As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't ever get any insight. I wish we could launch some civil legal probe into EU institutions themselves, but that would probably end up being like staring at floating points of a tensor.
Then the Parliament will have to agree as well, and we can see which parties there voted in favour, which you can take into account in the next European elections.
The Commission is toughest to hold accountable. The Commissioner pushing it (Ylva Johansson in this case) was nominated by a country's (Sweden, in this case) government, so Swedish voters could hold the parties in that government accountable in their next national election, I suppose, but that's a very weak signal.
They “just” wanted anything you sent to be scanned before it was sent encrypted.
Stupid and dangerous, the even have sections in the proposal that talk about encryption being important, but somehow less important than thinking about the children and putting a cop looking over the shoulder of every single citizen.
The solution is to remove guns/lobbyists, not attempting to beat them at their own game because you will absolutely lose.
If you do not, then the best you can do is to learn to play the game as best you can, so that at least you won't lose quite so badly.
It's like asking what can you do about parliamentarians elected in other districts.
For example, US policy has quite a lot of influence on me, but I can't vote for US politicians. Or Russian policy, for that matter.
If your commissioner and MEPs have been solidly opposed to a policy there might not be much you can do. But do you know that that’s a case? Many governments tend to blame unpopular proposals on the EU while the commissioner that they themselves chose vote in favour.
In practise, that means she's supported by all except one of the relevant Swedish parties.
Until a few years ago, nominations for Commissioner jobs were mostly handed to long-serving but lower-level politicians. This has changed a bit in recent times, but not fundamentally so. One of the critiques of the current constitutional setup is precisely that the executive, in practice, can execute very little without constantly going back to the Council.
Unfortunately, both Sweden’s most recent commissioners have been prominently advocating against encryption and for mass surveillance. I really hope our new commissioner for the 2024-2029 period ends up with a better track record on privacy advocacy.
Both claim it was a misstake, but ironically leaked chat messages seems to indicate that the green party MP Rasmus Ling did vote for it intentionally.
https://www.dn.se/sverige/interna-chattar-motbevisar-mps-utt... (swedish news article about it).
Isn't it kinda late to act?
I'll give you that it's not a terribly strong signal.
Why and how exactly this proposed law came to exist in its current form is much harder to figure out, but that's not necessary to fully understand in order to oppose it successfully.
This is the site where we can see who voted what in the parlement: https://howtheyvote.eu/
Another way that representative democracy works is that for many issues, you get a lot of heads-up on what will be discussed, and can influence your representative accordingly.
This generally requires coordinating your resources and efforts with other people. Lobby, protest, rabble-rouse, bribe.
Half of politics is who shows up.
This is how they voted last time, voting against is voting for privacy
There's nobody to vote for.
I looked at how Parliament voted on the AI act.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/166051
Basically everyone voted for it.
You linked to the European Parliament vote, and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
>and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
The one I linked is the AI act.
Member countries are represented in the council by representative of their government and EU citizens in the parliament by MEPs they voted for.
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%. Rich or poor, we all use the same communication infrastructure. Rich people don't want their chats monitored either. People don't want this. Intelligence agencies want this. But ask the people working at those agencies, ask them as individuals, and they won't want this on their phones either.
Ideally, yes. In practice, the 1% have resources the 99% don't which allow them to minimize their exposure to mass surveillance. Whether this means carving out exemptions for their own communications or conducting their meetings in person, in private, in other jurisdictions.
Quibbling over the mathematical inaccuracy of the term is tilting at windmills. You'd have better luck getting people to stop using the word "literally" to mean its opposite.
The top 1% are pretty close to having most of the wealth in the US. They have about a third of it. Then 90-99 have about a third, 50-90 have about a third, and 0-50 have a rounding error.
The top 0.1% have about 15-20% of the wealth, which is very concentrated but not a very big fraction of the entire pie. Meaningful cutoffs are tricky to assign.
I don't know how to measure power. You could probably assign a lot of power to the top 0.01%, but in the US they have a single digit percentage of wealth.
You can get quite a bit of data, what are you looking for?
The German Bundesregierung signalled a few days ago they would vote against Chatcontrol (IIRC, it is part of the Ampel coalitions founding contract to vote against surveillance enhancing measures on the EU level.) Nancy Faeser, Social Democrats, Germany's interior minister and usually not against surveillance, and Marco Buschmann, Liberal Democrats, Germany's justice minister, released statements that Chatcontrol is irreconcilable with liberal democratic states of law. The Greens were opposed anyhow and said so the last few weeks. So, unity of sorts.
France had said from the start they would vote against it (but apparently backtracking after the EU election) and with the two biggest countries in the EU against it now, the law had little chance to pass the informal council vote.
Add on top that around 30 MEPs from the Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats already wrote a letter stating that their fractions are opposed, thus ratification would have been unlikely. Add on top strong efforts by economic lobby groups, I guess the Belgian president of the council saw no reason to put the vote forward anymore.
Of course, all this could be wrong. I'm just puzzling things together I read over the last few days and weeks.