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Comment by rollulus | Hacker News Reader

Initiatives like Chat Control makes me pessimistic. They keep on coming in all sort of variations and we defend. Given enough of such iterations, at some point though they’ll eventually be lucky and god knows how long it will take to revert things. And what I don’t get is that this sort of proposed legislation is more than Stasi could've ever wished. And yet it’s openly discussed as if it’s good idea. And note that “they” are supposed to represent “us”.

It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.

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>It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.

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.

Eh, while I agree with the comments around desire. I think it compounds the bigger the governing body. Look at the five eyes for example.

Because some of the governments in TFA have given positions opposing it?

And they can keep opposing it if they really don't want it.

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.

Can the EU sanction countries for not complying?

Yes. But having local polititians whine against EU regulation and then vote for it is a common pattern to get easy wins with easily led people like the original posters here.

What if politicians who voted for an EU regulation get voted out? Would politicians who opposed the regulation have no choice but to comply or leave if the majority of EU countries continued supporting it?

The newcomers will have to start a new movement and make EU change it or exit EU. EU is very bad if your country suddenly wants to be a something completely different for a few years for example, it’s much more accommodating to gradual changes over the years.

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 complex, they can be sued or funding can get cut but EU is not like the USA.

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.

If they can be sued for it, I wouldn't say it's accurate to say they can continue opposing it. Even cut funding, if they still have to contribute funds to the EU, would be coercive.

You miss the point, they can be sued after agreeing to it but not implementing it.

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.

The EC members who currently are sponsoring this bill (Chat Control 2.0) are not elected, they are appointed.

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.

Indeed, it doesn't change the fact that the countries themselves might implement such things.

Many dictators were democratly elected.

They are appointed by the elected(the governments of the countries and the European Parliament, which are all 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.

So they are not elected? Right? Therefore they are not accountable to the public.

Fun fact, the American president and the British prime ministers are also not elected.

If you like to argue over technicalities, we can do that.

Who cares? I don't live in UK or USA. They can have whatever disfunctional system they want, doesn't mean I will tolerate it at my home because of that.

There are dictators elsewhere, should I have one at home too?

I am not a citizen of the UK nor from the US, if this system is enough for you, then by all means feel free to disagree.

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.

As I said, EC members are appointed by the elected governments and EP and the EP members are directly elected. If you don't like it you can start or join a political movement to change it or political movement to exit the EU.

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 individual commissioners are appointed by national governments in a completely opaque process.

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.

Is there any country that directly elects their government and its ministers?

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.

Yes, most EU countries directly elect the parliament and the government is formed from the parliament members - usually the winning party/coalition, but not always. In some it's a tradition that the winning party leader gets the first shot at getting their cabinet approved by the parliament, then a second shot, and if they can't do it the president appoints somebody else.

Your ministers are appointed, no?

No, they are members of the parliament.

But they are not directly elected to ministerial positions.

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 don't want "a" directly elected commissioner.

I want a directly elected Commission. The same system would suffice - chosen by the elected parliament among its members.

That would actually be a great idea, because then political parties and voting citizens would have a bigger reason to try to win European elections. Probably would make the parliament less liberal-conservative too.

Your system is better than mine then.

> and not have to defend it

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.

They're repeatedly suggesting things like this until the MPs are confused enough and vote yes. At least that's what happened with the copyright directive.

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.

> people cannot revoke your mandate

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 appears you don't understand the role of the directly elected EU parliament.

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.

While this is true in a practical sense for the British PM, it is only true in the most technical legal sense for the US President.

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.

Lots of important jobs aren't elected. But got the job by being elected repeatedly for other things.

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.

> They are appointed by the elected

The more indirect the method is, the more control shifts from voters to lobbyists and insiders versed in the system.

IMHO that’s about centralization of power, not the directness.

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.’”

I wished that was true...

much rather: he had to spend significantly more for them to do so...

"They are appointed by the elected(the governments of the countries and the European Parliament, which are all elected)."

The executive (governments) should not become legislators, under the principle of seperation of powers of Montesquieu.

> 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...)

A quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that the main sponsor is Ylva Johansson, who is not presently an elected politician, because she stepped down in 2019 after being a member of the swedish parliament for 13 continuous years, for this party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Party_(Sweden)

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.

Small reminder that the left party described in your comment is actually formerly known as the communist party in Sweden and that they supported during WW2 the invading soviet forces vs Finland.

That may explain why she is interested in bringing this legislation forward. I think privacy is not at the forefront of preoccupations for communists.

When I grew up (far north in Norway) it was said that filling out a membership form in the communist party would get your phone tapped at once. She's older than I am and I'd be surprised of the Swedes treated their communists any different in first 30 years of her life.

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.

This is a false equivalency argument.

It would be just as false as saying "rdm_blackhole supports decriminalising incitement because he supports free speech".

She joined the the so-called Vänsterpartiet when their full name was: Vänsterpartiet - kommunisterna (VPK) aka The left party - communists. At that time the party had ties to eastern germany and the Soviet Union. She was elected to parliament as representative for vänsterpartiet - kommunisterna.

There is no false equivalency whatsoever here.

It sounded as if GP meant to imply the Swedish communist party's attitude to privacy was equivalent to something, without stating what. The Soviet communist party's attitude, perhaps?

The Soviet one spied on everyone. The Swedish one was spied upon. That's not equivalent.

Note that she left the Left Party in 1992, and instead joined the Social Democrats. So she's been a member of the national parliament as a representative of the Social Democrats.

This is relevant as the Social Democrats are pro chat control, while the Left Party is against chat control.

I didn't vote for Ursula, and if the shit gets really really bad, our government is a few kilometers away from where I'm now, and modern pitchfork analogs are easy to find.

She is appointed by the MPs you elected, in a similar manner with the British Prime minister.

This doesn't really help me with anything, and I still can't replace her in any way. Replacing local MPs is hard too, since (at least my country) doesn't have a legal basis for a referendum to remove the current government and hold new elections, but locally we at least have pressure tactics in the form of posters, grafitti, protests, granite road tiles and guillotines.

The British Prime Minister needs to be an elected MP. She would need to be elected and then "promoted" for it to be an analogy.

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.

british prime minsters are chosen as the head of the party, by members of the party. This thread seems to not understand that members of the british public can vote for the leader of the party they wish to vote for.

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.

The worst part of Chat Control is that they know this will be a privacy nightmare, but get this, some people most likely in the inner circles of the EU elites will have exemptions so that it doesn't breach their own security or confidentiality.

Rules for thee not for me.

You should be glad EU exists not wishing to leave it. More than half of countries support this kind of control, and yet it probably won't pass because of a minority of countries. Seems like EU will actually end up preventing this from spreading across the continent.

Does the law require unanimity, or just a majority? This page[0] seems to suggest only a majority is necessary, but I can't find anything else to back that up; but I suppose we'll find out in a week or two.

[0]: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-eu-governm...

It’s not gonna pass against Germany.

How do you know? Faeser is not known to be fond of our constitution.

Maybe they still remember Stasi.

The law will first have to pass the EU parliament which is a simple majority of the plenary (i.e. all MEPs). Then it needs to pass the Council which in this case would probably require qualified majority at the least and unanimity at the most.

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.

Because leaving the EU worked out so well last time someone tried.

Speaking as a Remain voter, I think that 2023 would look the almost the same post-Covid and Russia invading Ukraine. Brexit is a distant third in terms of damage done.

It's probably made the nation more fragile / less resilient to externals shocks though, such as Covid and the Ukraine invasion.

Brexit didn’t really help in terms of privacy though, the UK being one of the leading western anti-encryption countries politically.

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.

Well, the UK government could still introduce a law of their own anyway. Unless you're saying the EU would've created an EU-wide law that mandated that member states couldn't do it, but that seems very unlikely based on what we know of the EU.

They kind of have one. The charter of fundamental rights of the EU contains privacy protections that has been used to shoot down at least the data retention directive and IIRC the EU-US data transfer frameworks.

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.

It seems like the EU is gridlocked on implementing any regulations here. It's a buffer against national governments going ahead and implementing this.

My country, Sweden, is one of the ones pushing for this to be implemented so I am very happy to have the EU block it. What is the position of politicians in your country?

My country is one of the ones pushing for this to not be implemented, so I am very unhappy to have the EU force it.

Luckily governments are not a monolithic and coherent block. France for example was an early backer of matrix..

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.

But isn't that precisely the problem with large supranational orgs like the EU, to which its member countries cede some of their sovereignty. Countries often HAVE to implement EU policy in their own laws, or else face sanctions. They can't just pick and choose.

Yes, but we as a society can then choose and pick decentral end to end encrypted solutions like matrix over centralised ones like whatsapp.

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.

for some issues it's the other way around: not all eu laws can be passed bc some countries vote against them. That's also the reason you can't vote out a country so you need to find compromises

AFAIK germany too uses some app with signal protocol

> France for example

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)

France has the shittiest laws concerning freedom of communications. To run an open WiFi you need a licence from the comms regulator.

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.

I would suggest support more direct democracy movements in Europe, such as DiEM25.

"And note that 'they' are supposed to represent 'us'."

'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.

If the governments vote laws that are aggressive towards the people, then the software developers need to make licenses for their software disallow government use until they start to be more citizen friendly.

There are a lot of software developers in this forum.

At a certain point you have to say enough is enough. The same for the cyber resilience act that spits in the face of millions of open source developers who collectively are the only reason governments have all their nice toys to play with.

But well, we all know that in the end this law will not be obeyed anyway? Everyone will blatantly violate it. It will only be used to punish political "wrongdoers" (say the social network that refuses to mute opposition to the ruling party).

It's not like the EU is some separate entity endowed by special stupidity. It's just "us", humans - some of us smart/informed, some of us less so. If you remove your country from the whole, one time you might be out of reach of some stupid idea from the outside, the other time you will be out of reach of the reasonable voices outside, fully exposed to your home-grown bad ideas.

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.

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