EU doubles down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services | Hacker News Reader

EU doubles down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services

patrick-breyer.de

150 pointsbelter35 comments

The title of this article is very misleading, suggesting that EU governance is some kind unified body, and that these documents actually represent what “The EU” wants to do.

EU governance is far more complicated, and these documents only represent the view of one part of the EU governance system, the EU Council.

The EU council is basically made up of people sent by the state governments of all the members, and basically represents the views of those state governments. The council is the only legislative writing body in the EU, but it has no power to enact legislation. It can only write proposed legislation, and present it to the EU parliament for voting on.

The EU parliament is made up of directly elected MEPs and represents the interests of EU citizens as a whole, and not as individual member states. To get legislation passed, the parliament and council need to work together to get legislation written that the council is happy to write, and the parliament is happy to enact. The council is small body of 27 people, representing the interests of state governments, and the parliament 705 MEPs and represents “the people”.

There’s currently no evidence that these proposals by the Council will have any success in the parliament, if anything quite the opposite. The EU parliament has made I quite clear they don’t like this type of draconian legislation, and won’t vote to enact it.

Obviously that doesn’t mean we should ignore these proposals. It’s important to make it clear we don’t like it, and lend weight behind the arguments being put forward by MEPs to block this legislation. But to say this represents the EU “doubling down” on penalising privacy-friendly services is ridiculous. It represents the EU council doubling down, but that only one small part of the EU governance bodies, and the other bodies are actively fighting back.

> The council is the only legislative writing body in the EU, but it has no power to enact legislation.

Funny, as I recall that is one of the roles of Commission. It is the one with the power of initiative.

If its draft legislation is not accepted, and modifications are proposed which it does not like, it can simply withdraw the proposed legislation.

The council and the parliament can only request that the Commission draft some legislation to a purpose.

So there are three institutions involved. The Commission, the council, and the parliament. Where the latter is very much the junior partner, and the council can set political direction, but the Commission is the only part with the power to initiate legislation.

The whole thing is quite different from any form of national government and legislature.

(NB there are two councils - the EU Council, and the Council (of ministers) - which gets very confusing for those of us not actively following along.)

Sorry a correction.

You're speaking of the European Commission. The European Commission is the beaucratic engine of the EU and also drafts legislative bills (proposals).

The council is the body that comprises the heads of states who vote on new legislation proposals, this runs alongside the European Parliament.

Certain proposals only need parliamentary approval to become law (if there is already a treaty giving it authority) and others also need council approval when a treaty or directive needs to be approved.

Thanks for explaining a bit how things work in the EU. Pretty interesting, and not something I would have thought or cared to look up.

In this light it feels a bit like some of the grandstanding bills US politicians write or even pass in the House, knowing they haven’t a chance in the Senate, or whatever. And perhaps the audience is folks in the home country or even other politicians in the home country?

> not something I would have thought or cared to look up.

Wikipedia articles on the operation of EU institutions are awful - barely any better than the official EU documentation. You'd be led to guess that the Wikipedia articles were composed by EU officials.

> In this light it feels a bit like some of the grandstanding bills US politicians write

It's more sinister than that. The Commission is the permanent secretariat of the EU; the Commissioners are usually political has-beens in their home country, and they don't need to grandstand, because they are not elected.

So what happens is that the Commission settles on some horrible scheme, and proposes legislation accordingly. Parliament duly wrecks the proposal, and sends it back. This continues until someone gets tired. But Parliament is subject to elections; the Commission isn't (and it doesn't seem to get tired, either). So the same horrible proposals keep coming back, until elections bring in a Parliament that is more favourable to the proposal.

In some places, the mask of this being a child-pornography problem is falling down already, see [^1]. The Swedish Social Democrats, which is the biggest political party in Sweden, wants for everybody to use their IDs to comment in social media just so that the party can wage their electoral war.

[^1]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/swedens-socia...

This legislation confuses me. Why would a party /its lobbyists care about trolling? It seems that a greater effect would be that sockpuppet accounts can no longer be used. Wouldn't this represent a loss to authoritarians?

e.g. ones who openly conduct psychological operations on their own citizens:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/...

Reading the article it isn't just that though, privacy problematic as it is, troll accounts spreading misinformation is an issue, especially for elections, and real weird for one of the major parties to admit to employing against even their supposed allies.

And while that mask fell off, a similarly hard to argue against reason that they bring up is the russian state, which no one here likes, so it isn't like they actually pulled off the mask, just swapped it for something almost equal, assuming they stick to that reason.

EU: secure communication is bad and helps criminals

The same EU: the Russians/Chinese intercepted confidential messages. We don't know how that could happen.

No amount of encryption will save you if you run your top secret meetings on an open Webex session.

I suspect this is a fundamental mindset issue between thinking as a lawyer/law maker vs. thinking as a programmer.

https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/05/25-12.04.31.html

We can see how machines fail, and make the mistake of applying those standards to laws and money and so on, where they don't fit; law makers expect humans to be the ones actioning any given requirement, and cannot understand why it's so hard to only encrypt good content from good people and not bad content from bad people.