is the actual text of the workplan somewhere? The linked article refers to the text
more effective tools for law enforcement
in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text?
(Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)
It's linked in the second paragraph of article.
This is pushing for encryption backdoors in eurocrat speech: lawful access to data, roadmap, impact assesment, updating rules.What you are citing from is an older press release from April 2025.
The article in this HA submission itself is from April 2025.
"Law enforcement need lawful ways to enter a home"
"See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.
The lawful way for law enforcement to enter a home is to get a search warrant (or whatever the EU equivalent is) and show it to the owner, who then lets them in because that's what the law requires. No need for law enforcement to even worry about the lock. If the owner doesn't let them in when they have a search warrant, they're violating the law, and sure, they can technically keep the doors locked and refuse to open them, but it's only a matter of time before they'll end up giving in one way or another.
But if law enforcement wants to be lazy, they can say, look, this whole search warrant business is so tedious, and even then it might take time before the owner capitulates, so why not just pass a law that requires all locks to have backdoors in them so we can open them? Then we can just let ourselves into someone's home whenever we feel like it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave a bona fide need to do so in order to protect the public.
The latter is what the EU Commission is trying to do.
> "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".
It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.
It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.
> It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
Same idea, yeah. One of the issues with "TSA-approved" locks is that the corresponding keys are widely available. We should not expect a government backdoor key to be secured any better than that.
Maybe. I think that strengthening laws that force servers to be more diligent would be unpopular (especially with this crowd), but it's a lot different from forcing backdoors.
The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.
No that is not what they are doing.
This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.
You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.
The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.
And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!
There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.
This is from April 2025.
Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.
Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me? I’m afraid that I, as a good person and father, am going to be punished for not letting them read my private messages. I’m afraid for my future in the EU.
> Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me?
Depends on where you live. If for example you live in the UK, they will jail you until you pony up the PIN to your phone and any other passwords they want from you. Don't know how it is other countries.
No one really cares about your individual comms. The goal of legislation like this is to ensure that E2E chat apps are no longer distributed on the app stores, so even if a tiny amount of nerds like us might use them among ourselves, they are no longer relevant socially.
And being one of the few who use them will be considered aggravating factor in unrelated lawsuits. This already happened once even though it's not illegal: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...
The problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members).
There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.
It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.
There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".
While I don't mind privacy, I care much more about other topics, like, for example, education. The right wing party in the country I vote in, when it got into power (not for long thankfully) managed to slash 1 billion of education!
The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.
They are not going to do anything to you, but they will throw anyone into a jail who develops end to end encryption.
Stuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.
If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls
Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.
It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
r/europe represents Europeans about as accurately as r/politics represents Americans. it's a heavily curated consent manufacturing outlet. what you see there is what its political commissars allow to be seen.
Here we see something posted from 18 months ago as if it's happening today. In the intervening time, the democracy rejected the proposal. So what is this post if not fearmongering by some kind of troll?
There is a reason why the popularity of far right is all time high everywhere in the EU.
Like far right isn't going to vote in mass surveillance the moment they have any chance. (Not disputing that there are other frustrations that are fuelling the rise of far right, correct or not. But isn't one of those)
Google "security despite encryption" etc. It is some good rhetorical manipulation a'la EU over again.
We see it in the EU here but the groups pushing for that are everywhere, including the US, UK, Australia, etc
So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years
Indeed. This is also why we should resist getting locked further into the Apple/Google duopoly. In such closed systems it will be straightforward to require backdoors. Much harder if we have general-purpose computers that we can run our own software on.
That's why for wallet features only Apple and Google are allowed. Condition everyone picking only iOS or Android, but not Linux, or others.
This is why you shouldn't use a phone wallet. Doesn't your bank give you a card?
Yep, conversely, this wouldn't have happened if we had a healthy mobile ecosystem.
This is from 2025. I don't know why someone has seen fit to repost it again in 2026.... I'm guessing they didn't look at the date.
And lots of people here are spouting FUD.
In the ensuing period, the EU took expert advice later in 2025, and as they say in an update a few months later in June 2025[1]:
So there is ZERO EVIDENCE that the EU are "pushing for encryption backdoor".It is instead quite clear from the above that the experts are on "our" side AND the EU are listening to them.
Instead, all these publications are just a reflection of a democratic process of discussing modern threats. The documents clearly mention "terrorism, organised crime, online fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse, online sexual extortion, ransomware".
So it is only fair and reasonable that politicians should be discussing ways to counter these threats. And quite honestly they would not be doing their job if someone did not MENTION "encryption" and ask "the question" to the experts and other stakeholders.
The fact they are DISCUSSING "encryption" does not automatically mean they want to backdoor it.
I know it is alien to people in the US under the present administration, but this is how proper politics works. You openly discuss issues of the day, you seek opinions from stakeholders and experts, rinse and repeat until you make a decision (or not). The present US administration could do with learning a thing or two. ;)
People here need to rein in the FUD.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
The OP/submitter's history basically looks what I expect coming from a US or Russian propaganda bot.
Thank you, should be top comment.
When I was young and naive I voted to remain in the EU in the brexit referendum. Since then I’ve learned a few things and realise the EU is not an institution to be affiliated with politically. In terms of what we did with the opportunity we had - we totally dropped the ball.
It’s just so disappointing how the EU is still so popular across Europe.
Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS.
It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well.
IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
There are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block.
In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.
Been using matrix for years now. Even operating a server for a small community. It is slightly more involved for regular users though so that is not the best but otherwise works. Setting up your own federated instance is quite simple, there is an Ansible playbook around to make it even easier. You could even isolate it and have it only for your org. From what I know there is some traction to get it adopted in a bunch of agencies eu-wide.
I loathe how difficult Matrix is for normal people though. It's a nightmare to find a client, get an account, connect to your server, set up push notifications, and then navigate to a chat, much less set up encryption.
Fine for us, my mom is never managing.
Hopefully if it gets more mainstream some of these things get smoothed out, because it's nice once it's working.
Huh, I guess that works. I never considered it as a Signal replacement. It always seemed closer to an IRC (and I guess Discord and maybe Slack) replacement to me. But yeah I do believe it has end to end encryption for individual communication as well.
FWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't.
A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.
The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.
So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.
[1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
As someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it.
We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.
They don't have to. Signal, in particular, since it's not connected to massive revenue streams, can just wait to see if the country blocks it.
Sorry, maybe I'm dumb. Why would "gatekeepers" poke the bear?
> IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
I'm pretty sure they'd see it as a win, at least unless it led to massive public backlash. So why not skip that step and just give them the backlash?
There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.
> Lawful Access
Always a cute little euphemism for it.
Backdoor is a weakness of design by definition. How it can possibly protect EU?
Let them learn their lesson. As soon as it comes together it will be taken over by the first AI to crack it and then they will be pwned and have to learn the hard way. No child, spoiled, stupid or otherwise will learn hard lessons without experiencing pain.
Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
So "Think of the children" did not work and now they go about it with "Fear the Russians" or "Fear the Chinese" or whatever boogieman they're looking at creating.
From the article: "The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented." - so a revival of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra?
The question that I have: what do they fear so much they spend so much time and effort trying to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption for private communications?
Very European move.
Politicians are quick to criticize when Russia does it, but I guess it's okay because it's Europe. They have magic cheese that can only be bought from one island in Greece........
I'm still mourning the pre gdpr Internet. Now productivity took a hit for cookie theater.
This is in a desperate need of a (2025) flag.
The lobbyists are working hard again to abuse every EU citizen. This is quite typical of the fake commission here - not voted in by the people, not working for the people. An alien organisation that constantly wants to expand the EU and increase taxes to self-finance itself.
(2025)
Politicians and the interests around them just don't quit.
I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin.
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
I think people use emoji for this
Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.
The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
Fuck you, slop bot.
Guess I found the trap phrases.
Rare AI slop use case
Only a fascist like totalitarian government would keep pushing for more and control and les freedoms.
Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.
I'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.
When you stop seeing it is when you know there is a real problem.
Funny, I see something completely opposite.
It has nothing to with EU itseld and a lot of to do with far right trying to turn people against EU. EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk. They want to push it over the line and break down.
Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet".
That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.
It's also got to do with the structures, that make the governing body of the EU, if it lets bought politicians again and again push hostile agendas, against the will of the people inside the EU, and inching ever closer to that, which we don't want to become.
> EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk
Funny given it's not and was never supposed to be a "democracy" or a federation for that matter.
> That disappeard, now EU is fascist
Not necessarily? Mass surveillance is something integral to totalitarian states of any leaning.
Yes, European countries are supposed to be democratic.
> Not necessarily?
I dont think it is fascist, but yes people on HN call it fascist more often then is reasonable.
From a comment further up: 'If you don't know, the unfortunate way the EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.'.
> with far right trying to turn people against EU.
The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.
Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.
> now EU is fascist.
Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...
Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...
Here is small excerpt:
The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.
War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.
These threads are amusing.
In an earlier one about Iceland and EU, people criticizing EU were downvoted, called russian bots or far-right. I don't expect much difference here.
Chat control and ProtectEU are certainly not the last totalitarian measures EU will invent, there will be more. And I find it interesting that people still defend EU without any hesitation.
Now I think the initial trade union was great and a necessary counter weight when competing with larger economies and countries. But it rather quickly evolving into something that is less concerned about the citizens, and more about staying in power.
I live in Scandinavia, and I’m sad to say, but most progressive legislation comes from the EU.
Our national government only legislates on populist issues. Racist laws, more surveillance, less oversight of cops and authorities, bans on big dogs and burkahs etc. - either symbolic issues that affect very few people in reality or mostly just limiting freedom and civil rights, never expanding on it.
I don’t like that we have many unelected technocrats and the corruption sucks, but the EU changes my life for the better. I honestly can’t say that about our national governments over the past two decades.
It's not that, it's calling the EU a dictatorship, meanwhile the US has genuinely slipped out of the liberal democracy rankings to a electoral democracy (the same as Hungary last year) and seems to be on the path to full blown oligarchy. There is genuine concern here about this bill but it's not the elephant in the room. The EU hasn't threatened to invade a NATO country, isn't initiating trade wars with close allies and seemingly done a 180 on foreign policy in the past 2 years.
Last year, there many seemed to have major concerns about Hungary but again it was pointed out that things could be turned around. I don't see how the US is doing to turn this around.