German government comes out against Chat Control
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Ausgerechnet Spahn. Manchmal glaubt man seinen Augen und Ohren nicht. Wir müssen Wachsam bleiben. Mit dem Argument das es böse Menschen gibt, wurde schon viel böses getan. Massenüberwachung zerstört jede Gesellschaft. Deutschland hat mehrfach darunter gelitten. Und die Versuche Massenüberwachung einzuführen wiederholen sich.
You may disagree (or agree) with many of their other views, but as an opposition party, they are precisely the corrective Germany and Europe need to keep the power-hungry elites in check.
Votes by party affiliation and name to verify this can be accessed here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2025-10-...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/almond-milk-can-keep...
They should call it what it is. Cow corpse flesh.
The concept of calling a food that is meant to mimic another food with an appropriate modifier in front has existed forever.
So, for example, white chocolate isn’t chocolate…but with the appropriate modifier no one is confused about it.
Very few are principled enough to stick to that in power.
You may it seem like they operate independently. They do not. This determination (while I subjectively agree) came of a report was released by a failed government's acting minister of internal affairs, on her last day of office. I read it myself and even though I don't like it, it's pretty imprecise and does some pretty heavy straw grasping at times.
The public was sold this Nazi story about the AfD by the established powers to keep them down. Looking at what has been going on it's wild to me to call the AfD authoritarian compared the the Altparteien...
One of those empty words one needs to be careful with it does not mean anything, and everything. Politics is not about suppressing ideas of other people, somethings parties can agree on others not so much.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/the-tr...
Additionally, this is something that would be in their ideological background. I guess they just fear to become victims themselves.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)
(And the russia and china connections of the AfD should be a case for the secret services anyway. Unfortunately the former boss of one service is a fan of the party, so not sure if they are really looking now)
But I guess you can’t guard against something you either do not have the capacity to or do not wish to see.
Last time I checked we had free votes and I could say that I hate Merz.
Seriously though, the notion that free speech is impaired in Germany is completely ridiculous and just a massive hoax. Compare this with the situation in the USA where the same people - like Vance who brazenly attacked Germany for an alleged lack of free speech - were super quick to demand a cancellation of Kimmel, because "you can't say that!"
We have laws against hate speech, and they may not be perfect, but they have a reason - we simply don't want to tolerate something like the Nazis shouting "burn the jews" in the name of free speech. Calling for violence does not have to be protected by speaking your mind. That's completely silly.
But the idea that Germany is anything but a completely free country is ridiculous. Some of the shit that people say (AfD, BSW) drives me nuts, but well, it's a free country.
Extremists doing what extremists can, which is being extreme as a default. Don't expect much support from public, and greta's gradual slide to political extremism isn't helping much, most people are fed up with her and her persona just poisons topics with... extremism.
Mistakes happen and get corrected. Doesn't mean there is a systemic issue.
[1]: https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/meinungsfreiheit-in-gefah...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/policing-speech-online-germ...
Germany’s constitution (the Basic Law) does protect freedom of opinion and expression, but it explicitly allows restrictions via “general laws” to protect personal honor, youth, and human dignity.
Recent enforcement shows how this plays out: police raids have targeted individuals posting “hate speech” or “extremist” content online. What constitutes hate speech or extremist content is “conveniently” interpreted at times.
And if you do believe in such a conspiracy, please post your personal information such that I can forward it to the relevant agencies and have your house raided. Because we have been through that shit in this country and have no desire to ever see it again.
Friedrich Merz insult – house search (2024)
"Pimmel" tweet and Andy Grote complaint (2021)
Robert Habeck "Schwachkopf" meme case (2024 / 2025)
They're all politicians. Houses were raided in all cases.
You do you. I have no intention engaging with people on “full kool-aid on whatever bubble they are in”.
Complain to CBS and the Americans.
[1]: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nach-schwachkopf-post-p...
I say it again, it's nasty and needs a very strong set of counterbalances, which Germany - unlike the US - still has. Therefore this remains a much more freer country than Say-whatever-you-like-on-Rogan America. Freedom for us is free healthcare, a welfare state, an ethics-based concept of societal rights and obligations. We don't market ourselves as the beacon of free speech and FREEDOM by making both empty words fueled by extreme individualism. We still believe in Solidarität and on social-oriented policies, both on the right and left side of the isle. We have ferocious political battles about topics that are too violently policed, by the way, like right now about Palestine and Israel, and people take to the streets FREELY, despite some despicable police brutality episodes. We do have the contradictions and complexities of any modern western society.
Yet we don't have too many runaway billionaires that are more powerful than governments, and we are still ALL a bit better off because of that. It's boring, but it works.
AfD is against all this, and it is because it's provenly funded by Russia and other enemies of the west. They appeal to the Volk, but in reality are infested by double-standards, hate, and a specific type of political individualism and authoritarian views that need to be stopped with all legal and societally-acceptable means possible.
• 2011: Under Angela Merkel (CDU) and the SPD coalition, Germany decided to abolish nuclear power after Fukushima, dismantling one of the few sources of domestic energy independence.
• 2011–2015: The same governments backed and defended Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2, tying Germany’s critical infrastructure even closer to Russian gas — despite repeated warnings from Eastern European neighbors.
• 2011: The abolition of compulsory military service further weakened Germany’s defense capacity and NATO readiness.
These weren’t minor policy missteps — they systematically made Germany more vulnerable to Russian influence.
And it’s also worth noting a historical irony: Angela Merkel’s family moved from West Germany to East Germany in 1954, one of the very few families to go in that direction. Between 1949 and 1961, roughly 2.7 to 3 million East Germans fled the communist East for the capitalist West — virtually nobody went the other way.
A literal millionare is chancellor.
> reedom for us is free healthcare,
Last I looked I paid 10k a year for government mandated healthcare. Where can I apply for the free one?
Before you downvote:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
You can argue legality if you like, but the substance matches the textbook definition.
These people should be arrested.
My sticking point is the word "terrorism" itself. Words are defined by how we collectively use and understand them, and the common understanding of terrorism involves bombs and bullets, not software and surveillance.
I get your logic, however. You're breaking down the definition into intimidation for political ends, and you're not wrong that coercive control is a form of violence. But the leap to calling it "terrorism" just doesn't work for me. It feels like you've reverse-engineered a justification for a word that, on its face, is hyperbolic in this context. It's an authoritarian nightmare, for sure, but it isn't terrorism.
We’ve since normalised it to mean only non-state actors with weapons, while the organised psychological violence of governments gets rebranded as “policy.” The fact it’s done by men in suits, with forms instead of grenades, doesn’t make it less coercive - only more efficient and socially acceptable.
If a law deliberately instils fear in civilians to secure political obedience, it meets the core definition. The method evolved; the principle didn’t.
Also part of the reason it doesn’t feel like terrorism to many is bias. We’ve been conditioned to picture terrorists as outsiders with explosives, not officials with conference badges.
I agree with the expansion of meaning, but that mean nazi resistance was terrorism. Ukraine counterstrike on the crimea bridge/russian raffineries is terrorism. I do think it is, but now i do need to qualify terrorism before using the word.
If we expand to all kind of violence, not only physical, well any new policing laws is terrorism. Laws that increase poverty are terrorism, as poverty is an economic violence exerced by the society on its most frail. Taxation is violence too. I will need to add qualifiers each time i use terrorism, and that cheapen the meaning.
[edit] my la setnence cheapened my argument and could start a new side debate that doesn't interest me, i'm removing it.
And while I'm sure there are some people (from opposites sides of the political spectrum) who would agree that poverty-causing laws and taxation are violence, perhaps even terrorism, there also remains the question of intention.
In contrast, the 2011 attacks in Norway, the Unabomber attacks, and anything the Rote Armee Fraktion did aside from robbing banks, all have a very clear intention to primarily affect public opinion, political discourse, and civil society in general.
My doubt in the parent comment's assertations lies in the intention as well. Certainly this policy would cause fear in some way, but I think the intention of this policy really is just a techno-authoritarian power grab.
The US (and UK I think) tried to extend it to add 'surprise attack on an occupying force', and that didn't work, but if it did, the negative connotation of the word would lessen a lot faster, and you'd see it used as a positive already ('my little terror' could easily become 'my little terrorist' if the negative meaning is dissolved enough).
I agree on everything you say, I wanted to explain my point better.
But we must stop somewhere, else we end up like the people arguing that the most democratic country in the middle east is somehow the apartheid one.
It only works if one looks away from the fact that there are so many more things that need to be declared terrorism first.
And it directly misleads people.
Here's a short teaser and links to more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Spahn#Controversies
So, what the parent poster is saying that the controversial Spahn did the right thing for once, which comes a bit as a surprise.
Or maybe this course of action is just more convenient at this time?
Probably the latter.
The lesson from history is to keep the autocrats from grabbing power. Trying to contrain them with laws ex ante hasn't worked since like Cicero. I'm not sure Berlin opposing Chat Control fits into their domestic anti-authoritarian arc.
This isn't so much about making Chat Control illegal (thereby containing or limiting future authoritarians) as it is not setting up the infrastructure for them to wield as soon as they win an election.
I'd argue the current stance of being opposed to Chat Control is more like "Don't collect religious affiliation on the census" - meaning we can both agree with your comment I partially quoted, while also recognizing that Berlin's public oppostion can be meaningful.
Fair enough, you’re right. If they’re incompetent authoritarians (or just non-authoritarian right-wingers), this could mitigate the damage.
read both of your comments and was wondering what happens if both of you were correct.
If you have an absolutist monarchist state that is flourishing because its past 3 kings were good people that cared about the people and the country, a potentially bad leader that would take that over could use that power to cement their position indefinitely.
Meanwhile in countries with separation of powers, term limits and checks and balances, gaining absolute power and staying there is a higher difficulty level, requires for more things to align, and most importantly: takes much longer to pull off.
The point isn't to make it impossible for bad governments to yield power. The point is to add checks to that power that make it useless in the hands of a bad actor that doesn't outright use violent force.
For example a good stage might see use in keeping good data on which citizens are in which political movements, but whenever you collect and maintain such data on behalf of your citizens you should also consider how a bad power could abuse such data. Thst is literally the bare minimum when it comes to acting responsibly.
>https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2018/kw08-de-v...
Other European countries like Switzerland, also banned full face veils(burqas) in public. Try entering a bank, city hall, school, etc with a balaclava, ski mask or motorcycle helmet see how that goes.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/304/1930412.pdf
Allowing the surveillance of minors if they show signs of radicalization? This to me makes sense under existing child protection laws. If kids are being raised in environments that are harmful to themselves and society, should we just sit by and let them get permanently wrecked till they reach adulthood, over a technicality? The earlier you can catch the issues the better for everyone and the higher the chance you can rescue the child. Existing child protection laws in Germany already allow the state a lot of power to take children away from parents if they're seen as unfit.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/111/1911127.pdf
Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
These are common sense viewpoints a lot of Europeans agree with, not authoritarian ones.
Extreme collectivism affects both extreme, that is the concept that people are nothing but sacrificial lambs for the religion, the country, or the revolution.
In addition to the authoritarian aspect pointed out by a sibling comment, the far-right generally consider the ends to justify the means because of their sense of righteousness. They will compromise their values to get what they want (control over others). Just look at the hypocrisy of the free-speech absolutists on twitter who have no complaints over Lonnie shutting down Leftist accounts.
Blame the Jews, the immigrants, the trans, and then people will grudgingly accept the Gestapo, ICE, prosecution without proof or courts.
Which then allows you to target the opposition without proof.
Contemporary examples include the Philippines, Hungary, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and arguably Russia, Turkey and India. Modi is a Hindu nationalist. The United States unfortunately is shaping up to count as an example as well.
Extreme forms of nationalism tend to have a narrative of grievance, a desire to restore a once a great national identity, and a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens, and enemies without and within, against whom authoritarians powers must be mobilized.
So there's a conceptual basis, in terms of setting the stage for rationalizing authoritarianism, as well as abundant historical examples demonstrating the marriage of nationalism and authoritarianism in action. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but I would say there's an extremely strong and familiar historical canon to those who study the topic.
Their conclusion is that "[...] ethnic and elitist forms of nationalism, which combine to forge exclusive nationalism, help to perpetuate autocratic regimes by continually legitimating minority exclusions [...]"
Right-wing nationalism as we're currently experiencing it is exclusive. It broadly advocates for restoring revised historical cultural narratives of a particular ethnic group, for immigration restriction and immigrant removal, for further minority culture erasure, and so on.
1: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:859c6af4-d4fd-461e-b605-42...
You are getting downvoted because this pretty basic stuff. Either you’re part of today’s lucky 10k, or your post reads very much like far-right Gish galloping.
Feudalism did not have this concept; a country was the land belonging to a king (or equivalent), mediated through a set of nobles. There was no concept of illegal or legal immigration; the population of a country were the people who worked for, or were owned by, the nobles ruling that country. There were land rights granted to peasants who had historically lived in that place, but these could and were often overruled by nobles.
European nobility had no such idea of ethnicity or national grouping; the English monarchy is a German family, and most of European nobility were related to each other much more closely than to the citizens of their country.
Early post-monarchy states didn't have this concept. The English Civil War and the French Revolution didn't create states that had a defined concept of the citizen as a member of any ethnic grouping. Again, there's no mention of immigration in any of the documents from this period. It just wasn't a concept they thought about.
The whole concept that a nation-state is a formalisation of a historical grouping of ethnically related people is a very recent one, only a couple of hundred years old.
So to answer your question: It is very easy to have a sovereign country without a policy that prevents unfettered immigration; you just don't care about your population being ethnically diverse. Your citizens are the people who live in your country, and have undergone whatever ceremony and formality you decide makes them citizens.
This is, after all, how America historically did this; if you arrived in America and pledged allegiance, you became a citizen of America.
It’s an odd phenomenon called a mass formation in large populations, when groups of people get fixated or obsessed with a certain concept or even a thing that the group ourself becomes self-reinforcing; usually until a point of exhaustion is reached or self-destruction. It can also be effectively injected into a culture as it was in Germany’s case after the war through endless and limitless collective and hereditary blame abuse to the point that Germans generally do not have self-respect, and if they show even a slight bit of self-respect they are branded far right, as of that means anything being the subconscious conditioning people have been subjected to.
It’s kind of sad and unfortunate and humanity should never have allowed the collective torture, abuse, and punishment of Germans even to this day 80 years later. It’s a sick and depraved thing only the most devious and evil people would condone, let alone perpetrate.
We seem to have a general problem with people not understanding that democracies have regular elections and the other party is going to get back in at some point. So then whenever one party is in power, instead of thinking ahead by five minutes and realizing that adding new constraints on the government and adding rather than eroding checks and balances will help you the next time the other team gets in, everybody thinks of them as an impediment to doing whatever they want immediately.
And then like clockwork they get butthurt when they checks they eroded or failed to put into place aren't there after the next election, as if they had nothing to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany
https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/russia-today-verbot...
1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).
2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).
Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).
Such as removals because of copyright claims?
Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians, which is why politicians are very active suing random supporters of their opponents, because that is an effective way to police speech, open specifically to politicians.
I do think a lot of people care, but censorship in Germany does a lot to protect the people who could change the law. That law obviously needs to be abolished, politicians are uniquely unworthy of protection when it comes to speech.
For example, the concept of privacy protecting against media coverage is actually weaker for politicians (when in official duty) than for ordinary citizens (Allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht).
And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
And if you look at how these laws are used by politicians they look quite spectacular.
>And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
The Wikipedia article and how the law was applied article disagrees.
Do not forget that this applies to insults. E.g. calling a politician "dumb" is enough to get sued. These laws create a way for politicians specifically to prosecute people criticizing them. This isn't a hypothetical, it is how the law is actually used.
You make it sound like it happens all the time and everyone is used to it. I know of once case (Pimmel-Andy), and that led to a shitstorm, including part of the police operation being declared unlawful after the fact.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/landgericht-hamburg-a...
Is that an opinion or a harmful false claim?
Together with a fellow activist, who also served as informal legal counsel, they gave a talk on this case at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5RmTOGucZo
As Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, the idea that you should be able to slander anyone in power is a nice underdog philosophy (particularly popular in the US, where the underdog is always right) but what it gets you is a post-truth environment in which reputation means nothing.
And as a German what a lot of people don't get, we're very much an honour based society, not an English or French liberal society. People in power aren't suspicious just because they have power, the crank is not correct just because he's the little guy. I think Lee Kuan Yew was largely correct if one looks at Anglosphere media and politics, where truth and reputation have entirely been replaced by conspiracy and tantrums. Far from the wisdom of the crowds being some truth finding mechanism you just enable the most charismatic nutjob.
We aren't. We are a totally Americanized failed state governed by mentally ill losers who continue to destroy this country in every possible way imaginable.
The German society which was the basis for this law does not exist anymore. Politicians are all complete clueless losers who do not deserve an ounce of respect.
That's the problem with these proposed laws.
We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again. The nations that want this mass spying only have to win once.
We need a way to permanently stop these proposals once defeated the first time so that they cannot just continue to try over and over again until it passes.
Fighting corruption only works when enough people fight it at enough levels, and continue to fight it. There is no getting around the fact that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
We do have a way to reinforce our position, though!
We can design and consume technology that makes this hard.
We can stop working for companies that build centralized platforms for messaging.
We can teach our neighbors how important rights to privacy and speech are in language that they understand.
There can be enough friction that this becomes harder for politicians. Remember the Reddit Sopa and Pipa protests? - that was pretty epic! I don't think Reddit will help us in its current state, but we can absolutely mount those defenses on Wikipedia, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
And we should continue to move off of platforms that don't align with our freedoms. And build our platforms in a way that encourages "normies" to join.
A billionaire pedophile ran a covert sex ring with a suspected who's who of a client list who was almost barely prosecuted for "reasons™"
Social media companies caught red-handed psychologically manipulating users for various ends
Damn near everyone helping to destroy actual free speech and privacy willingly because they've been talked into it (ironic)
Governments that engage in mass surveillance so egregious if you had tried it 40 years ago there would have been an uprising. Aided by the tech community I might add.
Industries that abuse data and algorithms to manipulate pricing or commit outright fraud.
A pharma corp addicting countless americans to opioids with almost no real consequence, killing hundreds of thousands and ruining millions of families.
Several industries have poisoned the planet and its inhabitants in various long term ways for profit.
And yet if you suggest something is a conspiracy it is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Speaking of conspiracies that doesn't sound like an accident... The trick to conspiracy theories is critical thinking and not uncritical dismissal.
If I have any words of consolation: when the "conspiracy theory" turns out to be more practice than theory you get to say I told you so.
Edit: typo
The cage is real, it's not a state of mind. It's not something that can be recycled out of. You'll know when you're really doing something when you can give people a time and a place to show up; when that showing up isn't to stand in the street and socialize with each other, burn down a Starbucks, or spit in the face of a cop who makes less than you do; and when most of you end up dead or in prison.
I always reply like this, but some people think everybody else in the world is so weak and naïve, when they themselves aren't doing anything important and have not taken a fraction of the risks or suffered a fraction of the loss of the people they're asking to speak up. Speaking against power is an impotent magic spell. You can recognize journalists who speak against real power by their deaths.
Everybody is just aping the US black civil rights struggle, where watching the violence done in their name to nicely dressed, well-behaved people filled enough people with disgust that politicians wouldn't get a boost from continuing to support it. That was how a small minority population faced with irrational restrictions in a media-saturated society was able to barely overcome explicitly unfair laws (and go no further, we're still the underclass, we're still dying.)
The history of effective, revolutionary, positive protest by what are often majorities involved people getting out into the streets as a show of strength, not a show of weakness. It always involves converting and including portions of the army and the police forces. It involves building strong shadow governments. Not this pantomime where everybody pretends to be black, and the people who are the blackest, weakest, most undeserving of their treatment win because mommy parliament or daddy supreme court are moved enough to declare them the winner.
They only need to succeed once, we (the ones opposing the law) have to succeed every time.
I'm borderline not joking that there should be warning labels like those on cigarettes on the ballot when voting.
Jens Spahn, the speaker in the video OP shared, is not a member of the government but a leading member of the parliament and of one of the ruling parties. A tiny but important difference.
I think ‘a leading member’ is underselling it a little. He is the “Fraktionsvorsitzender”, which is comparable to the majority leader in the US Senate.
Not really. First of all, Jens Spahn doesn't lead a majority, he merely leads his party's parliamentary group, which has 208 of 630 seats. Second, he has already proven this year that he doesn't have the members of his own parliamentary group under control, so his stance on a matter should not be taken for more than it is.
It's an unsustainable situation.
> The EU tries something like this every few years.
This is NOT the EU trying it (I'm not even sure you know what you mean when you say "The EU"). This is certain groups of politicians from certain EU member states raising it again and again.
Please keep yourselves informed, don't spread an incorrect message, because this is an important issue to fight and needs accurate information.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content (https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...)
Undermining Democracy: The European Commission’s Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance (https://dannymekic.com/202310/undermining-democracy-the-euro...)
1. maladministration: Ombudsman regrets Commission approach to access to documents request concerning EU legislation on combatting child sexual abuse (https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/news-document/en/189565)
2. maladministration: Decision on how the EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) dealt with the moves of two former staff members to positions related to combatting online child sexual abuse (case 2091/2023/AML) (https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/200017)
Please keep yourselves informed, don't spread an incorrect message, because this is an important issue to fight and needs accurate information.
There is a long history to CSAM, long before your 2021 date. If we want to keep it fairly recent, here is a straight from the source link for you (no journalist or blogger added their skew). This is 2019 where The Council (elected ministers of member states) are deciding for push this forward. This is how the EC (commission) usually get their mandate.
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12862-2019-...
Research also tells us that various NGOs and Europol have been pressing the commission to act on this (side stepping national governments), but ultimately The Commission goes through the Council to get their mandate.
And keeping it more recent, this is being pushed (again unfortunately) through elected ministers of member states onto the Commission.
I'm not saying that the commission are not involved, but your message is trying to make this complicated scenario down into "evil unelected beurocrats" coming up with schemes to spy on us. It is narrow minded and directs people the wrong way.
Unfortunately the only country that ever left proceeded to shoot itself in both knees, light itself on fire and jump in a pool of gasoline. For NO reason.
A pedigree of chatcontrols has already been turned down several times in the past but there's nothing stopping it from being raised from the dead a couple of years later over and over until it finally passes. And then it's very much impossible to unpass.
That brand of defeatism has been spewed every step of the way every time. If everyone thought like you, the first version of Chat Control would have passed. But it didn’t. And even if it eventually does, later is better than sooner. Later is worth fighting for.
Look, it’s fine if you yourself want to personally give up, this is tiring. But please don’t rub your despondency on the people who are trying to fight for something which benefits you. You’re not helping. On the contrary, you’re making it worse for everyone, including yourself.
Every time you make that sort of comment, you’re helping those who want to oppress you. Either join the fight or move aside.
Minimize govt. Remove the govt ability to control many aspects of one's life.
I know. I've always called myself a progressive left individual, then found out the modern progressive left is all about solving every issue with more rules, more centralisation, more bureaucracy and more prohibition. It's maddening to see how many people feel their government isn't legislating enough and is still too liberal.
Case in point: Online Safety Act has been heavily pushed by Labour (despite starting as a Tory thing). Chat Control is being pushed by the Danish Social Democrats.
We could instead say “promote a utopia where everyone is treated fairly and empathetically and everyone’s needs are met without destroying the planet or a need for government”. That’d “fix” the current problem and more, the issue is what exactly can we do to “promote” that change.
"Mit der CDU/CSU wird es keine anlasslose Chatkontrolle geben, wie sie von einigen Staaten in der EU gefordert wird."
Anlass is cause/reason here, so keine anlasslose literally translated means: not without cause/reason.
What about "reasonable causes", and the infrastructure enabling those? Be it legal/bureaucratic/technical? IMO it's already in place, mostly, and got abused many times, already.
This is just "weasel wording", changing nothing for so called "lawful interception".
If you got flagged by some algorithm somewhere, or got reported by someone behind your back, there will be Anlass!
Automagically...
Because neither the algorithms, nor the organizations handling the flagging, enabling the reporting are transparent.
They are unaccountable (to the public/affected) black boxes by design, be it for economic, organizational, or political reasons.
Inevitably leading to kafkaesque absurdities like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
Wiretapping a chat if the citizen is suspected of a crime AND after a judge has reviewed the evidence and green-lit such surveillance is - imho - more acceptable. We do that with phones, why would we not do it with chats?
> Wiretapping a chat if the citizen is suspected of a crime AND after a judge
> has reviewed the evidence and green-lit such surveillance is - imho - more
> acceptable. We do that with phones, why would we not do it with chats?
The only way to make court-mandated surveillance possible is to ensure that nobody's chat is encrypted to begin with, such that after a court order has come in, the data can be easily read. So to outlaw end-to-end encryption entirely is what this proposal is really about: break privacy guarantees for everybody to enable surveillance in a few outlier cases.
Of course, once encryption has been broken, three-letter agencies the world over will be reading your chats whether they have a warrant or not.
There is no way to have private communication for good people only. Either you have freedom for all, or freedom for none.
Article in German: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/eu-ueberwachungsplaene-unionsfr...
Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that.
It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allowed to advocate for the murder/rape/extermination of other human beings because of the way they look)
That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.
We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.
Edit: To anyone reading and thinking of joining in to any of the discussions, the message is clear - Facebook or Reddit level of inanity is all you will find here.
Sure, there is the rollercoaster, ups and downs, small wins and losses going on all the time. But look at the general trends - these freedoms that we enjoyed are by and large being chipped away, it's all trending down, worldwide. It's two steps back, one step forward. Maybe CC doesn't get put in place this particular time, but they will ram it through eventually, at some point the right angle will be found to make the right people vote for it. Then the battleground will move onto something even more egregious, and so on. I'm not seeing why there would be a sudden reversal of this trend in the coming decades.
Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".
It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.
And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.
The most obvious mechanism is a constitutional amendment, but in the U.S. the only amendment to be drafted and adopted in modern times is the 26th amendment (1971), 54 years ago. (The 27th amendment had a weird status where it was belatedly adopted with a 200-year delay.) It's hard to imagine many constitutional amendments actually being passed now because it's been challenging to find consensus on many things within U.S. politics lately.
I don't know that the EU at a supranational level has any mechanism at all to ban future EU directives. Maybe they could decide to remove something from the list of areas of competence of the EU? But Chat Control is under the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" and I can't imagine the EU deciding that that should be abandoned as an area of Union competence.
Edit: The international human rights treaties, at least in regulating law enforcement, have tended not to follow the idea that some kind of regulation or law enforcement power is completely off-limits, but just that they need procedural safeguards -- especially for surveillance and investigatory powers. In this case, Chat Control opponents (including me) would like it to be completely off-limits, but the human rights instruments arguments might more naturally go into "did they create enough surrounding rules and mechanisms about how it's used and how it's regulated?" rather than "can we just say governments just can't make this rule?".
It's the task of parliaments, governments, and courts to reevaluate and resolve all these contradictions over and over again. It's tedious and takes a lot of resources, but that's the price for democracy.
The constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) famously guarantees freedom of expression as a fundamental right for the people. That hasn't stopped the government from trampling all over freedom of expression, though. The EU is of course nowhere near North Korea in terms of what is considered acceptable, but don't ever trust that the words in the constitution will be enough to keep the government from doing something.
In fact, if ChatControl does fail, they have already planned to include this in ProtectEU - a larger package coming soon...
Ok, maybe these are not weasel words in this case. The CDU probably wants to present itself as a friend of the people using a popular issue that they don't really care about. My suspicion is that this is exactly why the ChatControl issue is brought up yearly. It distracts people from wars, the economy etc., there is a big discussion and finally the government graciously comes down on the side of the people. Each and every year.
Were this true, some politicians would do it for that reason. It would need to get a lot of attention to be an effective distraction, and it does not. The mainstream press barely covers the issue. Many people who would be directly harmed by it don't even know what's being considered.
It's no wonder we see the countries that oppose this as well. Makes one think. Sweden's case is peculiar given their military opposed it. I wonder what's going on there.
¹ Quelle = source, TKÜ = Telekommunikationsüberwachung = telecommunication surveillance. aka installing trojans on your devices.
Most people think they have nothing to hide and because "I'm not a terrorist they can watch me".
They really did not learn from their parent's generation (Gestapo, Stasi).
The German social perspective on privacy has been strongly for the individual over the state for a long time. Chat Control goes too far, and Germany should be a loud voice in the heavy moderation of state surveillance powers.
Edit: 234K signatures at the time of this posting.
It's a lame excuse.
They are using the A word exactly like they used the self-A word for self-pleasure a few decades earlier.
Raise your hand who's never used your phone to create some A word material as a child.
It's funny how politicians want laws against issues for which they usually are the guilty party.
But if you look up past decisions, you will quickly notice that they have very similar ambitions here.
At some point they were against ISP saving connection info, only to switch in the last moment and then fully support and even pushing for it.
Aside from privacy violations, this did not have any positive effect on crime at all. It also showed that the German constitution is more or less a paper tiger.
Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.
> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.
There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.
It is the same as free speech. You can say what you want, but you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing in many countries.
Shooting someone is also "just physics", yet many governments have been known to frown upon it (depending on the context).
-ChatControl, as it is currently defined, is not going to happen, because it's absolutely stupid and would make impossible, amongst other things, online banking
-Yet, there is a growing and legitimate demand for lawful interception of 'chat' services. I mean, "sure, your bank account got emptied, but we can't look into that because it happened via Signal" just isn't a good look
-So, something has got to give. Either 'chat' services need to become 'providers of telecoms services' and therefore implement lawful interception laws, or the malware industry will continue to flourish, or something even more stupid will happen
Pick your poison.
Why on earth would mass intercept be necessary or even help in that?
If you got scammed by someone, then you can contact the police and hand over your message history. Why would the cops be interested in someone else's message history for this?
Lawful interception is not "mass intercept."
It's the ability to surveil traffic from/to a clearly identified party, upon a judicial order for specific reason, for a limited time.
ChatControl, on the other hand, is mass interception. I'm against it. Most people in the EU are against it. But to prevent things like ChatControl coming up over and over again, a basic tool to combat Internet crime is required.
Something does have to give: the constant demands for interception capabilities on end-to-end encrypted protocols. Those demands must be thoroughly destroyed every time they rear their head again.
If you needed any indication for how these pseudo-charities (usually it's a charity front and a commercial "technology partner") are not interested in the public good, SafeToNet, a company that up until last year was trying to sell a CSAM livestream detection system to tech companies to "help become compliant" ("SafeToWatch") now sells a locked down Android phone to overprotective parents that puts an overlay on screen whenever naked skin can be seen (of any kind). It's based on a phone that retails for 150 pounds - but costs almost 500 with this app preinstalled into your system partition. That's exceptionally steep for a company that up until last year was all about moral imperatives to build this tech.
It's just local image hashing and matching? Or is this only one implementation idea?
The reason we know is because authorities were able to place listening devices into the rooms that they were in, or surveil them from other buildings.
There's a different set of laws for that...
If you're the victim, just hand over the relevant chats yourself. Otherwise, just follow the money. And if the attackers are sitting in a country whose banks you can't get to cooperate, intercepting chat messages from within that country won't do you any good either.
Also, if someone has malicious intent and is part of a criminal network, the people within that network would hardly feel burdened by all digital messages on all popular apps being listened in on by the government. These people will just use their own private applications. Making one is like 30min of work or starting at $50 on fiverr.
Because if lawful interception of in-transit messages is not possible or permitted, hacking either the client or the server becomes the only option.
You may enjoy reading https://therecord.media/encrochat-police-arrest-6500-suspect.... Or just downvoting me. Or both.
The two sides in this debate seem to be talking at cross purposes, which is why it goes round and round.
A: "We need to do this, however it's done, it was possible before so it must be possible now"
B: "You can't do this because of the implementation details (i.e. you can't break encryption without breaking it for everyone)"
ad infinitum.
Regardless of my own views on this, it seems to me that A needs to make a concrete proposal
Apps like Signal don't entirely fall within the scope of these, which is the cause of the current manic attempts to grab more powers.
My point is that these powers grabs should be resisted, and that new services should be brought into the fold of existing laws.
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that, instead, state hacking should be endorsed. Which, well...
If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.
If people speak up and say "take away our rights" at a referendum, let that be their decision, not a political backroom deal.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2021/1232/oj
[2] Article 10 at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
Lawful intercept laws exist in most, if not all, EU countries.
It's just that super-national overlay services like Signal don't entirely fall within the framework of those.
So, there is now a choice: expand interception powers indefinitely (a.k.a. ChatControl, which, to make things crystal-clear, I'm 100% against), or bring new services into the fold of existing legislation.
Don’t give them any ideas!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_global_telecommunications... https://unshakled.org/salt-typhoon-the-unintended-consequenc... https://group2000.com/articles/a-wake-up-call-for-securing-l...
And how in the world can we have safety if relational trust is suffocated before it can even take root?
Please use your imagination! Those aren't the only options if we embrace trust as essential rather than looking at any need for it as a liability.
That anyone thinks this blatantly obvious attack on free speech is actually going to be used only for law enforcement is wild to me.
Do you want the police to regularily intercept and check your signal chats for fraud and crime so this does not happen, or what is the point here?
No, that's not how lawful intercept laws work.
I want police to be able to obtain a judicial order to intercept, for a limited time, in cleartext, the (Signal chats, or whatever other encrypted communications) of identified parties reasonably suspected to be involved with criminal activity.
ChatControl is not that, and it's one of the reasons it's a nonstarter.
They already have that in most (?) jurisdictions by now.
With a warrant, they can install a virus on the device that will then do targeted surveillance.
ChatControl is bad, because it is blanket surveillance of everyone without warrant.
Should Thailand be granted access to enforce their lease majeste laws, for example? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Th...
Who gets to decide what gets made available to who?
No matter what the state says, or what legislatures pass what laws, we're going to continue to live out our right to general purpose computing, including sending only what we choose to send over the wire, and encrypting content as we see fit.
Now let's talk about something else.
In fact the proposed chat control law has an exception for government agencies
People are not going to stop sending each other their boobs or penii, and while that remains the case, encrypted messaging will thrive.
Civil disobedience involves breaking the law with full knowledge that it's illegal, to protest injustice.
By way of example: in the United States, the 1st amendment to the constitution guarantees freedom of "the press" - it is referenced not by the right to print what one wants, but specifically in reference to the technology of the time, the printing press.
It's obvious that our evolutionary trajectory is one in which widely distributed general purpose computing is normal.
Making laws that contradict this is just childish, and at some point the adults in the room need to be willing to ignore them.