> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Trolltrace is becoming real
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).
> 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.
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?
I think this is more the entire front of the house being open to the street.
To me, a backdoor is passive. There for someone to enter. What's under discussion here is sonething active, so in some sense worse.
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.
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"
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.
Haha that’s a good point, I guess another sign that they really have no clue what they are doing
“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.
I think you may be looking at this wrong if you think it’s a ridiculous plan. It’s no more “ridiculous” than when anyone else is lying, deceiving, gaslighting, manipulating, and controlling and trying to hide and obscure that fact.
Pardon the comparison, but this mindset reminds me of a person that makes half hearted rationalizations and excuses for their abusive partner’s clearly hostile, vile, enemy actions when they are being cheated on. It’s just that the victims usually cannot see the trap they are in, especially not from within that trap that has been made to look very appealing for deceptive purposes in the first place.
Europeans in particular, especially anyone under 30 who does not even know anything other than a world of the EU and all the shiny EU PR/Propaganda that makes you not want to trust your lying eyes that they are constantly being groomed and love-bombed with, intentionally are deprived of the very tools necessary to recognize the danger of the situation they are in. Because after all, you have a common currency now and isn’t that great, right? And don’t you like traveling, you like traveling and taking drugs and having sex; you like the sex right? So pay no attention to the cost for the deal with that devil is losing self-determination and real freedom as people fall hard to the typical patterns of abuse and love-bombing. It’s affection and gifts today, abuse later when the trap has sprung!
And there’s no polite asking to be released from a tyrannical, abusive totalitarian system later when the trap has been sprung and your culture and people has been polluted and intentionally mixed up to destroy it. Or even now for that matter, as people like I am doing right now, who simply point out that the EU is an illegitimate abusive subversion of legitimate national statehood and ethnic self-determination and thereby an objective tyranny, are aggressed against hard and immediately.
The people of what would become the Soviet Union or even communist China also thought the wonderful bright eyed Bolshevik/Cultural Revolution communist revolution would solve all the problems with equality for all. Now the system does not even teach what a bait and switch hell and destroyer of cultures and people the Soviet Union and Mali’s China were anymore because those ideas and the people who hold them and perpetrated those evils upon humanity are now in control of the EU and are trying hard to get their vile hooks deeper into the USA too.
As a Russian whose parents actually remember the USSR, I'm genuinely horrified by the Brezhnev vibes the EU's giving off.
As someone who lived in a country under the russian boot at some point and who remembers the USSR from direct experience, you probably have a lot of stuff to study up on. But be careful on what internet connection you do it.
Maybe you could also say why you think he's wrong instead of sending him to brush up on.
Direct experience of the USSR, in the Netherlands? I must be in the wrong timeline because mine certainly didn't have the Dutch Soviet Socialist Republic!
Anyway, it's cute that you chose to respond with a personal attack on me. Looks like you don't have any other argument, and you know it :)
You have no clue.
> and ethnic self-determination
Didn’t know where this was going but I’m glad you told us
"intentionally mixed up to destroy it"
Can you expand on that.
You got me in the first half.
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."
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.
>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.
> Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists?
And what would this change?
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.
The people in power.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Not to mention that once voted in they are not bound by their campaign promises.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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)?
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!
>"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."
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..
That approach has spectacularly backfired for the UK, as they used to do the same thing too. ;)
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.
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?
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
>
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.
Here’s some data. Skepticism is pretty low and approval is pretty high
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%.
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.
Your clique might be more skeptical. Statistics show the population at large is not.
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.
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.
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.
Not exclusive to the EU, the US does the same, as does the UK.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
European Commission is not a democratic body. No EU citizen voted for 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.
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.
Good thing that elected parliament needs to vote for this. So what's your point?
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.
Maybe those you call extremists are now the only sane people.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
> it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.
That's very naïve.
Yeah; it's even worse than that.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?
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.
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.
(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 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.
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]
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.
More countries will follow after they ratify Russia's "United Nations Convention against Cybercrime" which has key disclosure explicitly stated in the text.
> 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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I assume he means something like "supremacy clause."
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> 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.
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...
AfD is under the watch of spionage agencies but somehow they are THE risk, not the legacy parties and bureaucracy.
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> It's not hard to imagine what they'll try to do, and chat-control will make it easier for them.
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is against Chat Control.
Most probably because they are not in power or leading the coalition at the moment. Similar positions were held by the once similar parties in Italy before they rose to prominence, and from once bigger parties trying to not vanquish.
Power consolidation is a shared trait of every leading individual or group of people.
And because they fear it, for now. Opportunism at its finest.
Yeah when they come to power, they might even try to ban the opposition. Oh wait, that's the current guys
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You say this while Germany is actively supporting a genocide in Palestine. The world has really turned on its head.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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].
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.
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 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.
It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.
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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 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?
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.
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
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.
Since it's politically incorrect to write nazi germany, ill just write Soviet Germany.
This type of bullshit is rooted in their culture.
Why cant they just record meta data and hand it out on courts order. Why must it be a backdoor
Wish we the public could read all the private chat logs of all the people who decided to be undecided.
What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.
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 neverever 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.
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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EU must go.
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.
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
Didn’t the surveys indicate a brexit as a pretty big regret once people understood what it meant?
If the UK no longer has democracy then that is not something the EU can fix by giving UK chat control.
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.
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.
No, just Ursula and lobbies among the Denmark wacko against privacy.
down with the EU
The EU began as a simple customs bloc and negotiating tool. It has morphed into a blood sucking behemoth preventing growth and discouraging progress.
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...
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.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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,
What they want is everyone to be watched, all of the time. Crimes will be determined later.
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.
> 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)
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?).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Trolltrace is becoming real
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).
> 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.
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?
I think this is more the entire front of the house being open to the street.
To me, a backdoor is passive. There for someone to enter. What's under discussion here is sonething active, so in some sense worse.
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.
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"
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.
Haha that’s a good point, I guess another sign that they really have no clue what they are doing
“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.
I think you may be looking at this wrong if you think it’s a ridiculous plan. It’s no more “ridiculous” than when anyone else is lying, deceiving, gaslighting, manipulating, and controlling and trying to hide and obscure that fact.
Pardon the comparison, but this mindset reminds me of a person that makes half hearted rationalizations and excuses for their abusive partner’s clearly hostile, vile, enemy actions when they are being cheated on. It’s just that the victims usually cannot see the trap they are in, especially not from within that trap that has been made to look very appealing for deceptive purposes in the first place.
Europeans in particular, especially anyone under 30 who does not even know anything other than a world of the EU and all the shiny EU PR/Propaganda that makes you not want to trust your lying eyes that they are constantly being groomed and love-bombed with, intentionally are deprived of the very tools necessary to recognize the danger of the situation they are in. Because after all, you have a common currency now and isn’t that great, right? And don’t you like traveling, you like traveling and taking drugs and having sex; you like the sex right? So pay no attention to the cost for the deal with that devil is losing self-determination and real freedom as people fall hard to the typical patterns of abuse and love-bombing. It’s affection and gifts today, abuse later when the trap has sprung!
And there’s no polite asking to be released from a tyrannical, abusive totalitarian system later when the trap has been sprung and your culture and people has been polluted and intentionally mixed up to destroy it. Or even now for that matter, as people like I am doing right now, who simply point out that the EU is an illegitimate abusive subversion of legitimate national statehood and ethnic self-determination and thereby an objective tyranny, are aggressed against hard and immediately.
The people of what would become the Soviet Union or even communist China also thought the wonderful bright eyed Bolshevik/Cultural Revolution communist revolution would solve all the problems with equality for all. Now the system does not even teach what a bait and switch hell and destroyer of cultures and people the Soviet Union and Mali’s China were anymore because those ideas and the people who hold them and perpetrated those evils upon humanity are now in control of the EU and are trying hard to get their vile hooks deeper into the USA too.
As a Russian whose parents actually remember the USSR, I'm genuinely horrified by the Brezhnev vibes the EU's giving off.
As someone who lived in a country under the russian boot at some point and who remembers the USSR from direct experience, you probably have a lot of stuff to study up on. But be careful on what internet connection you do it.
Maybe you could also say why you think he's wrong instead of sending him to brush up on.
Direct experience of the USSR, in the Netherlands? I must be in the wrong timeline because mine certainly didn't have the Dutch Soviet Socialist Republic!
Anyway, it's cute that you chose to respond with a personal attack on me. Looks like you don't have any other argument, and you know it :)
You have no clue.
> and ethnic self-determination
Didn’t know where this was going but I’m glad you told us
"intentionally mixed up to destroy it"
Can you expand on that.
You got me in the first half.
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.
>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.
> Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists?
And what would this change?
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.
The people in power.
> 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
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's the EU way - "We will keep holding the vote until we get the result that we want."
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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)?
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!
>"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
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..
That approach has spectacularly backfired for the UK, as they used to do the same thing too. ;)
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?
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
> 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.
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.
Your clique might be more skeptical. Statistics show the population at large is not.
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.
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.
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.
Not exclusive to the EU, the US does the same, as does the UK.
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.
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 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.
> 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/ .
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.
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-...
European Commission is not a democratic body. No EU citizen voted for 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.
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.
Good thing that elected parliament needs to vote for this. So what's your point?
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.
Maybe those you call extremists are now the only sane people.
>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.
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
> 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.
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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.
> it's the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.
That's very naïve.
Yeah; it's even worse than that.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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-...
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.
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-...
> there's no supremacy class
What does "supremacy class" mean?
I assume he means something like "supremacy clause."
> 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
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...
AfD is under the watch of spionage agencies but somehow they are THE risk, not the legacy parties and bureaucracy.
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> It's not hard to imagine what they'll try to do, and chat-control will make it easier for them.
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is against Chat Control.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates
Most probably because they are not in power or leading the coalition at the moment. Similar positions were held by the once similar parties in Italy before they rose to prominence, and from once bigger parties trying to not vanquish.
Power consolidation is a shared trait of every leading individual or group of people.
And because they fear it, for now. Opportunism at its finest.
Yeah when they come to power, they might even try to ban the opposition. Oh wait, that's the current guys
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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.
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.
> 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.
You say this while Germany is actively supporting a genocide in Palestine. The world has really turned on its head.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
It will not. Criminals will move elsewhere and they will be spying on regular citizens. As intended.
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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 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?
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.
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
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...
Since it's politically incorrect to write nazi germany, ill just write Soviet Germany. This type of bullshit is rooted in their culture.
Why cant they just record meta data and hand it out on courts order. Why must it be a backdoor
Wish we the public could read all the private chat logs of all the people who decided to be undecided.
What does this mean for `Datenschutz` in Germany? I can't imagine the courts would let this stand.
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.
> 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.
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/
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."
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.
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.
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.
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EU must go.
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.
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?
If the UK no longer has democracy then that is not something the EU can fix by giving UK chat control.
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.
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.
No, just Ursula and lobbies among the Denmark wacko against privacy.
down with the EU
The EU began as a simple customs bloc and negotiating tool. It has morphed into a blood sucking behemoth preventing growth and discouraging progress.
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...
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.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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?).
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.
> 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.
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.