EU member states still cannot agree about end-to-end encryption
cyberlaw.stanford.edu
cyberlaw.stanford.edu
It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.
At least within the EU you have the chance of having at least one member state be an adult about it and realise that mass surveillance won’t work out the way they hope.
It’s possible that the CJEU strikes down a chat control-style law based on that charter, but preferably we don’t have to test that.
So if the worst happens and a mandatory chat control will gets implemented by the government, then it is a good thing that other parts of the government helped making sure, there are working alternatives avaiable, that are not so easy to regulate.
And then they will have to back off, if enough people and companies are doing it (likely legal, through loopholes, only big services have to implement it). Or being fine to only censor whatsapp and the mainstream.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/data-retention-france-illeg...
> In a decree made public today [18. October 2022], French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has extended the temporary retention of communications data of all citizens in France for another year. The blanket retention obligation concerns identity data (surname, first name, date and place of birth, postal address(es), e-mail address(es), telephone number(s)) as well as payment information, connection data (IP addresses, port numbers, identification numbers of users and their devices, date, time and duration of each communication, data on supplementary services and their providers)
The good thing about it is that it's an ungovernable nation and they havd mass protests and strikes when the government does something unpopular.
[0]: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-eu-governm...
Qualified majority would be at the least 55% of Council countries and Council representation from at least 65% of the population.
Unanimity is obvious; all EU Council members would have to agree.
What makes you think that your country’s politicians don’t want that but some people in Brussels are forcing it?
Those people in Brussels are just people from all the countries, including yours. You also vote them in.
The desire of governments controlling the population is universal.
However I agree that EU can also be used as a scapegoat when implementing unpopular policies, unfortunately. They can claim that they totally didn't want it but EU mede them accept it.
Suddenly you decide that you want to collect all the private data online and sell it to the highest bidder? Decided that cancerogenic chemicals in the food are cool? It’s not going to happen fast.
It's more like a club where the countries come together to decide how to do things and then they implement local laws to do it. They are not hostile countries brought together by force, the hostilities are usually between neighbours and EU acts as a way to resolve them. For example, countries close to the borders see large refugee influx and the countries further away don't want to have anything to do with that and EU tries to find a way to ease the pressure on the border countries(so far, not very successfully but managed to create a mechanism of keeping refugees outside of EU by paying the host countries like Turkey). Or let's say a country wants to join EU, an EU country might have long standing disputes and EU tries to find a common ground to mediate it(Bulgaria & Northern Macedonia is a vivid recent example). Or let's say there's ethnic issues causing wars and other tragedies, EU creates a law to guarantee the rights of the minorities so that the ethnic issues are no longer relevant those resolved.
For example, let's say Poland agreed to GDPR but they went ahead and made itself a hub for data brokers with no respect to GDPR, then Poland gets sued and funds cut. Poland doesn't get sued or funds cut if they voted against GDPR and blocking it in first place.
They do not answer to anyone and they collude with lobby organizations to push an agenda. This is the far from being a democratic process.
Many dictators were democratly elected.
When you say it like "they are not elected but appointed", you make it sound like some 3rd party is appointing them and you have no power on it but those who appoint the members of EC are the members of EP(elected every 5 years) and the national governments(elected accordingly to the local laws).
If you you want to make it sound undemocratic, you can say that the US president is elected by the electoral college and citizens of the USA have no way to vote for their president.
If you like to argue over technicalities, we can do that.
There are dictators elsewhere, should I have one at home too?
In my book an elected official is someone who was voted in office. If you are not elected then you are appointed. If you are appointed you do not need to be accountable because the people cannot revoke your mandate nor can they vote you out.
To me it seems inconceivable that someone who was appointed can decide to bring forward such a law and not have to defend it.
However it's not O.K. to go around claim that those people are appointees of 3rd parties and are agents of companies and rule with impunity and the EU citizens can't do anything about it. It's a misrepresentation of the reality.
It's like claiming that British PM and the US president are not elected. While technically true, it misrepresent the democratic system.
The exact distribution of responsibilities of the EC and who is to lead the commission is determined through international diplomacy.
Sure, the democratically elected parliament can veto the commission. But not propose a new one.
To even start comparing it with elections for US president and British PM is disingenuous at best.
The commission is appointed by the European council (i.e. prime ministers and presidents of the member states) and approved by the parliament (your directly elected representatives).
They _should_ absolutely be held accountable in the same way we hold ministers accountable in the member states.
In a parliamentary system (ie most countries in the EU) members of parliament are elected. Parliament appoints a premier. Premier appoints ministers with parliamentary approval.
EU commissioners are nominated by the member states subject to their own laws. Typically that means they are chosen by your elected government.
If you want a directly elected commissioner that’s a matter of national politics. Your country is free to change its laws to select a commission nominee via a national vote.
I want a directly elected Commission. The same system would suffice - chosen by the elected parliament among its members.
The commission has to defend their suggestions or they won't make it through council and parliament. And if an individual commissioner is only delivering suggestions that get voted down, they're not likely to get reappointed.
Is there room for improvement? Sure. Is this specific suggestion a complete piece of trash? Sure. Will that be different if we have some kind of presidential election on the EU level? Not so sure.
Just like with the migrant quotas that Hungary and Poland are boycotting. Meanwhile, the far right gets more votes because people are fed up with this BS and naïve enough to vote for them.
Most elected position have an unrevokable mandate, unelected positions are typically easier to revoke.
> If you are appointed you do not need to be accountable
They need to be accountable to who can revoke their position, which is generally elected officials.
I am not defending the EU here, I am not well informed enough in that regard; I am just criticizing the false dycothomy of elected/appointed when electoral systems create a much bigger variance of effects.
It can and has fired the entire Commission in the past, and it must approve EU legislation.
Much more fun to subscribe to a conspiracy theory about all-powerful people behind the curtain though.
Yes; it is true that the Constitution provides for the election of electors, who will then choose the President.
But in fact, while the Electoral College makes the precise mechanism of election slightly indirect and the methods of weighting the votes byzantine, in any practical sense there's no question that the US president is elected, and not appointed.
Many important EU figures have been elected repeatedly for national parliaments, as national ministers or for leadership positions in major national political parties, and only after that got an EU job.
I think it's by design: The jobs are put together as a nationally/politically balanced team, picked from from a large set of candidates who have generally been accepted by national voters over a period of time.
The more indirect the method is, the more control shifts from voters to lobbyists and insiders versed in the system.
How many businessmen you see going around and promoting EU? if it’s that easy to influence they should love it.
Here’s a quote from Anthony Hilton about the media magnate Murdock:
I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’”
The executive (governments) should not become legislators, under the principle of seperation of powers of Montesquieu.
What if Montesquieu was just wrong and systems with fused or subordinated executive and legislative powers actually just work better in pretty much every way that separation-of-powers systems?
Yeah, the US unusually strongly applies Montesquieu in its Constitutional design, but the US isn't particularly well-governed among modern democracies. (Personally, I think the dominance of poor electoral methods and the resulting partisan duopoly is a bigger effect than separation of powers here, but...)
I have the impression that this is often the case: EC members are recruited from members of national parliament, ministers and people who stepped down from either of those recently.
So technically you're correct, she's not elected. But she got the job by being elected.
That may explain why she is interested in bringing this legislation forward. I think privacy is not at the forefront of preoccupations for communists.
Anyway, my point is that she's been repeatedly elected. She didn't get her present job in an election, but someone who's won three elections in a row recently is democratically legitimate, even if the current job isn't directly elected.
It would be just as false as saying "rdm_blackhole supports decriminalising incitement because he supports free speech".
There is no false equivalency whatsoever here.
The Soviet one spied on everyone. The Swedish one was spied upon. That's not equivalent.
This is relevant as the Social Democrats are pro chat control, while the Left Party is against chat control.
They are not just "appointed", all the elected MPs get together and have a popularity contest as to who is going to represent them. That's all the PM does, they are not the head of state.
She is closer to the House of Lords, where people can suggest bills, and no one votes for them and even if they decide to be evil, it's virtually impossible for the people to remove them.
The House of Lords is also a terrible institution that is designed to remove power from those who vote.
We do not vote on individuals, but on a group at election time. That group is democratically elected, and within that group the leader is democratically elected by its party members (whoever wishes to join).
The EU by definition is anti-democractic (any centralization of power without accountability results in loss of democractic influence). The most important thing to understand is that the public do not have the same level of influence on the direction of the EU that say the public has in in the UK. With that said, the position of the UK and its dealings is irrelevant to the matter at hand. If we are are discussing an anti-democractic group we don't make it democractic by finding someone equally or more so anti-democratic.
And that is ignoring the fact that if your country left, you would in practice still adhere to those stupid rules because half of your country does business with the EU. You would just lose influence on those rules.
At least being a part of a large entity has some advantages on the world stage.
Rules for thee not for me.
'They' in the Council of Ministers do not represent us, they are not elected by 'us', and their names sometimes are not even on polls.
They also have a conflict of interests, as Minister of Interior wants more power for himself and his services.
There are a lot of software developers in this forum.
Not to mention the dubious benefit of preventing abuse.
Many Europeans still remember the dark times before 1989. Why there is a need to come back to it?
Soon , they'll expand it to wrong-think and who knows maybe disable your device if you dare criticize the EU or someone in power. I mean why stop at CSAM right? Any other reason will work. It's the ultimate power in the hands of politicians.
This woman, who is behind Chat Control is a former communist party member. I think that she must remember with fondness the time where the state has absolute power over it's citizens and decided now, was good time to bring this back to life.
Norwegian actress Tonje Gjevjon faces up to 3 years in prison for saying men cannot be lesbians https://nypost.com/2022/12/15/tonje-gjevjon-faces-up-to-3-ye...
Swiss LGBTQ+ rights groups hail 60-day sentence for polemicist who called journalist a ‘fat lesbian’ https://apnews.com/article/lgbtq-discrimination-switzerland-...
Woman’s conviction in Austria for calling the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile did not breach her right to free speech, European Court of Human Rights rules https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6316567/Woman-corre...
What is the best path of action for someone who is privacy minded? Buy a dumb phone?
The problem would be with the messaging/media services that have EtoE encryption integrated in the same app.
I am not sure how buying a dumb phone solves anything.
So you'd use e-mail and SMS?
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source app that doesn't obey this scanning. Or they'll use some kind of overlay encryption. Like sending gpg encrypted files as you point out.
So, in a year or so the police will rightfully complain they can't filter those and there's too many apps to check for. So what will the EU do? They'll mandate client side scanning in the OS that scans everything being displayed on screen. It's the only way to catch everything. They just killed privacy for everyone using an off the shelf phone. And perhaps PC if they include those.
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source OS.
So, in a year after that the police will complain they can't check open source devices. So what will they do? They'll mandate running a signed OS and using attestation to access the internet. They just killed FOSS and privacy for everyone using technology.
And of course, no that won't be the end of it. The pervs will share their pics on paper or whatever. And everyone else will be under surveillance for the rest of our lives.
This endeavour will only lead to erosion of privacy and will not lead to prevention of sharing this material because they'll just find another way.
Whatever the EU will come up with, it'll either easily be bypassed, or it'll be unthinkably draconian. The former won't solve the problem and the latter will end society as we know it. There is no solution other than hard police work.
Are you SURE your own are not part of the support?
- Spain
It is hard to even comment on in idea that extreme. The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.
> The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.
Lots of us think that the world would be better if tech companies didn't play so fast and loose with our data, and were better regulated.
I see Americans going on and on about denying warrantless searches of their house and car. It's everywhere. Assert your rights, don't consent to a search, remain silent, don't talk to the police. That position is logically inconsistent with then letting every random company you ever have any vague dealings with (like loading their web page) deeply investigate your life in excruciating detail. If you're arguing against the first of these, you should be arguing against the latter too.
Any data that Google has is available to law enforcement, and that is a major problem, but in the abstract someone can object to government invasion of privacy without objecting to Google's dragnet.
- There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive, SSD, printer... as a "just in case it happens to store/copy copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].
- They forced link aggregators to pay newspapers/sites for linking to their content, even just using their <og> tags. [1].
So such insane statement comes as an absolute non-surprise to anyone who's followed Spanish tech legislation for a while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociedad_General_de_Autores_y_...
[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/google-news-spain-faceb...
Sadly, Spain isn't the only country that does this. The copyright lobby has been very successful at making people fund their failing business model.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/catalonia-ban...
From this background, it's more understandable they want to all possible methods to spy their own citizens.
EU’s function is to create a mechanism to find a common ground but that’s very hard so that’s why EU is has made a name for being slow and ineffective.
Spain and Switzerland or Sweden and Italy would have very, very different understanding on what the state should be able to do and how much involvement they must have because the way they govern their countries and the problems they face are very different.
Spain or Italy would usually be arguing on preserving some traditional way of doing things, Finland and Denmark would attack the issue very pragmatically and have great ideas that can’t possibly work anywhere else and the France and Germany would propose something that would increase their power in the area and the original concerns would be secondary.
Even if it goes to vote, sometimes referendum results might turn out differently than expected.
Spain's central gov's been found to actively spy trhough malware politically opposing parties[1], so hearing they are against e2e encryption just sounds about right.
The importance of money in politics is greatly overstated, this is just government wanting more control.
Remember the Lisbon Treaty, which necessitated a referendum in Ireland - which was repeated until the politically desired result was in.
Clearly, you have have no idea whatever what you're talking about, and subscribe to conspiracy theory BS without bothering to do any homework because it fits your prejudices