Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
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So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU.
Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny.
2 - The vote was on the "Urgency requirement"
> parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny
Eh. This is the least problematic thing here. Some MEPs might just be on official PTO.
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
The Council decided Chat Control was on the agenda, the Commission wrote the law, and the MEPs voted to reject said law in March. Then the president of the parliament (not the MEPs at large) asked the Council to ignore the March vote and proceed with the agenda under urgency as if it had passed.
Now a minority of the MEPs (331 out of 720) - but a majority of who were present at the time and chose not to abstain - have voted to deal with the matter under urgency, but haven't voted on the substance of it. This makes the actual vote happen on the last sitting day, when apparently they are hoping a lot of MEPs will be away.
> The Council decided Chat Control was on the agenda
The Council is different from the European Council (yes, the treaty drafters were not much creative in naming institutions), the latter is composed of the heads of states and sets the agenda like you said, while the former is composed on ministers in the policy area under discussion, and it's a "co-legislator" together for the Parliament (on most areas, including Chat Control 1.0 & 2.0, both must agree to pass an act).
The issue here (it's part of the "democratic deficits") is that, in its second reading, the EP needs an absolute majority to amend/reject the Council first reading, and a simple majority to approve it and pass it into law.
If the former, the EU is an autocratic democracy. If the later, an autocratic oligarchy.
Either way bad. Only true democracy in Europe is Switzerland where the people actually get to vote on laws.
But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I should have just started with this criticism of the overall system.
Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad.
This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it.
This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already.
Literally second paragraph.
> to reinstate the transitional regulation for Chat Control, which expired in April
That’s not true, the previous instance of it expired, and the parliament rejected it. It wasn’t already lost, it was actually a win for people against the proposal
Certain implementations may fall afoul of data protection laws however.
With the massive, byzantine web of local, state and federal laws everyone is violating numerous laws and regulations all the time. The goal here isn't to arrest everyone all the time for petty crimes and regulatory violations, it is to give the ability to the powers-that-be to select anyone engaging any frowned-upon behavior and pull up a list of legal violations that can be used to silence and/or imprison them. Activists, protesters, political opponents, people who are against whatever latest war the government chooses to engage in or speaking up against "chat control" or whatever the latest Orwellian government seizure of power is will be the ones who are targeted. The end game, which we are rapidly approaching with the elimination of privacy and individual autonomy, is totalitarianism.
The NSA wiretaps all phone calls - do they extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other case nobody would ever know or care about?
Microsoft has your browsing history - we know this because of the recently unsealed court case. Do they do it?
Facebook already ignores this law and scans the content of all private messages anyway. Are they doing what you predicted?
I don't think even the actual Stasi was stopping people at random for petty crimes, right?
These are what leaked. Which is to say that it is very naive to assume that large powerful organization is not going to use its power for gain.
Microsoft and Facebook both use the scanning to network your connections and to build profiles of users to better manipulate your behavior. Hence the Cambridge Analytica Scandal let alone what we dont know about.
Why hand over power to these super powerful and large orgs? What do we supposedly gain as a society? I mean look at flock and Palantir, all it takes is for the political winds to change and the power is there because of these bills.
my bad then, i misunderstood the context
Really, it's not the first time the EU pulls that kind of shite off.
And summertime is the perfect time, in Europe everyone's at the beach.
They even managed to find a work around an actual referendum.
Here the council, with the help of the EPP party is doing that undemocratic maneuvering: They made it on purpose so that the parliament is unlikely to be able to push back a third time (all of that leaked a few days ago)
People do this all the time, regardless of whether or not they're right or wrong. "This product I own is definitely secure because the marketing says so, even if the CVEs prove me wrong" is a common sentiment online and in real life.
Not to play too hard on the computing-detatched normie stereotype, but this type of surveillance is bound to succeed due to their apathy. We've seen this play out in the US before, and it's always a shoo-in for the surveillance legislation. Security, privacy and fairness doesn't even cross most people's minds anymore.
An executive order isn't a law. It is an instruction for an executive branch agency or committee.
https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
When the congress doesn't even know that the president can do this or that, it's just dictatorship with some theater. In Europe, the EU's powers are much much more limited.
The way the EU is designed has nothing to do with the US or France. First the Parliament and Council (the bodies democratically elected) do not have power of legislative initiative.
Then the Commission, which is a "super" executive power, is not democratically elected. Unlike France or the US (the two you mentioned).
The EU has an architecture that is fundamentally different from the US or French system. In many way it is actually closer to something like the UN or PRC.
The head of the executive is elected, that makes quite a big difference.
> You’re missing the point I’m making, which is about how „democratic“ is a nuanced spectrum.
Yes and some have the right to argue that China is a democracy. They do have a lot of elections. And the CCP has a very broad spectrum of ideas and politics within it, in fact much broader than the people you will find in the EU Commission.
In the end it is about how much you perceive the common will is represented and served by the regime in place. Chat Control has openly gone against it for years and is being shove down our throat.
And there is a reason why farmers have been driving their tractors to Brussels from all over Europe for decades. The trip ain't cheap.
It doesn't matter how the European parliament voted.
https://www.politico.eu/article/president-vs-parliament-robe...
Personally, I don't fell lawmakers proposing laws that I want. Firstly, because I don't belive that laws are solutions for problems.
Yes, (un?)fortunately that's how democracy works. You keep trying until you get the required majority. No different than elections.
And now, instead of blaming "democracy" or the EU, how about we look at people we all elected to our national and EU institutions who are now making this happen.
And just preemptively, there's is not a single person in a decision-making position on this issue whose power wasn't gifted to them either directly or indirectly by the voters. So let's not blame the EU for people being dumb with their votes.
> democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is
It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
> EUR02a. Some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content in the search for child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught. However, according to police reports, in the vast majority of cases innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position that your personal electronic mail and messages are searched for suspect content. What is your opinion?
Obviously this is not a good faith attempt to understand if people support message scanning.
> EUR02a. In the interest of protecting children, some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each EU subject in the search for dangerous, illegal child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught and children protected. According to activists who defend child pornographers, police reports indicate that a few innocent people may be mildly inconvenienced due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position of a law enforcement official trying to catch these evil people, who is currently obstructed due to false questions of “rights” and “privacy.” What is your opinion?
I jest, of course, I’m sure you would prefer something more straightforward and less manipulative like “EUR02a. Do you support child pornography?”
Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
Even your slightly longer formulation doesn’t really explain what scanning means and how that might affect people and society. Most people aren’t familiar enough with technical and legal details to dig into the implications without added context.
> Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
you might ask questions like "How comfortable would you be with your personal mobile provider scanning your chats for child porn?" or "What would you consider to be an acceptable accuracy rate for such a scanner?". Then you could reasonably infer that respondents who say "not comfortable" or "90-100%" oppose Chat Control, because Chat Control will perform such scans and they're not 90% accurate. (Someone else who thinks the scans are 90% accurate might respond that your interpretation is wrong, but this dispute would not call the poll results themselves into question.)
I don’t think the voting result would be different if he had been even more fair about this question, as the poll is not something that MEPs are going to care about. This was clearly designed to be passed by any means necessary, and this time they got it through. But at least now people have a poll to use when they campaign to repeal it in the future, or when they want to point to the unrepresentative nature of EU decisions like this one.
It's important not to phrase it as "read your messages to detect child porn..." because that implies they won't do anything else with the messages, and Europe is a place where they still assume that if someone says they do X to do Y, they're only allowed to do Y and severely punished for doing anything else.
They keep voting and voting and voting until the energy of the people to protest diminishes or they find a way to get it in.
There needs to be a counter-balance where politicians can be removed or even punished by the people for proposing unpopular bills.
Because they're not representing the needs of their constituents? Democracy is more than just voting—and if it wasn't, most states we think of as authoritarian would also be democratic.
One good case: The original rule was good but had specifics that made it unpopular. Retrying repeatedly is a pathway to refining it into the minimal valuable version that is acceptable to all.
One bad case: The original rule is terrible and progress was stopped only because of public outrage. The assumption of the public is that a groundswell of opposition will cause a fundamental rethinking. However, because such outrage cannot last, repeated attempts will cause fatigue in the public opinion and resignation to pass anything.
If the situation is closer to the front it's "democratic". If it's closer to the back it's "not democratic". One represents a refinement to match the will of the people; the other relies on our human inability to focus tremendous energies continuously on a broad front. Both match a representative democracy repeatedly tabling (haha) a bill.
The Stop Killing Games campaign, for example, has noticed that the EU commission keeps repeating lobbyist lies and has no expectations of new laws actually passing, so they're focusing on amending existing law through parliament.
And
“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”
- Jean-Claude Juncker
I really fear where this is headed.
In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)
Very much. I also fear they coming for this, we already have instances of where using secure alternatives tags you as a criminal[0], so i don't doubt a future where non-approved applications will get you in trouble. With everything happening around Android locking itself down[1] and Windows being a spyware[2] anybody who wants privacy will be 'different', and can be tagged and excluded from parts of society for not using the same services.
[0]: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1940440326830989549
Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent
Google is already working on closing the possibility to install apps from outside the app store, Apple has been like that since forever. The fact that a few technically savvy users with rooted phones will still be able to use Signal doesn't mean anything. It will be dead if the EU decides they don't want it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
the government can compel entities to let them access their systems and keep it a secret.
Also, if Signal runs on AWS, that is another potential vector of surveillance.
These kind of responses is why it is hard to trust privacy advocates on HN. They are high on rhetorics, but half the time dont know what they are talking about.
When you hear of "person arrested after NCMEC cyber tip" that's what this enables - people sharing or storing CSAM that was caught by this scanning, reported to NCMEC, and then sent to local authorities.
I have zero problems with Chat Control 1.0 as the existing derogation brought the EU into line with the rest of the world. Chat Control 2.0 is problematic however, but again, is not what's being voted on here.
I did saw it was an extension of the 1.0. To my understanding, "allows to scan" can also mean enabling a pipeline for accepting requests of scanning lawful content because, well, they can. In practice, it creates a mechanism to crawl people's information because when they feel like. While the law do make it explicit that this 'allowance' should not be used for anything else outside of the scope, i can't trust they won't. Once the mechanism is there, and that is valid for other countries, it might be used for stuff outside this scope since it's possible.
I work in the ISP field, and this happened in another context. First, a pipeline was built to block sites without a judge, because doing it only with court orders made it to difficult. After a few months of many ISPs complying the scope grew, now they can target piracy websites at will, and you must comply. Why stop there?
My fear is that this sets an example. I hope I'm wrong, but i don't trust them. There's a reason it was rejected before and it is being passed like that now.
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).
The way legislation is expected to proceed in countries with parliamentary systems, especially with strong civil services, is that
1) a problem is identified. This can be the civil service detecting it on their own, petitioning from groups impacted by the problem (lobbying, the public etc).
2) The government prioritizes problems to solve according to political imperatives.
3) The civil service and/or parliamentary committees gather evidence on the problem and possible solutions.
4) the civil service and/or committee report on the issue. In practice this always finds the solution that the government wanted.
5) A bill is drafted based on the report.
6) The bill then proceeds through parliamentary committee, legislative votes, and whatever else is part of the lawmaking process.
When we see this issues fail, it's typically at step (6). But the problem still exists, and the issue is still on the agenda. It's still a priority to solve. So steps 4-6 are re-tried with different parameters that hopefully allow the bill to pass and the problem to be solved.
Just failing to pass parliament is not enough. You also need the political leadership to redirect their prioritization and implicit preferred solution.
I'm not saying this is good, just this is what happens.
People are pushing back on this every single time. Maybe it's time legislators read the room instead? Is there a step for this too?
It's even worse for places like the EU that have a strong civil service or with a branch like the EC that isn't elected, because the processes above are very insulated from the general public
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
For once I'm pleasantly surprised that everyone I voted for was against.
"Against" means that the MEP voted against the extension of Chat Control 1.0
I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.
But this stupid reaction finally explains to me why human life for ordinary people will always largely be a life of suffering.
Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.
In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."
The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.
Finally, it’s important to realize that the power of laws is limited to the extent that people are able and willing to enforce them. Some dictatorships have wonderful things in their constitution that are not heeded at all.
Equally, there is abundant precedent for forbidding interference with old-fashioned postal communications, that seemingly doesn't translate to electronic communications...
The downside is "lets try giving everyone basic income of $100k/week". But apart from that great!
We're not talking about E2EE here, we're talking people sharing CSAM on Kik, or Snapchat, or sending it via gmail, or uploading it to DropBox etc. etc.
Anyway, this is about Chat Control 1.
"Memories from Krähwinkels days of terror" (my translation - the original is of course leages better)
We, Burgomaster and Senate,
Are hereby proclaiming this mandate,
With great paternal care addressed
To all classes, east and west.
'Tis mostly nasty foreign folk,
Who brashly dared to wildly stoke
Rebellion. Such sinners, let us pray to God,
Are seldom born upon our sod.
There too are atheists, you will find;
Those who leave their God behind,
Who, in the end, will be as prone
To defy our own earthly throne.
Obeying authority is the key
For Jew and Christian, bond and free.
Let everyone close up their shop
When twilight falls, head home chop chop.
If three are gathered in the street,
They must disperse with flying feet.
And after dark, upon the lane,
No lightless soul shall walk again.
All weapons must promptly be surrendered
To the Guildhall, to be tendered;
And every sort of ammunition
Is subject to the same condition.
Who argues in the street shall face
A firing squad in an open place;
Arguing with gestures also must,
Be punished harshly, as is just.
Put your trust in the Magistrate,
Who guards the pious, loving state
Through gracious rule, most wise and kind;
Your duty: simply to not mind.
But afaik Chat Control 1.0 was/is in effect but expired. It's not relevant to Signal or Whatsapp because they're e2ee, it's relevant for eBay, Linkedin, perhaps SMS.
Look, there are no private chats on any platform or app provided by Meta, Google or Microsoft. They are known to send a copy of everything at least to the US government (the Snowden revelation). So, what's it to them to also do searches on behalf of European authorities? Plus, what do you mean, you don't want to? Are you for the pedophiles? Maybe you're a pedophile yourself! Search his chat logs, tout de suite!
We must really get the people around us to stop using WhatsApp, Teams, GMail, and all of that junk. There are excellent alternatives - we are only a laziness' reach away from actual half-decent privacy.
Future looks very dim for EU as a whole, I'm glad I left it for America
This is how everything seems to go with the EU. Great idea followed by something objectionable.
Orwell
- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no
- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.
The alternative is feeding nationalistic right wing extremism, which we really don't want in Europe.
Authoritarian centralization efforts need to be fought Huang style - with an European twist - as we might be behind on a lot of axis but we "Didn't Wake Up a Loser".
China / US leadership must not be the carte-blanche to formalize whatever low bar in how we handle our own privacy; going straight for the "self own" I guess?
Sorry for prompt mode but I hope this is at least somewhat legible to fellow Europeans, if not please listen to antirez in original Italian or auto translated:
I hear quite a few tangents in there; the main one being: especially in EU we need to go "agentic". Don't wait for politics to do The Right Thing. They should play retrospective backup at best.
I'm thinking they might be actually thankful for having been provided vision / imagination.
Team up with the bureaucrats after the fact but don't listen to them too much - again - to Do The Right Thing. Especially when they are potentially infected by lobbyists...
FFS I hate this timeline; we really need to show up for real. Again and again and again and again...
https://youtube.com/shorts/u3SY8nvjhQA
Don't give up on core tenets basically; the EU is a (comparatively) great place to live because it's a free place.
We can't have multitudes, be "antifragile" etc through centralization and surveillance.
Even if we were to believe this to be a winning move, it's not how this European project was envisioned and we won't ever be able to truly "compete" at that game.
In these times hence we IMO should be doubling down on the core tenets; freedom being chief amongst them.
Akin to how Huang in that interview alludes to globalization and how it made him / USA a winner.
Absolute fucking joke
Was having lots of people's lives saved by a much faster vaccine rollout not a good thing?
The other part is steganography, or hiding real messages within a innocuous anodyne message stream. And encryption can be used in conjunction as part of hiding said messages.
It can be within pictures with the lowest bit values. It can be constructed punctuation and spaces. Lots of things.
But hidden and plausibly deniable messaging is the ONLY way to defeat a government(s) that want to invade every communication aspect for humans.
Unfortunately, verified devices will close that loophole.
Found a new problematic meme? Someone leaked a video of you taking a bribe? Someone published a photo of damage from a missile strike? Add it to the database of forbidden media and quickly track down the source.
This is not a defense of surveillance, just that your argument doesn’t hold as well as you might believe.
It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are temporarily offline. Get people used to the idea that is the place to share things they do not want leaked when the big platform 3rd parties expose files. The admin can encrypt the storage and periodically zero out files and zero out empty space for privacy.
People with slightly higher opsec may choose to block mobile proprietary devices.
The ideal hiding space would be visible to the public, and indistinguishable from a mountain of other material that's visible to the public--especially if they don't have to log in to see it. That way if a message is found, the search for co-conspirators doesn't narrow at all.
Like cool you get leftovers you can warm up (never something fresh, innovative), but then you also have to deal with the drama and cringe.
I'm not a politician or some civil rights activist but I can see that. It's right there. We have a similar situation in Germany these days. We'll be giving more rights to the Federal Intelligence Service ( foreign intelligence) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic intelligence). Basically allowing them to act more offensive (or offensive at all).
We're one or two elections away from having fascists in the government again.
Is it already a conspiracy theory if I suspect them of doing that deliberately because I can't imagine them being stupid?
It is still unclear to me if Proton Mail, Tuta, SimpleX servers, Signal, etc. fall under this or might.
Do they even have to officially declare if they are complying?
When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.
The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.
As for burning down the house ... as it apparently seems to be the only legal route to stop the flies, alas, I'm willing to pay that price.
They are not elected. Even the EU is illegal, since joining the EU was rejected by people of many European countries, but that was ignored.
They just do what they want and do thorough media coverage. In rare cases that doesn't work, people just dissapear.