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Comment by nehal3m | Hacker News Reader

I was upset at the parliament for even considering this and extremely relieved that they chose not to pursue this draconic instrument. That said, we as citizens will have to remain vigilant and let our voices be heard because the onslaught on our privacy is constant from both commercial interests, spy agencies and state actors. These parties have no issue keeping pressure up over decades whereas we the citizens can become exhausted and exasperated.

We need some laws to swing our way; enshrine our rights to privacy in clear terms so implementing laws like chat control become a non-starter.

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The EU parliament did its job pretty much 100% correctly in my opinion. Their job is to consider the laws the EU commission suggests and thats what they did. They correctly determined it was a shitty law and voted it down.

In my opinion you should be upset at the EU commission, and especially commissioner Ylva Johansson from Sweden who seems to be the one pushing this stupid stuff.

I have to admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the process, so I thank you for correcting me. :-)

The previous commenter is not correct. Parliament votes for its own position on this law, which is then negotiated with the Council ( the 27 national government representatives) which itself has already developed a position. The two institutions negotiate a compromise (wir support from the commission as broker) which then both institutions must vote on in order for it to become EU law. So they can still vote something down later, but generally if it comes to a vote on the final text it is already a position parliament agrees with. In the EU processes laws that are unlikely to be agreed usually don't even get to a vote, rather the commission withdraws it's proposal and provides a new one.

I think the problem is that they didn't rebuke these groups and tell them that the people don't want to approve stazi tactics in order make it easier for police surveillance for their pet "concern". We all know the primary reason is to slowly sneak in surveillance everywhere, not necessarily for evil purposes, but a system which once set becomes extremely easy to expand upon for surveillance all the time, for any reason because a democratic society just accepted it.

> We need some laws to swing our way; enshrine our rights to privacy in clear terms so implementing laws like chat control become a non-starter.

I think those are already in place - one major point against the previously suggested approach was that it would conflict with a bunch of existing regulation, and so it would never get past the courts even if it was passed.

Two convenient examples:

- Article 8 of the EU convention of human rights guarantees a right to privacy, specifically that "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv.... Clearly conflicts with "let's scan everybody's correspondence".

- The E-Commerce Directive defined the rules for online business in the EU back in 2000, and specifically prohibits states from ever imposing general monitoring obligations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_....

For all its problems, in areas like this the EU is actually pretty well set up.

> Article 8 of the EU convention of human rights

Worth noting that this isn't just a regulation; since the Lisbon Treaty it is effectively part of the EU's _constitution_, and can't simply be regulated or legislated away.

Though also note that it's the European convention on human rights, not the EU one. It's from the Council of Europe, a separate body, but the Lisbon Treaty effectively enshrined it in EU law.

EDIT: Nope, see comment below. The terminology is a bit of a mess...

> but the Lisbon Treaty effectively enshrined it in EU law

Actually no, ECHR rulings and the ECHR itself are considered guiding principles when the ECJ decides related questions but the EU is not technically bound by the ECHR

This is made moot by the fact that the EU doesn't have independent enforcement so all EU law is enforced by the member states and all member states are members of the CoE and the ECHR has already ruled that a member state can't violate the ECHR and justify itself by saying they were following EU law

But the comment above could also be referring to the EU charter of fundamental right which is binding on EU institutions and EU member states (when they're implementing/enforcing EU law), article 8 of the charter is about the protection of personal data so you can read the original comment both ways.

Either they said EU instead of European and were talking about the ECHR's "Right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence" or they said convention of human rights instead of "charter on fundamental rights" and were referring to the EU's "Protection of personal data"

Fun

Oh, fair, yep. Ugh, the terminology is a mess.

And just to make sure, note that the "Council of Europe" is a different (and non-EU) body than the Council of the European Union and European Council.

The European Parliament has no saying in what laws it votes. The European Commission draft those, and the Parliament can at best rectify or reject them.

The Parliament can ask the Commission to table a specific law though. And it can dismiss the commission at will.

So it doesn't have de-jure legislative powers, but de-facto it does.

> Commission to table a specific law though

Just for the folks on the West side of the Pond, pretty much means to drop the bill. "To table" is so weird.

No, "to table" in terms of (EU) parliamentary procedure means to begin the consideration, it's the US that uses "to table" to mean dismiss[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_(parliamentary_procedure...

Very strange, the US usage seems to be like what we would use “to shelve” for (as in take it off the table and put it on the shelf to forget about), at least in Australia and the UK.

As if the English language was not complex enough :D

Sorry for the confusion, I'm not a native speaker (although I live in UK). I meant that the parliament can ask the commission to present a specific law for discussion.

Of course the parliament doesn't need to ask the commission to drop a law, it can simply vote against it.

Yes, and the sad reality is that even if each one of these absurd legislative proposals has only a 1% chance of passing, sooner or later they will. That’s just math / probability theory. We have to find some way of reducing the inflow.

... Wait, no, that's not how it works. The commission (broadly representing the will of the member states) proposes laws, the parliament (broadly representing the will of the people of the member states) votes on them. It's perfectly plausible that these remain permanently out of whack.

I think you see this dynamic in action more with the commission vs EU parliament dynamic than you do with national government vs national parliament because in many countries there are, in practice, consequences to the government losing a vote in parliament, so governments will generally mostly restrict themselves to bills that they think they can win. There are no such consequences in the EU system, so you see a lot of this.

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