> Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes,
maintaining law and order or military purposes;
If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?
If they have it all figured out, this exception should not be necessary. The reality is that it isn't secure as they are creating backdoors in the encryption, and they will flag many communications incorrectly. That means a lot of legal private communications will leak, and/or will be reviewed by the EU that they have absolutely no business looking into.
It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.
I also wonder about the business implications. I don't think we can pass compliance if we communicate over channels that are not encrypted. We might not be able to do business internationally anymore as our communications will be scanned and reviewed by the EU.
> It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.
There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.
That one line on its own should be enough put the illegitimacy of this proposal on clear display. Privacy for me (the surveillance state) but not for thee (the populace).
Oh Harry, don't worry! Everyone can happen to have bloated his aunt by an accident!
(quoting from memory), and also
I like Ludo. He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favour: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."
This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
>Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists
Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.
their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...
It's not undemocratic. The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue.
One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.
Parliamentary democracy just fundamentally has a weakness when it comes to single-issue voting. After picking a party to vote on based on housing, economic policy, crime, ..., how much voting power so to say is left for.. which guy the party says they'll send to the european commission? And what that guy's stance on chat-control is? If they're even publicizing that...
Do those numbers include the UK when it was in the EU? Obviously removing a large pool of sceptics would shift the numbers.
The "positive" number has recovered from a low in the wake of the Eurozone crisis but is still fallen significantly from the pre-crisis level of around 50%.
My EU skepticism is gonna skyrocket if Chat Control goes through and I will start voting for the anti-EU party. Whatever benefits the EU has is not worth losing our freedoms.
It will not be if chat control passes, and I am not sure it was true most of the time before (there was no significant change between Brexit and the Online Safety Act)
There were similar problems in areas other than privacy and encryption, or indeed technology.
And who runs the EU? The MEPs and members of the countries government.
It's not like it's a different country imposing their way onto us. Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented.
Right, because a commission that keeps bringing legislation to a vote until one of those two vote pools gets a majority, despite the law being against my government's constitution (in strong terms), and me having no way to stop it if all representatives of my country voted against, is totally not the EU imposing its way on my country.
How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?
The problem is the indirection. Only the European Commission can propose legislation [1], so the legislative direction of the EU is entirely determined by them - MEPs can only slow it down.
And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.
[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.
>"Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented."
And be told to sod off.
From Wikipedia: [0]-"Currently, there is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state."
> It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
Please inform yourself or you're in danger of letting things happen through your ignorance. The commission is not pushing this. They're acting on instructions from a certain number of elected politicians.
And, you're misleading others when you post stuff like this.
None of us posting in these topics wants this proposal to pass. And in order to fight it, you've got to be correctly informed.
>This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.
The state(s) wants this and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.
They need to be named. Shouldn't be able to go anywhere in Brussels (or any city in any member state) without seeing their photo and name on a giant bus shelter poster. I would throw some € in the direction of that.
It hasn't been resubmitted yet, has it? The proponents keep it alive without putting it to an actual vote, AIUI. They try to wait until they think they have a majority, and keep their proposal ready for a vote on short order before their majority dissipates.
Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.
How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
> How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
The same way you can vote out other politicians in your own country - you can't. Assuming you live in (say) Amsterdam, you have no right or control of who people from other regions of the Netherlands vote for.
How do i vote out representatives not from my country? In this case my country is vehemently opposed to this.
How do i vote out representatives if all of them support the measure despite it being unpopular in my country, no matter the faction? That was the case with centralized copyright checking.
EU parliament, and especially EC, are so far removed from any form of accountability, that frankly votes are almost irrelevant - same factions form no matter who's there, and EC runs on rotation.
Lobbying takes prime spot over votes.
EU is sitting in the middle ground between federation and trade union... and we get downsides of both systems.
She's facing two more no confidence votes in October. You just need to convince all 720 members of European Parliament from 27 countries to get rid of her and her commission. Easy.
You mean the extract people that put here there in the first place despite her unanimous lack of popularity in Europe and especially in her home country of Germany where she failed upwards?
Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good about this type of democracy.
Next European Parliament election will be in 2029.
Edit: there was a copypaste of voting requirements here, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/voting-ri.... This is apparently wrong; you can also vote if you're not residing in the EU, only EU citizen. (I thought this was the case, and that link not saying that made me suspicious.) How it is possible that they've put up incorrect information on voting rights, I have no clue.
(a) is a citizen of the Union within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 8 (1) of the Treaty;
(b) is not a national of the Member State of residence, but satisfies the same conditions in respect of the right to vote and to stand as a candidate as that State imposes by law on its own nationals,
Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.
> This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.
> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)
Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.
> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.
> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.
Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.
Democracy is incompatible with freedom by definition, it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.
Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.
If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.
But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.
A few comments about the state of security and privacy in the UK so let me reply with a top level comment instead:
People forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.
> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]
Worth noting that with RIPA (2000, activated in 2007) UK has enforced key disclosure. It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason (including random data).
I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.
More countries will follow after they ratify Russia's "United Nations Convention against Cybercrime" which has key disclosure explicitly stated in the text.
I can't believe with our history involving the Third Reich and the Stasi that we aren't staunchly opposed. Especially with the impending political upheaval when AfD finally gets enough votes to form a ruling government. Our politicians are insanely shortsighted and somehow don't understand the danger they're enabling.
I didn't think this was even possible. Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states? I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights. If that's not the case, the danger isn't limited to just Germany. With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level. Ratification of other Treaties without the sovereignty component is decided upon by the states' national parliaments in all other member states.
Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists.
In the particular, the Seville Declaration recognised the right of Ireland (and all other member states) to decide in accordance with National Constitutions and laws whether and how to participate in any activities under the European Security and Defence Policy.
> Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states?
Sometimes yes.
> I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights.
What are a country's fundamental constitutional rights can be "dynamically adjusted" depending on the political wishes. :-(
> With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
No. The EU isn't a federation, there's no supremacy class. The member countries are sovereign and obviously can't go against their constitutions or basic laws.
Privacy of communications is usually a normal law not constitutional principle, so slots perfectly fine without any supremacy issues between constitution and EU law.
You see, we the people are staunchly opposed. But the interests of our political leaders (we all know what 'leader' translates to) do not align with out interests. So ...
The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.
It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?
edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.
Yes, Germany is very hypocritical, a lot of people have short memories.
On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..
I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly.
Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.
Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.
> The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
This has absolutely started happening, albeit not yet on a large-scale, systematic basis. Mahmoud Khalil [0] resided in the US legally when he was detained with the intention to deport.
Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].
> "I find it extremely worrying that the German government is so shirking its responsibility to take a position on this," said Left Party MP Donata Vogtschmidt, who chairs her group's digital committee. "Because in the Council of the EU, the current blocking minority against chat control depends directly on Germany." If the German government does not stick to the position of its predecessor, "the dam could break and the largest surveillance package the EU has ever seen could become reality."
> Jeanne Dillschneider, Green Party spokesperson on the committee, wrote to netzpolitik.org about her impression of the meeting: "The CDU/CSU, in particular, has often shown in the past how little the protection of fundamental digital rights means to them. I fear the same thing will happen now, even more so, with the CDU/CSU-led Ministry of the Interior." She therefore considers it "all the more crucial whether the Ministry of Justice upholds our fundamental digital rights during this legislative period."
> "I'm cautiously hopeful that some colleagues from the coalition parties apparently share my criticism of chat control," Dillschneider continues. "The question now will be whether they can actually bring themselves to reject chat control. However, I'm not particularly optimistic here."
> Dillschneider's committee colleague, Vogtschmidt, wants to ensure that the Bundestag is forced to take a position on the issue beyond statements made in committee meetings. This is permitted by Article 23 of the Basic Law, which allows parliament to adopt European policy statements. The government must then consider these in negotiations. Vogtschmidt believes: "Now I think chat control will have to be brought back to the Bundestag plenary session to raise awareness of this monstrous danger among a wider public. I will work towards this in the coming days!"
Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...
I believe the concept is that I may not be able to jail you for your criminal activity but I can still jail you for breaking the encryption law.
But more generally I think one has to account for the power of the default option - with so many criminals posting their crimes on social media and/or their Venmo descriptions, the likelihood of criminals abandoning (say) WhatsApp and coding their own is rather slim.
Datenschutz doesn't prevent court-ordered telecomms surveillance either. This would presumably fall in the same category. (Or in fact be unconstitutional, as BVerfG has already ruled several times regarding blanket data collection in other context.)
No, you see, you can trust Father State. He would neverever do anything bad with your data. Trust him. 1933-1945? 1948-1990? Those were ... different times. He's been on a twelve steps program. He's better now.
Data to private companies? That baker that remembers your telelphone number that's DANGEROUS. He could sell the info how many breadrolls you buy per week to the FSB or the MSS. Also, we would lose a chance to add extra fines to small and medium companies, and no-one wants that, do we? ⸮
The older I become, the more 'government' - regardless of the colors it is wearing at the time - looks like Thénardier to me.
> What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany?
Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.
"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).
People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial.
It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology.
silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.
The politicians are lay people, and only have one tool in their toolbox: laws. So every solution is a legal one.
"Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN." Solution? Create a law requiring VPNs to be registered to a user with their address. There's no conspiracy here - it's simple cause and effect. This is a contrived worst case example because this level of accountability? is not currently proposed.
I would prefer other solutions, but these solutions are firstly much easier for the politicians to understand and also much cheaper to implement and see results.
This is utter nonsense. The "technology and encryption make law enforcement harder" narrative is pushed by people to gain power. That's all there is to it. Technology has, if anything, made surveillance and law enforcement so much easier than it ever has been before. Law enforcement always wants to look helpless and like the victim though because they want absolute control over your life.
> "Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN."
Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.
If the UK citizens want Chat Control they should have it. If they don't, they should not elect a government that wants it. Same goes for almost every issue the EU is pushing. Not everyone in the EU needs Chat Control just because the UK citizens really want a government that will give them Chat Control.
Yes, the EU did escalate things to such an extent that absolutely countries should be considering leaving over the EU’s insane push to destroy all privacy and thus free speech.
Good luck. EU has been producing one Europe crippling law and regulation after another and it still enjoys wide support for some reason. Ursula is facing two more no confidence votes in October so hopefully the tide is changing.
People were told the lie that without the EU there will be war again. Like the economic stagnation and decline of Europe is somehow the final solution and the end of history.
You don't have to convince me. You have to convince people who will immediately reject anything negative about EU, even here on HN (see the coming downvotes).
EU is not enough. I'm sometimes not happy with the decision taken by governments in France, so what really has to happen is HauteGaronnExit, where my departement is freed from the influence of borders decided in a Revolution two centuries ago, of which I was never explicitly asked to approve.
And, come to think of it, I don't like all the decisions taken by the departement either. Surely things will work great when my street is responsible for the electrical grid, immigration or international commerce.
And when I say "my street", I obviously mean "my half of the street". I'm not against odd-numbered houses "per se", but, you know...
> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union.
I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.
I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone.
But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.
Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.
Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.
> Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.
Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.
I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).
It's the same reason police (in every country) are always asking for more powers, and then end up not using them effectively. It's a cycle where crime is not perfectly prevented/punished, politicians blame the police, police blame not having enough powers, and then they get more. But the wrong ones to prevent the next tragedy, well, in hindsight of course. So new powers are needed yet again. (And no-one needs to examine why the existing powers are not used effectively, since the underlying problems there would probably be a lot more expensive and boring to fix, e.g. better pay/hours, better management, education, outreach, blahblahblah.)
Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.
One interesting line in the proposal:
> Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes;
If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?
If they have it all figured out, this exception should not be necessary. The reality is that it isn't secure as they are creating backdoors in the encryption, and they will flag many communications incorrectly. That means a lot of legal private communications will leak, and/or will be reviewed by the EU that they have absolutely no business looking into.
It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.
I also wonder about the business implications. I don't think we can pass compliance if we communicate over channels that are not encrypted. We might not be able to do business internationally anymore as our communications will be scanned and reviewed by the EU.
> It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.
There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.
Trolltrace is becoming real
The exclusion includes politicians because there would suddenly be a paper trail. Especially in the EU there were lots of suddenly lost messages.
Security is just the scapegoat excuse.
That one line on its own should be enough put the illegitimacy of this proposal on clear display. Privacy for me (the surveillance state) but not for thee (the populace).
This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
>Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists
Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.
> Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists?
And what would this change?
The people in power.
> current individuals in power as extremists
Those who support and push anti-constitutional laws, maybe. All individuals in power, no.
or maybe let's not?
their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...
Or maybe it's time to realise you are the extremist.
It's not undemocratic. The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue.
One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.
Parliamentary democracy just fundamentally has a weakness when it comes to single-issue voting. After picking a party to vote on based on housing, economic policy, crime, ..., how much voting power so to say is left for.. which guy the party says they'll send to the european commission? And what that guy's stance on chat-control is? If they're even publicizing that...
> The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue
Then it's not very democratic to change it.
It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
> It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
Exactly. There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007.
Europeans in general like or is indifferent towards the EU.
> EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007.
My observations are different.
Here’s some data. Skepticism is pretty low and approval is pretty high
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1360333/euroscepticism-e...
Do those numbers include the UK when it was in the EU? Obviously removing a large pool of sceptics would shift the numbers.
The "positive" number has recovered from a low in the wake of the Eurozone crisis but is still fallen significantly from the pre-crisis level of around 50%.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by country - The EU's own report suggests very big variations between countries: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/905...
Your clique might be more skeptical. Statistics show the population at large is not.
If public opinion and vote was honored there never would have been an EU, just ask the French.
This is wrong though.
France held a referendum on the creation of the EU in 1992, and approved it.
You're thinking of the 2005 referendum, which was about the TCE. The EU already existed before that.
My EU skepticism is gonna skyrocket if Chat Control goes through and I will start voting for the anti-EU party. Whatever benefits the EU has is not worth losing our freedoms.
That approach has spectacularly backfired for the UK, as they used to do the same thing too. ;)
What do you mean by backfire?
A massive unrest and protests.
as another comment suggest "A massive unrest and protests."
but not for chat control but another things, they have going much worse
UK is much worse than EU in terms of privacy and encryption.
It will not be if chat control passes, and I am not sure it was true most of the time before (there was no significant change between Brexit and the Online Safety Act)
There were similar problems in areas other than privacy and encryption, or indeed technology.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45274678
It is, but i would rather take toothless UK's one over EU's Orwellian nightmare.
UK's one is easily avoided.
But reality is that NONE of those options should be even considered.
It might be easily avoided now, but it's easy for them to tighten the reins in the future.
how so?
And who runs the EU? The MEPs and members of the countries government. It's not like it's a different country imposing their way onto us. Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented.
Right, because a commission that keeps bringing legislation to a vote until one of those two vote pools gets a majority, despite the law being against my government's constitution (in strong terms), and me having no way to stop it if all representatives of my country voted against, is totally not the EU imposing its way on my country.
> And who runs the EU?
How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?
The problem is the indirection. Only the European Commission can propose legislation [1], so the legislative direction of the EU is entirely determined by them - MEPs can only slow it down.
And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.
[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.
>"Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented."
And be told to sod off.
From Wikipedia: [0]-"Currently, there is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
Yeah the Commission really needs to go, MEPs need to be able to propose laws. That's really all there is to it to fix the entire situation.
> It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
Please inform yourself or you're in danger of letting things happen through your ignorance. The commission is not pushing this. They're acting on instructions from a certain number of elected politicians.
And, you're misleading others when you post stuff like this.
None of us posting in these topics wants this proposal to pass. And in order to fight it, you've got to be correctly informed.
Don't forget "if we let people vote by some misfortune and their vote is opposite of what we wanted we will overrule it anyway".
>This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.
The state(s) wants this and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.
European Commission is not a democratic body. No EU citizen voted for them.
The European Commission is a civil service drafting these proposals on instructions from elected politicians.
I am going to keep banging this drum because there is too much ignorance on this topic and it harms the fight against it more than helps.
By this logic, most of EU governments are not democratic bodies either.
In my country I vote for a person and that person gets a seat in parliament. That is democratic according to this definition.
They need to be named. Shouldn't be able to go anywhere in Brussels (or any city in any member state) without seeing their photo and name on a giant bus shelter poster. I would throw some € in the direction of that.
Start with these:
Ylva Johansson from Social Democrats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson#Surveillance_of...
Peter Hummelgaard from Social Democrats
https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498
I'm not a fan, but in what was is this, or any other topic, undemocratic to have debates and votes on?
The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
This topic is undemocratic because it's part of the constant attempts to rephrase and resubmit the same unpopular proposal.
It's p-hacking democracy. If a proposal has 5% chance of passing just resubmit it twenty times under different names with minor variations.
It wastes time that lawmakers could spend on proposals that the public actually want.
It hasn't been resubmitted yet, has it? The proponents keep it alive without putting it to an actual vote, AIUI. They try to wait until they think they have a majority, and keep their proposal ready for a vote on short order before their majority dissipates.
Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.
This is at least 3rd time similar measure has been tried in EU parliament, form my memory.
> Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
> How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
The same way you can vote out other politicians in your own country - you can't. Assuming you live in (say) Amsterdam, you have no right or control of who people from other regions of the Netherlands vote for.
How do i vote out representatives not from my country? In this case my country is vehemently opposed to this.
How do i vote out representatives if all of them support the measure despite it being unpopular in my country, no matter the faction? That was the case with centralized copyright checking.
EU parliament, and especially EC, are so far removed from any form of accountability, that frankly votes are almost irrelevant - same factions form no matter who's there, and EC runs on rotation.
Lobbying takes prime spot over votes.
EU is sitting in the middle ground between federation and trade union... and we get downsides of both systems.
>Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?
She's facing two more no confidence votes in October. You just need to convince all 720 members of European Parliament from 27 countries to get rid of her and her commission. Easy.
You mean the extract people that put here there in the first place despite her unanimous lack of popularity in Europe and especially in her home country of Germany where she failed upwards?
Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good about this type of democracy.
Yes. The same fractions which put her there (EPP and friends) will also pick another puppet who will do their bidding.
Next European Parliament election will be in 2029.
Edit: there was a copypaste of voting requirements here, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/voting-ri.... This is apparently wrong; you can also vote if you're not residing in the EU, only EU citizen. (I thought this was the case, and that link not saying that made me suspicious.) How it is possible that they've put up incorrect information on voting rights, I have no clue.
Actual reference, this time legal text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Any person who, on the reference date:
(a) is a citizen of the Union within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 8 (1) of the Treaty;
(b) is not a national of the Member State of residence, but satisfies the same conditions in respect of the right to vote and to stand as a candidate as that State imposes by law on its own nationals,
shall have the right to vote […]
So either citizenship or residency is sufficient.
I was talking about voting for the position held by Ursula, the president of EU commission, not the EU parliamentary elections.
> How do I vote out Ursula [von der] Leyen?
This can only be done indirectly.
Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.
>This can only be done indirectly.
So the short answer is "YOU can't".
She was elected by the European parliament. As an EU citizen, you elect that one.
You vote for a few people from your country to become MEPs. Anything beyond that is out of your control.
> You vote for a few people from your country to become MEPs. Anything beyond that is out of your control.
Just like in your country's own elections.
after how many layers of voting does democracy just becomes plain oligarchy?
> This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.
> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)
Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.
> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.
> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.
Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.
[dead]
[dead]
Democracy is incompatible with freedom by definition, it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.
Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.
If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.
But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.
> it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.
That's very naïve.
The people doing the public opinion control you mention are powerful private interests.
What makes you think those people would be any less dangerous to your freedom when unbounded by law?
A few comments about the state of security and privacy in the UK so let me reply with a top level comment instead:
People forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.
> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66028773
Worth noting that with RIPA (2000, activated in 2007) UK has enforced key disclosure. It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason (including random data).
I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...
More countries will follow after they ratify Russia's "United Nations Convention against Cybercrime" which has key disclosure explicitly stated in the text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_agai...
I can't believe with our history involving the Third Reich and the Stasi that we aren't staunchly opposed. Especially with the impending political upheaval when AfD finally gets enough votes to form a ruling government. Our politicians are insanely shortsighted and somehow don't understand the danger they're enabling.
I didn't think this was even possible. Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states? I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights. If that's not the case, the danger isn't limited to just Germany. With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
For the most part yes, with caveats.
Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level. Ratification of other Treaties without the sovereignty component is decided upon by the states' national parliaments in all other member states.
Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists.
In the particular, the Seville Declaration recognised the right of Ireland (and all other member states) to decide in accordance with National Constitutions and laws whether and how to participate in any activities under the European Security and Defence Policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Declarations_on_the_Tr...
It's enshrined in German Case Law as 'Identitätsvorbehalt'.
https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/das-europalexikon/30945...
The Polish constitutional court has also ruled that EU law does not supercede national law. Thus, primacy of EU law is wholly rejected in Poland.
https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/07/polish-court-rules-some-...
> Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states?
Sometimes yes.
> I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights.
What are a country's fundamental constitutional rights can be "dynamically adjusted" depending on the political wishes. :-(
> With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
No. The EU isn't a federation, there's no supremacy class. The member countries are sovereign and obviously can't go against their constitutions or basic laws.
Privacy of communications is usually a normal law not constitutional principle, so slots perfectly fine without any supremacy issues between constitution and EU law.
It is indeed a constitutional principle in many EU countries.
It is also part of the Treaty of Lisbon via the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is the closest thing to a constitutional level law for the EU.
Not that this has ever stopped anybody.
You see, we the people are staunchly opposed. But the interests of our political leaders (we all know what 'leader' translates to) do not align with out interests. So ...
The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.
> You see, we the people are staunchly opposed.
Doubtful. We on hackernews are staunchly opposed. Most regular people either support or don't care.
AfD is under the watch of spionage agencies but somehow they are THE risk, not the legacy parties and bureaucracy.
You say this while Germany is actively supporting a genocide in Palestine. The world has really turned on its head.
> Third Reich and the Stasi
It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?
edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.
Yes, Germany is very hypocritical, a lot of people have short memories.
On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..
I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly.
Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.
Source: I write dystopias on the subject. https://w.ouzu.im
It's been constantly weakened and people were always saying "don't worry, we will find a workaround, we should do nothing".
Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.
> The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
This has absolutely started happening, albeit not yet on a large-scale, systematic basis. Mahmoud Khalil [0] resided in the US legally when he was detained with the intention to deport.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Khalil_(activist)
Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk
> "I find it extremely worrying that the German government is so shirking its responsibility to take a position on this," said Left Party MP Donata Vogtschmidt, who chairs her group's digital committee. "Because in the Council of the EU, the current blocking minority against chat control depends directly on Germany." If the German government does not stick to the position of its predecessor, "the dam could break and the largest surveillance package the EU has ever seen could become reality."
> Jeanne Dillschneider, Green Party spokesperson on the committee, wrote to netzpolitik.org about her impression of the meeting: "The CDU/CSU, in particular, has often shown in the past how little the protection of fundamental digital rights means to them. I fear the same thing will happen now, even more so, with the CDU/CSU-led Ministry of the Interior." She therefore considers it "all the more crucial whether the Ministry of Justice upholds our fundamental digital rights during this legislative period."
> "I'm cautiously hopeful that some colleagues from the coalition parties apparently share my criticism of chat control," Dillschneider continues. "The question now will be whether they can actually bring themselves to reject chat control. However, I'm not particularly optimistic here."
> Dillschneider's committee colleague, Vogtschmidt, wants to ensure that the Bundestag is forced to take a position on the issue beyond statements made in committee meetings. This is permitted by Article 23 of the Basic Law, which allows parliament to adopt European policy statements. The government must then consider these in negotiations. Vogtschmidt believes: "Now I think chat control will have to be brought back to the Bundestag plenary session to raise awareness of this monstrous danger among a wider public. I will work towards this in the coming days!"
Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...
I believe the concept is that I may not be able to jail you for your criminal activity but I can still jail you for breaking the encryption law.
But more generally I think one has to account for the power of the default option - with so many criminals posting their crimes on social media and/or their Venmo descriptions, the likelihood of criminals abandoning (say) WhatsApp and coding their own is rather slim.
It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.
[dead]
Why cant they just record meta data and hand it out on courts order. Why must it be a backdoor
As a Dutch citizen Chat Control is the first time I genuinely wish the Netherlands was not part of the EU.
That seems naive — this was pushed by several Dutch ministers over the past decades. It would have been made law here in any case.
Law and order, tuff-on-crime political parties (PVV, VVD, CDA¹) just love the idea of control over citizen's chat messages.
This is not 'because of the EU'. We are part of the EU and influence its policies.
1: https://chatcontrole.nl/stemwijzer2023/
Wish we the public could read all the private chat logs of all the people who decided to be undecided.
What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.
Datenschutz doesn't prevent court-ordered telecomms surveillance either. This would presumably fall in the same category. (Or in fact be unconstitutional, as BVerfG has already ruled several times regarding blanket data collection in other context.)
Ah, so my email address is highly private info. But all of my communications are not. Great.
No, you see, you can trust Father State. He would never ever do anything bad with your data. Trust him. 1933-1945? 1948-1990? Those were ... different times. He's been on a twelve steps program. He's better now.
Data to private companies? That baker that remembers your telelphone number that's DANGEROUS. He could sell the info how many breadrolls you buy per week to the FSB or the MSS. Also, we would lose a chance to add extra fines to small and medium companies, and no-one wants that, do we? ⸮
The older I become, the more 'government' - regardless of the colors it is wearing at the time - looks like Thénardier to me.
> What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany?
Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.
"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).
I get what you mean, but Datenschutz and the bizarre processes built to appease it make an appearance almost every day here.
People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial.
It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology.
silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.
The politicians are lay people, and only have one tool in their toolbox: laws. So every solution is a legal one.
"Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN." Solution? Create a law requiring VPNs to be registered to a user with their address. There's no conspiracy here - it's simple cause and effect. This is a contrived worst case example because this level of accountability? is not currently proposed.
I would prefer other solutions, but these solutions are firstly much easier for the politicians to understand and also much cheaper to implement and see results.
But they do find them without the tools. Every other week there are terror suspects arrested. Every week some pedophiles are arrested.
If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.
This is utter nonsense. The "technology and encryption make law enforcement harder" narrative is pushed by people to gain power. That's all there is to it. Technology has, if anything, made surveillance and law enforcement so much easier than it ever has been before. Law enforcement always wants to look helpless and like the victim though because they want absolute control over your life.
> "Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN."
Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.
[dead]
EU must go.
No EU means that most states would already have implemented Chat Control. Case in point, the UK.
If the UK citizens want Chat Control they should have it. If they don't, they should not elect a government that wants it. Same goes for almost every issue the EU is pushing. Not everyone in the EU needs Chat Control just because the UK citizens really want a government that will give them Chat Control.
Is there any living person that thinks the UK people want ChatControl? No? Me neither.
With 69% of people supporting the Online Safety Act [1] I'm confident there are people in the UK that would also support Chat Control
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
If the UK no longer has democracy then that is not something the EU can fix by giving UK chat control.
Well that escalated quickly, didn't it?
Yes, the EU did escalate things to such an extent that absolutely countries should be considering leaving over the EU’s insane push to destroy all privacy and thus free speech.
No, just Ursula and lobbies among the Denmark wacko against privacy.
The EU began as a simple customs bloc and negotiating tool. It has morphed into a blood sucking behemoth preventing growth and discouraging progress.
Good luck. EU has been producing one Europe crippling law and regulation after another and it still enjoys wide support for some reason. Ursula is facing two more no confidence votes in October so hopefully the tide is changing.
People were told the lie that without the EU there will be war again. Like the economic stagnation and decline of Europe is somehow the final solution and the end of history.
You don't have to convince me. You have to convince people who will immediately reject anything negative about EU, even here on HN (see the coming downvotes).
EU is not enough. I'm sometimes not happy with the decision taken by governments in France, so what really has to happen is HauteGaronnExit, where my departement is freed from the influence of borders decided in a Revolution two centuries ago, of which I was never explicitly asked to approve.
And, come to think of it, I don't like all the decisions taken by the departement either. Surely things will work great when my street is responsible for the electrical grid, immigration or international commerce.
And when I say "my street", I obviously mean "my half of the street". I'm not against odd-numbered houses "per se", but, you know...
> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union.
I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.
I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone.
But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.
Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.
Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.
> Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.
Agreed.
Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.
I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).
It's the same reason police (in every country) are always asking for more powers, and then end up not using them effectively. It's a cycle where crime is not perfectly prevented/punished, politicians blame the police, police blame not having enough powers, and then they get more. But the wrong ones to prevent the next tragedy, well, in hindsight of course. So new powers are needed yet again. (And no-one needs to examine why the existing powers are not used effectively, since the underlying problems there would probably be a lot more expensive and boring to fix, e.g. better pay/hours, better management, education, outreach, blahblahblah.)
Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.
> however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful.
Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.
Yeah but that wasn't my point.
My point is that "this isn't about catching criminals" is the wrong wording.
You don't start a debate by twisting the words of the other party. No matter how right you are. Otherwise you will be seen as a pariah.
But this isn't about catching criminals.
For _you_ it isn't.
If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.