"The procedure now chosen gives the proponents of Chat Control a significant tactical advantage. Since the law is in its second reading, an absolute majority of 361 votes of all parliament members is required for amendments or a renewed rejection on Thursday. In contrast, a simple majority of the MEPs present is sufficient for the other side. As many parliamentarians have historically already departed by the last day before the summer break, the re-enactment of the regulation is considered almost unavoidable."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU.
Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny.
> So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control [2.0, implied] is bound to become law?
Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad.
This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it.
This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already.
I think their point is that you lose some battles in a war, chat Control 1.0 is a battle that was already lost. While it is still worthwhile to make an effort to retake lost ground there, that can be done strategically and through habitual effort and does not demand immediate attention the same way an imminent threat of losing new ground would be
> chat Control 1.0 is a battle that was already lost
That’s not true, the previous instance of it expired, and the parliament rejected it. It wasn’t already lost, it was actually a win for people against the proposal
I can't actually think of a good reason that the law should prohibit a company from having the option to automatically scan private messages for CSAM. Can you?
Certain implementations may fall afoul of data protection laws however.
Because they shouldn't be scanning private messages indiscriminately no matter for what. Lets rephrase it and look at it from "private companies will scan their users private messages for evidence of crimes and report people to police." Where is the limit here? I think it is naive to assume this will stop at csam and will soon be used as a judicial bludgen to extort random citizens for petty crimes that in any other case nobody would ever care or know about.
It’s the council. We have to be clear which institution we are talking about within the EU, otherwise that doesn’t make any sense. The European Parliament already pushed back that proposal. The EU is made of a lot of different actors with their own agenda.
Here the council, with the help of the EPP party is doing that undemocratic maneuvering: They made it on purpose so that the parliament is unlikely to be able to push back a third time (all of that leaked a few days ago)
If the EU as a system has an undemocratic backdoor it's descriptively correct to call it undemocratic. Not to play too hard on the HN user stereotype, but you wouldn't call a computer system that is mostly secure other than a known privilege escalation exploit secure, would you?
Every single democratic system relies on norms at some level. Democratic isn’t a boolean flag. When the French prime minister is using the 49-3 rule to bypass the parliament that’s undemocratic, that doesn’t make the system itself undemocratic. When a US president is using an executive order to pass a law that’s undemocratic, that doesn’t make the system itself undemocratic. Here the maneuver goes against the spirit of democracy and against the expected norms, however the EU itself is democratic
> you wouldn't call a computer system that is mostly secure other than a known privilege escalation exploit secure, would you?
People do this all the time, regardless of whether or not they're right or wrong. "This product I own is definitely secure because the marketing says so, even if the CVEs prove me wrong" is a common sentiment online and in real life.
Not to play too hard on the computing-detatched normie stereotype, but this type of surveillance is bound to succeed due to their apathy. We've seen this play out in the US before, and it's always a shoo-in for the surveillance legislation. Security, privacy and fairness doesn't even cross most people's minds anymore.
One of reasons the the EU exists is so domestic prime ministers can deflect blame and say "not me, it was them over there in the EU parliament and my hands are tied"
In Germany it's usually the other way around: the EU tries to force us to do objectively good things, while national and regional governments drag their feet implementing EU law or complying with regulations. We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU, and every time it's for something where the EU seems clearly on the morally right side
And all that despite our government's best efforts to send their worst politicians to represent us in the EU. Describing von der Leyen as a disgraced politician who just failed upwards would not be entirely inaccurate
Germany is one of most wealthy, powerful and biggest contributors to the EU budget. They can't be bullied round easily.
"We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU"
The state controls the media... a lot of headlines are orchestrated. But it is done so well, unless you know, you don't know...
Where Germany doesn't agree, it has sway. Where Germany and France don't agree, it is unlikely, and where Germany, France and Italy don't agree it's not going to happen as some countries matter more than others.
Sure, but all of those used to be true of the UK too back when they were in the EU, and yet they had the good cop/bad cop roles swapped compared to Germany
The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
That is incorrect. Usually, the legislation happens in the trilogue, which is an abomination and everything but well representing it's citizens interest, but the Commission can do very very little if the council says no. That again is a body consisting of elected officials with varying degrees of distance from a direct election.
Best example for a change: everything that happened after Magyar replaced Orban in the council.
This is just to say... Its complicated. The EU can definitely do with a reform and better, stronger democratic legitimacy.
It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints.
This is for proposing legislation, not fixing local quality of life issues, and the success rate has been rather poor. China’s system has a broad scale, but is directed at local problems and has a very high success rate.
As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption.
The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them.
This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving.
From what I can tell, there are many issues that aren’t off limits to criticize on Chinese social media. In fact, recurring social media complaints are what spurred development of the hotline system.
It’s mainly complaints that are considered sensitive or destabilizing that are suppressed. This should sound familiar to those of us in the West. Germany actually goes farther by directly funding left-wing protest groups, as these are not considered destabilizing.
They have lower crime rates, more modern infrastructure, plentiful housing, lower cost of living (especially electricity), they're the place to be if you want to manufacture anything, affordable childcare, incredibly well educated doctors, many of the most incredible leisure and entertainment events in the world and they don't ban air conditioning.
So yeah, if I had to choose to live in a country where I had to toe the party line and bite my tongue when it came to political expression it would be China. At least they would be providing a high quality of life and a secure and peaceful society in exchange even if I had to deal with the negatives of being a minority in their country.
We have spent 20 years criticising China for the great firewall and control of social media, but now are adopting similar laws ourselves.
There is significant probability that China will have better quality of life than Europe in 2045 and that very little will be left of European liberties
It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
The right actually believes the EU and the German government for example have a far-left ideology it's very common, I even once heard someone say they thought the World Economic Forum is communist. The right captures these resentments towards neoliberal corruption and undemocratic decision making and straight up funnel that energy towards anti-immigration, anti-woke and notably pro-russian politics.
It has more terms as well: neoliberal encasement, depoliticization or post-politics, it's designing a system in such a way as to protect private property, international trade and other economic orthodoxy from democratic influence. That is an incredibly potent theory to understand the EU by. Lots of work in academia on the subject as well, for instance:
It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances.
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
What? Tell me the similarities :)
There is not strong-willed, controlling figure or imposed ideology, the financial institutions are fairly independent, in general journalism is relatively free to choose topics, the federal states can be pretty independent from the central power if they choose to do so, and all the rest I already wrote in a sister comment.
Note I did not compare this to any country, just applying criteria for dictatorships.
There is a long tradition of calling rule without care for the ruled 'tyranny'. Aristotle considered this the worst perversion of the best form of government, i.e. monarchy.
No, I think the term applies very well. That there are worse dictatorships does not really nullify the statement.
Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either.
We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one.
I think you mean something different than I when we think of dictatorships.
I agree in being unhappy with this decision and maneuvering, but we do have to keep a watch out for actual, in the political sense, dictatorships and not mix them up with other concerns.
If the decision-makers are elected by the people, it's not a dictatorship, no matter how many atrocities the nation commits.
You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.
The criterion is if the parties in power can be voted out of office again, which is very much the case in Europe (see the recent example of Hungary). A dictatorship is if this is not possible anymore.
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
> Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize.
And you don't see the problem with allowing processes like this just before the extreme right might gain control of the French presidency AND gets a shot at the German chancillary (even if, yes, it's likely to fail)? The ability to make laws for the entire EU, overriding popular opinion ...
You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to?
And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too.
Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so.
The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet.
And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that.
And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads.
We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe.
> And you don't see the problem with allowing processes like this
Oh, I 100% see the problem with it. I think pushing draconian laws, that have already been defeated, in secret backroom deals is dodgy as.
I think you have some very valid points.
I think the centre and left just see opportunities to act without compromise, never considering that it will piss of their electorates. The electorate will reply by voting just to piss off the politicians regardless of the consequences. Just like with Brexit.
That still doesn't mean that the EU is currently worse than actual dictatorships.
Oh please. That is not and never was my argument.
I just said, it is not a dictatorship. No Fun discussion anything with you.
If you'll indulge my argument: I have a fair amount of confidence in the stability of the system and fairness of elections. It may be rigged in favour of some interested parties, but there are solid ways to get the people currently in power to be replaced by others and still retain stability in the system.
Not so in any of: Iran, Russia, Albany, Eastern Germany, The phillipines, China, Belarus, Sudan, ...
That is my whole point. The rest is a different topic, but cynicism usually does not help in doing something.
It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.
You think the UK is influenced by backroom dealing and not just the fact that they want to trade with the single market, which is the whole point of banding together as the EU?
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
Yup, edited to clarify I mean the MEPs bring “the will of the people”. Clearly not enough has happened on local level to raise awareness / lobby against chat control. I don’t think many outside tech are even aware if the slippery slope of the surveillance machinery.
uhm, the will of the people is often already half-lost with the politicians/parties they directly elect, so I would hardly consider another layer of representative "demo"cracy on top of another layer of representative democracy following the will of the people at all.
But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I should have just started with this criticism of the overall system.
We have representatives in Switzerland, please don’t misrepresent our political system to push your anti-EU agenda. We do not vote on every single laws. It’s a semi-direct democracy. A representative democracy is the most common instantiation of democratic systems.
"Memories from Krähwinkels days of terror" (my translation - the original is of course leages better)
We, Burgomaster and Senate,
Are hereby proclaiming this mandate,
With great paternal care addressed
To all classes, east and west.
'Tis mostly nasty foreign folk,
Who brashly dared to wildly stoke
Rebellion. Such sinners, let us pray to God,
Are seldom born upon our sod.
There too are atheists, you will find;
Those who leave their God behind,
Who, in the end, will be as prone
To defy our own earthly throne.
Obeying authority is the key
For Jew and Christian, bond and free.
Let everyone close up their shop
When twilight falls, head home chop chop.
If three are gathered in the street,
They must disperse with flying feet.
And after dark, upon the lane,
No lightless soul shall walk again.
All weapons must promptly be surrendered
To the Guildhall, to be tendered;
And every sort of ammunition
Is subject to the same condition.
Who argues in the street shall face
A firing squad in an open place;
Arguing with gestures also must,
Be punished harshly, as is just.
Put your trust in the Magistrate,
Who guards the pious, loving state
Through gracious rule, most wise and kind;
Your duty: simply to not mind.
It's sad to see we pretty much have forgotten the history leading to this poem and how we are reverting so much as a society.
Not quite, the EU parliament can't propose new laws nor repeal existing ones, only amend them and vote on proposals from the commission.
The Stop Killing Games campaign, for example, has noticed that the EU commission keeps repeating lobbyist lies and has no expectations of new laws actually passing, so they're focusing on amending existing law through parliament.
So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.
All votes have a certain margin or fluctuation, as individual representatives can be pressured, swayed, or coerced by any number of means. If a vote fails over and over again then eventually passes under dubious circumstances (start of vacation when attention is elsewhere), that seems to be against the spirit of democratic rule. At least to me, but what do I know? Maybe everyone loves this outcome and all the prior rejections were just a fluke.
Because they're not representing the needs of their constituents? Democracy is more than just voting—and if it wasn't, most states we think of as authoritarian would also be democratic.
The vast majority (72%) of European citizens are opposed to Chat control. Regardless, the proposal has been brought up and rejected relentlessly, mostly by action of politicians (commissioners) who are not directly elected to begin with. We have more than enough reasons to be furious.
That's talking about a different Chat Control that has mandatory scanning. This is talking about an older Chat Control that allowed sites to scan on their own without getting in trouble due to privacy laws, which has been in effect but recently expired. The thing passing now is reauthorizing that older law.
We already had two votes to renew it before it expired, and both failed. The second one was forced by the EPP immediately after the first, and then they voted against it too because they failed to amend it even stronger before the vote.
What you have to understand about issue polling is that it's very easy to get whatever results you want if you simply instruct the pollster to ask in absurd ways. This was the question posed to respondents:
> EUR02a. Some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content in the search for child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught. However, according to police reports, in the vast majority of cases innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position that your personal electronic mail and messages are searched for suspect content. What is your opinion?
Obviously this is not a good faith attempt to understand if people support message scanning.
Since you don’t consider that “good faith” I have rephrased it for you, in a format you may prefer:
> EUR02a. In the interest of protecting children, some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each EU subject in the search for dangerous, illegal child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught and children protected. According to activists who defend child pornographers, police reports indicate that a few innocent people may be mildly inconvenienced due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position of a law enforcement official trying to catch these evil people, who is currently obstructed due to false questions of “rights” and “privacy.” What is your opinion?
I jest, of course, I’m sure you would prefer something more straightforward and less manipulative like “EUR02a. Do you support child pornography?”
I understand that you're trying to dunk on me but I don't get what the point is supposed to be. It's certainly possible to come up with other bad ways to ask the question. If someone was interested in genuinely understanding the public's opinion, rather than including a demand to take some particular perspective, they would ask things like "Do you support online platforms scanning all personal messages for child pornography?" or "If you had to weigh the two, would you consider detection of child pornography or the right to privacy to be a higher priority?" And of course for the latter you’d randomize the order in case people are more or less likely to pick the first option.
I suppose the gold standard would be to present detailed arguments from each side with evidence (if any), for context. Barring that, the original question did seem to provide a rough summary of each side’s position. It may be weighted towards the anti Chat Control side, with the formulation “pro says this, but anti says this, and imagine that you are affected”. So perhaps they could have asked a reverse formulation 50% of the time to be more fair. But the poll was commissioned by Breyer, and of course he wanted to bolster his position.
Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
Even your slightly longer formulation doesn’t really explain what scanning means and how that might affect people and society. Most people aren’t familiar enough with technical and legal details to dig into the implications without added context.
“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
And
“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”
And the worse part is: they do that because the alternative means you're building a railway on a surface tunnel because some people don't like it (or worse, not building anything)
Even if you are not in the EU, this will affect you. Some countries really like to copy such regulations from others. Once services starts complying, other governments will go like "if you did for them, you can do it for us, right? so it's not technically impossible", and things only get worse from there. Not all services will simply block the EU as well, which would be better to send a stronger message if approved.
Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.
In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)
> Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.
Very much. I also fear they coming for this, we already have instances of where using secure alternatives tags you as a criminal[0], so i don't doubt a future where non-approved applications will get you in trouble. With everything happening around Android locking itself down[1] and Windows being a spyware[2] anybody who wants privacy will be 'different', and can be tagged and excluded from parts of society for not using the same services.
This is why you should be building parallel networks and even institutions, as the Czechs did under Soviet rule (look up “Parallel Polis”). Mutual aid will become critical.
The trouble is that most conventional ways of building a new service are trivial to block. What is needed now is unstoppable messaging and social networking built on top of existing services and protocols that won't be blocked right away, services with more legal protection - like email with GPG, or some kind of steganographically encrypted layer on top of Instagram.
Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent
I am speaking beyond services, you need allies who are willing to come to each other’s aid, especially financially, but also for things like physically relaying data from place to place if that is ever needed. And for more mundane things like watching your house when you are out of town. Offline networks are going to become much more critical.
I wish you were right, but the EU only needs Google and Apple, both having big EU businesses, to block Signal.
Google is already working on closing the possibility to install apps from outside the app store, Apple has been like that since forever. The fact that a few technically savvy users with rooted phones will still be able to use Signal doesn't mean anything. It will be dead if the EU decides they don't want it.
This is existing regulation being extended. It allows sites to scan messages. Not mandates.
These kind of responses is why it is hard to trust privacy advocates on HN. They are high on rhetorics, but half the time dont know what they are talking about.
I genuinely mean no disrespect here, but if the title reads as cryptic, your sources haven't been fully informing you about the issue. "Derogation from certain provisions of the ePrivacy Directive" is just what Chat Control (or at least Chat Control 1.0) means.
> I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.
Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.
In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."
First they tried to approve software patents during an agriculture and fisheries council session, now they are bending procedural rules to hack it in before summer vacations. Some weird form of democracy™.
A “no ever” law requires a constitutional majority. And for this concrete case, some member states effectively already have that via privacy guarantees in their constitution.
Finally, it’s important to realize that the power of laws is limited to the extent that people are able and willing to enforce them. Some dictatorships have wonderful things in their constitution that are not heeded at all.
I would have thought that the right to privacy as a fundamental human right would have been sufficient. But apparently not....
Equally, there is abundant precedent for forbidding interference with old-fashioned postal communications, that seemingly doesn't translate to electronic communications...
It is really worrisome to me that such a procedure is even possible. I don't understand all the EU voting rules, they are so complex that it feels to me like if they want to push something through there is always some way to do it even though the vast majority of people don't want it.
All new laws should be given a trial period where the lawmakers are forced to live with them for 90 days before the public is subjected to them. At any time during that period lawmakers can change their vote.
In addition there should be pretty specific criteria to determine if the law is successful or not. After 90 days it can be evaluated, and either rolled back or extended
The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?
Part of the confusion is that there are two things involved here; 'Chat Control 1', an existing (but expiring) derogation to the ePrivacy Directive which allows, but does not require, providers to scan messages. 'Chat Control 2', which you'll likely have heard more about, would _require_ providers to do this. The wiki article is quite poorly written and implies that 1 is an earlier version of 2, which isn't really the case.
It's probably line item 156/289 on some intern's list of things to check once a week and make sure it "looks good". Politicians engage in just as much publicity management as big corporations do.
As I understand it, chat platforms provider will not be held in violation of the data privacy laws if they add automatic detection and reporting of unlawful content to their platforms. E.G. a CSAM detector in a client app for an end-to-end-encrypted messaging service would be lawful.
You're looking for an answer that doesn't exist. The term "Chat Control" was coined by the opponents of these proposals to express their worst case assumptions; they reject the idea that the specifics matter, because they fear that any kind of chat scanning can be abused in basically the same ways. Supporters of chat scanning proposals don't call them "Chat Control" or view all such proposals as part of a unified whole.
No one will do anything to stop it, nor ChatControl 2.0 in the future. No one will revolt, or seize the government in response to anything that happens.
The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.
In your doomed reality maybe, but in this reality it was already stopped a couple of times and chances are good, that it will be stopped again - unless people believe all is doomed.
The more people become criminals the harder it becomes to enforce the law. This is especially ironic because criminals that genuinely matter and cause wide-scale harm won't even be impacted by this.
I think this all came from trying to enforce rules on people that shit talk on the internet which is especially pointless now cause you may be trying to enforce law on a random AI agent.
Part of me wants Chat Control to get passed so that there is more incentive for at least the tech literate to start using more decentralized messaging tools.
But afaik Chat Control 1.0 was/is in effect but expired. It's not relevant to Signal or Whatsapp because they're e2ee, it's relevant for eBay, Linkedin, perhaps SMS.
UK already technically banned encryption, causing Apple to remove the encrypted cloud service for UK customers. Check UK's "Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)"
Hilarious that the politicians, the very people who are pretty much always ousted as some form of degenerate pedophile the world over, are the ones pushing for this bullshit and explicitly carving out enclaves where their messages don't get scanned.
This is the anti-EU move but they simply don't understand that.
Authoritarian centralization efforts need to be fought Huang style - with an European twist - as we might be behind on a lot of axis but we "Didn't Wake Up a Loser".
China / US leadership must not be the carte-blanche to formalize whatever low bar in how we handle our own privacy; going straight for the "self own" I guess?
Sorry for prompt mode but I hope this is at least somewhat legible to fellow Europeans, if not please listen to antirez in original Italian or auto translated:
I hear quite a few tangents in there; the main one being: especially in EU we need to go "agentic". Don't wait for politics to do The Right Thing. They should play retrospective backup at best.
I'm thinking they might be actually thankful for having been provided vision / imagination.
Team up with the bureaucrats after the fact but don't listen to them too much - again - to Do The Right Thing. Especially when they are potentially infected by lobbyists...
FFS I hate this timeline; we really need to show up for real. Again and again and again and again...
Reminder that EU institutions were designed from ground up to smother democracy:
- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no
- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.
This is all fixable by changing the treaties. The first step to fixing it, however, is to give up fundamental opposition to its existence and instead support the underlying ideals and approach the shortcomings from a constructive angle.
The alternative is feeding nationalistic right wing extremism, which we really don't want in Europe.
Effect of law enforcement not doing their jobs. Chat Control is illegal in many countries including Germany and that includes preparation for the roll out. Just need a prosecutor with a spine.
The cypherpunks were right. Rights to encryption are only a part of what we need.
The other part is steganography, or hiding real messages within a innocuous anodyne message stream. And encryption can be used in conjunction as part of hiding said messages.
It can be within pictures with the lowest bit values. It can be constructed punctuation and spaces. Lots of things.
But hidden and plausibly deniable messaging is the ONLY way to defeat a government(s) that want to invade every communication aspect for humans.
The trouble with pictures is that when you share them online the platform will likely compress them before serving them to others, spoiling your steganography. I think text-in-text is the way to go. Decrypt that recipe for brownies into the actual message. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075
One can host their own private or semi-private forum, chat server, chan board, etc... and choose not to re-encode the images and/or permit .tar .7z .zip archives and so on. Keep the bots away with basic auth to minimize skiddie risk to platform RCE's.
It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are temporarily offline. Get people used to the idea that is the place to share things they do not want leaked when the big platform 3rd parties expose files. The admin can encrypt the storage and periodically zero out files and zero out empty space for privacy.
People with slightly higher opsec may choose to block mobile proprietary devices.
What I don't understand is, what kind of legitimate criminal would not use such techniques? Are bank robbers planning things out on iMessage? If so, presumably they won't be criminals for very long. Therefore these types of initiatives only impact the innocent and inept but still active criminals.
The purpose of these efforts is not to catch criminals, at least not primarily, it’s to map the spread of “dangerous” ideas and the networks behind them. In other words, to prevent effective political change.
Found a new problematic meme? Someone leaked a video of you taking a bribe? Someone published a photo of damage from a missile strike? Add it to the database of forbidden media and quickly track down the source.
They'll make sure to catch just enough criminals that when you say it's all bullshit some snooty waste of oxygen on HN can say "well akshually" and link you to some cherry picked news story that makes it all look like a good thing because they caught some small time house painter dumping waste paint in the sewer or nabbed someone for selling vapes to teenagers.
Security is the reason given to us since most of us are too trusting or dumb to look any further into it. It becomes clear security isn't what they're doing it for after giving it more than a few minutes of thought
i'm so tired of this bs, these elected people act as tsars, even when said NO they try again and again while employing shady tactics and there is no way of punishing these a*holes. Elections exist, but when same 35% (number taken out of butt, but point is - it's low) of people vote we get same sht who elects same sht to EU. And i don't know about other countries, but my country sends complete degenerates to EU, like litteraly degenerates.
i'm so tired of this bs, these elected people act as tsars, even when said NO they try again and again while employing shady tactics and there is no way of punishing these a**holes. Elections exist, but when same 35% (number taken out of butt, but point is - it's low) of people vote we get same sh*t who elects same sh*t to EU. And i don't know about other countries, but my country sends complete degenerates to EU, like litteraly degenerates.
Talked to a fellow European coworker recently and they seem very supportive of chat control and that it was necessary to stop "far right nationalism" and then I pressed on for them describe what it is and they got angry and refused to clarify. I think this is a good snapshot of where Europe is right now that chat controls have become politically weaponized and people who are supportive of it seem clueless as to what it actually is proposing.
Future looks very dim for EU as a whole, I'm glad I left it for America
Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.
When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.
The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.
Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house to get rid of flies. That is absolutely not the right solution. Without the EU, chat control would already have been implemented in its worst form everywhere, just as it already is in the UK. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control.
I'm always astonished how democratic politicians willingly allow for tools which might be misused by a future undemocratic party.
I'm not a politician or some civil rights activist but I can see that. It's right there. We have a similar situation in Germany these days. We'll be giving more rights to the Federal Intelligence Service ( foreign intelligence) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic intelligence). Basically allowing them to act more offensive (or offensive at all).
We're one or two elections away from having fascists in the government again.
Is it already a conspiracy theory if I suspect them of doing that deliberately because I can't imagine them being stupid?
Are you fascist already back from Erfurt after kicking dissidents in the head? What would the regime do without their terrorist GONGOs to which they funnel millions of taxpayer money?
> I'm always astonished how democratic politicians willingly allow for tools which might be misused by a future undemocratic party.
You totalitarian pieces of shit have no grasp of irony. Fucking scum.
I am not a lawyer, but, as a Russian citizen, let me warn you. The very fact that your comment criticizing the EU regime, that you yourself admit could send you to jail, is online and not deleted by Thursday, makes it a "lasting crime". For lasting crimes, it does not matter that the regulation criminalizing the action or state of affairs was not in force when they started. What matters is that the condition defined as illegal (comment existing) is true when the regulation outlawing it is in force - i.e., that you did not cease and desist. Yes, this is a creative way authorities circumvent the ban on ex post facto laws - they say "it is not ex post facto".
Commented on Tuesday, deleted the comment on Wednesday, the regulation is enacted on Thursday => OK.
Commented on Tuesday, did not delete before Thursday => jail (and it does not matter that you can't delete it anymore because it has a reply).
Sarcasm of course, as Russian laws do not apply here.
It’s a good time to download the source code for software that allows locally encrypted messaging, particularly without central infrastructure.
Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be.
I love how your average EU left-leaning cybertistic who has less serotonin than Werther and yet thinks all their country needs is more 3rd world "refugees" acts upon a tiny modicum of difficulty or government control (which should not be read as me advocating for it, naturally)
> Any advice from free people of China on circumventing government restrictions and control?
You should look into what goes on WeChat
But anyway the Chinese has way more agency and way less qualms about using air-conditioner so let me make a guess on who's surviving the heat waves
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU.
Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny.
Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad.
This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it.
This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already.
That’s not true, the previous instance of it expired, and the parliament rejected it. It wasn’t already lost, it was actually a win for people against the proposal
Certain implementations may fall afoul of data protection laws however.
Literally second paragraph.
> to reinstate the transitional regulation for Chat Control, which expired in April
Really, it's not the first time the EU pulls that kind of shite off.
And summertime is the perfect time, in Europe everyone's at the beach.
They even managed to find a work around an actual referendum.
Here the council, with the help of the EPP party is doing that undemocratic maneuvering: They made it on purpose so that the parliament is unlikely to be able to push back a third time (all of that leaked a few days ago)
An executive order isn't a law. It is an instruction for an executive branch agency or committee.
https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
People do this all the time, regardless of whether or not they're right or wrong. "This product I own is definitely secure because the marketing says so, even if the CVEs prove me wrong" is a common sentiment online and in real life.
Not to play too hard on the computing-detatched normie stereotype, but this type of surveillance is bound to succeed due to their apathy. We've seen this play out in the US before, and it's always a shoo-in for the surveillance legislation. Security, privacy and fairness doesn't even cross most people's minds anymore.
2 - The vote was on the "Urgency requirement"
> parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny
Eh. This is the least problematic thing here. Some MEPs might just be on official PTO.
In Germany it's usually the other way around: the EU tries to force us to do objectively good things, while national and regional governments drag their feet implementing EU law or complying with regulations. We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU, and every time it's for something where the EU seems clearly on the morally right side
And all that despite our government's best efforts to send their worst politicians to represent us in the EU. Describing von der Leyen as a disgraced politician who just failed upwards would not be entirely inaccurate
Germany is one of most wealthy, powerful and biggest contributors to the EU budget. They can't be bullied round easily.
"We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU"
The state controls the media... a lot of headlines are orchestrated. But it is done so well, unless you know, you don't know...
Where Germany doesn't agree, it has sway. Where Germany and France don't agree, it is unlikely, and where Germany, France and Italy don't agree it's not going to happen as some countries matter more than others.
As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption.
The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them.
This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving.
It’s mainly complaints that are considered sensitive or destabilizing that are suppressed. This should sound familiar to those of us in the West. Germany actually goes farther by directly funding left-wing protest groups, as these are not considered destabilizing.
So yeah, if I had to choose to live in a country where I had to toe the party line and bite my tongue when it came to political expression it would be China. At least they would be providing a high quality of life and a secure and peaceful society in exchange even if I had to deal with the negatives of being a minority in their country.
We have spent 20 years criticising China for the great firewall and control of social media, but now are adopting similar laws ourselves.
There is significant probability that China will have better quality of life than Europe in 2045 and that very little will be left of European liberties
It can only propose; the decision is made by the EU parliament.
Whenever one reads EC you need to read: "All of the heads of state in a trenchcoat". Macron, Merz, etc
And yet this is an EP maneuver
And let's not forget on the American lobbyists pushing for it (Including Big Tech)
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
Although I’d argue it is often just as much a failed technocracy.
This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129546
https://lpeproject.org/blog/neoliberal-encasement-infrastruc...
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
We are crying wolf, and we'll pay the price.
There are dictatorships, where a very select few people have absolute power, but there’s no visible dictator.
Iran is a country like this. There’s no visible dictator. It’s a game of power between the clergy, the military, and the civil government.
Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either.
We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one.
You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
Right. They pay Turkey to do that: https://www.rescue.org/eu/article/what-eu-turkey-deal
I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize.
You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c70yk5xjyl1t
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ (the biggest party gets first shot at providing the chancellor and government)
And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too.
Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so.
The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet.
And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that.
And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads.
We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe.
Oh, I 100% see the problem with it. I think pushing draconian laws, that have already been defeated, in secret backroom deals is dodgy as.
I think you have some very valid points.
I think the centre and left just see opportunities to act without compromise, never considering that it will piss of their electorates. The electorate will reply by voting just to piss off the politicians regardless of the consequences. Just like with Brexit.
That still doesn't mean that the EU is currently worse than actual dictatorships.
If you'll indulge my argument: I have a fair amount of confidence in the stability of the system and fairness of elections. It may be rigged in favour of some interested parties, but there are solid ways to get the people currently in power to be replaced by others and still retain stability in the system. Not so in any of: Iran, Russia, Albany, Eastern Germany, The phillipines, China, Belarus, Sudan, ... That is my whole point. The rest is a different topic, but cynicism usually does not help in doing something.
Chat control is no different.
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I should have just started with this criticism of the overall system.
If the former, the EU is an autocratic democracy. If the later, an autocratic oligarchy.
Either way bad. Only true democracy in Europe is Switzerland where the people actually get to vote on laws.
"Memories from Krähwinkels days of terror" (my translation - the original is of course leages better)
It's sad to see we pretty much have forgotten the history leading to this poem and how we are reverting so much as a society.> democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is
It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.
The Stop Killing Games campaign, for example, has noticed that the EU commission keeps repeating lobbyist lies and has no expectations of new laws actually passing, so they're focusing on amending existing law through parliament.
Because they're not representing the needs of their constituents? Democracy is more than just voting—and if it wasn't, most states we think of as authoritarian would also be democratic.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
> EUR02a. Some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content in the search for child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught. However, according to police reports, in the vast majority of cases innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position that your personal electronic mail and messages are searched for suspect content. What is your opinion?
Obviously this is not a good faith attempt to understand if people support message scanning.
> EUR02a. In the interest of protecting children, some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each EU subject in the search for dangerous, illegal child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught and children protected. According to activists who defend child pornographers, police reports indicate that a few innocent people may be mildly inconvenienced due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position of a law enforcement official trying to catch these evil people, who is currently obstructed due to false questions of “rights” and “privacy.” What is your opinion?
I jest, of course, I’m sure you would prefer something more straightforward and less manipulative like “EUR02a. Do you support child pornography?”
Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
Even your slightly longer formulation doesn’t really explain what scanning means and how that might affect people and society. Most people aren’t familiar enough with technical and legal details to dig into the implications without added context.
They keep voting and voting and voting until the energy of the people to protest diminishes or they find a way to get it in.
There needs to be a counter-balance where politicians can be removed or even punished by the people for proposing unpopular bills.
And
“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”
- Jean-Claude Juncker
I really fear where this is headed.
In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)
Very much. I also fear they coming for this, we already have instances of where using secure alternatives tags you as a criminal[0], so i don't doubt a future where non-approved applications will get you in trouble. With everything happening around Android locking itself down[1] and Windows being a spyware[2] anybody who wants privacy will be 'different', and can be tagged and excluded from parts of society for not using the same services.
[0]: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1940440326830989549
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48801059
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815196
Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent
Google is already working on closing the possibility to install apps from outside the app store, Apple has been like that since forever. The fact that a few technically savvy users with rooted phones will still be able to use Signal doesn't mean anything. It will be dead if the EU decides they don't want it.
These kind of responses is why it is hard to trust privacy advocates on HN. They are high on rhetorics, but half the time dont know what they are talking about.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
For once I'm pleasantly surprised that everyone I voted for was against.
I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.
But this stupid reaction finally explains to me why human life for ordinary people will always largely be a life of suffering.
Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.
In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."
Finally, it’s important to realize that the power of laws is limited to the extent that people are able and willing to enforce them. Some dictatorships have wonderful things in their constitution that are not heeded at all.
Equally, there is abundant precedent for forbidding interference with old-fashioned postal communications, that seemingly doesn't translate to electronic communications...
The downside is "lets try giving everyone basic income of $100k/week". But apart from that great!
Anyway, this is about Chat Control 1.
The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.
But afaik Chat Control 1.0 was/is in effect but expired. It's not relevant to Signal or Whatsapp because they're e2ee, it's relevant for eBay, Linkedin, perhaps SMS.
Was having lots of people's lives saved by a much faster vaccine rollout not a good thing?
Absolute fucking joke
Authoritarian centralization efforts need to be fought Huang style - with an European twist - as we might be behind on a lot of axis but we "Didn't Wake Up a Loser".
China / US leadership must not be the carte-blanche to formalize whatever low bar in how we handle our own privacy; going straight for the "self own" I guess?
Sorry for prompt mode but I hope this is at least somewhat legible to fellow Europeans, if not please listen to antirez in original Italian or auto translated:
https://youtu.be/cmYiWsFn3GM
I hear quite a few tangents in there; the main one being: especially in EU we need to go "agentic". Don't wait for politics to do The Right Thing. They should play retrospective backup at best.
I'm thinking they might be actually thankful for having been provided vision / imagination.
Team up with the bureaucrats after the fact but don't listen to them too much - again - to Do The Right Thing. Especially when they are potentially infected by lobbyists...
FFS I hate this timeline; we really need to show up for real. Again and again and again and again...
- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no
- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.
The alternative is feeding nationalistic right wing extremism, which we really don't want in Europe.
The other part is steganography, or hiding real messages within a innocuous anodyne message stream. And encryption can be used in conjunction as part of hiding said messages.
It can be within pictures with the lowest bit values. It can be constructed punctuation and spaces. Lots of things.
But hidden and plausibly deniable messaging is the ONLY way to defeat a government(s) that want to invade every communication aspect for humans.
It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are temporarily offline. Get people used to the idea that is the place to share things they do not want leaked when the big platform 3rd parties expose files. The admin can encrypt the storage and periodically zero out files and zero out empty space for privacy.
People with slightly higher opsec may choose to block mobile proprietary devices.
Found a new problematic meme? Someone leaked a video of you taking a bribe? Someone published a photo of damage from a missile strike? Add it to the database of forbidden media and quickly track down the source.
This is not a defense of surveillance, just that your argument doesn’t hold as well as you might believe.
Unfortunately, verified devices will close that loophole.
They are not elected. Even the EU is illegal, since joining the EU was rejected by people of many European countries, but that was ignored.
They just do what they want and do thorough media coverage. In rare cases that doesn't work, people just dissapear.
Future looks very dim for EU as a whole, I'm glad I left it for America
It is still unclear to me if Proton Mail, Tuta, SimpleX servers, Signal, etc. fall under this or might.
Do they even have to officially declare if they are complying?
When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.
The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.
I'm not a politician or some civil rights activist but I can see that. It's right there. We have a similar situation in Germany these days. We'll be giving more rights to the Federal Intelligence Service ( foreign intelligence) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic intelligence). Basically allowing them to act more offensive (or offensive at all).
We're one or two elections away from having fascists in the government again.
Is it already a conspiracy theory if I suspect them of doing that deliberately because I can't imagine them being stupid?
> I'm always astonished how democratic politicians willingly allow for tools which might be misused by a future undemocratic party.
You totalitarian pieces of shit have no grasp of irony. Fucking scum.
Thanks for the warning. Comment deleted to avoid jail time.
Commented on Tuesday, deleted the comment on Wednesday, the regulation is enacted on Thursday => OK.
Commented on Tuesday, did not delete before Thursday => jail (and it does not matter that you can't delete it anymore because it has a reply).
Sarcasm of course, as Russian laws do not apply here.
Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be.
Also NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/) in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed.
I love how your average EU left-leaning cybertistic who has less serotonin than Werther and yet thinks all their country needs is more 3rd world "refugees" acts upon a tiny modicum of difficulty or government control (which should not be read as me advocating for it, naturally)
> Any advice from free people of China on circumventing government restrictions and control?
You should look into what goes on WeChat
But anyway the Chinese has way more agency and way less qualms about using air-conditioner so let me make a guess on who's surviving the heat waves