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Comment by AnssiH | Hacker News Reader

> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?

There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).

There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.

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Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).

"ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.

Chat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it.

For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.

This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.

There's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes.

That would be more like there being no setting to tell Meta to stop sending you cakes, but them continuing to send cakes. Except they take something from you, instead of giving.

There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head idiotic and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down.

The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.

I still dont understand how a thing that passes this way has any legitimacy? Cant the EU just not allow it to be enforced?

That's a bit of a touchy subject that exposes the fact that the EU has repurposed a system for designing industry standards (not laws) and has a shaky legal foundation.

To some extent countries are bound by EU law, but what this means depends on the institutions and legal structure within that country. Although the EU tends to claim they have final say, but how can someone interpreting national law agree with that if the EU goes against the law they are interpreting? Even if the EU is right they can only ask members to acoid contradiction, they lack the force to demand it.

Yeah this sounds like another scam. I big one. We should really find another way to govern societies.

The EU is not a government. It's a standard body for countries and their governments.

Ohh. But doesnt it push and control legislation? If it was just a standards body, couldn't countries governments just approve or deny recommendations at will?

It seems like its operating as a government too me, but maybe I am not seeing the whole picture.

Some of its standards supersede national law (I think it was the regulations that did so, amd standards needed to be built into national law, could be the other way around).

And this makes a lot of sense with rules about food safety, product standards etc. It almost makes sense for privacy protections. It makes very little sense for surveillance laws.

Governments also codify into law that everything X standardizes is automatically a regulation for other standard bodies. Road and building standards work that way: they are just standards issued by a random association and the government has stated, that all developments in their jurisdiction need to follow this associations standards.

The government could also do this for the EU, it's called leaving the EU.

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