EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided | Hacker News Reader

EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

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417 pointsdoener308 comments

One interesting line in the proposal:

> Detection will not apply to accounts used by the State for national security purposes, maintaining law and order or military purposes;

If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?

If they have it all figured out, this exception should not be necessary. The reality is that it isn't secure as they are creating backdoors in the encryption, and they will flag many communications incorrectly. That means a lot of legal private communications will leak, and/or will be reviewed by the EU that they have absolutely no business looking into.

It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.

I also wonder about the business implications. I don't think we can pass compliance if we communicate over channels that are not encrypted. We might not be able to do business internationally anymore as our communications will be scanned and reviewed by the EU.

The exclusion includes politicians because there would suddenly be a paper trail. Especially in the EU there were lots of suddenly lost messages.

Security is just the scapegoat excuse.

  Oh Harry, don't worry! Everyone can happen to have bloated his aunt by an accident!

(quoting from memory), and also

  I like Ludo. He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favour: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."

That one line on its own should be enough put the illegitimacy of this proposal on clear display. Privacy for me (the surveillance state) but not for thee (the populace).

> It's ridiculous that they keep trying this absolutely ridiculous plan over and over again.

There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.

Trolltrace is becoming real

Maybe we should scan their communications for corruption and undue influence. I'm sure it's all above board, so it should be fine if we get an independent group to review them right? (Just following to their reasoning..)

Our current minister of justice in Denmark, Peter Hummelgaard, says "yes" to everything proposed by the police and intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, he has demonstrated no ability whatsoever of understanding the technical challenges of implementing something like this, and he firmly insists on the false claim that it is possible to let the police read encrypted communication without compromising the security model. He also directly spreads misinformation and downplays the significance of this by falsely claiming that Meta and others already scan E2EE chats to show us advertisements. He has said that he wants a crime-free society, and I don't doubt that that is his goal. I just also think he is too stupid to understand that a crime-free society has never existed, and if it is attainable, then it is probably not a very free society.

All in all, he seems to be a scared, stupid sock-puppet of Europol.

And I doubt you achieve it by taking away people's privacy. There are bigger issues that need to be addressed and have nothing to do with E2EE. If they cannot address that, then ...? They just do not seem to care about what they are claiming to care about.

I think that one problem is that politicians defer too much to "experts" in decisions like this.

I cannot remember who it was, but one British prime minister, when told by intelligence services that they needed greater surveillance powers, told them essentially, that of course they would claim that, and firmly refused.

Politicians now mostly lack the backbone. That does not stop them ignoring expert advice when it is politically inconvenient, of course.

The problem is not they ask experts. Politicians are so utterly incompetent on the thing they are putting law on, at the level they will believe openoffice is a firewall[1]. That doesn’t mean all of them are that blatantly unaware of the basics for which they are supposed to decide of some rule, but that is definitely a thing.

The next thing is, do they know how to rely efficiently on a diverse panel of expert, or do they take only yes-man/lobby-funded experts around them?

On a deeper level, are they accountable of the consequences of their actions when they enforce laws which any mildly skilled person in the field could tell will have disastrous side effects and not any meaningful effect on the (supposedly) intended goal?

What we need is direct democracy, where every apt citizen have a duty to actively engage in the rules applied without caste exception.

Let’s protect children, yes. What about making sure not any stay without a shelve to pass the winter[2]? Destroying the right of private conversation except for the caste which decide to impose that for everyone else is the very exact move to offering children a brighter future.

[1] https://framablog.org/2009/04/02/hadopi-albanel-pare-feu-ope... [2] https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20240919.OBS93798/en-europ...

> The next thing is, do they know how to rely efficiently on a diverse panel of expert, or do they take only yes-man/lobby-funded experts around them?

Unfortunately, I know the answer to that!

> The problem is not they ask experts

I think with with IT they do realise that they do not know. They also believe someone who says something is feasible, or a good solution over someone who says it is not.

> I think with with IT they do realise that they do not know.

We are no longer living in the 2000's. They know. Many are simply evil or have competing interests and want to loose their income/career.

Regarding your parent, "direct democracy" is a euphemism for mob rule.

>Regarding your parent, "direct democracy" is a euphemism for mob rule.

Anything that pretend to be democracy without imposing active participation of citizen in ruling is an euphemism for some other system which doesn’t dare to present itself for what it is.

Oligarchy is not democracy. Aristocracy is not democracy.

Assimilating the only actual form of democracy to its degenerated ochlocratic form, and pretending that whatever undemocratic political regime that officially brand itself as democratic is so: thus are the two basic strategy of newspeak control. War is peace.

Yes there is a risk with actual democracy. The full truth however is that there are risks of degeneration with any political system. Pseudo-representative systems used in western side have by far cross the threshold of mere theoretical possibility to degenerate into oligarchic plutocracies.

Moreover which caste brandishes the scarecrow of the hypothetical fickle crowd to evict actual democracy? And in support of which system, and what caste will it favor?

The nailing point of democracy is not that it’s perfect and immune of any big issue. The cardinal point of democracy is that people are promised the pains and joys they will self-provide for themselves; so the control feedback loop of changing their own behaviors and rules stay in their power.

# Related resources

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_rule

It is pointless exception. If chat control will pass, everything is vulnerable by design. Or how do you distinguish if WhatsApp is installed on a phone of Joe Nobody or or a phone of a politician? You won't, unless you have some list, which can be leaked and from "do not touch credentials" will turn "target these credentials"

Haha that’s a good point, I guess another sign that they really have no clue what they are doing

The exception means legally, that category of people, can't be prosecuted even if incriminating stuff were collected through such channels.

The next logical step, after a prosecutor or political push, would be for the Highest Order Courts of Member countries to invalidate evidence collected through such channels for those categories of people.

Nope, not in Sweden. Anything can be used as evidence here, even illegally obtained stuff.

You are looking on it from a wrong perspective. You have access to communications of politicians, military and government apparatus. You can effectively control these figures through extortion (I know about your mistress) or blackmail (I picked up your kids from school today next time I may keep them for a while)

Politicians who are pushing these laws are having a feeling that bad things can't happen to them. However they are usually prime targets for bad things happening to them, because they are the ones wielding the power - if you can influence the politician, you can control his power.

If you read it closely they are not mandating backdoors in encryption.

WhatsApp could still have messages end-to-end encrypted. What they would be mandated to do is for the app to send copies of the messages to WhatsApp for their staff to review the contents.

This obviously breaks the point of end-to-end encryption. Without actually making it illegal for them to use encryption, or add any “backdoor” so it can be reversed.

It’s a weasely way of trying to have their cake and eat it.

So… a backdoor?

Not a backdoor, but a built-in snitch.

isn't that a backdoor?

Backdoor kinda implies it is not used very much or it would be a front door.

But it is available for use. Corruption is not a fantasy but a reality. Usually who reach the top on political scale have seen it all, I mean all. Being polite to describe this reality use cases, (inside trading, political targeting, discrimination, monopoly etc). Who would know, who can stop it, who would dare!

What are the protection mechanisms? Are we suppose to hope that the untouchable/s is 100% honest?

It feels uncomfortable to say the least.

I was arguing if the "backdoor" is not secret or atleast seldomly used it is a ordinary door.

Chat Control would always spy on people and thus not be a backdoor.

To me, a backdoor is passive. There for someone to enter. What's under discussion here is sonething active, so in some sense worse.

I think this is more the entire front of the house being open to the street.

To be honest, I’m starting to consider this more a front door. You don’t need to break encryption if you can just bypass it.

“False positives” is the most likely explanation. A common tactic for government agents is to pose as criminals and extremists, either to more effectively infiltrate existing criminal or extremist networks or to run sting/entrapment operations.

> If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary? Doesn't this say either that it's not secure, or that there is a likely hood that there will be false positives that will be reviewed?

Its all a scam! No one cares about you.

They are just setting up the new infrastructure to manipulate & control the docile donkeys more effectively (working class)

Unfortunately, they will be successful.

I mean national security agencies usually have their own extensive internal monitoring.

EU rules typically contain carve outs for national security matters too.

This is a bad law, but these carve outs are normal and expected.

Carve outs for politicians are a different matter.

> If it's all very safe and accurate, why is this exception necessary?

Because you'd be massively adding an attack surface on to National Security elements for no benefit to National Security.

This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

That approach has spectacularly backfired for the UK, as they used to do the same thing too. ;)

What do you mean by backfire?

A massive unrest and protests.

as another comment suggest "A massive unrest and protests."

but not for chat control but another things, they have going much worse

UK is much worse than EU in terms of privacy and encryption.

It will not be if chat control passes, and I am not sure it was true most of the time before (there was no significant change between Brexit and the Online Safety Act)

There were similar problems in areas other than privacy and encryption, or indeed technology.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45274678

Key disclosure was law at least a decade before Brexit, so was compatible with EU law, and the other change (the chat control like one) was in the Online Safety Act (and has not been enforced so far because its not technically feasible), so that does not contradict my claim (if that was your intention).

It is, but i would rather take toothless UK's one over EU's Orwellian nightmare.

UK's one is easily avoided.

But reality is that NONE of those options should be even considered.

It might be easily avoided now, but it's easy for them to tighten the reins in the future.

how so?

> It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

Exactly. There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.

EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007.

Europeans in general like or is indifferent towards the EU.

> EU skepticism is at a 15 year low, and general approval hasnt been higher since 2007.

My observations are different.

Your clique might be more skeptical. Statistics show the population at large is not.

Here’s some data. Skepticism is pretty low and approval is pretty high

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1360333/euroscepticism-e...

Do those numbers include the UK when it was in the EU? Obviously removing a large pool of sceptics would shift the numbers.

The "positive" number has recovered from a low in the wake of the Eurozone crisis but is still fallen significantly from the pre-crisis level of around 50%.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by country - The EU's own report suggests very big variations between countries: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/905...

Did you already forget that Brexit went through on a razor thin margin?

It happened at all because the UK was the most Eurosceptic big EU country so it could still have an impact on the numbers.

Also, negative and positive feelings are not the same thing as a vote. For example, some people who felt negative about the EU voted remain because they were worried about economic disruption (the government was predicting a severe recession in the event of a leave vote - not after leaving, merely as a result of a vote). I am sure people can think of other examples and both ways, but the point is that "feel negative/positive" and "would vote to leave/remain) are not the same number).

The current "positive" number from spring 2025 is actually 52%, only 5 points down from the highest number in the past 20 years, and the second highest trust number in the same time period.

Sure, the eurozone debt crisis of the 2010s was rough for the trust mumbers, taking them down to 33% but they've fully recovered from that.

You are looking at this: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3572

it seems to be using a different measure (numbers do not match the link I posted) and I cannot see any numbers from 20 years ago.

There is graph from 2012 but that is from the low (if you look at my link).

Have a missed a pre-crisis comparable number in skimming it? If not, then what I see is still a significant decline over the last 20 years in the net positive.

IMO the Eurozone is very likely to have further crises. The architects of the Euro expected a greater degree of fiscal union but that never happened. A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.

I'm looking at the "standard barometer 103 - Spring 2025"[1] which lines up with the first graph in the "standard barometer 101" you linked.

> A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.

That's an opinion. You're free to have that opinion, but trust/distrust of the European Union has little to do with that opinion.

[1]: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3372

If public opinion and vote was honored there never would have been an EU, just ask the French.

This is wrong though.

France held a referendum on the creation of the EU in 1992, and approved it.

You're thinking of the 2005 referendum, which was about the TCE. The EU already existed before that.

Sure, and to add more anecdata, my observations are different from yours.

It's easy / tempting to extrapolate from our limited bubble / point of view, but it doesn't tell you anything about a population at large.

My EU skepticism is gonna skyrocket if Chat Control goes through and I will start voting for the anti-EU party. Whatever benefits the EU has is not worth losing our freedoms.

And who runs the EU? The MEPs and members of the countries government. It's not like it's a different country imposing their way onto us. Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented.

>"Talk/contacts your ministers and MEPs if you want your voice to be represented."

And be told to sod off.

From Wikipedia: [0]-"Currently, there is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state."

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission

> And who runs the EU?

How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?

There are people with no backing, not even existing parties, that get elected as EU representatives. So its not that difficult to run if you have a platform some people care about.

It is much easier to break into EU than the local governments, since EU has so much less power, so you have more weird people there.

The problem is the indirection. Only the European Commission can propose legislation [1], so the legislative direction of the EU is entirely determined by them - MEPs can only slow it down.

And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.

[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.

True, but this is the same as with most EU countries government. In France, I can contact my Ministers... but to what avail!

Right, because a commission that keeps bringing legislation to a vote until one of those two vote pools gets a majority, despite the law being against my government's constitution (in strong terms), and me having no way to stop it if all representatives of my country voted against, is totally not the EU imposing its way on my country.

I did send hand-written mails to several German representatives, and this is how I was rewarded.

Obviously I'm not expecting that my actions alone are enough to get the outcome I want, but it's difficult not to feel the bite of "if voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." It's just going to be some other paid-for dickface in corporate pockets, every time.

You don't make it illegal, you simply ban who the people are voting for, even retroactively if necessary.

You can't be serious.

There should't be a discussion at all.

This law proposal is explicitly against the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the allegedly institutions that are supposed to upheld the charter are CJEU, European Commission, FRA, NHRIs, where are they?

I'm pretty sure that if this passes, the EU Court of Justice will eventually find it more or less in violation with EU fundamental rights.

That will take time, though, so I guess they are either hoping that some impossibly secure, reliable and unerring technologies emerge in the meantime, or they are prepared for a forever battle with the Court, coming up with ever new adjustments as soon as previous schemes get struck down[1], meanwhile allowing European law enforcement agencies to keep testing, developing and iterating on whatever client-side scanning or other techno-legal approaches they may come up with. I think this was roughly what they — ie, basically a group of a dozen or two law enforcement reps from different member states agencies and ministries along with like one lonely independent information security expert — said themselves in some working group report as part of some kind of Commission roadmap thing presented by von der Leyen not too long ago.

[1] On the data protection side we've already seen this kind of perpetual movement through the years with respect to different “safeguarding” mechanisms made available to enable transfers of personal data to the US without too much hassle, from Safe Harbor through Privacy Shield to the current Data Privacy Framework.

I've looked at the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and don't see why this would violate it.

Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data have exemptions for government. The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].

[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...

[2] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/8-protection-per...

What's the point, then? The purpose of a document defining people's rights is to help ensure that governments don't trample those rights. If the government has explicit carve-outs to violate those rights, then the Charter isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

If you don't see it, it doesn't mean that it is not braking it.

They themselves even wrote it in the proposal - "Whilst different in nature and generally speaking less intrusive, the newly created power to issue removal orders in respect of known child sexual abuse material certainly also affects fundamental rights, most notably those of the users concerned relating to freedom of expression and information."

This proposal is de facto a mass communication surveillance of EU citizens.

Exactly as you mentioned every single member state and EU have laws that can for example issues a court order and seize your communication devices if you are braking a law for an investigation, there is no need for EU to have a law that first goes against the very essence of EU, second it also brakes I am pretty sure every single constitution of each different member states.

If this law passes you live in a totalitarian state and there is no excuse for that.

I'm totally opposed to this law. My comment was about the fact that the EU is imposing their view on EU countries, like we have no say on the matter. I emailed all my MEPs to oppose this proposal.

Don't forget "if we let people vote by some misfortune and their vote is opposite of what we wanted we will overrule it anyway".

   It's Not Who Votes That Counts, It's Who Counts The Votes

- J.Stalin

> In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes.

- Mogens Jallberg

Regarding your Stalin "quote", please see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/ .

> It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."

Please inform yourself or you're in danger of letting things happen through your ignorance. The commission is not pushing this. They're acting on instructions from a certain number of elected politicians.

And, you're misleading others when you post stuff like this.

None of us posting in these topics wants this proposal to pass. And in order to fight it, you've got to be correctly informed.

Yeah the Commission really needs to go, MEPs need to be able to propose laws. That's really all there is to it to fix the entire situation.

Every country in the world has a "Commission". It's no different to the UK Civil Service or the various US Federal Governments. If it didn't exist then the EU would be unable to implement any of it's policies.

Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it. In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.

The EU doesn't implement any of its policies by itself, ergo it should not require an executive branch of its own. There is no EU army, no EU police. We already have an instance of that in each member state which is required to implement EU laws on its territory, the Council of Ministers coordinates on that afaik.

The general process is a bit like this, simplified:

- the Council of heads of state appoints the Commission

- the Commission proposes laws

- the Parliament approves laws

- the Council of ministers implements them

- the Court blocks any unconstitutional laws

The problem has been for the longest time that the Commission appointments are not elected, somewhat mired in cronyism, and they keep proposing nonsense laws while the elected parliament can just stand there and vote no while not being able to suggest any legislation we actually need.

While the EU foundation was laid out in a time much different to our modern times and the faults that rise with it, especially that the majority of the EU doesn't have the sway as a union should and that a single state can block all others.

But at least when it comes to Chat Control, it is not EU level, it's member states pushing for it and at least for now EU blocking it, so at least for once it is a good thing and the minority of ~8 states can still block it for the majority, block it for all 27 states..

Not exclusive to the EU, the US does the same, as does the UK.

I'm not a fan, but in what was is this, or any other topic, undemocratic to have debates and votes on?

The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

>Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?

Next European Parliament election will be in 2029.

Edit: there was a copypaste of voting requirements here, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/voting-ri.... This is apparently wrong; you can also vote if you're not residing in the EU, only EU citizen. (I thought this was the case, and that link not saying that made me suspicious.) How it is possible that they've put up incorrect information on voting rights, I have no clue.

Actual reference, this time legal text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Any person who, on the reference date:

(a) is a citizen of the Union within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 8 (1) of the Treaty;

(b) is not a national of the Member State of residence, but satisfies the same conditions in respect of the right to vote and to stand as a candidate as that State imposes by law on its own nationals,

shall have the right to vote […]

So either citizenship or residency is sufficient.

I was talking about voting for the position held by Ursula, the president of EU commission, not the EU parliamentary elections.

> How do I vote out Ursula [von der] Leyen?

This can only be done indirectly.

Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.

>This can only be done indirectly.

So the short answer is "YOU can't".

She's facing two more no confidence votes in October. You just need to convince all 720 members of European Parliament from 27 countries to get rid of her and her commission. Easy.

You mean the exact people that put her there in the first place despite her unanimous lack of popularity in Europe and especially in her home country of Germany where she failed upwards?

Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good about this type of democracy.

Yes. The same fractions which put her there (EPP and friends) will also pick another puppet who will do their bidding.

She was elected by the European parliament. As an EU citizen, you elect that one.

You vote for a few people from your country to become MEPs. Anything beyond that is out of your control.

> You vote for a few people from your country to become MEPs. Anything beyond that is out of your control.

Just like in your country's own elections.

after how many layers of voting does democracy just becomes plain oligarchy?

Fair question. I'm personally a big fan of what I believe is called direct democracy - getting the populace to vote on a more fine-grained level and individual issues. Not just generic representatives with a bucket list of stuff they say they do and what you suspect they'll actually do. I admit that the EU level feels quite indirect, but I would still carefully call it democratic.

This topic is undemocratic because it's part of the constant attempts to rephrase and resubmit the same unpopular proposal.

It's p-hacking democracy. If a proposal has 5% chance of passing just resubmit it twenty times under different names with minor variations.

It wastes time that lawmakers could spend on proposals that the public actually want.

It hasn't been resubmitted yet, has it? The proponents keep it alive without putting it to an actual vote, AIUI. They try to wait until they think they have a majority, and keep their proposal ready for a vote on short order before their majority dissipates.

Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.

This is at least 3rd time similar measure has been tried in EU parliament, form my memory.

And the fact that it didn't pass tells you something didn't it?

yeah, for now - it was always close. And they need to succeed only once.

the issue is that they try to push it despite citizen protests, and each time they try people just grow more fatigued.

> yeah, for now - it was always close. And they need to succeed only once.

What do you mean, this can just be reverted it isn't like these laws can't be changed. Currently most people don't vote in EU elections, so you don't need much to affect those even if just 10% hates this proposal and go out to vote it would massively effect the outcome.

Therefore its much harder for unpopular things to persist at EU level than country level so far. Until EU has stable parties that is, but currently there is nothing stable at EU level, a tiny thing can change it all.

It is vastly harder to revert a law that entrenches whoever is in power.

> Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?

> How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?

The same way you can vote out other politicians in your own country - you can't. Assuming you live in (say) Amsterdam, you have no right or control of who people from other regions of the Netherlands vote for.

How do i vote out representatives not from my country? In this case my country is vehemently opposed to this.

How do i vote out representatives if all of them support the measure despite it being unpopular in my country, no matter the faction? That was the case with centralized copyright checking.

EU parliament, and especially EC, are so far removed from any form of accountability, that frankly votes are almost irrelevant - same factions form no matter who's there, and EC runs on rotation.

Lobbying takes prime spot over votes.

EU is sitting in the middle ground between federation and trade union... and we get downsides of both systems.

Democracy is incompatible with freedom by definition, it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.

Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.

If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.

But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.

The people doing the public opinion control you mention are powerful private interests.

What makes you think those people would be any less dangerous to your freedom when unbounded by law?

> it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.

That's very naïve.

Yeah; it's even worse than that.

>Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists

Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.

or maybe let's not?

their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...

I do think the ambition to spy on all private communication to be quite extremist.

Especially Germany should know better. If you build two autocratic dictatorships on average per century, maybe start to take care that state powers are restricted.

The US is fully correct in its criticism of Germany regarding freedom of speech and house searches. Sure, on surveillance their arguments would be very weak...

Absolutely nothing positive will be gained by this surveillance, so there isn't even the smallest security benefit. On the contrary.

Again, I disagree, I wouldn't call it extremist. It's vile and wrong, but people all over the political spectrum are in favour of this. there's a difference between something being bad or self-serving, and something being extremist. Labelling everything as extremist does not help anyone, especially today when everyone is already highly divided.

No way I'm getting into the restrict state powers discussion as that is highly complex and not something that can properly be discussed on an internet forum.

I disagree, for me it is an extreme position that affects the lives of everyone because of diffuse security whims. At best, since the motivation could be entirely different.

We had that in Germany by extremist autocratic parties and these policies are quite a clear mirror.

"Scanning the communications of everyone" - Might want to let that go through your head again.

Hmm, sure, I can agree that the position is extremist, I still don't agree that 1 (or some) extremist positions makes the current people in power extremist. Or at least, maybe they are, but I think most of the alternatives are more extremist.

It's definitely a disgusting horrible proposal.

Define "extremist". Many people would argue mass immigration is an extremist position but was the normal accepted position for the people in power within the European Union but was never a popular position with the populations of Europe.

So these so called <<right wing extremists>> represent the normal position.

Politics are an inherently violent affair. The government is simply a monopoly on legitimate violence. Politicians decide the laws, which result in people breaking them getting beaten up & dragged to a cell. Not to say this is always a bad thing: some people cannot be stopped from misbehaving just by talking, but it definitely is violent.

I see this a lot and am not convinced. It appears reductionist in a way that feels like it's pushing an agenda.

Democratic governments clearly are about addressing community needs and coordinating efforts that require pooled resources (at least). I'm not denying there may be a monopoly on violence. However, in a democratic system, such a monopoly would be voted on, giving the monopoly some legitimacy (not saying it's necessarily moral).

Yet in reality, the US, for example, has the Second Amendment, which grants citizens the right to bear arms and form militias. That doesn't sound like the government has a monopoly on violence.

I guess the weasel word is "legitimate"? But is that legal or moral legitimacy (or something else)? By whose definition and arrived at how?

It feels like such a pithy comment, "a monopoly on legitimate violence", like it's expressing something deep. Yet I get the sense that supporting it requires some contortion of logic and language. Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem self-evident to me at all.

I mean, the state's monopoly on violence is a legal philosophy that's been around for over a century. It isn't exactly radical or controversial.

You can start from the Wikipedia page if you're interested[0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

> current individuals in power as extremists

Those who support and push anti-constitutional laws, maybe. All individuals in power, no.

There's something called implicit context (this submission and the entire ongoing discussion), which clearly refers to the first group of people you mentioned. Why would I be talking about people who aren't involved in pushing this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

> Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists?

And what would this change?

The people in power.

Usually, calling things by their proper name helps change perceptions, which often triggers other reactions. Language is very powerful.

I understand that but I'm asking what might be hoped to be triggered.

This forum has rules that would make this impossible to honestly answer, I imagine.

People are allowed to talk about voting here.

I believe their insinuation was political violence.

I do not. Even if it was, it is still best to suggest voting anyway.

They need to be named. Shouldn't be able to go anywhere in Brussels (or any city in any member state) without seeing their photo and name on a giant bus shelter poster. I would throw some € in the direction of that.

Start with these:

Ylva Johansson from Social Democrats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson#Surveillance_of...

Peter Hummelgaard from Social Democrats

https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498

It's not undemocratic. The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue.

One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.

> The behavior of the parliament reflects the reality that only a tiny minority of the population care at all about this issue

Then it's not very democratic to change it.

Parliamentary democracy just fundamentally has a weakness when it comes to single-issue voting. After picking a party to vote on based on housing, economic policy, crime, ..., how much voting power so to say is left for.. which guy the party says they'll send to the european commission? And what that guy's stance on chat-control is? If they're even publicizing that...

Not to mention that once voted in they are not bound by their campaign promises.

It can sometimes happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

> how much voting power so to say is left for.. which guy the party says they'll send to the european commission?

Short of a direct (referendum based) democracy how do you resolve that?

In principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy is an interesting idea to address this sort of issue.

More expressive voting systems help. If your vote has meaning when cast for something other than 1 of 2 platforms it can encode more of your preferences. Referendums are also not the only variety of direct democracy, you can have sortition.

How many people participate in party candidate selection at all... it's a mixed bag to "primary" out an incumbent... sometimes it's easy as they don't see it coming or a threat... others the entrenchment goes deep.

I think the primary positive feature of democracy is simply that we have regular peaceful transitions of power. I'm not sure that the fact that the people choose their own leaders by itself leads to higher quality leadership, or even leadership that cares more about said people. But the fact that the baton passes every couple of years is absolutely invaluable.

> This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.

> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)

Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.

> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.

> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.

Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.

European Commission is not a democratic body. No EU citizen voted for them.

By this logic, most of EU governments are not democratic bodies either.

In my country I vote for a person and that person gets a seat in parliament. That is democratic according to this definition.

The EU Commission is a group of permanent employees who sit in an office and write reports, administer projects and draft legislation. They have no voting rights. They are organised into departments, each headed by a politically appointed Commissioner.

Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.

For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.

The European Commission is a civil service drafting these proposals on instructions from elected politicians.

I am going to keep banging this drum because there is too much ignorance on this topic and it harms the fight against it more than helps.

Good thing that elected parliament needs to vote for this. So what's your point?

>This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.

The state(s) wants to snoop on the peasants' messaging and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.

I think the result of a referendum that would pose a question

"Do you want law enforcement to be allowed access to your private messages when investigating child molesters or would you like to listen to folks who put furry teen girls in front of their websites?"

would have results that you certanly wouldn't like. And they'd be democratic.

So perhaps before calling something undemocratic, first make sure that the majority of voters actually agree with you.

Phrasing the question is half the battle.

"Do you want to be spied on by your government?"

Yes is yes, no is no, anything more comes from evil.

Yes, that's exactly my point - it's important to understand the issue and the messaging about it.

Government "spies" on you for many many things and I think HN "all government is evil" panic isn't really reflected in outlook of EU citizens and won't be looked upon positively by public at large. So again, be careful what you're calling "undemocratic" because that's not the same as "different from my opinion".

Is it still democratic if the elected representatives are trying to subvert democracy?

What are you talking about here exactly?

Since being on the wrong side of supporting The Patriot Act in the US... I'm pretty firmly on the side of, if the government has a power that can be abused, it's only a matter of time until it is abused and in creative ways you never expected.

I'm generally against all reactionist legislation as an instance "no" stance as well.

The results of this past survey are not quite as gloomy:

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...

Politician can not face consequences when they discuss something illegal. Politicians in parlaments literal job is to define legal and illegal. That they repeat that until success and against the perceived will of the general population is maybe a procedural problem (as in: do not disturb the legal body with stupid stuff) but it is still their job.

I 100% agree with your position. Chat control is basically an attack on every conversation everywhere because modern social habits are using it like my chat with my neighbors over the fence. It is not the same as mail interception it is much worse.

>Politician can not face consequences when they discuss something illegal.

Politicians can't face consequences from the legal system when they discuss something illegal. They can, and should, face consequences from the voters.

Maybe those you call extremists are now the only sane people.

When the government is monolithic (which it tends to become) and holds a lot of power it is just a matter of time before "some animals are more equal than others". The best safeguards I know about are 1) limiting the power of government and 2) checks and balances on what powers they do have.

Nothing is perfect, and even having the two pillars above does not guarantee eternal justice (or even that the pillars will remain in place). But we can try to keep remembering and demand better. Sincerely: Good luck, EU.

> and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

And who is going to hold them accountable? They make the laws, they're the ones who should know best this is illegal, so if they don't care no one else will. Voters? I live in America so I've lost a lot of faith in people voting for politicians who will protect their rights.

I legitimately have no idea how to fix this type of problem. We spent the better part of the 20th century setting up systems to enable people to thrive and have expanded rights. And now the generations that benefited from all of that want to tear it down and take us back to feudal times with unelected, unaccountable, all-powerful leaders and a nobility class that owns everything and leaving 95% of people live in poverty and sickness. It's like we forgot how to raise strong people with good morals.

A few comments about the state of security and privacy in the UK so let me reply with a top level comment instead:

People forget that the UK has ChatControl. It was made into law as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. It has not been enforced so far because it's not "technically feasible to do so" and because companies threatened to leave the UK with their services. You can be 100% certain it will suddenly become feasible if EU does the same.

> The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66028773

Worth noting that with RIPA (2000, activated in 2007) UK has enforced key disclosure. It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason (including random data).

I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...

More countries will follow after they ratify Russia's "United Nations Convention against Cybercrime" which has key disclosure explicitly stated in the text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_agai...

> It is illegal to fail to disclose a password for any data for any reason [...].

So it's also illegal to not know the password?

I've forgotten my own debit card PIN or phone unlock code on a couple occasions.

> (including random data)

Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data. The only hint is the presence of metadata (GPG armor, bootloader password prompt, etc).

This law is catch-all BS designed to persecute people for no other reason.

The UK has worse privacy than ANY other country on Earth? Really?

No other country has willingly turned itself into a total panopticon, no. Perhaps others would like to - but they don't have the resources.

You can't walk a fucking meter on the streets without being recorded by the nanny state.

I can't believe with our history involving the Third Reich and the Stasi that we aren't staunchly opposed. Especially with the impending political upheaval when AfD finally gets enough votes to form a ruling government. Our politicians are insanely shortsighted and somehow don't understand the danger they're enabling.

> Third Reich and the Stasi

It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?

edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.

Yes, Germany is very hypocritical, a lot of people have short memories.

On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..

Spain is particularly bad for meddling with the internet, mostly with regards to piracy.

While Germany has arrested many thousands of people for online speech, similar to the UK. But the UK gets much more media attention over it.

> Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...

Chat Control is extremist - a terrorist attack on civil liberties. If Germany were serious about its commitments, the architects behind this assault would already be facing prosecution. Instead, authorities focus on token speech prosecutions while leaving the machinery of mass surveillance untouched.

The optics are chilling: yesterday it was door-to-door searches under authoritarian regimes; today it’s device-to-device searches for wrongthink. That isn’t protecting against extremism - it’s repeating it with new tools.

Yes the arguments for free speech and privacy are self-evident. People always think they can add conditions, as if those conditions won't perpetually expand to greater and greater areas. Or become a power given to dangerous individuals who form future governments.

I didn't think this was even possible. Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states? I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights. If that's not the case, the danger isn't limited to just Germany. With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.

Privacy of communications is usually a normal law not constitutional principle, so slots perfectly fine without any supremacy issues between constitution and EU law.

It is indeed a constitutional principle in many EU countries.

It is also part of the Treaty of Lisbon via the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is the closest thing to a constitutional level law for the EU.

Not that this has ever stopped anybody.

I think the issue lies with how do you define "privacy of communications is respected".

Because that would technically make any present day wiretap illegal too.

So the detail is written in normal law tract...

> Can EU laws actually override the constitutional rights of member states?

Sometimes yes.

> I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights.

What are a country's fundamental constitutional rights can be "dynamically adjusted" depending on the political wishes. :-(

> With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.

There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.

No. The EU isn't a federation, there's no supremacy class. The member countries are sovereign and obviously can't go against their constitutions or basic laws.

> there's no supremacy class

What does "supremacy class" mean?

I assume he means something like "supremacy clause."

I mean supremacy clause, a US law with which I made an analogy.

I'm completely out of my depth but this is not what I understand after reading here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/primacy-...

> The member countries are sovereign and obviously can't go against their constitutions or basic laws

False.

> The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law

Mm.

That is sort of like a supremacy clause, and of course it's valid for the EU.

But that doesn't mean that a Swedish or German etc. court can let that override our basic law. Our basic law is after all the foundation of our law, so if something conflicts with that, it obviously can't be valid.

For the most part yes, with caveats.

Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level. Ratification of other Treaties without the sovereignty component is decided upon by the states' national parliaments in all other member states.

Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists.

In the particular, the Seville Declaration recognised the right of Ireland (and all other member states) to decide in accordance with National Constitutions and laws whether and how to participate in any activities under the European Security and Defence Policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Declarations_on_the_Tr...

It's enshrined in German Case Law as 'Identitätsvorbehalt'.

https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/das-europalexikon/30945...

The Polish constitutional court has also ruled that EU law does not supercede national law. Thus, primacy of EU law is wholly rejected in Poland.

https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/07/polish-court-rules-some-...

You see, we the people are staunchly opposed. But the interests of our political leaders (we all know what 'leader' translates to) do not align with out interests. So ...

The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.

> You see, we the people are staunchly opposed.

Doubtful. We on hackernews are staunchly opposed. Most regular people either support or don't care.

AfD is under the watch of spionage agencies but somehow they are THE risk, not the legacy parties and bureaucracy.

You say this while Germany is actively supporting a genocide in Palestine. The world has really turned on its head.

It's about as believable as a country with history involving the Third Reich and Stasi openly standing behind a country that the UN, and every relevant scholar on the subject, confirms is committing genocide.

In other words, it's very believable. It is incredible how billions of hours have been spent on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and nothing has been learnt. Potentially the best phenomenon in existence at showing that humanity is, after all, so much less intelligent than it believes it is - that even after such a destructive event and so much performative effort at analysis and learning, the key takeaway did not become part of the social psyche whatsoever.

What did you expect? People voted for the party that gave the previous coalition a hard time because of the debt brake but totally ignored it as soon they came into power.

I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly.

Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.

Source: I write dystopias on the subject. https://w.ouzu.im

Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.

What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.

Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk

Using another pretext to target someone for their views is definitely a thing. This is not new (e.g., the Assange case) but its frequency is increasing.

I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.

The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.

In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.

Tribalism eroding the rights of all. Makes sense to me! I think you are on to something here.

> Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court

I think you have an overly rosy view of the legal landscape in the US in the 1970s.

> The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.

This has absolutely started happening, albeit not yet on a large-scale, systematic basis. Mahmoud Khalil [0] resided in the US legally when he was detained with the intention to deport.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Khalil_(activist)

Khalil also gave material support to terrorists which is explicitly called out as a no-no on your residency paperwork.

That would be a crime. Khalil was not charged with any crime. The only conceivable reason to not charge him at this point, is because there is no evidence of him committing a crime.

The admin doesn't have to charge him, they can just revoke his visa and deport him.

He passed out written Hezbollah materials. Like with their name, flag and logo on it.

He shouldn't go to jail, but he is no longer welcome in this country.

That's not providing material support. It's just speech.

Tell that to anti-genocide activists who get deported for saying things like "Killing children is wrong" or "Maybe we shouldnt export guns to a Pedo-State"

It's been constantly weakened and people were always saying "don't worry, we will find a workaround, we should do nothing".

> "I find it extremely worrying that the German government is so shirking its responsibility to take a position on this," said Left Party MP Donata Vogtschmidt, who chairs her group's digital committee. "Because in the Council of the EU, the current blocking minority against chat control depends directly on Germany." If the German government does not stick to the position of its predecessor, "the dam could break and the largest surveillance package the EU has ever seen could become reality."

> Jeanne Dillschneider, Green Party spokesperson on the committee, wrote to netzpolitik.org about her impression of the meeting: "The CDU/CSU, in particular, has often shown in the past how little the protection of fundamental digital rights means to them. I fear the same thing will happen now, even more so, with the CDU/CSU-led Ministry of the Interior." She therefore considers it "all the more crucial whether the Ministry of Justice upholds our fundamental digital rights during this legislative period."

> "I'm cautiously hopeful that some colleagues from the coalition parties apparently share my criticism of chat control," Dillschneider continues. "The question now will be whether they can actually bring themselves to reject chat control. However, I'm not particularly optimistic here."

> Dillschneider's committee colleague, Vogtschmidt, wants to ensure that the Bundestag is forced to take a position on the issue beyond statements made in committee meetings. This is permitted by Article 23 of the Basic Law, which allows parliament to adopt European policy statements. The government must then consider these in negotiations. Vogtschmidt believes: "Now I think chat control will have to be brought back to the Bundestag plenary session to raise awareness of this monstrous danger among a wider public. I will work towards this in the coming days!"

Can someone please explain to me how that law will prevent anything or anybody from encrypted messaging, if I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat? Like, yes, you can prevent the FANANG from implementing it, but criminals will just use the secure one...

It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.

I believe the concept is that I may not be able to jail you for your criminal activity but I can still jail you for breaking the encryption law.

But more generally I think one has to account for the power of the default option - with so many criminals posting their crimes on social media and/or their Venmo descriptions, the likelihood of criminals abandoning (say) WhatsApp and coding their own is rather slim.

> [...] I can just whip up a website and use javascript plus websockets/webrtc to implement encrypted chat?

HTTPS relies on centralised authority. It's right there in the name: Certificate Authority.

Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?

chrome --disable-web-security

Here, fixed it for you Mr. Criminal.

It won’t.

It makes no attempt to outlaw encryption. We can still legally use PGP and completely avoid eavesdropping.

What it does mandate is that messaging providers who they will name (think WhatsApp, Signal), will be obliged to have people reviewing the content of all messages sent.

All but the stupidest of criminals will thus work around it, encrypting themselves over the top. While the average Joe gets all their messages read.

This is the part that I think most politicians simply don't understand.

I've been trying to argue this point with my government several times (some MPs even replied friendly, so they'd actually read it, but still don't understand or believe it).

I like to think I wrote a good analogy of what ChatControl/client-side scanning really is. They say "it's not a backdoor, it doesn't break E2E encryption", and they're right.

> It's like asking to an alcoholic schizo with a history of corruption, who only speaks Russian, and that you are forced by law to feed and host at your place at your own expense, to check your private letters before you're allowed to put them in an envelope.

https://gagliardoni.net/#20250916_clientside

https://infosec.exchange/@tomgag/115213723470901734

It's sad to see Germans have not learned the lessons of the past. If you are in Berlin I highly recommend the Stasi Museum to understand how dystopic mass surveillance can get.

Wish we the public could read all the private chat logs of all the people who decided to be undecided.

It should be implemented for politicians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate

"Von der Leyen previously used her phone to award contracts worth several hundred million euros while acting as defense minister of Germany, effectively bypassing public procurement processes. She subsequently deleted all messages from her phone when investigators probed her. While awarding the COVID-19 vaccine contracts worth billions of euros as head of EU commission, she similarly bypassed procurement processes via her phone and withheld messages on it."

This insane push for surveillance and privacy infringements could be the catalyst needed for the next state exit from the EU

and thus further decline of the only democratic superpower left? Why would that be desirable?

The EU is accelerating into a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that does nothing except say the word Democracy out loud and tax their citizens

I think the worst european country in terms of online freedom right now is the UK, which kind of defeats your point entirely.

As a Dutch citizen Chat Control is the first time I genuinely wish the Netherlands was not part of the EU.

That seems naive — this was pushed by several Dutch ministers over the past decades. It would have been made law here in any case.

Law and order, tuff-on-crime political parties (PVV, VVD, CDA¹) just love the idea of control over citizen's chat messages.

This is not 'because of the EU'. We are part of the EU and influence its policies.

1: https://chatcontrole.nl/stemwijzer2023/

Why cant they just record meta data and hand it out on courts order. Why must it be a backdoor

This dystopian direction of the European Commission coincided with a lot of interaction between Thorn, the European Commission, and Europol. [0][1][2]

Thorn is coincidently is also the vendor of Spotlight, software which solves exactly the problem they are lobbying against.

Thiel's Palantir also has overlapping software capabilities and is also raising questions in their work with Europol. [3]

Connecting these dots was the only thing that made sense to me in order to explain why these repeated repackaged proposals keep steam rolling everything despite all the security concerns, unconstitutionality, and general lack of common sense.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/07/18/european-ombudsman-...

[1] https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...

[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/200017

[3] https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/dutch-group-calls-f...

So, does it make sense for citizens of other countries to call Denmark? Buy advertising on Denmark billboards? And can one do something in Germany?

What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.

> What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany?

Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.

"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).

I get what you mean, but Datenschutz and the bizarre processes built to appease it make an appearance almost every day here.

Datenschutz doesn't prevent court-ordered telecomms surveillance either. This would presumably fall in the same category. (Or in fact be unconstitutional, as BVerfG has already ruled several times regarding blanket data collection in other context.)

Ah, so my email address is highly private info. But all of my communications are not. Great.

No, you see, you can trust Father State. He would never ever do anything bad with your data. Trust him. 1933-1945? 1948-1990? Those were ... different times. He's been on a twelve steps program. He's better now.

Data to private companies? That baker that remembers your telelphone number that's DANGEROUS. He could sell the info how many breadrolls you buy per week to the FSB or the MSS. Also, we would lose a chance to add extra fines to small and medium companies, and no-one wants that, do we? ⸮

The older I become, the more 'government' - regardless of the colors it is wearing at the time - looks like Thénardier to me.

Since it's politically incorrect to write nazi germany, ill just write Soviet Germany. This type of bullshit is rooted in their culture.

Whatever happens, at least Signal will not be complicit in this shit show. Will WhatsApp and IMessage bend the knee? I guess we will see.

I mean it’s not hard to predict. Inevitably they will as their parent companies won’t give up such a big market.

How well a ban on signal would be enforced if they don’t comply would be interesting.

I still feel like this will fail to come into effect like all the other times. But we gotta keep eyes on it.

Apple did not bend the knee in the UK, it forced the hand of the UK to reveal it's goals. Obviously we will see, I don't have much hope either. As for Signal, I hope they pull out as it will get media coverage somewhat on this issue.

I have understood that Whatsapp is not a terribly profitable product for Meta, so it is possible that it would just be withdrawn from Europe, instead of making expensive and controversial modifications.

iMessage is not really a thing in Europe. Apple phones are simply not popular enough here for it to be an useful feature. I guess Apple would just disable it for European users.

EU must go.

Well that escalated quickly, didn't it?

Yes, the EU did escalate things to such an extent that absolutely countries should be considering leaving over the EU’s insane push to destroy all privacy and thus free speech.

Good luck. EU has been producing one Europe crippling law and regulation after another and it still enjoys wide support for some reason. Ursula is facing two more no confidence votes in October so hopefully the tide is changing.

People were told the lie that without the EU there will be war again. Like the economic stagnation and decline of Europe is somehow the final solution and the end of history.

You don't have to convince me. You have to convince people who will immediately reject anything negative about EU, even here on HN (see the coming downvotes).

EU is not enough. I'm sometimes not happy with the decision taken by governments in France, so what really has to happen is HauteGaronnExit, where my departement is freed from the influence of borders decided in a Revolution two centuries ago, of which I was never explicitly asked to approve.

And, come to think of it, I don't like all the decisions taken by the departement either. Surely things will work great when my street is responsible for the electrical grid, immigration or international commerce.

And when I say "my street", I obviously mean "my half of the street". I'm not against odd-numbered houses "per se", but, you know...

No EU means that most states would already have implemented Chat Control. Case in point, the UK.

If the UK citizens want Chat Control they should have it. If they don't, they should not elect a government that wants it. Same goes for almost every issue the EU is pushing. Not everyone in the EU needs Chat Control just because the UK citizens really want a government that will give them Chat Control.

Is there any living person that thinks the UK people want ChatControl? No? Me neither.

If the UK no longer has democracy then that is not something the EU can fix by giving UK chat control.

With 69% of people supporting the Online Safety Act [1] I'm confident there are people in the UK that would also support Chat Control

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...

Didn’t the surveys indicate a brexit as a pretty big regret once people understood what it meant?

Sure, when you frame the question as, "do you support these measures to ensure children don't have access to pornography?", of course people are going to support it.

Present evidence that the new laws will be a danger to their fundamental rights and maybe you won't get quite as much support.

Also, that survey shows that there's broad support even though the same people don't believe the new laws will be effective. So... that's pretty stupid.

In the meantime we get VPN adverts in the tube.

It depends on how you word the survey. ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA (Yes Minster: the unofficial video on-boarding course for UK bureaucrats)

No EU means that this law would have to passed in 27 different countries whihc would make it much harder to put this many people under surveillance.

So, in this particular case no EU would be a clear benefit because it would give us time to see the effect on this law on the neighboring countries first, just like we saw with the UK and the OSA.

I am becoming more anti-EU by the day and this is just one more nail in the coffin.

No, just Ursula and lobbies among the Denmark wacko against privacy.

The EU began as a simple customs bloc and negotiating tool. It has morphed into a blood sucking behemoth preventing growth and discouraging progress.

down with the EU

People are so emotive about this issue and the online safety act in the UK. They jump to conclusions that applied to any other issue would be conspiratorial.

It's not about "control" and "spying". The fact is it is policing that has been made extremely hard due to technology.

silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth. Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

The politicians are lay people, and only have one tool in their toolbox: laws. So every solution is a legal one.

"Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN." Solution? Create a law requiring VPNs to be registered to a user with their address. There's no conspiracy here - it's simple cause and effect. This is a contrived worst case example because this level of accountability? is not currently proposed.

I would prefer other solutions, but these solutions are firstly much easier for the politicians to understand and also much cheaper to implement and see results.

But they do find them without the tools. Every other week there are terror suspects arrested. Every week some pedophiles are arrested.

If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.

This is utter nonsense. The "technology and encryption make law enforcement harder" narrative is pushed by people to gain power. That's all there is to it. Technology has, if anything, made surveillance and law enforcement so much easier than it ever has been before. Law enforcement always wants to look helpless and like the victim though because they want absolute control over your life.

> "Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN."

Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.

Exactly. Where is the outcry from the same politicians about the Epstein client list being shoved under the rug by the US? Nowhere? Then they don't actually care about protecting children.

And the politician ultimately responsible for (as in "she was in charge and failed to prevent/deal with it") the worst child abuse scandal in the UK went on to hold more senior positions and Blair wanted to make her minister for children at one point.

Yeah, nonsense, bullshit, whatever you want to call it. Actual pedos will trivially bypass Chat Control by switching to a messaging service that doesn't enforce it, or even by sending encrypted ZIP files via any ordinary messaging service.

> silk road was only busted because the guy had his http proxy responding on the VPS's IP and not just the tor eth

Does this justify every browser reporting every URL you visit to the government, and implementing a government-controlled blocklist of URLs on the off chance that a criminal might use Chrome for their criminal activity?

> Yeah, nonsense, bullshit, whatever you want to call it. Actual pedos will trivially bypass Chat Control by switching to a messaging service that doesn't enforce it, or even by sending encrypted ZIP files via any ordinary messaging service.

Yep, and then the politicians will create laws that outlaw encrypting zip files without a backdoor etc. That's my point, there's no nefarious plot here, it's just dumb laws to solve real problems.

I don't want these laws but they're going to be pushed while everyone is just pushing back on conspiracy grounds. That's not going to win over the average person.

> That's my point, there's no nefarious plot here, it's just dumb laws to solve real problems.

You don't know the plot any more than we do. Whether the current government is nefarious or not is quite irrelevant.

Chat Control is a surveillance and censorship tool that we're being pinkie-promised will only be used "for good". In reality it is a tool which can be repurposed for domestic oppression, political persecution, and crowd control overnight at the government's sole discretion.

> everyone is just pushing back on conspiracy grounds.

That's not a conspiracy, that's just a factual statement about the indiscriminate capabilities of this technology. Governments across the world have a near-100% track record of abusing their power. It's not a matter of "if", it's only a matter of "when".

Otherwise what should we do next? Abolish freedom of speech? You wouldn't be silly enough to believe that the government would imprison you for your political speech, would you? That's conspiratorial thinking.

> That's not going to win over the average person.

Why should we care? If the fact of the matter has been explained to them and they're still gullible enough to give up their most essential civil liberties in exchange for nothing, they're a lost cause and a waste of time.

I don't count on the average village idiot to save the day here, I expect the EU courts to strike the law because it clearly violates the charter of fundamental human rights.

Sovereign governments already hold the ultimate power in society. By your reasoning any and all laws are an attack on your liberty.

If you're going to engage in bad faith then I'm not interested.

My "reasoning" is firmly rooted in the founding principles of liberal democracies and our legally recognized fundamental rights.

Our previous run-ins with fascism is why they exist, and anyone working to delegitimize them needs to be treated with utmost suspicion.

> Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

No, this is not "unfathomably good luck", this is how the system works. Most of crimes are repeated crimes, most of the criminals are serial criminals. People who obey the law, then break it once, then obey it ever since -- are very rare and even if they're not caught I wouldn't care much anyway.

And if you're a normal criminal doing your criminal stuff day after day and year after year you'll make mistakes. One of them will get you caught.

Never in the history of humanity did the law enforcement cast a net that caught 100% of crime, it always had been the game of probabilities, luck and persistence. Steal once and you'll likely walk away. Steal every day to make a living and you'll get caught many times in your lifetime.

> This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union.

I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.

Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.

Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.

Agreed.

Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.

I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).

> however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful.

Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.

It's the same reason police (in every country) are always asking for more powers, and then end up not using them effectively. It's a cycle where crime is not perfectly prevented/punished, politicians blame the police, police blame not having enough powers, and then they get more. But the wrong ones to prevent the next tragedy, well, in hindsight of course. So new powers are needed yet again. (And no-one needs to examine why the existing powers are not used effectively, since the underlying problems there would probably be a lot more expensive and boring to fix, e.g. better pay/hours, better management, education, outreach, blahblahblah.)

Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.

Yeah but that wasn't my point.

My point is that "this isn't about catching criminals" is the wrong wording.

You don't start a debate by twisting the words of the other party. No matter how right you are. Otherwise you will be seen as a pariah.

But this isn't about catching criminals.

For _you_ it isn't.

If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.

That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.” It’s a form of concern-trolling: pretending the problem is rhetoric while sidestepping the actual flaw.

The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated goal is statistically self-defeating.

The “catching criminals” line is deliberate gaslighting. It’s crafted to reassure people who don’t understand how these systems work, while the real function is mass surveillance of everyone.

> That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.”

You're acting like I'm trying to derail the argument. That is not the case.

You are putting a lot of assumptions in your wording. This will not help you.

Classic gaslight: accuse me of twisting and ‘acting’ while you’re the one twisting. The wording isn’t the issue - the substance is. And you’ve avoided it entirely.

That's because literally everybody here agrees with the substance.

There is no discussion here other than how to best bring the point across to those who do not agree.

> Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.

We have already experience with how false positives are skewed in practice, even case goes all the way to court.

Because ostensibly good people do not want to see the CSAM material, they believe what algorithm/first reporter stated, and ofc nobody "good" wants to let a pedophile go free.

And so the algorithm tries to hang a parent for making photo of skin rash to send to doctor (happened with Google Drive scanning) or a grandparent for having a photo of their toddler grandkids playing in kiddy pool (happened in UK, computer technician happened upon the photo and reported to police, if not for lawyer insisting to actually verify the "CSAM material" the prosecution would not actually ever check what the photo was of)

I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone.

But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.

I think 'restoring the ability to wiretap' is misleading as this is not 'restoring the ability', its more akin to 'wiretapping everyone all the time'.

Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.

Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.

Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.

> Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not

Chat control does not allow the government to read anyones messages for any reason, so no that is not true.

> Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

But storing these messages is illegal.

You are correct. I was still basing my post of the assumption that the AI scanning was still in the bill and that the proposed two strikes then chats would disclosed was there as well, which they is not. This provision seemed to imply that messages would have to be stored in order to be able to be provided after the two strikes.

I wasn't very clear in my original post always included an assumption that false positives were involved and that messages being stored were a result of that and not all messages being stored at all times.

The images and links that are scanned and is deems potentially problematic will be stored for up to 6 months or until they are deemed unproblematic. There is still a potential 6 month paper trail here, and in politically turbulent times that paper trail could still be damaging retroactively even if the report contains non CSAM.

Anybody who believes that it will be used on criminals instead of everyone is dangerously naive.

It seems to be mostly about mass survellance. The quote I've seen from Danish Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgaard seems to make that clear:

> We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,

https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/REU/spm/1426/index.ht...

What they want is everyone to be watched, all of the time. Crimes will be determined later.

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