The EU is a farce, an undemocratic virtue signaling organization, and this is why:
- The Parliament voted against the first reading of this proposal twice in 2026, the first time they only supported limited cases for it, while the second time they actually defeated it fully.
- The Commission didn't care, and kept the proposal on the table by refusing to withdraw it.
- Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority which is incredibly hard to pursue (you would think that we would need an absolute majority to PASS a proposal that was previously defeated on first-reading, not instead needing absolute majority to DENY a previously defeated proposal that was again forced to the table).
- Furthermore, absences in practicality count as "No" on the rejection. So of course they scheduled the vote in the summer when notoriously there will be many absences.
By never withdrawing a defeated proposal they can effectively and in practicality pursue any agenda they want (it requires a massive mobilization effort to find absolute majority to defeat any proposal, especially when absences for any reason effectively count against rejection).
In PRACTICALITY, the Commission can pursue any agenda whenever and however they want, and throw the votes down the drain.
It's worse than a farce. It's actually evil. The way "they" are pushing chat control, and how Ursula is avoiding justice (she has a huge corruption case hanging over her head but manages continuously cancel court dates); this makes a all too clear.
The only way to fix this is EU member states become more critical: but for politicians in those states an EU position is the best promotion they can make. So almost nobody dares to speak out.
Could you please give more detail about this for those of us less informed of EU things? What corrupt things has Ursula done? Or what has she been accused of, exactly? How long has she been cancelling court dates?
Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?
I write Donald sometimes. If you say Donald in the right context we know who are talking about. Or Kier or Emmanuel. There is nothing wrong with first names of public figures.
I tried to explain to my wife (American lawyer) how the EU Commissioners are selected and she told me "I'm not having fun understanding this." I had thought it was just the heads of government from each member state. That would make sense given the immense power of the body. But that's apparently not how it works.
Yeah, EU setup is absurdly convoluted but it's simply a result of the consensus that tires to balance difference sources of power (the people and the countries).
Ideally the whole EU population should just vote for MEPs in EU parliment, which the would form the government. But that would completely sidestep member states government which they won't ever agree to. And any even mention of reforminng the EU towards that is immediatelly shoot down because nationalists are screetching about soverignty (which at the same time complain that the EU is undemocratic)
So we have the setup with European Council (heads of governments) setting the agenda, Comission (presiden of which is selected by council and approved by parliment) that makes that into law and then Parliment and EU Council (not European council!) votes for it.
Yup, classic, mixed EP with EC. Makes you wonder if he explained it correctly to his wife (American lawyer), or if she verified.
I don't like the way US presidents are elected either, ignoring popular vote, and including gerrymandering. I also don't like how the US president is allowed to bypass Congress.
(1) Replace US president with a Commission of Presidents. One from each state (well, EU only has 27 member states). Each Commissioner is appointed by state legislature, not elected. No more presidential elections. This is the EU Commission.
(2) Replace US senate with a meeting of secretaries, or heads of departments from each state. Only one relevant representative from each state. But the senate composition is not fixed. When the senate discusses e.g. agricultural policy, each state sends their secretary of agriculture, of head of their department of agriculture. No more senate elections. This is the EU Council of Ministers (a.k.a. Council of the European Union or just "The Council").
(3) The house is the EU Parliament.
Take the right of legislative initiative away from the congress, and give it to the Commission of Presidents. The Commission writes the bills, and the senate and the house can only approve or disapprove (with comments).
(4) Change the states to follow the European model: The governor is not elected, but appointed by the state legislature, and is called "prime minister". (Except France has a presidential model.)
(5) The president / Commission is like a CEO. To supervise the CEO, we need a board. The heads of states (governors) meet 4 times per year to discuss and set broad and long term goals. This is the European Council.
Thank you! I think that's all correct except (1), unless I'm misunderstanding something you wrote. My understanding is that the European Council appoints a Commission President-elect. The President-elect and the Council of Ministers then prepare a proposed slate of the other Commissioners, on suggestion from the members states. Then the European Parliament can vote on the entire slate thumbs-up or thumbs-down: https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/how-commissi....
To analogize to the U.S., it would be like if the National Governor's Association selected a Head President. Then you had a Senate of Secretaries made up of the secretaries of various executive departments in the 50 states. Then the Head President and Senate of Secretaries put together a slate for the Commission of Presidents. And Congress would then approve the slate up or down.
Exactly, also the ECJ is horribly corrupt (search for the corruption scandal revealed by a French journalist few years ago). Nothing happened back them.
This will never become law in my country(Poland). Last time they tried to push it people protested in the millions.
While I agree that this setup is not very good, the EU Commission is essentially the equivalent of a government in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, and almost all such democracies I know about either have or have developed "ways" for the government to "push through" the will of the "chamber(s)". However, we do not consider those as farces as well, or so it seems to me, I guess mostly because those governments are still more or less directly "bootstrapped", and needs to be supported, by the chambers, which is what happens in the EU parliament as well.
I think what you've typed is not representative of what happened here. My understanding is that the EU Council forced this second-reading, not the Commission.
Look at "Timeline". This is the Council, not the Commission. This is your elected heads of state. This is "democracy" in action.
"Council and EPP attempting to bypass Parliament
With negotiators still deadlocked on core issues, the Council and the European People's Party (EPP) are trying to sidestep Parliament by reviving the expired Chat Control 1.0. The Council plans to fast-track a rewritten proposal with identical content, effectively circumventing the Commission's right of initiative, democratic oversight, and a fresh opinion from the European Data Protection Supervisor (source)."
The Commission refused to withdraw the proposal after Parliament rejected it, leaving it on the table. The Council disagreed with Parliament’s rejection, formally forcing a second reading.
Both the European Commission and the Council itself are not DIRECTLY elected EU bodies. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
The council is the prime minister or president (depending on the system). The commission is the government. The government mostly does what the PM/president tells it to do.
From the last article: "The Council position will now be examined by the European Parliament, under second reading.". Note that this is technically accurate under absolute majority rules for rejection (not for approving), but practically is where the "cheating" happens - as described in my original parent comment - because of the perverse procedures of the EU that are designed to basically make it almost impossible to go against the agenda.
The Commission did not withdraw it: no source because it stayed "pending".
The EU procedures are maliciously designed against the Parliament while preserving the technicality of plausible deniability. How do we call this architecture in software? We call it a "backdoor", except this one is embedded in the EU legislative process.
The Council of the European Union - that pushed this forward - is composed of national ministers that are directly elected to the Council itself and are simply there because they are appointed as ministers under their own country's constitutional system. Ministers are appointed, not elected.
Unlike the European Parliament which is directly elected by EU citizens. Conveniently, the EU citizens have been silenced on this matter despite the Parliament denying this full proposal not once, but twice.
I dont understand this line of reasoning about EU:
Ministers are appointed by people we vote. In most democracies the entire government is appointed and maybe indirect voted as a whole (by parliament and maybe directly by citizens).
What I am trying to say is people who proposed this are representatives of those countries (even if indirect their citizens votes vor the party that appointed them).
So representation is not the problem. The problem is citizens (at large) voting only on personal interest and not thinking or not understanding the second order effects. If you don't like what Council did here make sure next round of elections the party that proposed those ministers will not get elected in your country an should not have the power to form a government.
We seem to expect country officials to be even better when playing at EU level and think about yet a greater good than they are doing in their own countries.
You don't have effective representation just because a vote happens somewhere in a causal chain. A body that's appointed by people who are themselves typically indirectly elected is a lot of layers of indirection.
For effective representation, you need a feedback loop between the voting and the policymaking at the other end. If you add all these layers in-between, voters are going to have a hard time figuring out how their voting is actually changing outcomes. Imagine trying to play a video game that has huge lag between the control input and what the character on screen is actually doing.
I dont disagree. But I am also limited in seeing practical solutions to make EU better in this sense for people to feel represented at all levels directly. Please note the practical thing here cause idealist solutions I have plenty. It is just that countries are too nationalistic.
Why I find it hard: EU is another abstraction on top of what we already have: local, regional, national. EU is not just an alliance but a real governing body with legislative and executive branches.
Having an average (as in normal) citizen of a country have to think about their local interests, regional (as in around their local cities), national and global interests is too prone to manipulation. As we saw with Brexit and other campaigns. Too many of us are too focused on self interest and locality to be able to dedicate enough time to global matters.
It seems to me that the nationalism issue is orthogonal to the representation issue. In the current structure, the EU government is even more powerful than the U.S. federal government. The U.S. federal government can only legislate in certain areas, and cannot compel the states to enforce federal law. This restriction is strongly enforced by the judiciary. That's why, for example, U.S. states effectively legalized marijuana, even though it's illegal under federal law.[1]
As I understand it, the EU can legislate in any area it wants. And member states are required to enforce EU law as if it were their own domestic law. The EU can even sue member states for failing to implement and enforce EU law.
So it seems like the EU government is both extremely powerful (the nationalism issue), but also very insulated from European voters (the representation issue).
[1] And I think most people would say that the federal government isn't even allowed to regulate individual use of marijuana. There's a 2005 Supreme Court case to the contrary, but I don't think it would turn out the same way under the current Supreme Court.
You are confusing the EU Council with the Council of the European Union.
No head of state was involved in the discussion we are having today.
By the way my personal opinion is that the confusing names are by design, to give the appearance that head of states are involved in decisions that have nothing to do with them, democracy in the EU is just an illusion.
This is a bizarre argument. Emmanuel Macron sits on the EU Council. He has no democratic mandate?
The entire point of the EU design is that ultimately the member states national governments (the heads of) are the most powerful and set the direction. It was done this way because people didn't like the idea of EU ministers. There was even a huge objection to the change that introduced the Parliament, the MEPs that you are now saying should hold ultimate power.
And this is the problem. People decide up-front that the EU is "not democratic" and then they adjust their arguments and data to fit this narrative.
My apologies I was. But nevertheless, these are still these are elected representatives of the member states. These are not unknown "bureaucrats from Brussels".
it's more like a .. asymmetric confederation. Democratically elected leaders, conspire together in a confederation, to elect a body that is above and beyond the leaders of the democracy. I honestly don't think we have a proper label for what the EU [edit* council] has become. If you are looking at it from the OP's perspective, it's more of a "democratic deficit." It is an institutional design that prioritizes efficiency, expert consensus, and national vetoes over direct voter control and transparency.
I think what you've typed is not representative of how EU works.
The Council [1], also known as the Council of the European Union and the Council of Ministers, does not consist of heads of state. The body that consists of heads of state is the European Council [2].
The Council must go at some point. It is a "legislative" body... composed of members of the _executive_ branch of the individual countries. Granted, that's not the only problem with EU governance, but it is a rather glaring anomaly in terms of transparency and accountability.
Furthermore, at least in the case of Italy & other parliamentary systems, there's something like 3 levels of indirection between the people and their "representative" in the Council:
People elect members of the Parliament -> MPs decide who is the Prime Minister -> PM decides who sits in the Council
We should likely just replace it with either a "EU Senate", where each country elects the same number of senators, _or_ a chamber with truly European elections (as in, every EU citizen may vote for any candidate, regardless of their nation). But the latter option seems still out of reach as of today.
How are we going to change it? They are simply going to pass a second-reading on a proposal to bring it back and use the same trick over and over again. All it takes is for one person to be "sick" at home for them to get it their way.
The EU voters have practically gifted their future to a bunch of technocrats. Over time (decades), it will get worse too, as inevitably power corrupts them more and more.
The EU is simply never going to represent the EU voters when it goes against their agenda. Want proof? They just did it.
Why not just have two bodies like every other parliamentary system? Europeans elect an MP and each member state elects a Senator. Then the majority party in the Parliament appoints a Prime Minister, who can appoint a cabinet. Nobody is more than two steps away from an elected position.
Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.
You need to specify which EU laws does this violate. "undemocratic" by your definition. There is no universally precise definition of "democratic". Because I'm sure EU council knows how to be democratic by their own definition of the term. They have an army of legal pundits who ensure that everything is done correctly within their legal framework.
Literally the voice of the EU voters has been suppressed on this matter despite the Parliament (elected by them) voted twice on denying this full proposal.
By any definition of the term, this is not a democracy and it's a technocracy at best.
> Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.
The American system was mostly cribbed from Europeans to begin with. Montesquieu, etc. The structure of the EU is bizarre according to the principles of democratic governance articulated by Europeans themselves.
Hard disagree on the conclusion. I agree that the commission and the council have made very unfair moves and it's justified to call them out for it. But we have also seen that the parliament (except for the EPP) was for the most part eager to listen to what people had to say about chat control.
> - Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority
Wait, that's the rule? On the second go around, the default outcome is for a previously defeated proposal to pass unless you can muster an absolute majority?
This seems like if the U.S. President had a reverse veto: it could pass any law Congress rejected by forcing a second vote and the law would pass unless there was an absolute majority against. Didn't the EU people read Montesquieu about separation of powers? He was French!
1. The Council triggered the second reading by adopting its own position and sending it back. You made it sound like the Commission just steamrolled it unilaterally.
2. The scheduling conspiracy is false. Parliament itself voted (331-304) on July 7 to fast-track this. Also, the votes in March and July were pretty stable: 311 against in March, 314 against in July.
We, as humanity, really need to stop equating democracy with direct votes and referenda. There are reasons why some bodies are nominated indirectly and through convoluted procedures. In many countries these processes exist to prevent the rise of fascisms or totalitarianism in general.
The EU, in particular, is a community of relatively different states, where you can’t have just direct elections with proportional representation, otherwise the most populous countries will decide for everybody. This is why there is a zoo of directly elected bodies, bodies nominated by the Parliament, others expressing the will of countries’ governments, and complex voting procedures with qualified majorities and veto powers.
In practice the EU has struggled to make national governments ratify trade treaties because their devolved regions were worried about beef prices. It’s not an unstoppable dictatorial behemoth that decides against the will of the people, if 10 farmers in Wallonia can stop it. They still haven’t convinced Germany that an Italian baker can open a bakery in Bavaria without attending a local mandatory 5 year Meister training.
What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
*What is coming back:*
US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
*What remains unchanged:*
Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
*What is still NOT being scanned:*
End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
The Internet Watch Foundation, the group, funded almost entirely by big tech, who pushed for this vote to be held under emergency procedure, is already at work lobbying for the end of E2EE [1].
In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.
Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.
Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.
People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.
The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.
> Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
Also without chat control they would have to follow much stricter eprivacy directive laws that makes many of their monetisation strategies ilegal.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
Where did you get that impression? The main driver for Chat Control 2.0 is lobby org Internet Watch Foundation where Apple one of the main donors (along with Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI)
In a same way - just because a charity claims they want to solve child porn doesn't mean that their real aim is to help their donors.
In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.
I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.
Dream on. X corp is one of the sponsors of Internet Watch Foundation who are the lobby group behind Chat Control. Musk might play how terrible this is for his audience but in reality they sell all the user data and train their models on it just like every other big tech corp.
Blud thinks musk has any principles, he is literally grifting for maga to stop immigration and then goes and facilitates h1b when there are plenty of talented workers that could be hired.
That guy is outright cheerleading fascists in European countries and wants to put them in power. Why would he want to take away such a powerful tool from them?
Once a law is passed that permits abuse of power, that new toy is available to whoever is in control of the government, which could be the parties he likes. Seen this kind of thing over and over again when one group gains control of a level of government, passes a bunch of authoritarian crap under the belief they have a mandate to rule forever, and then lose power, giving their opponents control over that new authoritarian toy. In the end, the political class gains more power and the public loses. What rarely happens is a change in leadership giving up the power the previous leadership gave itself.
That is regulatory capture but it really feels like it should be called something else.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
I think this is basically correct and aligns with Facebook’s massive push toward e2ee in Messenger. They don’t want to be on the hook, and didn’t do e2ee just for the fun of it
Honestly they have a lot of members including the BBC for some reason, Apple is one of them. It seems like it might just be good practice to support them, it signals ‘we are against child abuse’. Dropping support could lead to some bad headlines. Seems like an NGO that is really good at sales, probably putting some pressure on it’s members rather than the other way around.
I get that if you are an ngo that really wants to solve online child abuse you’d want a law like this. It may be mostly the ngo pushing for it, not necessarily big tech. I could be wrong.
> End-to-end encryption is a term used to describe blocking or preventing any third-party recipient from viewing, reading or becoming aware of information that one individual has sent to another. In response to growing concerns about online data security, many technology companies are adopting this strategy with potentially dire circumstances.
> The use of end-to-end encryption would prevent the companies or any third-party from detecting illegal activity occurring on their platforms, including the activity of people who use the internet to perpetuate online demand for graphic sexual abuse material of children.
> We believe personal security is extremely important and support efforts to improve online privacy. But, if this solution is implemented with no exceptions for detecting child sexual exploitation, millions of incidents of abuse will remain hidden, leaving these young victims without any help or protection from these horrific crimes.
After the whole internet lost its mind about Apple CSAM scanning and being horribly off target, I'd recommend to ignore news reports and go to the sources when making an opinion.
The only issues I can see is the error rate for non-CSAM scanning and how the latest vote was conducted.
Although the scanning part, it is still law enforcement that has to review that information and determine if there is a case. Most of the those are teens sharing naked photos with other teens.
Then I'm not very moved about this. I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another. What I care is not having a backdoor for E2E, i.e. like client-side scanning telling me what I am allowed to talk about like with the LLMs. CSAM excuse is a great excuse to turn every conversation to what we have with AI today.
If reading messages that are not for ones eyes is OK, then it is a much smaller step to the next level, which is to also being able to read encrypted messages. Slowly boiling the frog.
But the next level IS the chat control 2.0 and yes it is the one people should be concerned about. But it's not like this is unprecedented this is literally just an extension of something that existed.
> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
They are already allowed to do this, and already are doing this. When you provide data to the service provider in a non-e2ee fashion, it's their data as much as it is yours. They can scan it, data mine it, analyze it, whatever.
This is the whole point though. They are allowed to do this because of the original chat control from 2021 which was temporary and expired in march. Without chat control it is very debatable what companies can legally thanks to eprivacy directive.
They aren’t allowed to do whatever they want with your data, there’s strict restrictions on requiring consent for things you want to do with user data.
And your REALLY think E2E is going to "protect" you?
If the "services" want to watch, don't worry they will, "they don't need your password". But I guess they "do" that only for the very baddies, aka child exploitation, human trafficking, terrorists, killers, drug dealers, etc.
We all know here that "information system security" does not exist, this is a fantasy: there is only some "best effort" with a wide spectrum of compromises. If somebody talks to you about "deliverable security", that guy wants to sell you something.
E2E will protect you only against John Doh, "hacker only on Sundays". And we better keep that in mind.
What are you talking about. You think service providers can backdoor aes-gcm? There will always be technology that they cannot get around. The only way to backdoor is to explicitly change the encryption.
Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries. Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.
Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent
The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.
ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?
It's "not on the way", really. It is explicitly designed not to be democratic in any meaningful sense from the very beginning. It is not even a secret: the council work is intentionally opaque so that the actual people responsible for all this horrible stuff cannot be held accountable by the public. This is explicitly stated to be a feature, justified that it helps it all be more technocratic and less populist.
Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.
Which would be fine, if it was just a trade union like originally designed. I really love the original idea of EU. I could even get behind more federation style, although trade union is vastly preferable for me - but I do understand people pushing for it.
Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.
Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:
- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.
- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.
- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.
And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.
- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.
- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?
and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.
All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.
> Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.
No pun intended, but how is this legal? I mean, if you don’t have a quorum, then shouldn’t you just wait for an Autumn session? It feels like having a democratic parliament with backdoors like this kinda undermines the whole idea
Sounds like they did have quorum (84% present). I'm assuming the "trick" is related to the fact that it was an expired law up for renewal instead of a brand new law, which sounds pretty dumb to me. Maybe I'm mistaken about the details tho. I'm just some guy
I don't understand how it is that the EU Parliaments votes to reject legislation. Presumably, this is not the default for most rules. Is this some special class of rule -- put together by a special committee, for example -- that has to be voted down rather than up?
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ has a better way to sort by country and political party so you can see who woted for what. It is painful to see politicians I voted for supporting this, even after I have sent them a few emails. Honestly, based on the results from my country, in the upcomming euro-elections, I am seriously considering voting alt-right.
> Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries.
Maybe people should demand better of their representatives. Would YOUR job be OK with you not being able to perform your duties the day BEFORE your vacation starts? The time to go home is when your vacations STARTS, not one or more days before.
Yeah, there are two scummy things happening here. This would not be possible if they did their job. What sort of weird example does it set, when they don't ever care enough to stay for all the voting?
The EU and corrupt politicians (that's most of them), will do what they want, regardless of your opinions. I have completely given up on participating in democracy. My country is going to hell, and I don't believe anyone is able to stop it.
The internet is pretty stupid now and needs to be reigned in so our sons and daughters aren’t wide eyed zombies. Most of you won’t agree with me but it’s true and something needs to be done so I laud this.
"give me a boy until he is seven and I will tell you the man he becomes"
there will be at least 1 entire generation of western kids that spectated short form content on screens since the moment of birth. based on aristotle, this entire generation is going to be retarded. the EU legislature in question enables legal spectation of content exchanged by a generation of the retarded. the optimal path forward seems to be ensuring that the next generation is not retarded, otherwise human extinction will be rapidly accelerated. I don't see how corporate destruction of individual privacy is going to help ensure that the next generation is not retarded.
The content children in Asia are exposed to seems to be entirely different in nature. For instance, with Tiktok: it intentionally pushes brainrot content for western users, while in China it pushes educational and in general positive content. Speaking only from what I've read on the subject, and I'm entirely willing to accept that I'm wrong about that, but the point remains that the screens aren't the issue, it's the content on them that is.
did you read any studies that accounted for brain rot short form content vs non brain rot short form content? from my n=1 sample, this content format is universally destructive, regardless as to specific information conveyed
I hoped that my tunnel visioned perspective only applied to that which I could see. to be fair according to another commentor asian kids don't get pushed brain rot, so I suppose there are degrees to this
"a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028."
"Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!"
"Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?"
"Worth a shot!"
"It worked, should we also do this multiple times?"
Not only was Chat Control 1.0 already rejected twice by the European Parliament but:
- This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation - 112 MEPs of 719 didn't vote.
- The vote was called only two days before as an "Rule 170 - Urgent procedure" - 73 MEPs missed the vote making it "urgent". Normally it takes months of procedure to come up for a final vote.
I think that means those MEPs are not doing their jobs. They are the representatives of their people, but somehow they left for vacation before the last day of the session. They failed in the most important part of their duty.
It's a push by oligarchs to establish total surveillance and control of the masses to protect themselves from the coming environmental (climate change) and economic (mass unemployment) collapses.
In a functioning democracy, the masses would demand higher taxes on the wealthy to fund social support. The oligarchy has already bought out democracy in the US and other places to ensure that doesn't happen. So to keep the masses in line, a system of totalitarian oppression is required.
It's amazing more people don't recognize this and judging from some posts in this thread as a solution they will support oligarch backed alt-right like that will fix the problem.
Around ten years ago I watched some MEPs on YouTube talk about their jobs. A lot of them were scathing. The EP isn't a real parliament and the people in it don't have any real power, so it fills up with cheerleaders and hecklers.
Attendance isn't just low before the summer break, it's low all the time. MEPs miss votes for reasons as trivial as there being a football game on, because why not? It's not like their votes matter much anyway. Everything important is decided upon long before they get involved, they aren't allowed to actually write laws or pass them or repeal them, and so nobody with any political ambition goes there unless they're using it as a springboard to national politics.
> "Mr President, our parliament in the United Kingdom sat for 142 days last year and it was criticized widely for only sitting for that amount of time yet we in Brussels and Strasburg in the plenary and mini plenary, we sit for just five days a month and on three of those days it's only part of a day that we actually sit for. So we end up with debate in this chamber where microphones of speakers are cut off after 60 seconds, 90 seconds or 2 minutes, and we have no way of expanding on a point, we have no way of properly challenging a speaker, we have no means of proper scrutiny of proposed legislation that comes through. Surely it would make more sense to have sufficient time allocated to proper debate to reason debate and those who actually believe in the structures and institutions of this place should surely welcome that. I think my 60 seconds is up."
You can tell it's a joke institution because they regularly penalize MEPs for the content of their two minute speeches. Britain has the concept of parliamentary immunity but the EU does not, so you get "politicians" who are told what they can and cannot say by the leaders of other parties.
As much as Brexit was a footgun, this has always seemed to me a very valid criticism of the EU that the remain side of that debate never really tackled. There is a huge democratic deficit in the organisation.
The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)
> because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty
Well, the UK has only been asked about Europe twice - once to join and once to leave. Unlike many other European countries that frequently ask their populace as a way of standard governance.
The only other UK referendum in my lifetime was the 'alternative vote'
The UK government (no matter the party) just doesn't seem to like asking the public's opinion, on things. And after 2016, I'd be very surprised to see another referendum on anything, any time soon as the outcome of that was opposite to what the 'establishment' wanted (cue the last decade of squabbling). They will instead use the excuse: 'you gave us the mandate choosing us at the General Election'.
It cannot. EU laws are completely useless and must be implemented by every government as a local law, which won't be more powerful than the constitution.
The problem is that constitutional courts should then say the law was against the constitution and cancel it, but will that happen?
In theory, it can't. But in reality, it does in important cases.
Germany has implemented EU sanctions against a German journalist, which deprive him and his family of the ability to conduct basically any economic activity in Germany or even to leave the country. He is not allowed to work. No one is allowed to pay him money. He has to petition the government every time he wants to access even a small amount of the money in his own bank account. The same restrictions apply to his close family members, because they are suspected of helping him survive financially. He is barred from crossing any border in Europe, including to leave.
He has not been accused or convicted of anything in court. The only procedure that was required to hand down an economic death sentence was for the EU Commission to put his name on a list.
The German government claims this is all okay, because the journalist can proactively challenge his sanction listing in Brussels. It's a years-long process that will require paying lawyers - using money he is not allowed to access.
Needless to say, this is all highly unconstitutional. But the German government simply doesn't care. They just say they're implementing EU sanctions.
Very weird case. I don't think anyone can survive here in Germany on a 503€ allowance he gets, and let alone having some probable but unproven ties to a state considered an enemy since only recently, I would find crippling someone to that degree harsh even for a convicted war criminal. He's apparently not even allowed to pay rent!
It's not that weird. There are other cases like it. Jacques Baud is a Swiss guy and was sanctioned by the EU Commission for "spreading Russian propaganda". At the time he was living in Brussels and the EU became a prison that he's not allowed to leave.
The sanctions imposed on December 15 by the European Union against Jacques Baud and eleven other people include the freezing of their assets, a ban on doing business and bans on entering the EU.
“I don’t have the right to return to Switzerland, or even to travel within the EU. I’m essentially being held against my will,” says Jacques Baud.
Thanks for the example but there being other cases and me as an average person who follows the news having no idea about all this make it even weirder for me.
Genuinely thank you for linking to him and his case.
I live in Germany and am -principally- a massive advocate for and proponent of the free (or liberal) democratic basic order ("FDGO" [0]) we have had here for the last decades, and apart from Chat Control, I’m usually very highly pro-EU, too.
But reading this has genuinely left me in a bit of a shock now, and created some (for lack of a better word) FUD I haven’t felt before with regard to these two, eh, institutions governing us.
> EU laws are completely useless and must be implemented by every government as a local law
This isn’t true. Regulations are directly applicable and don’t require national legislation; directives generally do. Individuals affected by a failure to implement a directive can complain to the European Commission, which can bring infringement proceedings against the member state and potentially seek financial penalties.
EU law also has primacy over conflicting national law, and the CJEU’s position is that this includes constitutional provisions. Courts in Germany and Poland have challenged that position, but refusing to comply can put the countries in breach of their EU treaty obligations and lead to infringement proceedings and penalties.
our rights have largely held up even in the absurd world we live in, and the constitution continues to be a thorn on the side of those trying to abridge them. what we are seeing now is the conclusion of decades of eroding our rights and the tower still refuses to topple. though of course we're going to have a lot of work to do fixing it up after all is said and done.
Have you heard of ACLU v. Clapper, HLP v. DoJ, Doe v. Ashcroft, or US v. Moalin? Parent acknowledges decades of degradation and points to thorns like these.
I'm not sure any country actually has a Constitution with rights that are not up for a vote. There is generally a separate, harder procedure for changing the "basic law" or Constitution of a country -- for example, 2/3 of delegates or a 2/3 of states or something of that nature -- but I'd be surprised if there's a country where they have literally no way to change it at all.
The US constitution doesn't grant rights. It's sort of the whole deal which the rest of the western world doesn't really understand, much less Americans themselves.
Everything in the US Constitution is amendable, though -- in other words, the whole Constitution can be changed with a vote.
The US is founded on certain ideas about natural rights -- hence not granted, per se -- but that's somewhat orthogonal to this whole issue. Even if there were an unwritten constitution, a country could base its institutions, philosophy of lawmaking, jurisprudence, &c, on natural rights doctrine (and for a time, the British did exactly that).
The earlier post mentions "That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote." but if what they mean is natural rights, that goes well beyond any procedural issue around the basic law.
That page specifically says the constitution grants rights to the government and reserves the rights of the people. There is a lot in there about the case against the bill of rights, a big part of which is that itemizing the rights implies that they are limited to the list.
Editing to clarify that this isn't just semantics: under the 'grant rights to the people' model, a government that grants one set of rights is just as legitimate as one that grants another. It was the position of the founders that governments which deny certain rights are infringing on the pre-existing rights of the people. This is the basis for their position on revolution.
So that means there it offers zero protection against private corporations? It seems like that is a bad idea, isn't it better to say people have rights that nobody is allowed to violate instead? Like freedom of speech doesn't matter much if private corporations are allowed to silence you.
There are plenty of protections against private entities in the US legal system -- other people, corporations and organizations. Those were not the issues the founders were trying to address, though -- the common law offered many such protections.
Oh, believe me, I've been on the losing side of that issue with you for ages. I absolutely agree it is unethical for anybody to violate anybody's free speech, etc, and that that multiplies with corporate power.
But that means I'm familiar with the counterpoints. A government has the power to use violence: to operate a military that can kill non-citizens and a police force that can put citizens in prison. It's a lot more important to put a check on this than on a corp, even though quantity has a quality of its own. One thing to suppress dissidents by saying they can't use your website; another to put them in the gulags.
And then the other big issue is that corporations are just a bunch of people shaking hands. You have the right to free press, so you can write a newspaper that says what you like. You can sell that paper and you can publish people's op-eds if they give you the copyright permissions. You can refuse to publish the ones you disagree with. You can make agreements with the printing company to scale up and with other authors to contribute as you become popular, and, while this shifts the practical considerations, no amount of these agreements changes your principle right to free press.
For these reasons, it's best not to include this in your constitution. I have no idea what to do instead apart from shaming and boycotting unethical companies, which of course doesn't work when most people don't care an iota about the principle of free speech. Look at Athenian democracy and sigh?
Those are the same thing, with no difference existing between them in any context. You're complaining about the difference between a document that describes party A buying something from party B versus another one that describes party B selling the thing to party A.
Think about what it might mean for
(a) the government to give me the right to live in your house; or
(b) the government to restrict you from expelling me from your house.
The difference is whether you say "thank you" to the government that does (a) or "screw you" to the government that fails to do (b). It's the difference between me not killing you and me granting you the right to be alive- if I am doing the latter, you are my subject rather than my equal. It implies that I have the right to take it away. Welfare, the FDA, and protectionism are examples of (a) while your basic human rights fall under (b).
The page you link contains many interesting examples; but many of them are simply cases of making the vote harder -- requiring unanimous consent to change English-French bilingualism in Canada, for example -- rather than cases where the law simply can not ever be changed by a vote.
With regards to Germany, the page says:
...if a constitution provides for a mechanism of its own abolition or replacement, like the German Basic Law does in Article 146, this by necessity provides a "back door" for getting rid of the "eternity clause", too.
It's really hard to have a legal system that literally can not be changed by any legitimate vote -- only by revolution -- because what sits at the bottom of most of them (all of them?) is that the consent of some body politic is necessary and sufficient to legitimate a law.
Amending the US Constitution takes a lot of voting, with very large majorities in Congress / Senate and state legislatures. This has been achieved a number of times, and some of these decisions were rather unwise, like the Prohibition (18th amendment).
And then people wonder why there’s so little faith in the EU and why there is a perception of them being disconnected from the real interests of the people.
Exactly. The issue is them being automatically in favor, that’s a really extreme measure I as an eu citizen did not know about, even though I’d say I’m probably more informed then the average and was made to study eu history, structure and laws in school. That kind of stuff is really weird, even weirder is that such an emergency measure can be activated without countries being in active war or the like.
This is beyond retarded. It's not a loophole, it's too f stupid to count as a loophole. This interpretation is a violation of the law. They should jail every EU parliamentarian who claims that this is a valid interpretation.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
It completely perverts the entire system. With this approach, any law can be passed by a minority; just phrase as a negative.
I propose a new law: "The EU is hereby not not not abolished" ohh look, it failed to gain majority vote! EU is over! Everyone go home! Look at how clever I am finding loopholes!
>That kind of stuff is really weird, even weirder is that such an emergency measure can be activated without countries being in active war or the like.
What's also just as weird is how the EU can just straight up sanction, debank and make European citizens virtually homeless overnight, without even a trial day in court. Absolutely insane.
This is some NAZI/USSR shit, except you don't get executed, you just get deranked and made homeless and maybe die from that on the whims of some bureaucrat in another country.
We gave the EU superpowers to "protect us" but never asked ourselves what happens when they use those powers against us when people vocally don't agree with their agenda.
Jacques Baud (Swiss) and Xavier Moreau (French) citizens, got sanctioned by the EU[1] on the basis of "acting as mouthpieces for pro-Russian propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories". Sanctioning means asset freezes, debanking and travel bans, virtually a slow and painful sentence to homelessness and death since you won't be able to travel, have a bank account, a job, own or rent anything under sanctions.
I don't have a problem with them sanctioning people, I have a problem when it's not done by a judge but a snap decision done by bureaucrats without a public trial/hearing where the individuals get a chance to defend themselves for what they're accused of, especially when it's just for the act of speaking, even if we disagree with what they speak.
Because otherwise the EU is no different than a monarchic or totalitarian dictatorship who has people executed for speaking bad things against it, and there's nothing stopping them from doing the same to you, me and everyone else here for wrong speak against the crown's interests.
Nobody can be guilty of anything without a fair trial. Some bureaucrats power tripping acting as judge jury and executioners without trial is the definition of totalitarian tyranny.
Nobody, even law abiding citizens, wants to be under such an unaccountable legal system. Justifying it because it was used "only" against pro-Russians is insane. Today it's against them, tomorrow it will be against anyone who criticizes the EU leaders. That's how boiling the frog works. That's how fascists always did it.
>virtually a slow and painful sentence to homelessness and death
OK, do you have information as to how close to homelessness and death these two are? Based on my reading I'm unsure regarding Baud, but my impression is Moreau is probably not significantly affected.
sure, but people shouldn't lie about what the current consequence of things are either. I'm pretty sure I'm closer to death and homelessness than Xavier Moreau is.
on edit: also I think the whole death and homelessness worry expressed seems sort of weird, because I think the normal order would be homelessness and death. I may die soon, but in that context I will not actually be worrying about homelessness. Maybe that's just me though.
Xavier Moreau is not in the EU so a travel ban that prevents him from leaving the EU obviously does not affect him. The sanctions only affect the seized assets.
Meanwhile Jacques Baud is a Swiss Citizen in the EU and the sanctions ban him from leaving the EU, which makes the EU a de facto open air prison for him.
de facto a person can take a train into Switzerland from the EU (France, for example) with no border control. Or arrive by car. Once in Switzerland flights out are possible for a Swiss citizen. So I believe your statement is untrue.
Very reductionist comment- if you're an elected representative and you leave early to take a vacation knowing you'll be missing votes, you're not doing your job..
Ever worked with Europeans? This is how they treat work. In their culture taking vacation and actually switching off is part of the job. I'm not making a value judgement but their approach to work is very different to what some of us are used to.
So they should prorogue the entire Parliament and they all take a month off together. Why the fuck should some particular province or riding or whatever miss out on representation on an important issue just because their rep is out for a week on an island somewhere? Could they not have a proxy / surrogate??
taking vacation and switching off is actually the sane thing for a person to do. the problem is that there is no provision for your post being covered while on vacation, and it's a problem in the enterprise/organization.
imo that a representative of the people misses a vote should just not be acceptable under any circumstances.
that's of course if we had to take "democracy" as an actually meaningful representation of the people. this was a cheap political maneuver to get a bill passed. happens everywhere. they would have gotten the bill through by any other means anyway.
that would be in an ideal democracy, though, in reality european parlamentarians don't even draft laws, they are only able to sign off on laws drafted by shady appointees of an equally shady and largely unelected (by the people) comission, take it or leave it. that, photo ops and declarations is their whole job, it shouldn't be too complicated to have a fucking substitute when on vacation.
This. When I need to take my summer vacation, I need to request it to my manager in due time so the team can plan customer deliveries accordingly, and in my last day before leaving I need to do a handover of my open tasks to whoever will do the work in my absence. I can't just spontaneously decide one day that tomorrow I'm leaving for 2-4 weeks on vacation with no notice and no handover to my team.
What's stopping MEPs from having to do that? Do they have literally zero responsibilities and accountabilities? Because their job is pretty critical for our society an security, even if a trained monkey could do it in theory.
Oh, so it's also your fault when you plan, and get approved a vacation, and then in the middle of it (lets's say on week 2 out of 4) you're notified that in two days you must be in the office, or, according to you, you should get canned?
I don't know... I'm not European so I don't really care, but I feel like there are some jobs that have an existing overlap of _duty_. I was in the military, and PTO was viewed as a privilege, and sometimes leave was cancelled, but that makes sense because of the position. Other civilian jobs, like firefighters, police, maybe some medical practitioners, might have this same thing. Politicians I would say is definitely one of those positions, where you should actually be in "public service". Officials in a democracy are supposed to be elected not because we need people to fill vacant jobs, but because we need people to be on duty to make the hard decisions.
Basically, I don't think politicians should be held to the same standard as some SWE making note-taking apps.
This is a deeply American (and Puritan) view of work, and I can say that as an American who works in public service.
PTO is not a “privilege.” In fact, it is a documented right as part of the employment agreement your
company makes you, when you sign that document about the handbook. It should be a legal agreement, but somehow we’ve convinced people their purpose in life is to work for 50-60 years for 40+ hours a week and then have maybe 20 years to enjoy life before they die, happy to be of service to the people.
Public servants deserve MORE time off and MORE money because they literally are ON CALL most of the time. Taking a vacation should be MORE Normal and votes shouldn’t require people to be in person.
You build your government the way you build your country - you should show the utmost respect for those in public service by treating them right and respecting their time.
I didn't say it was a privilege. I said it was viewed as such when I was in the military.
I wasn't talking about work agreements with civil companies. You brought that in. My comment was in regards to public service only.
I don't disagree about public servants having more time off or more money. But I believe they should be on call. If that means cancelling vacation to vote, so be it. You don't want to have that life style? Don't run for public office.
FWIW, I've had skin in that game. I was stop lossed when I had 4 months left on my enlistment for a 15 month combat deployment. That's public service. Elected officials should be present and ready to serve.
Strange response... Since when is the idea of ‘duty’ supposed to be ‘deeply American’?
I’m not American but happy to agree with the OP - being an elected MP is not just a job and if they want to take leave whenever they want to and miss critical votes then I’m sure they would have no trouble getting a normal job instead!
Surely the parliamentary sitting schedule gives them plenty of time off already where they would not miss votes (I know it does in my country)
It is my limited understanding this is other way around - you plan your vacation, you get it approved, then on your vacation an emergency vote to reduce your salary is called and you automatically voted yes.
Sure you can. What unstoppable force is going to prevent you?
You might find out there are undesirable consequences if you make that choice, but that is only if the employer decides to bring undesirable consequences. MEP employers in particular are generally apathetic about having an employee on staff. Extremely so — to the point that they won't even take a minute out of multiple years to say "hi" to the person they hired, never mind give any direction to the employee.
It doesn't have to be that way, but when the employer doesn't care, that is the way it will be.
The idea behind _representative_ democracy is that _we_ take holidays and our representatives do the work of upholding _our_ democratic values. These MEPs took their holidays before the parliamentary session was complete.
If we're talking about _direct_ democracy then we have to do the work ourselves but because we don't want to do that (because we want to go on holydays), we give up our rights to those who _want_ to represent us.
That, of course, falls apart once those representing us start to only represent themselves.
> Plenary sessions of Parliament take place 12 times per year in Strasbourg and last four days
There are 48 days in sessions over a year. You're saying that it's too much to ask MEPs not to take holidays during those 48 days? Am I missing something here?
Most of the work of an MP is not sitting in plenary sessions looking bored. The normally important bits are in-between - committee and office work. This specific event here is an example of a plenary session suddenly being made extremely important by a procedural trick.
Do you those 48 days are the total number of working hours these MEPs have? Of course not. Something always needs to give when going on vacation. And usually missing a a plenary session is not weird or the end of the world. The problem here is that in this case the rules were abused.
For doing actual work? Getting in touch with constituents, listening to them, faction internal coordination, working on committee specific stuff, understanding proposals and motions of others, maybe filing their own... when taken seriously, this can be an intense job.
Honest question: when Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government, isn't it natural that the government will try to implement more control? And it looks EU officials do not have to accountable for anything. They will not suffer personally even when their policies wreck havoc. I don't quite understand why Europeans can trust EU at all. Case in point, EU HQs shut down its air conditioning on floors 1 through 7 to prevent electrical overloads, leaving the upper levels used by top officials unaffected. Yet did anyone like Leyen get punished? Note I'm not naive enough to believe politicians don't have special treatment in other countries. But at least in some countries, politicians will not be so shameless that they'd do it in broad day light.
> Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government
This antecedent is far too broad; what regulations, benefiting whom? It's pretty obvious in this case that the majority of their representatives do not favor at least this type of regulation. In other cases, the majority of representatives favor regulation which prevents private corporations from selling their PII to the highest bidder. So you're going to have to reckon with the nuance of the real world if you don't want to make obviously leading statements like this.
You're right, there are nuances in different policies. I was referring to the general power and consent that Europeans grant to the EU council. In my naive view their power is unchecked. As a result, we can start with good intent and good regulations, but eventually they will abuse their power as its the nature of power.
The power is checked in multiple ways: confirmation by the parliament is required in many cases and the court can overturn council decisions. The only issue is that one check is weak amd the other one is very slow.
The question I would ask next is that if a majority don't actually favor it, who will vote to sanction member countries that refuse to implement it in protest? Giving a central authority significant power likenthis inevitably leads to autocracy per Montesquieu.
Representatives are different to all of the EU bureaucracy and NGOs that make up the long-term powerful influentials in the EU. Representatives come and go.
I don't understand either but just for reference on your point:
Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years
'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'
Who was asked, i.e. tourists visiting Brussels? How many were asked? How were they asked, i.e. leading questions such as "you do like the EU don't you"? Who didn't respond?
And more importantly, who is doing the asking? Oh, the EU itself is doing the asking. They are, of course, not biased in any way at all.
These numbers are then provided by the same folks that just timed a vote on our privacy when a) MEPs were known to be on holidays b) reversing the vote procedures, i.e. the 'no's have reach a set minimum c) are happy to sign away our collective privacy.
All that for 52% - all time high. When I was going to school, 52% wasn't a score that I went home to my parents with and told them how good things were going - even if it was an "all time high".
Crazy, how the EU have mixed up mediocrity with democracy.
Let's be honest, like for national assemblies, lots of members of the parliament are quite dumb.
I think most of them will not even look at the biggest part of the laws they are supposed to vote. They will vote for whatever they are told to vote for by the party or carefully crafted lobbying.
For something like chat control, you don't see it but there are probably a dozen lobbyist that went to see them in turn, feeding lies and propaganda that they will not challenge because they have other "important" political subjects they are busy looking at.
The commission is leading the game with lots of tricks like what was done here to get what they want in the end.
Just look at the fact that very very few of member even realized or complained to have been played fool by the last vote.
And I mean that it is wonderful already that some many members did the right choice (and I hope because they understood the issue and not because they were told to vote this), but it is crazy that so many still voted in favor.
And who knows, maybe a lot of them didn't even understand the question and were thinking that the "no" was "no to chat control", but here it goes back to my initial point that they are dumb enough to be easily manipulated by the commission members.
Yeah, it always strikes me when this crazy, obviously stupid stuff ends up "49 to 51" like either there are active forces fighting each other ending in an equilibrium, or the equilibrium is arising passively, everyone and their representatives are just randomly scribbling in the circles.
Any time now even the most pro-european EU defender will realise that what was once a trade union has slowly transformed itself into an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster.
A surprisingly large amount of people are quite alright with that as long as they perceive that those undemocratic processes are producing the end results they desire. It's not unique to the EU, though they do play this game very well, or even to this time period. Once the powers have been granted, the public has only limited ability to revoke the power, with many of them easily swayed that it's good for this power to exist by having a red meat issue thrown to them to chew on as a distraction.
It wasn't really a trade union. It's purpose was to stop the re-emergence of something like the Nazis and to prevent wars. I don't think it's instincts were ever really democratic.
Reddit is one of the few remaining platforms where reach is determined democratically. You demean that populous by calling it the singular "reddit", as if it's a single hive mind. But you'll probably get your way, I imagine the billionaire censorship campaign will come for it too eventually. Then you'll only ever get to hear thoughts you agree with, glorious day ey?
Reddit is the most censored platform out there… posts and users that are not aligned with subreddit mods get banned or deleted prolifically. Subreddits that do not align similarly soon find themselves banned
Idk if many people remember how Reddit was when it started, its whole draw was that it was a bunch of relatively intelligent/friendly western internet people who liked to kinda role play as a hive mind.
I wouldn't call it the most censored platform, but it still has vestiges of its old self, particularly with respect to philosophy and politics.
Subreddits get banned for egregious shit. Reddit stays on the side of letting subs up, rather than banning.
Reddit has made it harder for mods to find out which subs you are active in, so that you can’t be banned for activity in subs that are in cold wars with each other.
Only in some bubbles. But most normies I know are massive EU fanboys and showing them the malicious things the EU is doing, they just shrug at best, or call you a Putin supporter at worst.
They'll only realize this when the jackboot is on their neck. But probably not even then because in some EU countries government obedience is like a religion.
I recommend my own personal democracy metric: your level of democracy is proportional to how easily you can shout “moron!” at your representative and have them hear you. Do you know who they are, can you find them at a public meeting, and will they be able to hear you? For the EU, all three combine to give a pretty low score.
As we’re seeing in the UK right now, if you stump up £500 and find ten people to counter-sign your candidacy, you can even run against your MP as a novelty candidate. If you choose your novelty name right you also get to stand next to them at the alphabetically-ordered result announcement.
Compare with comatose Kentucky senators on their deathbed or EU commissioners based in a country with French train signs. Neither are insurmountable obstacles to democracy — hold up a sign? Google Translate? — but, by my metric, they are lesser options to something more local and accountable.
I’m sure, back in the day, rural folk took umbrage at having to ride their donkey to the local town just to be able to throw cowpats at their despised burghers. We of course can do it on TikTok nowadays but nothing beats yelling in person.
EU commissioners are similar to minsters/secretaries in national governments. My chance of getting within earshot of German federal minister are only slightly better than those of an EU minister - especially those that are not also members of parliament.
But if I’m unhappy with EU policies I can talk to a member of the EU parliament (and yes I know two of the members from my city) or I can talk to a member of the Bundestag since national governments have a large role in the EU.
In the end, my voice is tiny. Which is expected, after all I’m just one of over 450 million people living here.
I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/
normie = normal "average" people; People who aren't terminally online and up to date on tech and politics drama. Exactly the ones oblivious to negative things the EU is doing in the background, because stuff like Eurovision or the World Cup takes up more of their attentions span than complex tech or politics.
>here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative
Only because that's how you choose to see it.
> for anybody who disagrees with your world view
So having a world view where government surveillance state should NOT be OK makes me the bad guy?
Okay, but couldn’t a more transparent and accountable structure have accomplished the same result? Why do you need a system with seven different bodies, more than one of which can make what’s effectively laws?
For example, why have an elected parliament that can’t even originate law, but an unelected commission that can make regulations that are effectively laws?
That's implementation details though; one can absolutely think that "EU is a good idea" and "specific EU systems need improving" simultaneously, without contradiction.
It's like thinking "I like Canada and am a proud Canadian, though I think there's still a lot of inequality and many policies can be improved upon and we can certainly be more efficient".
I understand, but my question is directed to the second point. Even assuming people like the EU in principle, it's constitutional structure seems bizarre and in need of major reform, at least from my American viewpoint. But there doesn't seem to be any movement to "mend it, don't end it." Do most EU supporters also think the constitutional structure of the EU is fine as-is?
>Why do you need a system with seven different bodies more than one of which can make what’s effectively laws?
because the European Union contains more than 600 million people and almost 30 very diverse countries (and is a supranational, not federal body). It's institutions also do mirror the structures of most other large unions.
The Commission is an executive body, the parliament is a legislative body, and the council is comparable to the state bodies in bicameral governments. You may as well ask why you have a Senate or Bundesrat when you have a HoR and Bundestag. Because minoritarian and majoritarian interests need to be balanced, even more so in the EU. If even actual nation states a fraction the size of the EU and bona fide countries aren't governed in unitary fashion, why do you expect anybody would centralize so much power in the EU.
If the purpose is to avoid centralizing power, why can the Commission make regulations that have the force of law without consent from either Parliament or the Council?
it can't. Any new regulation goes through the parliament and council as a legislative act. What the Commission can do, if a legislation already exists, is pass regulation that doesn't modify essential elements. There's a direct analog to this in the US, Federal Agencies which end up doing a lot of the actual technical rule making work.
If the FAA decides to make some aviation regulation that's binding through the entire country, and likewise if EU parliament and council have adopted legislation for say, the emission rates of cars the Commission then goes and decides the actual rules. In this particular case of Chat Control 1.0 it was put to a vote, but they didn't reach the majority they needed because apparently a significant number of representatives weren't even there. Of course politically a bit of a dirty trick to push something through like this before a summer break, although I'd say the blame is on the representatives, not the Commission.
These kinds of institutions, and really in most countries they do most of the implementation work are necessary because you can't have your legislative vote on thousands of technical details of how cars or planes work, that's just a technocratic reality regardless of where you are.
"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last."
What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around, with the majority being for. I'm guessing that site has it reversed then or I don't fully understand the proposal? Looking at which politicians from my country voted "no" on this site it seems to be mostly the ones that I'd expect to vote "yes", so that would support this site just having the options reversed.
On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.
"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject.
Parties in favor of chat control were:
- European People’s Party and
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):
The whole thing also played like a game. 6 months ago the vote was signaled as pretty safely against chat control. You could watch how one by one the MEPs switched their positions. I assume they realized the vote wont hurt them because it's under the radar of general population. So it was safe to follow the lobby money.
I don't know about the other countries, but in Romania most politicians are aligned with our secret service (quite a few even in the upper echelons are literally undercover agents - which sounds like a conspiracy theory but is well documented in some cases), so they are quite naturally aligned with this initiative.
They have one job (with a high salary), a lot of personal assistants and technical support from specialist from their own party. They only have to remember if they have to press the red or the blue button.
Hmm most MPs from Renew, Greens and eurosceptics (ECR) from my country voted yes. I'm a bit surprised since some of those are hardliner Christian conservatives that I'd never vote for under any circumstances.
Democracy is when you just try and try again and again until it passes with 51/49. Then its democratic and legitimized and only evil terrorists would oppose those laws we have all democratically agreed upon.
Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, they just accuse you of "collusion with Russia" and ban your bank account via "sanction policies". The ECJ doesn't have to provide any evidence of crime, you have to provide counter-evidence of the absence of crime (and good luck defending yourself without money). The ECJ judges, who interpret and impose these laws, are also not democratically really elected or anything, yet they hold power over your bank account. Makes ya think.
I do not think this is true. Do you have any proof? I‘m aware only of German court refusing to apply urgent procedure to unblock his bank accounts. The sanctions were applied not that long ago for him to get decision by German courts or ECJ.
No, this is a valid point. Court cases are usually playing out slowly amd carefully. So, in order to prevent harm to the parties involved caused by that slowness, injunctions can be issued by the court that can provide reasonable relief from immediate damages from the dispute that can't be compensated for or reversed later. In Germany, getting relief through an injunction really is about proving that lasting damage is caused while the case drags on. The full merrits of the case are explicitly excluded from consideration.
>Redfish forced to cease operations as an official subsidiary of Ruptly/RT
>Immediately after Red Media gets founded by the guy, but now in Turkey
>Redfish social media presence gets renamed to Red Media
>Red Media kept staff, equipment and reused content from Redfish
Tbh I'd be pissed if sanctions could be bypassed by simply changing your logo and handle.
I'd go further and suspect the Russian disinformation apparatus just threw them under the bus for "EU bad" points.
It's such a textbook and standard Russian propaganda practice to finance and push divisive and partial views I'm even surprised people keep falling for it.
Another "journalist" the far left (in Spain at least) considers a martyr. The whole coverage of his arrest was a shitshow (Freedom of expression! Poland is fascist! Freedom for Pablo!)
Then it was shown he spied on Nemtsov, Polish journalists... and he even hugged uniformed GRU officers upon arrival in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, while wearing a "my empire needs me" t-shirt.
Anti-immigration, anti EU narratives, solid antisemitic (not just anti-Israel) stances, interviews with all sorts of sketchy characters, the whole set. Luckily for de Vlieger, he had sold the operation to literal Viktor Medvedchuk (and then the platform took a further Russia victim, Ukraine bad turn), so he remains unsanctioned.
EU cant claim the moral high ground anymore with the way this was done. They've joined the rest of the world now. This was a win for foreign companies and makes me wonder if the EU has been infiltrated by outside interests.
Can it be undone? One of the key aspects of any society is that it can in fact change law/policy/leaders/etc without war/rebels. yes harm happens when bad crap gets in but if the system still supports change, it is working.
For all the bad in trump era like roe vs wade among many others. The same mechanism are what allowed roe vs wade to exist. A double edge sword but better than alternative variants of totalitarian multi decade long regimes.
Adding the reminder that these votes and majority rejecting are of unelected bureaucrats, so the way that it was framed was approved from above while making practically impossible to reject but still theoretically possible so people are forced to swallow it.
Wow does it become law if the majority of those present opposed it? The American Congress might be utterly dysfunctional, but we’ve never had a law pass despite the majority of members voting against it. What am I missing?
Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.
In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.
Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.
With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.
In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
Highly educated people, often from wealthy backgrounds, who are very globally orientated.
They are generally not representative of the average person in Europe.
They are the people who European government appoints.
> In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?
> I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I just added that to explain why it wasn't obvious who the political class is there because their incentives are more opaque to me.
What do you think is the main reason these highly educated people act against the interests of the common people?
For example with Chat Control, are they worried about preventing populism from taking hold? Or do they personally gain something financially?
Roberta Metsola's actions this week jeopardise the legitimacy of the EU project as a whole.
It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them
EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above
I'm really surprised at the hurry. The EU, and many EU governments, have been ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.
It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.
At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else).
Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.
So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.
Honestly where do you even go if you want to get out from under this? The US was the option, but is clearly circling the drain. The EU is democracy theater at best, a democratic mandate that can be set aside any time it's inconvenient for Ashton Kutcher, and speedrunning the rebuilding of a new Soviet Union. Feels like a matter of time until they start building a new wall to keep you from leaving.
In all these places I imagine the people making these decisions are members of the populace. They need to be gently reminded that they are not more equal than others and people do not like their decision-making habits. The way anyone else engaging in anti-social behavior would be reprimanded.
Are you going to take your phone and laptop with you? If so, then it doesn't really matter where you're going. You'll be populating multiple surveillance systems regardless of where you choose to live.
Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.
I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.
Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.
They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that. They didn't anticipate the Ukraine invasion, or the Middle East blowing up again.
> They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that.
Did we though? At least in Germany a bunch of anti-climate-change projects and changes have been and are being canceled and we're going back to coal and diesel. It seems we're optimizing to have no results and negative progress at the moment.
That's why the EU is a neutral pushover bowing down to the whims and tantrum of US, China, Iran, India, Turkey, etc. because a lot of their industry, energy, exports/imports are from those countries so any disputes would be devastating to the EU economy.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
Military spending != military capability and will to use force. For example, Germany spends way more than France on defense but has a less capable military and with no nuclear capability to boot.
From force projection capability, the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage. It's a pushover despite all that military.
The reality is that you need to be willing to drop some bombs every now and then or at least threaten or blackmail those who threaten your interests and way of life, to be taken seriously and for other countries to never fuck with you. For example the Ukraine virtually admitted to blowing up Nordstream pipeline and sending Germany's manufacturing into the storage, just to disrupt Russia. Now do you think Ukraine or any other country, would ever dare to blow up a US pipeline or piece of their infrastructure? Probably not, because they'd get carpet bombed in retaliation and their leaders shot or kidnapped by delta force.
And since the EU never plays hardball like that it always gets taken advantage of by more ruthless and unscrupulous nations with smaller and weaker militaries because both its citizens and its leaders are too afraid to ever use force.
> the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage.
The rhetoric right now is just bizarre. Why should the EU force countries against their will using military? Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
> Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
Internationally agreed upon rules don't come from first principles, they're downstream from power. The world was, and will always be, might makes right.
International rules are meaningless without hard power to enforce them.
Your rules in your country are real because you have judges and police to enforce those rules.
But internationally, there's no planetary police force(other than the US when it wishes to act like one), so solving disputes is dependent to how strong your military is, or on you capability to inflict pain on the offending country through other means like economy or trade.
That why the US walks away unscalved from international conflicts and the EU keeps getting buried further.
And then stop people from being able to afford cheaper stuff from china (without european middlemen) by implementinh a 3eur customs fee on an 1eur phone case!
That's a good thing. We complain about lack of industrialisation. China has historically protected their fledgling industries, if we want industrialisation back, we need to as well, to the detriment of mindless consumption of cheap stuff
But we want cheap stuff, we don't have unlimited money.
This law didn't open a phone case factory in europe, it just made the 1eur case cost ~5euros (vat is paid on customs too). The only alternative is to go to a local mall and buy a case there for 10-15euros, and it's the same chinese case, just more expensive, but the reseller pays a lot less tax, since they can buy 100 cases for 1eur and still pay just 3eur of customs on them.
So I, the consumer get 300% customs on that 1eur case (+vat on huge customs fee), while the mall kiosk gets 3% customs fee, how is that fair? And how will that build a phone case factory in europe?
Why not build the factory first instead? Have it make 2eur phone cases, and then the price raise would make me buy the european one, but for now, it's just makes me pay more for the same chinese stuff, and I can't spend the leftover money for a local beer at a local bar anymore, so stuff actually made in europe.
They will rapidly reindustrialize when the first shots are fired. The EU's goal is the strategic defeat of Russia. What the common people think or want is irrelevant. All environmental and climate legislation that gets in the way will be waivered indefinitely until the war is over 5+ years of drone warfare and 100s of thousands dead.
There are thousands of strikes per day today. The chips needed to control a drone are not the same high cost ones needed for data centers or otherwise. Older fabs work just fine and countries can just eat into their other industries.
Beyond this, if you start attacking neutral fabs you lose out on anything from them. Your expectations are quite a bit off if you think striking fabs stops a conflict.
These chips are not the latest nvidia etc: false like this are relatively easy to set up compared to fabs that make the chips you seem to be thinking about.
There are many fabs using "last year's" fab processes for defense purposes. Wouldn't be surprised if they had quick and easy way to set up fabs for chip weapons production in bombed out buildings and warehouses. Defense doesn't need civilian fabs. In the end, we, the civilians, stand to lose tremendously.
Once the chip fabs get bombed much of modern society collapses and insurrection and civil uprising becomes everyone's #1 concern. Politicians are just too stupid to realize this because they live in a protected bubble of fantasy land where nothing they do usually ever directly effects them.
This does not even make sense as a conspiracy theory.
Had "EU" wanted to hurt Russia there were was a thousand ways to do that. But they didn't. Instead they traded and built infrastructure. Most EU countries saw Russia as a partner before they invaded their neighbour in the most gruesome way possible.
If anything, the EU should have reacted sooner. It was shameful they didn't. You can't really pretend like nothing while an all out war is taking place on the same continent.
War is less imminent now than ever. Ukraine has caused a ton of damage to Russia and at this point the Kremlin has more to worry about than EU countries (pretty much every Russian government ever is brought down from within).
No, leftist governments in the EU have failed to provide prosperity and failed in all their promises, now they're going for total control to try to stay in power.
Look at France, as soon as Le Pen was cleared to run for the presidency they start talking about anti "misinformation" laws...
It's true. Rearming and mobilizing troops will cause a reciprocal reaction in your neighbors. Whether or not war is or was imminent is irrelevant; europe will manifest it regardless.
Are you calling Macron a "leftist"? It does help your argument because it's a tautology that "the leftists failed to provide prosperity" if the entire political spectrum counts as such.
I don't share this outlook, sadly - given that military figures especially around the Eastern side of EU keep saying military conflict with Russia is "inevitable" in the next 4 years. Of course - they are in the military, their job is specifically to look at the worst case scenarios. But I wouldn't be so sure the risk is not there.
I do think there's the possibility Russia attacks a NATO country in an attempt to save face. I don't think they have the manpower or equipment to sustain an assault that would require any level of mobilization from EU countries.
Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing
but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the
hurry nor any slowness.
> ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately
It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.
My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.
I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.
If you look at who voted for chat control approval you would find that it's majority the currently in power centre right parties. The more far right or left you go the more likely they were against. It's like the one issue where AfD, die Linke and Greens are aligned. That suggests that it's most likely hard lobby that bribes the established class.
Nt being able to scan personal communications would break big tech platforms main monetisation strategy (selling peoples data).
None of these will be used to attack the far-right parties on the right though. They barely investigate those parties in the individual countries, but they focus more on the moderate left already.
To me it seems like the minority would be far more interested in implementing surveillance tools so they can target the majority in order to try and gain and maintain power.
It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.
I think that's a little naive. This sort of legislation is much more useful in terms of managing the local population and what they are allowed to talk about than it is in terms of profit—except, I suppose, in the sense that holding companies liable for what is said with their software is unprofitable.
for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)
obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent
In Canada, there's been a lot of talk about how immigration, "broke the Canadian consensus," around immigration as a good thing.
The problem is, there never was a consensus around immigration. The Liberals own stats prove that. What there was was a consensus around multiculturalism and tolerance.
Immigration itself, was always split evenly among three camps in Canada: those who want more, those who want less, and those who think we have the right amount.
Trudeau & his fake leftist brigade many have ruined multiculturalism for a large portion of Canadians, permanently.
The promise (for the non-insane majority) was that immigration was going to save our economic bacon. That's the orthodox economist viewpoint after all.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
It's not even that some migration is need to save the economy.
You'd need pronatalist policies or you're going to be doing that "some immigration" for ever and ever.
Hm well then perhaps it's time to focus on saving "people," over the economy. Perhaps...states are actually best used to serve their people, instead of endless growth.
> for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
This is completely BS. Nobody wants to let in unlimited migrants. This is not a goal of anyone, including the left-most left. In fact on the left we are very aware that our welfare systems can't support unlimited people.
The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers. There's processes in places to determine whether they deserve this. The right just want to turn their boats back as they approach (pushback) which is literally illegal.
It's important to realise though that asylum seekers are not the root cause of most of our issues even though they are portrayed as such by the right in deflection from the real issues. For example here in Holland the biggest societal issue is the farmers who pollute too many nitrogen compounds and that causes housing projects to be put on hold. The number of asylum seekers has been steadily decreasing over the years.
But farmers make up a huge piece of the right wing so they'll never take ownership of the problem. Better to deflect on someone else.
Numbers are going down, but in my area there are now 4 buildings with asylum seekers. Started with a hotel, then an office building, then some newly built expensive houses that were first up for rent and now rented for asylum seekers, and now another office building. Honoring existing treaties out of principle can also be put on hold when the situation changes.
From what I can tell, a big part of the problem in Europe is that people seeking asylum are prohibited from making a living (due to widespread belief in the lump of labor fallacy) and so have to be dependent on welfare.
Yes and when a government tries to do something about that (like Spain granting temporary permits so they can work and pay taxes) it angers the right even more.
The issues here are the same as they have been forever in every country; Spanish people simply are not going to do the jobs the immigrants are doing. This is the same in every country I lived in or visited, including the US. In Spain, most my uneducated neighbours feel too high to even work in bars, let alone pick fruit, shovel shit, pick up garbage etc. So who is going to do that besides immigrants who are eager to do it; a few generations later, they will vote right and complain about immigrants and will say they are too good to shovel shit, of course.
Look, you can either let people make a living and manage their own lives while contributing to society, or you can not let them make a living and ensure they're housed and fed. You can't be angry at A and also be angry at B.
Nice framing. How about C: not letting in a flood of financial refugees with completly different cultural values in the first place or at least send them back at some point instead of giving them free citizenship and all its benefits as justification for them working here or not being able to work?
> just don't want to see brown faces in the street?
They could be green for all everyone cares about. The actual relevant distinction with real word implication is criminal statistics and per capita rates. Not to mention everyday real life bad experiences for people living outside of the sheltered silicon valley world.
>countries they're from won't take them
That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.
If they are only asylum seekers, it means they are still in the validation process.
Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').
> The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers.
But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.
If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.
(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run.
2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim.
3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
Well, don't forget some of these wars are caused by us. The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses so Dubya could make his Halliburton buddies happy. As a result and pure neglect to form a legit democratic government after the war a power vacuum ensued which caused the rise of ISIS which contributed to the war in Syria. Which directly caused the mass migration on foot from Syria.
In this way we do have responsibility towards them. The migration from Africa is a different issue but it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
> Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more.
Well exactly but nobody is talking about that. Everyone is talking about the asylum seekers. Which are only a small part of the issue.
And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market. So the parties backed by those with money are always obstructing new construction and other means to make housing cheaper. This is a much bigger problem when it comes to housing than those few apartments granted to asylum seekers.
Moral responsibility is not real responsibility that can be enforced at the point of a gun by anyone or any nation, and so this responsibility does not have to be assumed
> The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
Surely those who need refuge from the worst Islamic regimes are the women, not the men?
As for the housing market, yes, it'd still be in a bad state with zero migration. But at the moment, it seems that we can't build enough to keep up with the migration alone. And when we do manage to build loads of homes, we completely neglect most of the infrastructure needed to support them.
We haven't built a reservoir since the 90s. Transport is a real problem, with the roads overloaded and in bad condition while rail projects seem impossibly slow and costly (HS2 is probably the last one the UK will ever attempt?). And then there's the NHS, policing+prisons, education system, and so on.
>for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
be warned citizen, you are committing a serious wrong and hate think and will hence be labeled nazi, fascist or any other dehumanizing word to legitimize violence against you. Please correct your mistake to protect our democracy.
It is in the age of "everyone not agreeing with me is a nazi" and "punching a nazi is good". Just have a look at the black shirt antifa terrorist lynching people or at least intimidating everyone not agreeing with them.
You don't get called a nazi because they think you are one but because it's easier to justify violence against you that way.
Every time HN posts another one of these privacy-invading EU regulations, a bunch of pro-bureaucracy people are in here cheering on regulations and knocking down anyone who suggests that maybe this time they've gone too far.
Do they? What I read now and in the past is mostly Americans being proud somehow (with Trump doing whatever he feels like to fill his family's pockets).
Is it not comparable in this case? Two western rich nations being undemocratic. At least in the EU there is voting (pointless in this case, but often effective); the US dude just does whatever he wants while the people are against it (ratings and wars which were promised would not happen etc).
This comment does not add any value to the discussion.
PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.
Many of us find it difficult to be relentlessly positive as we watch organizations that constantly paint themselves as the epitome of democracy act in a way counter to the repeatedly-expressed will of the people. I cannot smile my way into fascism.
If it's indeed the case, it adds more value than 100 comments explaining non-happening course corrections, and revolts, and backlashes they believe we'll see.
It's useful to add some cynicism in the mix (or in this case, pragmatism)
I think I'm one of those to whom you refer (except that I'm already "awake", or at least I like to think so). I'm normally pro-EU but this chat control is anathema to me. I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.
Yeah, this is also a step too far for me. The EU has also done good things, like GDPR, right to repair, fining big tech again and again ... but it rarely follows up as much as it needs to.
The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at least contains the economically most powerful EU countries, so that we have enough economical weight, that the other big players cannot simply push us around. Currently, the EU seems to be hellbent on losing its support. But how to prevent that other union to go down the same road?
Anyway, it seems clear, that we can no longer allow EU decision makers to make rules for us. They are not to be trusted.
The alternatives are also not to be trusted: if the EU falls we will have war between EU countries and hitlers and francos back in their seats but now with mass AI; Hello Frank, we detected in your email sent 21 years ago that you made fun of Mr Klein, his son, our glorious leader, has auto signed the documents for you to be sent to NeoWitz where you will spend the short remainder of your life.
To understand whether/to what extent this is brazen, I'd be interested to learn the reasoning why urgency procedures are possible, and in particular, why the apparent majority against shouldn't have been enough, and what is needed to classify something as urgent.
Afaik, EU rules provide for urgent procedure only for proposals at first reading, while here it was used to compress a second reading vote and skip committee, just perfectly timed for the last sitting before recess.
The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.
To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.
The urgency procedure is not the issue here, the problem is that this was Parliament's second reading, and the treaties (article 294 TFEU) say:
> Second reading
> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:
> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;
> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;
> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.
It was the second reading, but was it also treated as such? (Because if so, it sounds like this would have been a rejection?) If not, what is the steelmanned reason for doing so?
Yes, it was the second reading; because of that, the motion for rejecting the Council common position was not approved, since it received a majority, but not an absolute majority, of votes
I don’t understand how a governing system requires a majority to reject a change to the status quo. The status quo must be maintained unless a majority decides to change the status quo.
It is the equivalent of having a gas pedal in a car that is fully activated unless you put your foot down.
The urgency procedure has nothing to do with the absolute majority requirement. It's necessary because, in the second reading, the Parliament should have an absolute majority to reject or amend the Council (i.e. the governments of the member states) position but only a simple majority to approve it
Its honestly a bit sad that this in particular got people up in arms on social media, nobody gave a single shit when they sacrifice millions of people and entire nations on the periphery to their death cult of market orthodoxy.
The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.
The regulation was rejected today with 314 votes against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions, but because of Metsola's lawfare that classified this regulation as under an "urgent procedure", an absolute majority was required to reject.
The EU parliament has 720 representatives (at the moment 719, one seat is vacant apparently), so 113 representatives didn't show up for the vote. The absolute majority would've been reached with 361 votes.
And there were a lot of them. Some i assume just couldn't give a fuck and are on vacation. The others for sure did it to help approval while keeping "clean" to their audience.
Sure, then just let the normal legislative process run its course, no need to bleed political capital and get an already polarised electorate to hate the EU even more by shoving this legislation through in this way.
I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".
Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.
That's how multi-party parliamentarism usually works. A minority is not allowed to choose the leader just because they are a slightly larger minority than the others.
Because no party has an outright majority, there are weeks of negotiations after the elections, as the parties try to find a compromise acceptable to a majority. Once a deal has been reached, the parliament votes to confirm it. If the vote fails, the parties return to negotiations.
Von der Leyen was chosen to head the Commission, because she was an acceptable compromise. All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
All the European Council's negotiations were private.
No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.
> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?
All real negotiations are private. When politicians debate or negotiate in public, they inevitably start talking past each other to the general public.
Voting rituals would be a waste of time. The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions. If no party has a majority, no candidate can hope to get majority support before the whole package has been agreed on.
> The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions
It's two votes, not one; the President and the rest of the Commission are confirmed separately. In this case there was a four month gap between the two votes!
VDL was confirmed by the Parliament on 16 July 2019, by 383 votes to 327 against, with 22 abstentions[0].
Her Commission was approved by the Parliament on 27 November 2019 by 461 votes to 157 against, with 89 abstentions[1].
I agree, my point about political capital was about the overton window shifting to allow a more mainstream EU-skeptic platform for national parties, platforms which up until recently were easily labelled Russophiles or European traitors for US money.
I was aware that VDL obtained her role by routing around the Spitzenkandidaten process, but I was never aware that her confirmatory vote was done in this way.
Her unpopularity at home also reinforces the idea that unpopular politicians can be sent to Brussels, because "in Brussels, you can't hear them scream".
It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.
My point is that this was a minority of 46.7% making that decision (because of a technicality that has been pointed out already). In a dictatorship, a minority of 1 against a million or more makes all the decisions. Even though you can say 46.7% and 0.0001% are both below 50%, it's missing a lot of nuance to claim they are of the same nature.
What should worry everybody is the big picture (trying to abstract from politics, ideologies and specific situation). In recent years we had:
- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)
- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)
- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)
So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.
There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.
Isn't it interesting that if you remove the US from that list, it all aligns with US foreign policy? How fortuitous that EU interests just happen to coincide so well with our American friends.
Then you are not paying attention, he satisfied his Murica-First Cult like a circus clown. The US is the biggest arms dealer in the world, the Europeans are delivering weapons from their stockpile to Ukraine, then the US is filling those stockpiles up. Works like clockwork, just like under Biden, there is no actual change in policy towards Russia/Ukraine.
EU is doing some concerning moves but, looking at your points, Russia attacked Ukraine. EU is not at war with Russia, only supporting Ukraine.
Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.
Yeah US is threatening to invade and take over Canada, Greenland, I mean no wonder the alliance is no longer strong right?
And the internal struggles are indeed a problem, this is due to the extreme right which has completely taken over America (and is sponsored by Russia). It was good to see the Hungarians came to their senses but it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now. Russia and America obviously not. Canada yes but they're not big. China just serves its own interests, they will never care about a partnership. They just want our money to buy their products, nothing else.
I think South America is another potential one and the EU is trying to connect there with eg Mercosur. But America is sponsoring the extreme right there too as you can see in Honduras and Colombia recently. And in Venezuela of course.
> The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
― Lord Palmerston
There are lots of possible allies, but no one single ally to depend on. India to counter balance China, Canada to have an ally in North America, etc.
> it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
Well yes the US has wanted it but never actually threatened to invade it before.
And no I don't think it's a good idea for Europe to become a federated state. The US' current situation shows how bad that could turn if the wrong person is elected.
At least we have the national governments here as a safeguard and we can also leave the EU if needed.
And yeah I didn't name India as a possible partner because they're too close with Russia. The EU is trying to make some deals with them but it's a bad idea while Modi and the BJP in general is in power in my opinion. They're similarly bad to minorites as the Chinese.
Indeed, this happens when you sacrifice public dialog for short-term gains calling everyone who does not agree with your points "far-right", "nazi", "russian asset". There will be literal fascists and people will support them just because they promise(probably bait-and-switch, but does not matter) to address public problems instead of gaslighting that problems are non-existent.
We call them that because it's true. The far right parties don't want to solve problems. They thrive on anger and hate. If they actually would solve something people would stop voting for them. Because anger and hate are the only things they have to offer.
They don't care about solving problems around migrants. It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
> It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
Its similar to Trumpism in that sense, if you ask afd voters for example they will talk about migration and crime. Must all be racists. The mainstream discourse ends there.
From a leftist pov I think its the dissatisfaction in the cartel party that makes this scapegoating popular in the first place. There are many meaningful ways that peoples material conditions are worsening, which is ignored by the establishment, then a new party comes along and blames it all on migrants. The fact the afd calls itself "alternative" is telling perhaps, it directly challenges the neoliberal "there is no alternative" (Thatcher) / "alternativlos" (Merkel) doctrine.
Germany almost 4x its defense spending, they spend hundreds of billions on defense while cutting social and infrastructure spending. Germany has neolib austerity literally written into their constitution since 2009 (debt break), interestingly the afd voters believe the inverse, that the german government has been over-spending for decades and there is no austerity which they actually want. But they also believe the cdu are leftists so there is that, just shit in their brains at the end of the day so how do you really make sense of it?
But now you have governmental overreach and legalized spying on European Citizens by (mostly) US Companies, so i would say that Law is truly binary bad.
Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.
But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.
Europe or EU has never looked at data protection against private companies and data protection against government as one and the same. Remember, that even GDPR has carveout for governmental use.
And it's not overreach it's kinda more of a loose exception to the GDPR which actually allows companies to read messages. Which they would already do without GDPR
I am not sure if the absurdity of that statement is intentional, or a result of just how far the Overton window has drifted.
First of all, private companies shouldn't be given that responsibility to begin with. Meta in particular, has a long history of unethical and immoral usage of personal data. I won't use the term "illegal", as the question of legality becomes moot when punishment can be factored in as a cost of doing business [1]. Given the long list of things Meta has been caught doing, together with the in grand total zero seconds of jail time. I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this would be any different. I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened, where in some room without windows and a lot of lawyers and business analysts, they have ran models and concluded that the cost of getting caught here is "a good financial decision". Wouldn't be surprised either if it also came with a guarantee of personal protection from prosecution, from NSA and other government entities, in exchange for a hand in that data pipe.
Secondly, for this to carry any plausibility for being motivated by "protect the children" arguments, it requires a minimal effort be enacted on more effective measures, and a measured balance with the cost this comes at. There are very good arguments for why this law would actively harm children. Throw in some Bayesian understanding, and you better have a state of the art system that somehow pretty much never has false positives, nor false negatives, where this was also the only way to detect and avoid said abuse. I don't know the numbers here, but I highly doubt this is a good idea, even with infinite generosity as to good intentions. We've all been children, we've all done stupid things. Now throw in the brilliant and surely-not-to-scar-a-child-for-life situations where parents and strangers looking at something they thought was private, and have a "grown up discussion" about. I shiver at the thought.
Thirdly, and aside from directly harming children in situations where they selves use technology and naively, and unwisely share pictures, consider how many take pictures of their own kids without clothes, because they are normal human beings, who do not consider there to be anything sexual about said depiction. You want to throw law enforcement in the mix here? Child protective services?
Fourthly, consider the possible negative for this abuse. If normal behavior (e.g. children being children, and e.g. normal parents otherwise sharing normal pictures if you are a normal person) can be selectively chosen as being a heinous crime, this should scare anyone, especially consider the political shifting trends towards fascism.
Western Europe is a place where the political structures, for better or worse (mainly worse) still trust people to follow the law. Much EU politics makes more sense with this in mind. They consider a law saying "you may only use this capability to scan for child porn" to be a barrier against other uses, the same way they consider a law saying "you must get the user's consent before setting a tracking cookie" to prevent anyone from setting a tracking cookie without consent. They don't feel a need for hard fences like "chat must be encrypted" or "browsers must disable cookies on every website by default" because they consider the soft law to be an adequate solution.
In this case, the phrase “consumer protections” is almost insulting when the things it’s supposedly protecting us from are a triviality compared to the horror show being introduced.
There will surely be some people who applaud your post for pointing this out. But the vast majority of people don't see "government spies on me" vs "private industry spies on me" as a meaningful distinction and there are MANY MANY recent examples of this: the discourse around Flock, the discourse around ICE using personal information to trace dissenters, the discourse around DOGE and Palantir.
But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.
I see a significant distinction between these two things. And I see chat control as a significant intrusion in my personal life.
Laws and democracy is a constant fight, no democracy was complete and perfect the day it was announced.
We lost a battle now. And unlike people like you who only resort to insults I am not willing to give up just because of this setback. I will continue to fight for these rights.
They're strong protections relative to most other jurisdictions, where there is no need to pass laws exceptionally allowing certain uses of private data, since such uses were never forbidden and sometimes are mandatory beyond what Chat Control 2.0 would mandate.
Chat Control 1.0 is the voluntary carveout rolled forward, nothing more. Breyer is right that this locks the door on stronger action against the real drivers. Even 'voluntary' scanning runs into ePrivacy Article 5(1) and CJEU jurisprudance on general monitoring. Providers keeping client-side scanning are exposed the moment a national court tests it against La Quadrature. The child safety framing keeps eclipsing case law that already limits mass processing of private comms.
USA allows overreach from both government and corporations. But pretends to hate a strong government.
EU allows overreach from government, but limits corporations. And pretends for it to be about rights, but in practice it's about keeping the overreach to themselves (the government).
This, and other similar legislation, serve as a constant reminder of why the American founding fathers had to revolt against tyranny, and why constitution amendments like the 1st and 4th exist. The 4th in particular was written as a response to a British law similar to Chat Control (writs of assistance).
It's hard to compare US and EU internet freedom because a person usually spends most of their life in one place and is clueless about the life in other.
I've never lived in US, were there any cases of ISPs blocking websites in USA? Even DNS-level blocking counts
A guy was arrested for a joke he posted on social media about Charlie Kirk. He spent some time in jail but ended up winning a lawsuit. So the answer isn't exactly 0 in the US
It's actually quite hard to say, as there are no official figures on arrests specifically for social media posts in either country. And lot of the specific cases that people point to in the UK (e.g. Lucy Connolly) have parallels in the US:
(The figures that the American right give for "arrests for social media posts" in the UK are actually figures from certain police forces for arrests under various pieces of online communication legislation, many of which have nothing to do with social media.)
> and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.
That's called "luck".
A friend of mine did likewise, and got a knock, then handcuffs, then a trial. He was acquitted because everything he said was allowed under the first amendment. In fact, several academics had published the same/similar stuff he did and not had any problems (or ever worried about them). But he was of the wrong race/religion...
There was never a time in the 20th-21st century where you can practice your 1st amendment rights and be absolutely sure you wouldn't get a knock on your door.
I think it's actually called statistics. In 2026, it would seem I'm statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK. I mean it's not like the reason is hidden. Arrests typically require crossing into narrow unprotected categories under the First Amendment: true threats (Virginia v. Black standard), incitement to imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio), or specific crimes like credible harassment, cyberstalking, or extortion.
It's quite a bit different than the UK's hate speech laws and the comparative result makes complete sense.
Then we agree that it's not unreasonable for me to feel confident I am unlikely to get arrested in the US over a social media post than in the UK, which is the whole point I was making all along.
If you want to invoke statistics, I'm sure 99% of UK citizens are confident they won't get arrested over a social media post either. They probably worry about it a lot less than you would if you moved there.
Well, sure, I tend to ground my feelings about matters in statistics. If others don't do that, then it makes total sense they might feel worried about it. But I mean there's entire groups of people saying, quite loudly, that they don't like the social media arrests and how they feel draconian. You don't really need to "guess" about a sentiment. Clearly enough people are concerned that it's being talked about at a national level. I'm not aware of anything similar, or to the same degree, happening in the US.
No, was just pushing back at the idea that the social media arrest isn't a concern to 99% of the British population. Typically 190,000 is considered the floor because there's a wide margin of people either too busy or too scared to sign their signature. Same is true in the U.S.
But sure, obviously we're never going to agree here. I've provided my logic/evidence and you're not convinced. Fair enough. I'm content to let others review the same evidence and form their own opinions on the matter.
Got a link for those UK stats? Last time I went looking, even a Parliamentary report expressed that the stats are difficult to find, because the crime is eg malicious communications which covers a lot of acts.
Your links in another comment do not contain nearly enough detail to support the argument you're attempting to make. The 2 laws mentioned therein are broad and could cover many acts.
It's like a newspaper looking at the statistics for murder and creating a story that murder by asphyxiation with a pillow is on the rise.
n.b. I am not disagreeing that the police are policing social media. It's obviously an easy target. But we should be careful of newspapers pushing narratives, by asking for precise data
Well, that presents a problem when the news organizations that did investigate are just outright dismissed. The Times did a FOI request and are the ones who published the 12,183 figure which ultimately demonstrated the massive increase year over year.
The fact that there were signed petitions, two reports from supposably untrustworthy news organizations (that I could fine, there's probably more), and that it's been discussed at the national level multiple times, will either convince someone that it's 100% fabricated if they lean one way politically or that it's true if they lean the other way.
More and more I've found that it has nothing to do with data anymore. People will just ignore whatever isn't suitable to their beliefs.
You don't have the data on arrests specifically over social media posts, because they don't exist, so you chose to dismiss my reply and attempt an ad hominem.
I am not leaning one way or the other 100%, as indicated in my earlier reply. You are just reading what you want to read
I agree when there is not precise data available, inferences can be made from other data, but you must not state things like "statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK" when you don't have the actual, relevant statistics.
If you wish to argue with statistics, you must present them. And they will be cross examined, as is right and proper.
It was an observation, based on my own experiences, of how more and more people are dismissive based on their existing preferences. A refrain if you might. I have no idea what you believe or what your motivations are and I wasn't trying to guess.
But I digress. I'm the only one who has even attempted to provide any sort of data in this thread - which is typical of HN. Cast doubt and force the other party to continue to provide information until some unstated goal is satiated (and I often find the goal tends to move as well). It's a brilliant tactic, basically no effort and you can continue to feel confident in your assumptions. I miss when conversations were reciprocal.
Tens of millions of Americans, usually supporters of the 2nd, have openly declared that having a firearm on you while at a protest is a crime punishable by death, and have done nothing to stand up against Trump, who has openly declared his hostility to the 2nd amendment multiple times now.
Bringing a rifle to a protest you expect to get hot, brandishing it about, and then shooting someone in self defense is perfectly fine, but having an every day carry firearm, getting held down by the president's personal paramilitary org, and being shot execution style is apparently fine.
I'm sick and tired of the stupid claims about how important the 2nd is while the very advocates of it only bring it up to talk about how much they want to shoot democrats.
There's idiots on all sides. Plenty of sane people who are too busy working and raising families instead of loudly participating in politics that still hold a balanced view on the subject.
I can hold the situation you cited as an example that should be shown in training in how not to handle a situation like that while at the same time vehemently pushing back against the bureaucrats trying to disarm me. It's why I've always identified as an independent my whole life.
Some people say im rather pessimistic - but i still kinda hoped that the EU will not go down this path.
That said - i was obviously wrong.
I don't really know what else to say than : this breaks a fundamental foundation of privacy. Sure i was never 100% aligned with EU level decisions (neither with my residing country one's) but that's just... wrong on so many levels... how can i even still argue to people that EU and democracy are good if this is what its heading for?
Usually i try to explain stuff with common grounds, the bigger picture or whatever is fitting. You can't have everyone happy on every decision.
But at this point im lost of arguments. They just betrayed every citizen from my pov.
So whats my point of this comment? Maybe i need to vent in an environment where i think people might get how bad this actually is, since people IRL around me don't seem to remotly understand the impact....
Really you should have felt betrayed back in 2011.
This isn't Chat Control 2.0 - which is the thing that has been getting attention for the last few years.
E2E encryption should not be broken, we should find other ways to catch and find predators.
Scanning messages in platforms (Chat Control 1.0)? I honestly thought this has always been done, I don't consider any platform private.
A lot of Internet regulations are just catching up to ones that exist in meat space.
I think what scares people when the regulations come to the Internet is that they are highly automated, and I think there's potential for mass injustices when automated systems.
Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments:
"What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures."
As I'm not trained in law, I have no strong opinions on if this proposal is a net positive or negative, almost any big name LLM will do a better job than I can manage by looking at the legal text, stroking my goatee and saying "I recon…". But what I can say that I've just seen a headline about a class action lawsuit in the USA due to grok making CSAM and the company failing to assist the police in their investigations, and another about Meta facing a lawsuit in India for delivering advertising for CSAM on Instagram.
My steelman in favour of the legislation:
The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution.
My steelman against the legislation:
Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging.
Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.
Real time notifications here would solve a lot of issues...
Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.
Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:
"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"
And half an hour later
"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"
I think you're probably wildly overoptimistic about the ratio of police officers to private nudes.
No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...
Such systems are unfortunately trivially defeated by, for example, adding rings of colourful blocks around the edges of the image. If the scanning systems are then updated to notice rings around the image, bad actors will start cutting images in half and adding the colours there, etc. It's a never-ending arms race that's bound to leave regular people worse off.
Don't you think modern image analysis tools such as llms will be easily defeated by measures such as adding colored rings?
A couple of years ago you could add some pixels to an image to change it's automatic classification from cat to ostrich. But the tech has improved and I think the race has now firmly been won by the side trying to de-obfuscate images, and only in rare scenarios can images actually be obfuscated efficiently and consistently.
> Don't you think modern image analysis tools such as llms will be easily defeated by measures such as adding colored rings?
The LLMs think one specific mystery plant in my garden hiding behind the hedge is velvetleaf; no, wild cotton; no, linden; no, hibiscus; no, mulberry; no, knotweed; no, paulownia; no, catalpa; no, hydrangea; no, grape vine; no, pokeweed.
Many of these claims were trivial for me to falsify with a quick image search, they don't look much like each other or my mystery plant. The things the AI "identified" were often simply not true of the photo.
Basically, even with current tech, you go straight back to false positives and false negatives: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628
One thing that should be noted is that, since the Parliament has been able to approve an amendment by absolute majority (which explicitly excludes E2E chats), the procedure is not over and the law is still not enacted, a third reading is still needed, after negotiations with the Council and the Commission, and in this case the Parliament will be able to reject the act by a simple majority
The new reading will happen if the Council rejects the amendment approved by the Parliament. When it does they have 6 weeks to negotiate, and then 6 weeks to approve the result of negotiations, if any.
Basically, the hope is that the Council rejects that amendment in its second reading (but right, the probability of this is not really high, since it codifies what was already true). I should have explained it better in my comment
This article seems to make good points about how useless and invasive Chat Control 1.0 is, but then posits Chat Control 2.0 as the answer. Is the latter not also terrible for privacy, demanding backdoors in all encrypted chat tech?
> Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes.
This vote was urgently scheduled for today, the last day of parliament before the summer break. 113 MEPs were not present for this vote, likely having taken vacation days to extend their break. It's hard to believe choosing to do the vote today was done accidentally.
> the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.
Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals
If there's no shadowy cabal then why do our politicians continue to pass domestically unpopular laws? I mean, there doesn't have to be a literal shadowy cabal, the effective "cabal" could be a combination of corruption, lobbying and pressure from security agencies.
Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular.
Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.
With this level of spying it becomes important to learn to use technologies that are outside of this system that people on HN usually laugh at. Tor, VPNs, Bitcoin, Bitchat, Nostr based socials, Signal and get some extra clean hardware (phone, laptop...) to work with when you need to...
If you so much as mention that this bill was passed to censor criticism of Israel, you will yourself be censored. Our politicians don't actually represent us.
Wow, I guess governments of the whole western world just woke up one morning and decided to clamp down on the free exchange of information on the internet at the precise moment their citizenry was up in arms over Israel committing mass genocide and blackmailing their politicians. What a coincidence!
Although it would be much more exciting to have some world conspiracy, try to consider what that would mean. That conspiracy's so powerful it can singularly decide votes across a union of dozens of countries, and yet still feels the need to enact a law to invoke that power in the first place.
No, this is a much more benign form of government overreach, one born out of a normal desire to suppress citizens, and perhaps a healthy amount of regulatory capture by large corporations.
You don't think Jeffrey Epstein blackmailing US and UK celebrities and politicians on behalf of the Israeli government qualifies as a conspiracy? Or that Epstein was one of many similar influence assets operated by Israel? Hell, AIPAC even brags publicly about buying elections here in the US.
Some people would happily set a bonfire to our collective rights and freedom and democracy if it meant Israel could continue the harvest of children in the third world. Instead of admitting that, they feign denial.
This is Pegasus by Policy. There is a reason why all Epsteinist Occupied Governments are pushing the same thing worldwide and that reason is so Israel can commit future Holocausts in peace and quiet.
Israel is the horcrux of Emnity towards Freedom. This is why they destroy freedom everywhere they infect the halls of power.
Yet people remain in denial because genociding third worlders is regular programming for Epsteinists.
I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.
The defence against this is to vote these MF MEPs out and kick asses of non–elected Eurocrats. Not going to happen.
Tech solution: Open GPG with PQE protocols. There is nothing else left (other than One Time Pads.)
And this is just the beginning. With LLMs and AI they will have resources to scan every character we type.
Or you can just host your own server like IRC. This is beyond idiotic, if they think that pedophiles will begin to suddenly use WhatsApp then I very much doubt about their basic literacy.
Such a weak reasoning and method which they used to push this is ridiculous agenda lead me to strongly suspect there must be something else behind it.
From Google: "The law seeks to require digital platforms and messaging services (like WhatsApp and Gmail) to automatically scan users' private messages, emails, and photos to detect and report illegal content"
-- EU policy makers are really honest people, hats off to them. There's no way politicians in my country allow their chats to be scanned, because they're very corrupt.
I find it amusing HN the degree to which wears horse blinders. Some of us have been raising concerns with EU for many years and we get shut down, called right wingers, Nazis and whatever other derogatory term is popular.
If it took this much for you to realize EU is bad, I wonder how much it will take before you’ll do something. As it stands, it sounds like everyone is complaining, but are still bending over and taking it. Thoughts and prayers.
I no longer hold the belief that The West is moral or good-faith actor. In my lifetime I've watch the state go from being relatively benign, to maintaining face, to all-out racket, corruption and anti-democratic behaviour. I sympathise with both left-wing and right-wing sentiment. The system no longer works by-and-for the people. Call it elite capture, call it communism. My view is we're dealing with a Janus-like system.
I would have expected the right wing parties to be against this, somehow, but... Nope, just checked my country's votes, and nationalists just love cc1.0 it seems.
There are at least two options to verify age without humiliating procedure of taking a selfie with a passport like a porn actor.
First, there are USB tokens that can hold a private key and sign messages. Such tokens could be sold at places accessible only to adults and verify that they are indeed adult. Obviously every token should hold the same private key.
Second, OS could implement "parent mode" which allows installing only white-listed, government approved apps (no Telegram or Whatsapp or other dangerous apps, but school apps are ok) and opening only white-listed government-approved websites. Put in jail the parents who did not set up a parent mode. Problem solved without passports and verifications.
If, however, the government insists on selfies, it means they just want to identify users and compile lists of "untrustworthy", "rebelious" and other persons of interest.
Also, employees who do verification, sometimes create internal chats where they post pictures of clients and mock their appearance. We had such case with Alfa-Bank in Russia, where the photo of a funny client with a passport and third-grader level comments leaked to Instagram account of employee's friend. The bank paid approximately $20 as a compensation.
Maybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?
You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.
1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.
2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.
3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)
4) Bob sends the image to Alice.
5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.
(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)
Well when it comes to ending encrypted traffic, I would assume if they can’t read your traffic you will be in violation and the police will show up at your door to kindly imprison you for a few years
If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.
Steganography fundamentally requires you to be able to know where the data is, which requires you to have the original image to compare against. The only other strategy I'm aware of is setting known pixel positions to exact data, which is very easy for basic tools to spot and decode. Or to add the data to non-visual data blocks if the image format supports those, which is also quite easy to spot.
Getting the criminals is not the point here, mass control is. How many of your friends do this now? The criminals might do it, but why, when they can just meet in person and talk there, without a digital recording of what they talk?
Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.
Any evidence what so ever for the "mass control" claim?
I do not want E2E comms broken, but these posts on hackernews always bring out such outlandish claims.
You can't be applying the "mass control" claim for the attempts at stopping the spread of CSAM? So can you point to any evidence of wide spread "mass control" with Chat Control 1.0?
Because it's control of what we send and it's done en-masse.
I was born in a communist country (with red stars, a communist party and a dictator), and even back then, the government requiring post office workers to read (and photocopy) our mail would seem absurd, but now, somehow it's ok, because "it's on the internet". And yes, CSAM could be sent via normal mail too.
Same for every repressive thing... if you went to a bar, and had to show your id, have it logged, and someone would write down when you came, who you sat with and how long you've talked, that would seem absurd even then... but now, since "it's on the internet", storing metadata is somehow ok.
Stop protecting the governments, if they wanted to stop pedos, they have the whole epstein list, and they don't care about it.
As if I wasn't apathetic enough about democracy. The only voting bill worth caring about is the one in the wallet. Then you can be the source of the corruption, instead of the sink. Every man for themselves.
EPP is a corrupt, authoritarian regime that will hopefully not last long. It is not a coincidence the union took a massive, noticeable turn for the worse in 2019 -- the von der Leyen presidencies have done immeasurable damage it will never recover from. They have also been complicit in crime and corruption from Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, for years, and that is even if you exclude the Pfizer disaster nobody was held responsible for. They are giving the opposing parties ammunition they need to take them and the dream of a stronger union down, and the only way they can fight back is banning those parties outright, one of which voted completely against this utterly insane, already repeatedly rejected mass scanning. It's hard to think of the union as anything positive when this is the direction it is taking.
How do we design such apps? Let's rule out age attestation (to allow only some age ranges) or scan of content because they are orthogonal to apps. What are the design patterns that prevent adults to meet kids? No messaging?
I mean, even the victims themselves came out and explicitly emphasized that scanning chat messages does not help.
I'm feeling these politicians was not doing it for the victims. Instead, it's almost like the victims are providing reasons to allow the politicians to expand their own power.
The Accelerationism (see note below) part of me think it's a good thing, because a heavily regulated country is often also a backward country. Doing things like this long enough, then you get out competed by everyone else, your population shrinks to zero and your land gets reused.
(Note: The word "Accelerationism" in the Chinese dissidents circle means that, if a bad future is certain and it trends to destroy itself eventually, we might as well just let it happen faster, so the pain maybe shorter. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-in-Chief)
Look, EU obviously have a few good regulations. But a regulation must be correctly designed and implemented, and it must not punish good people. Scanning private messages is a punishment to all.
If EU must scan something, I'd say scanning all messages/phone calls sent out by the politicians might do more good, consider how much trust people put on them (maybe they shouldn't).
So much effort and emotions wasted. EU should have a mechanism that disallows repeatedly pushing for things until they are greenlit. Lack of this type of measure renders whole governance incapable of being taken seriously.
If the EU just were to redirect the resources they're currently allocating to regulations like AI and Chat Control rather towards developing a genuinely competitive OpenAI or Anthropic alternative …
Once you realise the age group that are in that bracket of european law making you realise it's gen X AKA the helicopter parent generation and it all becomes less shocking.
More interesting that that mostly childless politicians are in favor of such things. That's makes sense since those legislations are NOT about children.
To me as a European, this is not only about the dystopia that is becoming the tech survailance of society but it is a perfect example of what I feel the EU is. It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.
This is what we have... Unelected bureaucrats using every opportunistic tool they can to, in my opinion get rid of democracy. What are we fighting for at this point? Personally I have lost all faith in the EU and I'm embarrassed to be living here. I'm so disgusted by politicians and the obvious de-route of democracy.
I know MEPs are. But who ellected Ursula? Who as far as i understand is the mother of this survailance... Calling This orban/Putin propaganda is Low. It is removing focus from the fact that i point out democracy is slowly withering in EU and survaulance is growing. Just look at the survailance lad for cars that was accepted the other day. I have no love for either of Putin/orban im simply telling my experience not making propaganda!
It is a renewel of something highly unpopular that was voted down already. It is how the EU operates look at the other comments here about "democracy". It is put to vote on last minute where they know MEPs are on vacation... Well the ** should not go on vacation before the vacation starts but that is just another thing about EU! Why are they in vacation before it starts?! It is so complicated rules that not even the news and experts totally understand what is going on.
Question about this from a EU citizen who doesn't know the details of how the EU works (who does?): Are there legal means to challenge this vote based on the procedure that was taking place?
innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.
Yank all the panopticon-levers that push social stability till the lever breaks, because that is all the levers you got.
Social Networks to push ideas and memes, that work against social-decomplexification parties and individuals.
There are also the other leviathan cybernetic levers- like implants- if you need insulin, or hearing aids- you are basically a deputy for social stability. Thus every prosthesis-citizen you can produce is a good citizen.
But it may still not be enough to prevent decomplexification events like Khemer Roughe or the Taliban.
Thus, push technology that allows for quick recovery, because somewhere some serverfarm with the most patient tutor survives.
Scenario-tree-root-hardening looks like this from the inside.
PS: Fuck you Peter - but its work that needs doing. The retarded don't herd themselves. Or they do, but if they knew- all the simulations would be worthless.
My utopian vision would be to change the selection/voting process so that our representatives are chosen based on real achievements and scientific understanding of the world, and not based on popularity and ability to persuade the crowd on standup-like rallies lasting 20 minutes, with empty words, populist-like propaganda, and lies hitting people's emotions instead of critical thinking.
My another utopian wish would be to held them accountable for what they promised in the campaign and how they align with their constituents' needs.
Instead we get corrupted idiots who don't even know what they're voting for, why they're voting that way, and if it's important at all. Chat control is one blatant example, mandatory cameras inside cars constantly spying on drivers is another one. Whoever advises them idiots, they're in real control of what's happening in EU.
Sadly, European Union that could be really useful (all-EU, flagship AI model anyone? But no, better restrict AI development, what can go wrong?) so people would genuinely like it, chosen to fight the people and try to gag criticism.
> What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
> What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
Myeahno. To hell with draconian law disguised as child protection and to hell with the powers that be, who knowingly and willingly are ruining just about everything nice.
> In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding: [..] Strict security standards for messaging apps (“Security by Design”) to prevent cyber grooming.
It's dispiriting to see a supposedly pro-privacy politician launder backdoors as "strict security standards".
I think they mean local scanning for CSAM - which feels like a reasonable solution that preserves privacy, but still addresses the real problem of, y'know, child abuse?
What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?
Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?
If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?
Weaponizing our own property against us, mandating that it spies and tattles on us, turning inanimate objects into policemen to construct the most total surveillance dystopia, is not in any way "reasonable". In no way does it "preserve privacy".
And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.
They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.
I'm curious where I can go to see real regularpeople who support this, is there like a different side of reddit, comments section? I don't know anyone who is blatantly anti-privacy and I want to hear their reasoning. Otherwise this just seems to be the EU rolling into a weird distributed autocracy without anyone blinking an eye.
"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". -- Jean-Claude Juncker, VDL's predecessor
It's not so much "support" as "not caring." Most "regular" people, when they hear about measures like this, say "oh no, the government can see my boring text messages to grandma, who cares", much they same way they shrug off the dangers of having a robot vacuum live-streaming the inside of their house to China ("there's nothing interesting in my house, who cares").
State owned news will follow orders or people be removed. Arrrrr!
They will have their incentives, even if people at the top of news reporting institutions are highly paid. Wouldn't want that dirt they have hidden be uncovered, now would they? Better dance to the tune and keep an overpaid job living by leeching off the tax payers.
Example: Look at Germany and how many Rundfunk Intendanten there are and how much they make a year, plus how little coverage such topics get.
The citizens do have a say: they vote in elections. This is a temporary law that was implemented 5 years ago so everyone had a chance to vote in the 2024 EU election and vote out those who supported this law. But most people don't care if a company like Meta is allowed to scan their messages. For those who care, they can always use an encrypted messaging service like Signal or Telegram.
Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?
I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.
Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.
And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.
By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.
It's not accessed on devices. This is about people using messaging applications, like Messenger. Then, as the message isn't encrypted, Meta can read the message on their servers. And with this law they are allowed to scan and sometimes report it to the government.
And more than a hundred did not vote, if they wanted to vote no they could have. But they didn’t so they’re implicitly in favor.
The fact that governments worldwide do not force either a vote for or against is a much greater issue as it allows representatives to launder their beliefs through inaction.
Well they explicitly hid the fact that there was going to be a vote, AND they had already said they were going to override parliament using more drastic procedures if it didn't pass here.
So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.
I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.
(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)
I do not believe solutions to these issues will be found with government regulators. I believe they can be enabled by new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.
Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors.
Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too:
> new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.
They will just call your code illegal in law. And if you will run it anyway, use deep packet inspection to drop your protocol packets, like they do in Russia
Today they already analyze the SSL handshake and traffic patterns in Russia. And if your valid https traffic crosses the border but doesn't behave like https (I don't know how they do it. Frequency of TCP packets and their size and the delay between?) your IP-address will be blocked
I want to stress that I'm speaking from experience. I personally installed a telegram proxy project which aimed to mirror the pattern of traffic and fool the censors
Man, the EU is supposed to be the beacon of liberal democracy (after the light of Reagan's shining city on the hill is now truly extinguishing), but with shit like this, it's really making enemies left and right (metaphorically and spectrally).
Exactly. I consider myself euro federalist but bullshit like this creating a very strong antipathy.
If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.
I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.
This "thought" is like a fart... No substance, leaves the receiver wondering "What am I meant to do with that?", and also asking "Do I care to ask for an elaboration?".
The slipperiness comes from the fact that the EU already admits that scanning of private messages didn't improve the catching and prosecution of perpetrators. Also, the biggest lobbyists for breaking E2EE argue that criminals are moving to encrypted platforms, and targeting encrypted platforms is actually the thing we need to finally put a dent in stopping the dissemination of CSAM
In plenty of cases it's absolutely self evident (especially when there are plenty of historical precedents for similar or analogous situations).
Yes you can get involved in extended arguments with people arguing in bad faith or whose world view is fundamentally incompatible with your but that's usually just a waste of time (I mean you wouldn't argue with Nazis either just the same as with people trying to institute a Stasi style surveillance apparatus through slow boiling)
How would this have worked in practice though? How could things like trade standards been harmonised or a common currency adopted without the trade union being able to do legislation?
And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.
>For example, Poland was hit with massive daily fines when it was embroiled in a dispute over rule of law measures, as well as a separate case linked to environmental permits at a coal mine on the Czech border.
>The Commission is allowed to take these fines out of that country’s EU budget allocation, preventing governments from simply refusing to pay up.
You're asking too much from bureaucrats that stand to directly gain post-mandate by consulting the companies they legislate for, and also believe that the legitimacy of the EU as a whole should be driven by output (economic prosperity, etc), rather than input (democratic mandates, political participation of their constituents)
Really the west is currently at the wrong side of history. With the US bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the last decade. Europe with its hypocrite stance in literally everything.
Slowly the west is becoming a much less free place to live than a Russia. And propoganda in the west makes people think they are free. It's bullshit. They are not free. You got more freedom to move around, start businesses, own stuff in China and Russia than in any western European country.
This was overwhelmingly approved by "The Left in the European Parliament" (that's their actual coalition name) as well as the Greens. It was overwhelmingly rejected by the European People's Party (AKA "The Right"). And mixed among other groups (S&D and Conservatives).
Indeed. The vote, however, was about stopping Chat Control. The key term is "derogation" in the title.
A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.
Okay, I am not EU citizen, let's see EPP's manifesto:
As a central part of its campaign for the European elections in 2009, the EPP approved its election manifesto at its Congress in Warsaw in April that year. The manifesto called for:[16]
- Creation of new jobs, continuing reforms and investment in education, lifelong learning, and employment to create opportunities for everyone (govt universal social investment, left)
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies (pro-federal pro-centralisation)
- Increased transparency and surveillance in financial markets(more regulation on market)
- Making Europe the market leader in green technology. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave. (Pro-Worker's rights, social security)
-A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven (Pro-migration)
Could you explain how that's considered right-wing?
> - Creation of new jobs, continuing reforms and investment in education, lifelong learning, and employment to create opportunities for everyone
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies
- - Making Europe the market leader in green technology.
Market ideology -> Right wing
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020.
Done through incentives, not nationalized industry -> market ideology, right wing.
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave
Classic birtherism -> right wing
- A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven
Importing cheap labor for European capitalists -> right wing
>Market ideology -> Right wing
>Done through incentives, not nationalized industry -> market ideology, right wing.
Yeah, compared to communists they are right, but even socialists does not push against market economy and if you consider socialists right-wing - we have a huge de-sync on definitions level I guess.
I have some bad news for you, the Chat Control was originally brought up by the left. Mainly by Ylva Johansson (Swedish Social Democrat, S&D group). Leftist origin via Johansson/S&D, but later sustained by mainstream centrists and now a watered down version is partly supported by conservatives too.
Left fascism was not so long ago. Think of the woke hysteria, black lives matter, cancelling on twitter, people losing their jobs because of them saying something the left ideology did not like etc.
Left have been and still are viciously hateful and racist towards white people. So if you are left and while, you are basically destroying your own livelihood.
Conservative Poland, Italy and Ireland are strictly against Chat Control. Well, at least against the worse version of it.
Liberals are not leftists ffs. S&D are liberals, if you go to the wiki page you can see that they are labeled centre-left. Centre-left in this case stands for left wing of liberalism.
This is an example of party which can be called leftist. It's actually even listed as that on wiki. Minimal condition in general is to be anti-capitalistic.
Not true. A lot of the left voted in favor for it. Ylva Johansson, the person behind all this who introduced Chat Control since the very beginning, is a literal ex-Communist and she's now at the left wing of the Social Democrats in Sweden and EU parliament.
The passing of laws that affect technology platforms has always been on topic on HN. That shouldn't be surprising on a site that's specifically for people interested in technology and tech industry topics.
The EU is a farce, an undemocratic virtue signaling organization, and this is why:
- The Parliament voted against the first reading of this proposal twice in 2026, the first time they only supported limited cases for it, while the second time they actually defeated it fully.
- The Commission didn't care, and kept the proposal on the table by refusing to withdraw it.
- Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority which is incredibly hard to pursue (you would think that we would need an absolute majority to PASS a proposal that was previously defeated on first-reading, not instead needing absolute majority to DENY a previously defeated proposal that was again forced to the table).
- Furthermore, absences in practicality count as "No" on the rejection. So of course they scheduled the vote in the summer when notoriously there will be many absences.
By never withdrawing a defeated proposal they can effectively and in practicality pursue any agenda they want (it requires a massive mobilization effort to find absolute majority to defeat any proposal, especially when absences for any reason effectively count against rejection).
In PRACTICALITY, the Commission can pursue any agenda whenever and however they want, and throw the votes down the drain.
EU's democracy is lipstick on a pig.
It's worse than a farce. It's actually evil. The way "they" are pushing chat control, and how Ursula is avoiding justice (she has a huge corruption case hanging over her head but manages continuously cancel court dates); this makes a all too clear.
The only way to fix this is EU member states become more critical: but for politicians in those states an EU position is the best promotion they can make. So almost nobody dares to speak out.
Could you please give more detail about this for those of us less informed of EU things? What corrupt things has Ursula done? Or what has she been accused of, exactly? How long has she been cancelling court dates?
Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?
Her name is von der Leyen. "Ursula" is fine for your friends, but it’s awkward for a public figure. Do you write "Donald" as well?
I write Donald sometimes. If you say Donald in the right context we know who are talking about. Or Kier or Emmanuel. There is nothing wrong with first names of public figures.
"ça va manu?"
You have 3 million threads here to police, talking about Elon. Get on with it...
Because in the name Elon Musk, Elon stands out.
Come on, "Elon" is the exception.
The "Awkward Police" is not a job.
yeah, I do write 'Donald', as do a lot of people. Awkward only if you are talking about the duck or the hamburger clown.
It's very usual to name famous people by their first name. like John, Ringo, George, or Paul. Or Steve and Bill. Or Sam and Dario.
Mario and Luigi.
what? it's her name. people use it. it's fine. you act like politicians deserve respect
That summurizes it pretty well. The Commission is essentially omnipotent, and there is no relevat judiciary to stop it.
This is farcical.
Yes, from a PURELY MONETARY viewpoint, Brexit was a disaster. But there are more important things than money.
I'm from Spain btw.
I tried to explain to my wife (American lawyer) how the EU Commissioners are selected and she told me "I'm not having fun understanding this." I had thought it was just the heads of government from each member state. That would make sense given the immense power of the body. But that's apparently not how it works.
You are mixing it with Council ;)
Yeah, EU setup is absurdly convoluted but it's simply a result of the consensus that tires to balance difference sources of power (the people and the countries).
Ideally the whole EU population should just vote for MEPs in EU parliment, which the would form the government. But that would completely sidestep member states government which they won't ever agree to. And any even mention of reforminng the EU towards that is immediatelly shoot down because nationalists are screetching about soverignty (which at the same time complain that the EU is undemocratic)
So we have the setup with European Council (heads of governments) setting the agenda, Comission (presiden of which is selected by council and approved by parliment) that makes that into law and then Parliment and EU Council (not European council!) votes for it.
A coupld of infographics how that works:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO...
https://static.cfr.org/sites/default/files/image/2022/03/-la...
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022...
Yup, classic, mixed EP with EC. Makes you wonder if he explained it correctly to his wife (American lawyer), or if she verified.
I don't like the way US presidents are elected either, ignoring popular vote, and including gerrymandering. I also don't like how the US president is allowed to bypass Congress.
(1) Replace US president with a Commission of Presidents. One from each state (well, EU only has 27 member states). Each Commissioner is appointed by state legislature, not elected. No more presidential elections. This is the EU Commission.
(2) Replace US senate with a meeting of secretaries, or heads of departments from each state. Only one relevant representative from each state. But the senate composition is not fixed. When the senate discusses e.g. agricultural policy, each state sends their secretary of agriculture, of head of their department of agriculture. No more senate elections. This is the EU Council of Ministers (a.k.a. Council of the European Union or just "The Council").
(3) The house is the EU Parliament.
Take the right of legislative initiative away from the congress, and give it to the Commission of Presidents. The Commission writes the bills, and the senate and the house can only approve or disapprove (with comments).
(4) Change the states to follow the European model: The governor is not elected, but appointed by the state legislature, and is called "prime minister". (Except France has a presidential model.)
(5) The president / Commission is like a CEO. To supervise the CEO, we need a board. The heads of states (governors) meet 4 times per year to discuss and set broad and long term goals. This is the European Council.
Thank you! I think that's all correct except (1), unless I'm misunderstanding something you wrote. My understanding is that the European Council appoints a Commission President-elect. The President-elect and the Council of Ministers then prepare a proposed slate of the other Commissioners, on suggestion from the members states. Then the European Parliament can vote on the entire slate thumbs-up or thumbs-down: https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/how-commissi....
To analogize to the U.S., it would be like if the National Governor's Association selected a Head President. Then you had a Senate of Secretaries made up of the secretaries of various executive departments in the 50 states. Then the Head President and Senate of Secretaries put together a slate for the Commission of Presidents. And Congress would then approve the slate up or down.
Exactly, also the ECJ is horribly corrupt (search for the corruption scandal revealed by a French journalist few years ago). Nothing happened back them.
This will never become law in my country(Poland). Last time they tried to push it people protested in the millions.
> This will never become law in my country(Poland)
I'm sorry to tell you, but if the choice becomes lose EU funding or pass it into law, it will happen.
While I agree that this setup is not very good, the EU Commission is essentially the equivalent of a government in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, and almost all such democracies I know about either have or have developed "ways" for the government to "push through" the will of the "chamber(s)". However, we do not consider those as farces as well, or so it seems to me, I guess mostly because those governments are still more or less directly "bootstrapped", and needs to be supported, by the chambers, which is what happens in the EU parliament as well.
> However, we do not consider those as farces as well
Speak for yourself. A lot of people do.
It's mindbogling how ignorant people are when it comes to how the EU is structured and how it works ;(
Please could you cite your sources for this.
I think what you've typed is not representative of what happened here. My understanding is that the EU Council forced this second-reading, not the Commission.
To provide evidence for my argument: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Look at "Timeline". This is the Council, not the Commission. This is your elected heads of state. This is "democracy" in action.
"Council and EPP attempting to bypass Parliament With negotiators still deadlocked on core issues, the Council and the European People's Party (EPP) are trying to sidestep Parliament by reviving the expired Chat Control 1.0. The Council plans to fast-track a rewritten proposal with identical content, effectively circumventing the Commission's right of initiative, democratic oversight, and a fresh opinion from the European Data Protection Supervisor (source)."
The Commission refused to withdraw the proposal after Parliament rejected it, leaving it on the table. The Council disagreed with Parliament’s rejection, formally forcing a second reading.
Both the European Commission and the Council itself are not DIRECTLY elected EU bodies. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
The council is the prime minister or president (depending on the system). The commission is the government. The government mostly does what the PM/president tells it to do.
Again, sources?
Parliament rejects the proposal: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file/pdf?r...
Council pushes it forward: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026...
From the last article: "The Council position will now be examined by the European Parliament, under second reading.". Note that this is technically accurate under absolute majority rules for rejection (not for approving), but practically is where the "cheating" happens - as described in my original parent comment - because of the perverse procedures of the EU that are designed to basically make it almost impossible to go against the agenda.
The Commission did not withdraw it: no source because it stayed "pending".
The EU procedures are maliciously designed against the Parliament while preserving the technicality of plausible deniability. How do we call this architecture in software? We call it a "backdoor", except this one is embedded in the EU legislative process.
The EU Council are the democratically elected leaders of the member states. How is them deciding the direction not "democratic"?
The Council of the European Union - that pushed this forward - is composed of national ministers that are directly elected to the Council itself and are simply there because they are appointed as ministers under their own country's constitutional system. Ministers are appointed, not elected.
Unlike the European Parliament which is directly elected by EU citizens. Conveniently, the EU citizens have been silenced on this matter despite the Parliament denying this full proposal not once, but twice.
> Ministers are appointed, not elected.
I dont understand this line of reasoning about EU:
Ministers are appointed by people we vote. In most democracies the entire government is appointed and maybe indirect voted as a whole (by parliament and maybe directly by citizens).
What I am trying to say is people who proposed this are representatives of those countries (even if indirect their citizens votes vor the party that appointed them).
So representation is not the problem. The problem is citizens (at large) voting only on personal interest and not thinking or not understanding the second order effects. If you don't like what Council did here make sure next round of elections the party that proposed those ministers will not get elected in your country an should not have the power to form a government.
We seem to expect country officials to be even better when playing at EU level and think about yet a greater good than they are doing in their own countries.
You don't have effective representation just because a vote happens somewhere in a causal chain. A body that's appointed by people who are themselves typically indirectly elected is a lot of layers of indirection.
For effective representation, you need a feedback loop between the voting and the policymaking at the other end. If you add all these layers in-between, voters are going to have a hard time figuring out how their voting is actually changing outcomes. Imagine trying to play a video game that has huge lag between the control input and what the character on screen is actually doing.
I dont disagree. But I am also limited in seeing practical solutions to make EU better in this sense for people to feel represented at all levels directly. Please note the practical thing here cause idealist solutions I have plenty. It is just that countries are too nationalistic.
Why I find it hard: EU is another abstraction on top of what we already have: local, regional, national. EU is not just an alliance but a real governing body with legislative and executive branches.
Having an average (as in normal) citizen of a country have to think about their local interests, regional (as in around their local cities), national and global interests is too prone to manipulation. As we saw with Brexit and other campaigns. Too many of us are too focused on self interest and locality to be able to dedicate enough time to global matters.
IMHO of course
It seems to me that the nationalism issue is orthogonal to the representation issue. In the current structure, the EU government is even more powerful than the U.S. federal government. The U.S. federal government can only legislate in certain areas, and cannot compel the states to enforce federal law. This restriction is strongly enforced by the judiciary. That's why, for example, U.S. states effectively legalized marijuana, even though it's illegal under federal law.[1]
As I understand it, the EU can legislate in any area it wants. And member states are required to enforce EU law as if it were their own domestic law. The EU can even sue member states for failing to implement and enforce EU law.
So it seems like the EU government is both extremely powerful (the nationalism issue), but also very insulated from European voters (the representation issue).
[1] And I think most people would say that the federal government isn't even allowed to regulate individual use of marijuana. There's a 2005 Supreme Court case to the contrary, but I don't think it would turn out the same way under the current Supreme Court.
The design of the EU which gives the member states elected politicians (heads of state) the most power is very intentional.
You are confusing the EU Council with the Council of the European Union.
No head of state was involved in the discussion we are having today.
By the way my personal opinion is that the confusing names are by design, to give the appearance that head of states are involved in decisions that have nothing to do with them, democracy in the EU is just an illusion.
This is a bizarre argument. Emmanuel Macron sits on the EU Council. He has no democratic mandate?
The entire point of the EU design is that ultimately the member states national governments (the heads of) are the most powerful and set the direction. It was done this way because people didn't like the idea of EU ministers. There was even a huge objection to the change that introduced the Parliament, the MEPs that you are now saying should hold ultimate power.
And this is the problem. People decide up-front that the EU is "not democratic" and then they adjust their arguments and data to fit this narrative.
The EU Council and the Council of the European Union are two different bodies.
Macron sits in the EU Council and it has nothing to do with this.
My apologies I was. But nevertheless, these are still these are elected representatives of the member states. These are not unknown "bureaucrats from Brussels".
In one you have the head of government of each member state, in the other the relevant minister depending on what is being discussed.
These are not European bureaucrats, they are the ministers of justice of each member state.
it's more like a .. asymmetric confederation. Democratically elected leaders, conspire together in a confederation, to elect a body that is above and beyond the leaders of the democracy. I honestly don't think we have a proper label for what the EU [edit* council] has become. If you are looking at it from the OP's perspective, it's more of a "democratic deficit." It is an institutional design that prioritizes efficiency, expert consensus, and national vetoes over direct voter control and transparency.
> Democratically elected leaders, conspire together in a confederation, to elect a body that is above and beyond the leaders of the democracy.
Sorry, what are you talking about here?
The Commission is subservient to the EU Council. The EU Council consists, by design, of all the heads of the nation states.
False, the Commission is an independent EU institution.
I think what you've typed is not representative of how EU works.
The Council [1], also known as the Council of the European Union and the Council of Ministers, does not consist of heads of state. The body that consists of heads of state is the European Council [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
The Council must go at some point. It is a "legislative" body... composed of members of the _executive_ branch of the individual countries. Granted, that's not the only problem with EU governance, but it is a rather glaring anomaly in terms of transparency and accountability.
Furthermore, at least in the case of Italy & other parliamentary systems, there's something like 3 levels of indirection between the people and their "representative" in the Council:
People elect members of the Parliament -> MPs decide who is the Prime Minister -> PM decides who sits in the Council
We should likely just replace it with either a "EU Senate", where each country elects the same number of senators, _or_ a chamber with truly European elections (as in, every EU citizen may vote for any candidate, regardless of their nation). But the latter option seems still out of reach as of today.
How are we going to change it? They are simply going to pass a second-reading on a proposal to bring it back and use the same trick over and over again. All it takes is for one person to be "sick" at home for them to get it their way.
The EU voters have practically gifted their future to a bunch of technocrats. Over time (decades), it will get worse too, as inevitably power corrupts them more and more.
The EU is simply never going to represent the EU voters when it goes against their agenda. Want proof? They just did it.
Why not just have two bodies like every other parliamentary system? Europeans elect an MP and each member state elects a Senator. Then the majority party in the Parliament appoints a Prime Minister, who can appoint a cabinet. Nobody is more than two steps away from an elected position.
Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.
You need to specify which EU laws does this violate. "undemocratic" by your definition. There is no universally precise definition of "democratic". Because I'm sure EU council knows how to be democratic by their own definition of the term. They have an army of legal pundits who ensure that everything is done correctly within their legal framework.
Literally the voice of the EU voters has been suppressed on this matter despite the Parliament (elected by them) voted twice on denying this full proposal.
By any definition of the term, this is not a democracy and it's a technocracy at best.
Edit: I am Italian.
Are you saying EU Council made an illegal Act that violates the provisions in other Acts? Why don't anyone talk about references to those violations?
They didn't say that; they simply said this is not the way of democracy. Legality has nothing to do with it.
> Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.
The American system was mostly cribbed from Europeans to begin with. Montesquieu, etc. The structure of the EU is bizarre according to the principles of democratic governance articulated by Europeans themselves.
The same language you unoriginal Euro/Canadians use to suppress speech and opinion.
Boring authoritarians, no wonder Americans are so superior to you in every way.
Hard disagree on the conclusion. I agree that the commission and the council have made very unfair moves and it's justified to call them out for it. But we have also seen that the parliament (except for the EPP) was for the most part eager to listen to what people had to say about chat control.
AND IGNORED IT
> - Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority
Wait, that's the rule? On the second go around, the default outcome is for a previously defeated proposal to pass unless you can muster an absolute majority?
This seems like if the U.S. President had a reverse veto: it could pass any law Congress rejected by forcing a second vote and the law would pass unless there was an absolute majority against. Didn't the EU people read Montesquieu about separation of powers? He was French!
Two things are not quite correct in your text:
1. The Council triggered the second reading by adopting its own position and sending it back. You made it sound like the Commission just steamrolled it unilaterally.
2. The scheduling conspiracy is false. Parliament itself voted (331-304) on July 7 to fast-track this. Also, the votes in March and July were pretty stable: 311 against in March, 314 against in July.
We, as humanity, really need to stop equating democracy with direct votes and referenda. There are reasons why some bodies are nominated indirectly and through convoluted procedures. In many countries these processes exist to prevent the rise of fascisms or totalitarianism in general.
The EU, in particular, is a community of relatively different states, where you can’t have just direct elections with proportional representation, otherwise the most populous countries will decide for everybody. This is why there is a zoo of directly elected bodies, bodies nominated by the Parliament, others expressing the will of countries’ governments, and complex voting procedures with qualified majorities and veto powers.
In practice the EU has struggled to make national governments ratify trade treaties because their devolved regions were worried about beef prices. It’s not an unstoppable dictatorial behemoth that decides against the will of the people, if 10 farmers in Wallonia can stop it. They still haven’t convinced Germany that an Italian baker can open a bakery in Bavaria without attending a local mandatory 5 year Meister training.
Just like HN. Undemocratic and full of censorship and disinformation.
Unintelligent authoritarians run amok.
FTA:
What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
*What is coming back:* US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
*What remains unchanged:* Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
*What is still NOT being scanned:* End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
So, E2E is unaffected?
The Internet Watch Foundation, the group, funded almost entirely by big tech, who pushed for this vote to be held under emergency procedure, is already at work lobbying for the end of E2EE [1].
In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.
[1]: https://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/end-to-end-encryption-and-k... [2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
It's confusing because of the indirection.
The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.
Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.
People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.
The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.
> Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
Also without chat control they would have to follow much stricter eprivacy directive laws that makes many of their monetisation strategies ilegal.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
I get why this might be a thing, but scanning E2EE messages? Big tech invested a lot in making E2EE happen.
Apple is wholly against Chat Control.
Where did you get that impression? The main driver for Chat Control 2.0 is lobby org Internet Watch Foundation where Apple one of the main donors (along with Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI)
because we all can agree child porn is bad and just because a company donates to a charity doesn't mean they get to dictate their policies
In a same way - just because a charity claims they want to solve child porn doesn't mean that their real aim is to help their donors.
In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.
I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.
Dream on. X corp is one of the sponsors of Internet Watch Foundation who are the lobby group behind Chat Control. Musk might play how terrible this is for his audience but in reality they sell all the user data and train their models on it just like every other big tech corp.
You're implying that X is not scanning, or ever planning to scan, private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion?
Blud thinks musk has any principles, he is literally grifting for maga to stop immigration and then goes and facilitates h1b when there are plenty of talented workers that could be hired.
lol He'll put on a show and then cave-in like he always does: https://people.com/elon-musk-says-he-didnt-do-nazi-salute-at...
That guy is outright cheerleading fascists in European countries and wants to put them in power. Why would he want to take away such a powerful tool from them?
He definitely does not want to put this power into the hands of EPP and S+D, which are precisely the two fractions that pushed this through.
Once a law is passed that permits abuse of power, that new toy is available to whoever is in control of the government, which could be the parties he likes. Seen this kind of thing over and over again when one group gains control of a level of government, passes a bunch of authoritarian crap under the belief they have a mandate to rule forever, and then lose power, giving their opponents control over that new authoritarian toy. In the end, the political class gains more power and the public loses. What rarely happens is a change in leadership giving up the power the previous leadership gave itself.
L, and I cannot stress this enough, OL
That is regulatory capture but it really feels like it should be called something else.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
Regulation is a good thing for big, established incumbents who can afford expensive lawyers. It keeps them safe from competition.
I think this is basically correct and aligns with Facebook’s massive push toward e2ee in Messenger. They don’t want to be on the hook, and didn’t do e2ee just for the fun of it
Why? To know more to train AI and sell your info to third parties. To spearhead ads to you.
Why an earth would a big tech company say no to gather more info on its users? Show me the first one
Because regulation (even well meaning regulation) always favors incumbents and hinders startups.
Do you have source for IWF funding being by big tech?
Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)
https://www.iwf.org.uk/membership/our-members/
The top 25 members (£90k+; big tech are here) contributed between £2.25M and £4.37M. The other 110 members contributed between £2.26M and £4.46M.
Honestly they have a lot of members including the BBC for some reason, Apple is one of them. It seems like it might just be good practice to support them, it signals ‘we are against child abuse’. Dropping support could lead to some bad headlines. Seems like an NGO that is really good at sales, probably putting some pressure on it’s members rather than the other way around.
I get that if you are an ngo that really wants to solve online child abuse you’d want a law like this. It may be mostly the ngo pushing for it, not necessarily big tech. I could be wrong.
This is really strange since the European Commission strongly recommends that staff use Signal[1].
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26073615-c-2025-5430...
Staff is exempted from mass surveillance.
Guess what's coming next:
> Overview
> End-to-end encryption is a term used to describe blocking or preventing any third-party recipient from viewing, reading or becoming aware of information that one individual has sent to another. In response to growing concerns about online data security, many technology companies are adopting this strategy with potentially dire circumstances.
> The use of end-to-end encryption would prevent the companies or any third-party from detecting illegal activity occurring on their platforms, including the activity of people who use the internet to perpetuate online demand for graphic sexual abuse material of children.
> We believe personal security is extremely important and support efforts to improve online privacy. But, if this solution is implemented with no exceptions for detecting child sexual exploitation, millions of incidents of abuse will remain hidden, leaving these young victims without any help or protection from these horrific crimes.
https://ncmec.org/theissues/end-to-end-encryption
> So, E2E is unaffected?
Because its an extension of an existing bill.
After the whole internet lost its mind about Apple CSAM scanning and being horribly off target, I'd recommend to ignore news reports and go to the sources when making an opinion.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=COM...
The only issues I can see is the error rate for non-CSAM scanning and how the latest vote was conducted.
Although the scanning part, it is still law enforcement that has to review that information and determine if there is a case. Most of the those are teens sharing naked photos with other teens.
Yes.
Chat Control 2.0 was the big one in those regards.
(Also, LOL @ Skype mention.)
Then I'm not very moved about this. I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another. What I care is not having a backdoor for E2E, i.e. like client-side scanning telling me what I am allowed to talk about like with the LLMs. CSAM excuse is a great excuse to turn every conversation to what we have with AI today.
If reading messages that are not for ones eyes is OK, then it is a much smaller step to the next level, which is to also being able to read encrypted messages. Slowly boiling the frog.
But the next level IS the chat control 2.0 and yes it is the one people should be concerned about. But it's not like this is unprecedented this is literally just an extension of something that existed.
> I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another
By this logic, I should be happy if mail delivered to my address always arrives already open.
I assume the same, but not because it’s sanctioned. Sanctioning is a slippery slope or a degree change as has been mentioned.
And the temperature of the frog pot rises by one degree.
Don't downplay Skype, as Teams is still just rebranded Skype for Business (LYNC).
Are my AIM chats safe?! /s
You should be using AIM OTR: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
Adding to this there is pidgin-otr and python-potr.
For IRC there is irssi-otr. There was weechat-otr but I think it may have gone unsupported as their script did not work in python3.
There is also ejabberd [0] that has OMEMO [1] preferred over OTR and PGP and supports many to many E2EE.
Someone tried to MitM Jabber, discussion here on HN [2].
[0] - https://ejabberd.im/
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264
You kid, but there are still some active AIM users (or at least, a revival of it)
E2E is unaffected... For now
Does this apply only to new messages or also to history?
> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
They are already allowed to do this, and already are doing this. When you provide data to the service provider in a non-e2ee fashion, it's their data as much as it is yours. They can scan it, data mine it, analyze it, whatever.
This is the whole point though. They are allowed to do this because of the original chat control from 2021 which was temporary and expired in march. Without chat control it is very debatable what companies can legally thanks to eprivacy directive.
They aren’t allowed to do whatever they want with your data, there’s strict restrictions on requiring consent for things you want to do with user data.
I assume those 400-page EULAs blast away any 'strict restrictions'.
Yes, and you consent when you enable iCloud.
And your REALLY think E2E is going to "protect" you?
If the "services" want to watch, don't worry they will, "they don't need your password". But I guess they "do" that only for the very baddies, aka child exploitation, human trafficking, terrorists, killers, drug dealers, etc.
We all know here that "information system security" does not exist, this is a fantasy: there is only some "best effort" with a wide spectrum of compromises. If somebody talks to you about "deliverable security", that guy wants to sell you something.
E2E will protect you only against John Doh, "hacker only on Sundays". And we better keep that in mind.
What are you talking about. You think service providers can backdoor aes-gcm? There will always be technology that they cannot get around. The only way to backdoor is to explicitly change the encryption.
Skype?
Are the messages to LLMs scanned (beyond normal collection for future training purposes) or is that just for human-to-human messenging?
Yes. I see no reason to think otherwise.
What's the purpose of this law? Protecting the recipients or punishing the senders?
I don't know what the companies want with it. But they'll try to hide the logs in discovery for a lawsuit. [1]As nyt found out.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/openai-faked-ina...
Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries. Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.
Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent
The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.
ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?
It's "not on the way", really. It is explicitly designed not to be democratic in any meaningful sense from the very beginning. It is not even a secret: the council work is intentionally opaque so that the actual people responsible for all this horrible stuff cannot be held accountable by the public. This is explicitly stated to be a feature, justified that it helps it all be more technocratic and less populist.
Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.
Which would be fine, if it was just a trade union like originally designed. I really love the original idea of EU. I could even get behind more federation style, although trade union is vastly preferable for me - but I do understand people pushing for it.
Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.
Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:
- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.
- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.
- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.
And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.
- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.
- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?
and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.
All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.
> Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.
No pun intended, but how is this legal? I mean, if you don’t have a quorum, then shouldn’t you just wait for an Autumn session? It feels like having a democratic parliament with backdoors like this kinda undermines the whole idea
Sounds like they did have quorum (84% present). I'm assuming the "trick" is related to the fact that it was an expired law up for renewal instead of a brand new law, which sounds pretty dumb to me. Maybe I'm mistaken about the details tho. I'm just some guy
I don't understand how it is that the EU Parliaments votes to reject legislation. Presumably, this is not the default for most rules. Is this some special class of rule -- put together by a special committee, for example -- that has to be voted down rather than up?
> It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?
There are a lot of countries in the EU that aren't shining beacons of democracy.
The EU makes sense as an economic block but some of the countries in it are politically unaligned with what people think of when they think of the EU.
You really should check out the list of voters, you will be surprised who exactly voted "yes". The list can be found here: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...
The “for” votes are for the reject motion in this case.
That is not the full list, plenty of votes are missing.
This one is more complete: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ has a better way to sort by country and political party so you can see who woted for what. It is painful to see politicians I voted for supporting this, even after I have sent them a few emails. Honestly, based on the results from my country, in the upcomming euro-elections, I am seriously considering voting alt-right.
You will be surprised to discover that the most open pro-democracy and “leftist” are also the most fascist and speech controlling ones.
At least in Spain this is exactly the case, and is really scary how much people falls for it.
Yea, like France or Germany or Belgium
You know Im right
> Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries.
Maybe people should demand better of their representatives. Would YOUR job be OK with you not being able to perform your duties the day BEFORE your vacation starts? The time to go home is when your vacations STARTS, not one or more days before.
>ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries...
Aren't they fucking paid to be there 'on the last day'?
Yeah, there are two scummy things happening here. This would not be possible if they did their job. What sort of weird example does it set, when they don't ever care enough to stay for all the voting?
> Are so many so naive?
No, it's the clueless general public that is criminally naive and fails to recognize the revival of fascism in real time under their own noses.
It's something straight out of that 2015 German movie, "Er ist wieder da" ("Look Who's Back").
Same giggles, same reactions, same gaslighting of those who see where it's heading, same final effect.
The EU and corrupt politicians (that's most of them), will do what they want, regardless of your opinions. I have completely given up on participating in democracy. My country is going to hell, and I don't believe anyone is able to stop it.
The internet is pretty stupid now and needs to be reigned in so our sons and daughters aren’t wide eyed zombies. Most of you won’t agree with me but it’s true and something needs to be done so I laud this.
Chat control doesn’t make the internet any less stupid.
I heard about it 30 years ago
Our parents are the zombies who keep voting for the destruction of their civilization just to keep their housing prices propped up.
The internet is not the problem, the algo is.
With the internet I have free MIT lessons, documentaries, debates on Youtube!
I have access to scientific journals.
I can access every book ever written in the world.
The internet is not the issue here. The homepages/fyp on youtube, tiktok, instagram is. Books and the correct asthetic needs to be prioritized.
That internet will still exist, you just won’t be anonymous while accessing those resources.
"give me a boy until he is seven and I will tell you the man he becomes"
there will be at least 1 entire generation of western kids that spectated short form content on screens since the moment of birth. based on aristotle, this entire generation is going to be retarded. the EU legislature in question enables legal spectation of content exchanged by a generation of the retarded. the optimal path forward seems to be ensuring that the next generation is not retarded, otherwise human extinction will be rapidly accelerated. I don't see how corporate destruction of individual privacy is going to help ensure that the next generation is not retarded.
Why just western kids? Cell phone and tablet use by little kids in Asia is on a whole other level.
The content children in Asia are exposed to seems to be entirely different in nature. For instance, with Tiktok: it intentionally pushes brainrot content for western users, while in China it pushes educational and in general positive content. Speaking only from what I've read on the subject, and I'm entirely willing to accept that I'm wrong about that, but the point remains that the screens aren't the issue, it's the content on them that is.
did you read any studies that accounted for brain rot short form content vs non brain rot short form content? from my n=1 sample, this content format is universally destructive, regardless as to specific information conveyed
This I can definitely agree with
I have no experience with the way children are raised in asia and am horrified that this phenomenon is not constrained to one particular region
Why did you think it was?
I hoped that my tunnel visioned perspective only applied to that which I could see. to be fair according to another commentor asian kids don't get pushed brain rot, so I suppose there are degrees to this
Why will basing them on Aristotle make them retarded?
the opening quote is attributed to aristotle
Ok but the opening quote doesn't say "I agree with this poster that these kids will be retarded"
My brother in christ, please, reading comprehension. The opening quote is saying that a child's formative years will decide how they turn out.
recommend to quickly spit out the bait before you get hooked
This is a nice piece of democracy right here:
"a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028."
"Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!"
"Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?"
"Worth a shot!"
"It worked, should we also do this multiple times?"
"Of course not! Pass the law, quickly!"
Not only was Chat Control 1.0 already rejected twice by the European Parliament but:
- This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation - 112 MEPs of 719 didn't vote.
- The vote was called only two days before as an "Rule 170 - Urgent procedure" - 73 MEPs missed the vote making it "urgent". Normally it takes months of procedure to come up for a final vote.
I think that means those MEPs are not doing their jobs. They are the representatives of their people, but somehow they left for vacation before the last day of the session. They failed in the most important part of their duty.
Its beyond political malpractice
It is a global push to kill technology
It's a push by oligarchs to establish total surveillance and control of the masses to protect themselves from the coming environmental (climate change) and economic (mass unemployment) collapses.
In a functioning democracy, the masses would demand higher taxes on the wealthy to fund social support. The oligarchy has already bought out democracy in the US and other places to ensure that doesn't happen. So to keep the masses in line, a system of totalitarian oppression is required.
It's amazing more people don't recognize this and judging from some posts in this thread as a solution they will support oligarch backed alt-right like that will fix the problem.
Around ten years ago I watched some MEPs on YouTube talk about their jobs. A lot of them were scathing. The EP isn't a real parliament and the people in it don't have any real power, so it fills up with cheerleaders and hecklers.
Attendance isn't just low before the summer break, it's low all the time. MEPs miss votes for reasons as trivial as there being a football game on, because why not? It's not like their votes matter much anyway. Everything important is decided upon long before they get involved, they aren't allowed to actually write laws or pass them or repeal them, and so nobody with any political ambition goes there unless they're using it as a springboard to national politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=166SAhPB5-Q
> "Mr President, our parliament in the United Kingdom sat for 142 days last year and it was criticized widely for only sitting for that amount of time yet we in Brussels and Strasburg in the plenary and mini plenary, we sit for just five days a month and on three of those days it's only part of a day that we actually sit for. So we end up with debate in this chamber where microphones of speakers are cut off after 60 seconds, 90 seconds or 2 minutes, and we have no way of expanding on a point, we have no way of properly challenging a speaker, we have no means of proper scrutiny of proposed legislation that comes through. Surely it would make more sense to have sufficient time allocated to proper debate to reason debate and those who actually believe in the structures and institutions of this place should surely welcome that. I think my 60 seconds is up."
You can tell it's a joke institution because they regularly penalize MEPs for the content of their two minute speeches. Britain has the concept of parliamentary immunity but the EU does not, so you get "politicians" who are told what they can and cannot say by the leaders of other parties.
As much as Brexit was a footgun, this has always seemed to me a very valid criticism of the EU that the remain side of that debate never really tackled. There is a huge democratic deficit in the organisation.
The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)
> because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty
Well, the UK has only been asked about Europe twice - once to join and once to leave. Unlike many other European countries that frequently ask their populace as a way of standard governance.
The only other UK referendum in my lifetime was the 'alternative vote'
The UK government (no matter the party) just doesn't seem to like asking the public's opinion, on things. And after 2016, I'd be very surprised to see another referendum on anything, any time soon as the outcome of that was opposite to what the 'establishment' wanted (cue the last decade of squabbling). They will instead use the excuse: 'you gave us the mandate choosing us at the General Election'.
That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote.
Even relying on people to vote no is not enough.
We already have a constitution like that in Italy, not that anyone cares to enforce it though…
Some European countries like Germany do, but the EU somehow can override those national constitutions.
No, it can't. It's going to be an interesting legal challenge.
Also, the European Court of Justice has, to the best of my knowledge, not ruled on this yet, either. The fact fight isn't over.
It cannot. EU laws are completely useless and must be implemented by every government as a local law, which won't be more powerful than the constitution.
The problem is that constitutional courts should then say the law was against the constitution and cancel it, but will that happen?
In theory, it can't. But in reality, it does in important cases.
Germany has implemented EU sanctions against a German journalist, which deprive him and his family of the ability to conduct basically any economic activity in Germany or even to leave the country. He is not allowed to work. No one is allowed to pay him money. He has to petition the government every time he wants to access even a small amount of the money in his own bank account. The same restrictions apply to his close family members, because they are suspected of helping him survive financially. He is barred from crossing any border in Europe, including to leave.
He has not been accused or convicted of anything in court. The only procedure that was required to hand down an economic death sentence was for the EU Commission to put his name on a list.
The German government claims this is all okay, because the journalist can proactively challenge his sanction listing in Brussels. It's a years-long process that will require paying lawyers - using money he is not allowed to access.
Needless to say, this is all highly unconstitutional. But the German government simply doesn't care. They just say they're implementing EU sanctions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru
Very weird case. I don't think anyone can survive here in Germany on a 503€ allowance he gets, and let alone having some probable but unproven ties to a state considered an enemy since only recently, I would find crippling someone to that degree harsh even for a convicted war criminal. He's apparently not even allowed to pay rent!
It's not that weird. There are other cases like it. Jacques Baud is a Swiss guy and was sanctioned by the EU Commission for "spreading Russian propaganda". At the time he was living in Brussels and the EU became a prison that he's not allowed to leave.
https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2025/article/ancien-espion-su...
The sanctions imposed on December 15 by the European Union against Jacques Baud and eleven other people include the freezing of their assets, a ban on doing business and bans on entering the EU.
“I don’t have the right to return to Switzerland, or even to travel within the EU. I’m essentially being held against my will,” says Jacques Baud.
Thanks for the example but there being other cases and me as an average person who follows the news having no idea about all this make it even weirder for me.
Genuinely thank you for linking to him and his case.
I live in Germany and am -principally- a massive advocate for and proponent of the free (or liberal) democratic basic order ("FDGO" [0]) we have had here for the last decades, and apart from Chat Control, I’m usually very highly pro-EU, too.
But reading this has genuinely left me in a bit of a shock now, and created some (for lack of a better word) FUD I haven’t felt before with regard to these two, eh, institutions governing us.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democratic_basic_order
That's what I'm saying. It's completely illegal but nobody cares.
> EU laws are completely useless and must be implemented by every government as a local law
This isn’t true. Regulations are directly applicable and don’t require national legislation; directives generally do. Individuals affected by a failure to implement a directive can complain to the European Commission, which can bring infringement proceedings against the member state and potentially seek financial penalties.
EU law also has primacy over conflicting national law, and the CJEU’s position is that this includes constitutional provisions. Courts in Germany and Poland have challenged that position, but refusing to comply can put the countries in breach of their EU treaty obligations and lead to infringement proceedings and penalties.
The Danish government is pro spying on its people.
Currently we have numberplate recognition everywhere and logging of SMS and position info of phones.
So this is just another step into the direction where we will be watched everywhere by our government in case we step out of line.
> The Danish government is pro spying on its people.
It would be more surprising if the organisation ultimately responsible for security did not want to.
UK is full of cameras… is it any safer?
Than the UK without cameras? Probably?
The sheer optimism of posting this as an American right now...
our rights have largely held up even in the absurd world we live in, and the constitution continues to be a thorn on the side of those trying to abridge them. what we are seeing now is the conclusion of decades of eroding our rights and the tower still refuses to topple. though of course we're going to have a lot of work to do fixing it up after all is said and done.
Have you heard of the Patriot Act?
Have you heard of ACLU v. Clapper, HLP v. DoJ, Doe v. Ashcroft, or US v. Moalin? Parent acknowledges decades of degradation and points to thorns like these.
Have you seen Wickard v. Filburn?
I'm not sure any country actually has a Constitution with rights that are not up for a vote. There is generally a separate, harder procedure for changing the "basic law" or Constitution of a country -- for example, 2/3 of delegates or a 2/3 of states or something of that nature -- but I'd be surprised if there's a country where they have literally no way to change it at all.
The US constitution doesn't grant rights. It's sort of the whole deal which the rest of the western world doesn't really understand, much less Americans themselves.
Everything in the US Constitution is amendable, though -- in other words, the whole Constitution can be changed with a vote.
The US is founded on certain ideas about natural rights -- hence not granted, per se -- but that's somewhat orthogonal to this whole issue. Even if there were an unwritten constitution, a country could base its institutions, philosophy of lawmaking, jurisprudence, &c, on natural rights doctrine (and for a time, the British did exactly that).
The earlier post mentions "That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote." but if what they mean is natural rights, that goes well beyond any procedural issue around the basic law.
The US constitution is one of the few constitutions that _does_ grant rights[0].
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
That page specifically says the constitution grants rights to the government and reserves the rights of the people. There is a lot in there about the case against the bill of rights, a big part of which is that itemizing the rights implies that they are limited to the list.
Editing to clarify that this isn't just semantics: under the 'grant rights to the people' model, a government that grants one set of rights is just as legitimate as one that grants another. It was the position of the founders that governments which deny certain rights are infringing on the pre-existing rights of the people. This is the basis for their position on revolution.
So that means there it offers zero protection against private corporations? It seems like that is a bad idea, isn't it better to say people have rights that nobody is allowed to violate instead? Like freedom of speech doesn't matter much if private corporations are allowed to silence you.
There are plenty of protections against private entities in the US legal system -- other people, corporations and organizations. Those were not the issues the founders were trying to address, though -- the common law offered many such protections.
Oh, believe me, I've been on the losing side of that issue with you for ages. I absolutely agree it is unethical for anybody to violate anybody's free speech, etc, and that that multiplies with corporate power.
But that means I'm familiar with the counterpoints. A government has the power to use violence: to operate a military that can kill non-citizens and a police force that can put citizens in prison. It's a lot more important to put a check on this than on a corp, even though quantity has a quality of its own. One thing to suppress dissidents by saying they can't use your website; another to put them in the gulags.
And then the other big issue is that corporations are just a bunch of people shaking hands. You have the right to free press, so you can write a newspaper that says what you like. You can sell that paper and you can publish people's op-eds if they give you the copyright permissions. You can refuse to publish the ones you disagree with. You can make agreements with the printing company to scale up and with other authors to contribute as you become popular, and, while this shifts the practical considerations, no amount of these agreements changes your principle right to free press.
For these reasons, it's best not to include this in your constitution. I have no idea what to do instead apart from shaming and boycotting unethical companies, which of course doesn't work when most people don't care an iota about the principle of free speech. Look at Athenian democracy and sigh?
That is a list of restrictions on government power, not a grant.
Those are the same thing, with no difference existing between them in any context. You're complaining about the difference between a document that describes party A buying something from party B versus another one that describes party B selling the thing to party A.
Think about what it might mean for
(a) the government to give me the right to live in your house; or
(b) the government to restrict you from expelling me from your house.
The difference is whether you say "thank you" to the government that does (a) or "screw you" to the government that fails to do (b). It's the difference between me not killing you and me granting you the right to be alive- if I am doing the latter, you are my subject rather than my equal. It implies that I have the right to take it away. Welfare, the FDA, and protectionism are examples of (a) while your basic human rights fall under (b).
Mr Madison, and a bunch of other Founding Fathers, might disagree a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Germany is one prominent example for obvious historical reasons.
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause are not all that uncommon in general.
The page you link contains many interesting examples; but many of them are simply cases of making the vote harder -- requiring unanimous consent to change English-French bilingualism in Canada, for example -- rather than cases where the law simply can not ever be changed by a vote.
With regards to Germany, the page says:
...if a constitution provides for a mechanism of its own abolition or replacement, like the German Basic Law does in Article 146, this by necessity provides a "back door" for getting rid of the "eternity clause", too.
It's really hard to have a legal system that literally can not be changed by any legitimate vote -- only by revolution -- because what sits at the bottom of most of them (all of them?) is that the consent of some body politic is necessary and sufficient to legitimate a law.
Amending the US Constitution takes a lot of voting, with very large majorities in Congress / Senate and state legislatures. This has been achieved a number of times, and some of these decisions were rather unwise, like the Prohibition (18th amendment).
Yes, there is a separate, harder procedure for changing the Constitution of the United States -- but that procedure is also a vote.
The bill of rights section of the Namibian constitution may not be amended
Sounds like an unlawful law to me, but hey. Im an American, what do I know.
> This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation
Surely this was not by someone’s design. Maybe though… you don’t leave a day early for your vacation?
And then people wonder why there’s so little faith in the EU and why there is a perception of them being disconnected from the real interests of the people.
Oh but they keep reposting how phones will have replaceable batteries now, so it's all fine, they are good guys!
I've seen several posts with the photo of Ursula (one of the most hated politicians of all times) associated with the batteries thing.
So 112 MEPs didn't do their job...got it.
Politicians can take vacations. Many things went wrong here but this ain't it.
Exactly. The issue is them being automatically in favor, that’s a really extreme measure I as an eu citizen did not know about, even though I’d say I’m probably more informed then the average and was made to study eu history, structure and laws in school. That kind of stuff is really weird, even weirder is that such an emergency measure can be activated without countries being in active war or the like.
Nobody is automatically in favor. What are you talking about, that’s not how it worked at all.
Make a "reverse vote" to reject passing a law = abstentions mean you don't reject passing the law = abstentions mean you support passing the law
This has got to be rejected by any court that has not been completely corrupted.
This is beyond retarded. It's not a loophole, it's too f stupid to count as a loophole. This interpretation is a violation of the law. They should jail every EU parliamentarian who claims that this is a valid interpretation.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
It completely perverts the entire system. With this approach, any law can be passed by a minority; just phrase as a negative.
I propose a new law: "The EU is hereby not not not abolished" ohh look, it failed to gain majority vote! EU is over! Everyone go home! Look at how clever I am finding loopholes!
>That kind of stuff is really weird, even weirder is that such an emergency measure can be activated without countries being in active war or the like.
What's also just as weird is how the EU can just straight up sanction, debank and make European citizens virtually homeless overnight, without even a trial day in court. Absolutely insane.
This is some NAZI/USSR shit, except you don't get executed, you just get deranked and made homeless and maybe die from that on the whims of some bureaucrat in another country.
We gave the EU superpowers to "protect us" but never asked ourselves what happens when they use those powers against us when people vocally don't agree with their agenda.
What are you even talking about?
They're describing EU sanctions on individuals, just very dramatically
Jacques Baud (Swiss) and Xavier Moreau (French) citizens, got sanctioned by the EU[1] on the basis of "acting as mouthpieces for pro-Russian propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories". Sanctioning means asset freezes, debanking and travel bans, virtually a slow and painful sentence to homelessness and death since you won't be able to travel, have a bank account, a job, own or rent anything under sanctions.
I don't have a problem with them sanctioning people, I have a problem when it's not done by a judge but a snap decision done by bureaucrats without a public trial/hearing where the individuals get a chance to defend themselves for what they're accused of, especially when it's just for the act of speaking, even if we disagree with what they speak.
Because otherwise the EU is no different than a monarchic or totalitarian dictatorship who has people executed for speaking bad things against it, and there's nothing stopping them from doing the same to you, me and everyone else here for wrong speak against the crown's interests.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
Were they found to be guilty of “acting as mouthpieces for pro-Russian propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories"? If so, well…
They were not put on trial so they weren't found guilty of anything at all.
Nobody can be guilty of anything without a fair trial. Some bureaucrats power tripping acting as judge jury and executioners without trial is the definition of totalitarian tyranny.
Nobody, even law abiding citizens, wants to be under such an unaccountable legal system. Justifying it because it was used "only" against pro-Russians is insane. Today it's against them, tomorrow it will be against anyone who criticizes the EU leaders. That's how boiling the frog works. That's how fascists always did it.
>virtually a slow and painful sentence to homelessness and death
OK, do you have information as to how close to homelessness and death these two are? Based on my reading I'm unsure regarding Baud, but my impression is Moreau is probably not significantly affected.
It's a terrible principle to think like this, though. People shouldn't be sanctioned because it might not be too bad in practice.
sure, but people shouldn't lie about what the current consequence of things are either. I'm pretty sure I'm closer to death and homelessness than Xavier Moreau is.
on edit: also I think the whole death and homelessness worry expressed seems sort of weird, because I think the normal order would be homelessness and death. I may die soon, but in that context I will not actually be worrying about homelessness. Maybe that's just me though.
Xavier Moreau is not in the EU so a travel ban that prevents him from leaving the EU obviously does not affect him. The sanctions only affect the seized assets.
Meanwhile Jacques Baud is a Swiss Citizen in the EU and the sanctions ban him from leaving the EU, which makes the EU a de facto open air prison for him.
> the EU a de facto open air prison for him.
de facto a person can take a train into Switzerland from the EU (France, for example) with no border control. Or arrive by car. Once in Switzerland flights out are possible for a Swiss citizen. So I believe your statement is untrue.
Very reductionist comment- if you're an elected representative and you leave early to take a vacation knowing you'll be missing votes, you're not doing your job..
> knowing you'll be missing votes, you're not doing your job
If you knowingly miss a vote, that’s part of the job. If your OOO gets played, that’s fucking up.
Perhaps there should not be a vote while so many representatives are absent, unless it’s about a truly critical issue, like war.
They did not know this, this was an emergency vote literally injected two days ago.
Ever worked with Europeans? This is how they treat work. In their culture taking vacation and actually switching off is part of the job. I'm not making a value judgement but their approach to work is very different to what some of us are used to.
So they should prorogue the entire Parliament and they all take a month off together. Why the fuck should some particular province or riding or whatever miss out on representation on an important issue just because their rep is out for a week on an island somewhere? Could they not have a proxy / surrogate??
They are already doing that. There is an official summer break until September 02.
taking vacation and switching off is actually the sane thing for a person to do. the problem is that there is no provision for your post being covered while on vacation, and it's a problem in the enterprise/organization.
imo that a representative of the people misses a vote should just not be acceptable under any circumstances.
that's of course if we had to take "democracy" as an actually meaningful representation of the people. this was a cheap political maneuver to get a bill passed. happens everywhere. they would have gotten the bill through by any other means anyway.
that would be in an ideal democracy, though, in reality european parlamentarians don't even draft laws, they are only able to sign off on laws drafted by shady appointees of an equally shady and largely unelected (by the people) comission, take it or leave it. that, photo ops and declarations is their whole job, it shouldn't be too complicated to have a fucking substitute when on vacation.
I don’t consider these politicians typical employees.
Do you think CEOs take vacation where they cannot be reached? If it does happen, it is a very rare exception.
This. When I need to take my summer vacation, I need to request it to my manager in due time so the team can plan customer deliveries accordingly, and in my last day before leaving I need to do a handover of my open tasks to whoever will do the work in my absence. I can't just spontaneously decide one day that tomorrow I'm leaving for 2-4 weeks on vacation with no notice and no handover to my team.
What's stopping MEPs from having to do that? Do they have literally zero responsibilities and accountabilities? Because their job is pretty critical for our society an security, even if a trained monkey could do it in theory.
Oh, so it's also your fault when you plan, and get approved a vacation, and then in the middle of it (lets's say on week 2 out of 4) you're notified that in two days you must be in the office, or, according to you, you should get canned?
I don't know... I'm not European so I don't really care, but I feel like there are some jobs that have an existing overlap of _duty_. I was in the military, and PTO was viewed as a privilege, and sometimes leave was cancelled, but that makes sense because of the position. Other civilian jobs, like firefighters, police, maybe some medical practitioners, might have this same thing. Politicians I would say is definitely one of those positions, where you should actually be in "public service". Officials in a democracy are supposed to be elected not because we need people to fill vacant jobs, but because we need people to be on duty to make the hard decisions.
Basically, I don't think politicians should be held to the same standard as some SWE making note-taking apps.
This is a deeply American (and Puritan) view of work, and I can say that as an American who works in public service.
PTO is not a “privilege.” In fact, it is a documented right as part of the employment agreement your company makes you, when you sign that document about the handbook. It should be a legal agreement, but somehow we’ve convinced people their purpose in life is to work for 50-60 years for 40+ hours a week and then have maybe 20 years to enjoy life before they die, happy to be of service to the people.
Public servants deserve MORE time off and MORE money because they literally are ON CALL most of the time. Taking a vacation should be MORE Normal and votes shouldn’t require people to be in person.
You build your government the way you build your country - you should show the utmost respect for those in public service by treating them right and respecting their time.
I didn't say it was a privilege. I said it was viewed as such when I was in the military.
I wasn't talking about work agreements with civil companies. You brought that in. My comment was in regards to public service only.
I don't disagree about public servants having more time off or more money. But I believe they should be on call. If that means cancelling vacation to vote, so be it. You don't want to have that life style? Don't run for public office.
FWIW, I've had skin in that game. I was stop lossed when I had 4 months left on my enlistment for a 15 month combat deployment. That's public service. Elected officials should be present and ready to serve.
Strange response... Since when is the idea of ‘duty’ supposed to be ‘deeply American’?
I’m not American but happy to agree with the OP - being an elected MP is not just a job and if they want to take leave whenever they want to and miss critical votes then I’m sure they would have no trouble getting a normal job instead!
Surely the parliamentary sitting schedule gives them plenty of time off already where they would not miss votes (I know it does in my country)
id take ON CALL to mean that when an emergency happens like an emergency vote, they drop everything including vacation to go attend.
this doesn't seem like oncall?
It is my limited understanding this is other way around - you plan your vacation, you get it approved, then on your vacation an emergency vote to reduce your salary is called and you automatically voted yes.
> I can't just spontaneously decide one day [...]
Sure you can. What unstoppable force is going to prevent you?
You might find out there are undesirable consequences if you make that choice, but that is only if the employer decides to bring undesirable consequences. MEP employers in particular are generally apathetic about having an employee on staff. Extremely so — to the point that they won't even take a minute out of multiple years to say "hi" to the person they hired, never mind give any direction to the employee.
It doesn't have to be that way, but when the employer doesn't care, that is the way it will be.
The idea behind _representative_ democracy is that _we_ take holidays and our representatives do the work of upholding _our_ democratic values. These MEPs took their holidays before the parliamentary session was complete.
If we're talking about _direct_ democracy then we have to do the work ourselves but because we don't want to do that (because we want to go on holydays), we give up our rights to those who _want_ to represent us.
That, of course, falls apart once those representing us start to only represent themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_(Aristotle)#Book_III
This is an absurdly bad take.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/faq/9/plenary-session...
> Plenary sessions of Parliament take place 12 times per year in Strasbourg and last four days
There are 48 days in sessions over a year. You're saying that it's too much to ask MEPs not to take holidays during those 48 days? Am I missing something here?
Most of the work of an MP is not sitting in plenary sessions looking bored. The normally important bits are in-between - committee and office work. This specific event here is an example of a plenary session suddenly being made extremely important by a procedural trick.
But it _was_ a plenary session, was it not? One of only 48? That someone could easily avoid scheduling a vacation during?
Do you those 48 days are the total number of working hours these MEPs have? Of course not. Something always needs to give when going on vacation. And usually missing a a plenary session is not weird or the end of the world. The problem here is that in this case the rules were abused.
What is the out of session time for?
For doing actual work? Getting in touch with constituents, listening to them, faction internal coordination, working on committee specific stuff, understanding proposals and motions of others, maybe filing their own... when taken seriously, this can be an intense job.
Most of that list is done in session.
This was just everyone leaving on a Friday, sort of a work day, sort of not.
Or exactly as planned.
Honest question: when Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government, isn't it natural that the government will try to implement more control? And it looks EU officials do not have to accountable for anything. They will not suffer personally even when their policies wreck havoc. I don't quite understand why Europeans can trust EU at all. Case in point, EU HQs shut down its air conditioning on floors 1 through 7 to prevent electrical overloads, leaving the upper levels used by top officials unaffected. Yet did anyone like Leyen get punished? Note I'm not naive enough to believe politicians don't have special treatment in other countries. But at least in some countries, politicians will not be so shameless that they'd do it in broad day light.
> Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government
This antecedent is far too broad; what regulations, benefiting whom? It's pretty obvious in this case that the majority of their representatives do not favor at least this type of regulation. In other cases, the majority of representatives favor regulation which prevents private corporations from selling their PII to the highest bidder. So you're going to have to reckon with the nuance of the real world if you don't want to make obviously leading statements like this.
You're right, there are nuances in different policies. I was referring to the general power and consent that Europeans grant to the EU council. In my naive view their power is unchecked. As a result, we can start with good intent and good regulations, but eventually they will abuse their power as its the nature of power.
The power is checked in multiple ways: confirmation by the parliament is required in many cases and the court can overturn council decisions. The only issue is that one check is weak amd the other one is very slow.
The question I would ask next is that if a majority don't actually favor it, who will vote to sanction member countries that refuse to implement it in protest? Giving a central authority significant power likenthis inevitably leads to autocracy per Montesquieu.
Representatives are different to all of the EU bureaucracy and NGOs that make up the long-term powerful influentials in the EU. Representatives come and go.
I don't understand either but just for reference on your point:
Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years
'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'
On the other hand look at who issued this report. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
> 52% of Europeans trust the EU,
Who was asked, i.e. tourists visiting Brussels? How many were asked? How were they asked, i.e. leading questions such as "you do like the EU don't you"? Who didn't respond?
And more importantly, who is doing the asking? Oh, the EU itself is doing the asking. They are, of course, not biased in any way at all.
These numbers are then provided by the same folks that just timed a vote on our privacy when a) MEPs were known to be on holidays b) reversing the vote procedures, i.e. the 'no's have reach a set minimum c) are happy to sign away our collective privacy.
All that for 52% - all time high. When I was going to school, 52% wasn't a score that I went home to my parents with and told them how good things were going - even if it was an "all time high".
Crazy, how the EU have mixed up mediocrity with democracy.
Just to be clear, here you see the EU, but behind this there are a few corrupt national government officials that are pushing hard for this.
But hundreds voted?
314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions
Let's be honest, like for national assemblies, lots of members of the parliament are quite dumb.
I think most of them will not even look at the biggest part of the laws they are supposed to vote. They will vote for whatever they are told to vote for by the party or carefully crafted lobbying.
For something like chat control, you don't see it but there are probably a dozen lobbyist that went to see them in turn, feeding lies and propaganda that they will not challenge because they have other "important" political subjects they are busy looking at.
The commission is leading the game with lots of tricks like what was done here to get what they want in the end.
Just look at the fact that very very few of member even realized or complained to have been played fool by the last vote.
And I mean that it is wonderful already that some many members did the right choice (and I hope because they understood the issue and not because they were told to vote this), but it is crazy that so many still voted in favor.
And who knows, maybe a lot of them didn't even understand the question and were thinking that the "no" was "no to chat control", but here it goes back to my initial point that they are dumb enough to be easily manipulated by the commission members.
Yeah, it always strikes me when this crazy, obviously stupid stuff ends up "49 to 51" like either there are active forces fighting each other ending in an equilibrium, or the equilibrium is arising passively, everyone and their representatives are just randomly scribbling in the circles.
>This is a nice piece of democracy right here:
this is just eu in a nutshell, the irish were made to vote on both nice and lisbon treaties twice (both were voted no in the first vote)
Any time now even the most pro-european EU defender will realise that what was once a trade union has slowly transformed itself into an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster.
A surprisingly large amount of people are quite alright with that as long as they perceive that those undemocratic processes are producing the end results they desire. It's not unique to the EU, though they do play this game very well, or even to this time period. Once the powers have been granted, the public has only limited ability to revoke the power, with many of them easily swayed that it's good for this power to exist by having a red meat issue thrown to them to chew on as a distraction.
The USA is a nice demonstration of how far it can go if you can manufacture enough "red meat issues" and keep going for decades.
It wasn't really a trade union. It's purpose was to stop the re-emergence of something like the Nazis and to prevent wars. I don't think it's instincts were ever really democratic.
Reddit still thinks the EU represents democracy.
Reddit is one of the few remaining platforms where reach is determined democratically. You demean that populous by calling it the singular "reddit", as if it's a single hive mind. But you'll probably get your way, I imagine the billionaire censorship campaign will come for it too eventually. Then you'll only ever get to hear thoughts you agree with, glorious day ey?
Reddit is the most censored platform out there… posts and users that are not aligned with subreddit mods get banned or deleted prolifically. Subreddits that do not align similarly soon find themselves banned
Idk if many people remember how Reddit was when it started, its whole draw was that it was a bunch of relatively intelligent/friendly western internet people who liked to kinda role play as a hive mind.
I wouldn't call it the most censored platform, but it still has vestiges of its old self, particularly with respect to philosophy and politics.
Subreddits get banned for egregious shit. Reddit stays on the side of letting subs up, rather than banning.
Reddit has made it harder for mods to find out which subs you are active in, so that you can’t be banned for activity in subs that are in cold wars with each other.
Only in some bubbles. But most normies I know are massive EU fanboys and showing them the malicious things the EU is doing, they just shrug at best, or call you a Putin supporter at worst.
They'll only realize this when the jackboot is on their neck. But probably not even then because in some EU countries government obedience is like a religion.
I recommend my own personal democracy metric: your level of democracy is proportional to how easily you can shout “moron!” at your representative and have them hear you. Do you know who they are, can you find them at a public meeting, and will they be able to hear you? For the EU, all three combine to give a pretty low score.
As we’re seeing in the UK right now, if you stump up £500 and find ten people to counter-sign your candidacy, you can even run against your MP as a novelty candidate. If you choose your novelty name right you also get to stand next to them at the alphabetically-ordered result announcement.
Compare with comatose Kentucky senators on their deathbed or EU commissioners based in a country with French train signs. Neither are insurmountable obstacles to democracy — hold up a sign? Google Translate? — but, by my metric, they are lesser options to something more local and accountable.
I’m sure, back in the day, rural folk took umbrage at having to ride their donkey to the local town just to be able to throw cowpats at their despised burghers. We of course can do it on TikTok nowadays but nothing beats yelling in person.
EU commissioners are similar to minsters/secretaries in national governments. My chance of getting within earshot of German federal minister are only slightly better than those of an EU minister - especially those that are not also members of parliament.
But if I’m unhappy with EU policies I can talk to a member of the EU parliament (and yes I know two of the members from my city) or I can talk to a member of the Bundestag since national governments have a large role in the EU.
In the end, my voice is tiny. Which is expected, after all I’m just one of over 450 million people living here.
What is "normies" in this context?
I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/
>What is "normies" in this context?
normie = normal "average" people; People who aren't terminally online and up to date on tech and politics drama. Exactly the ones oblivious to negative things the EU is doing in the background, because stuff like Eurovision or the World Cup takes up more of their attentions span than complex tech or politics.
>here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative
Only because that's how you choose to see it.
> for anybody who disagrees with your world view
So having a world view where government surveillance state should NOT be OK makes me the bad guy?
Here in the UK, a large proportion of the population still think the EU is a good idea... Despite all the evidence proving otherwise.
Did leaving the EU actually fixed anything for the UK?
I know I do.
I think the main purpose of the EU is to prevent wars between European states by providing a forum for compromise and cooperation.
I’d say it’s succeeded in that nicely since its founding. Not one war between member states despite ongoing disputes.
Seems like a very good idea.
I hate this law though, it’s undemocratic.
Okay, but couldn’t a more transparent and accountable structure have accomplished the same result? Why do you need a system with seven different bodies, more than one of which can make what’s effectively laws?
For example, why have an elected parliament that can’t even originate law, but an unelected commission that can make regulations that are effectively laws?
That's implementation details though; one can absolutely think that "EU is a good idea" and "specific EU systems need improving" simultaneously, without contradiction.
It's like thinking "I like Canada and am a proud Canadian, though I think there's still a lot of inequality and many policies can be improved upon and we can certainly be more efficient".
I understand, but my question is directed to the second point. Even assuming people like the EU in principle, it's constitutional structure seems bizarre and in need of major reform, at least from my American viewpoint. But there doesn't seem to be any movement to "mend it, don't end it." Do most EU supporters also think the constitutional structure of the EU is fine as-is?
>Why do you need a system with seven different bodies more than one of which can make what’s effectively laws?
because the European Union contains more than 600 million people and almost 30 very diverse countries (and is a supranational, not federal body). It's institutions also do mirror the structures of most other large unions.
The Commission is an executive body, the parliament is a legislative body, and the council is comparable to the state bodies in bicameral governments. You may as well ask why you have a Senate or Bundesrat when you have a HoR and Bundestag. Because minoritarian and majoritarian interests need to be balanced, even more so in the EU. If even actual nation states a fraction the size of the EU and bona fide countries aren't governed in unitary fashion, why do you expect anybody would centralize so much power in the EU.
If the purpose is to avoid centralizing power, why can the Commission make regulations that have the force of law without consent from either Parliament or the Council?
it can't. Any new regulation goes through the parliament and council as a legislative act. What the Commission can do, if a legislation already exists, is pass regulation that doesn't modify essential elements. There's a direct analog to this in the US, Federal Agencies which end up doing a lot of the actual technical rule making work.
If the FAA decides to make some aviation regulation that's binding through the entire country, and likewise if EU parliament and council have adopted legislation for say, the emission rates of cars the Commission then goes and decides the actual rules. In this particular case of Chat Control 1.0 it was put to a vote, but they didn't reach the majority they needed because apparently a significant number of representatives weren't even there. Of course politically a bit of a dirty trick to push something through like this before a summer break, although I'd say the blame is on the representatives, not the Commission.
These kinds of institutions, and really in most countries they do most of the implementation work are necessary because you can't have your legislative vote on thousands of technical details of how cars or planes work, that's just a technocratic reality regardless of where you are.
Well, the No vote triggered some adjustments, so this is indeed relatively democratic. What would be the alternative?
The revised law not passing until it gets a majority would seem more democratic.
So is it undemocratic if a law is voted on by a majority and doesn’t pass because the law says it takes 3/4 to make that type of change?
"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last."
It’s less democratic, yes.
Let's just as enthusiastically revote on the chat control law right now then! Oh, wait... revotes only happen when the bureaucrats/lobbyists want them
And then politician always wonder why nobody has any trust left.
What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around, with the majority being for. I'm guessing that site has it reversed then or I don't fully understand the proposal? Looking at which politicians from my country voted "no" on this site it seems to be mostly the ones that I'd expect to vote "yes", so that would support this site just having the options reversed.
> What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around
They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.
Found this, source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.
"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:
- European People’s Party and
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
Countries in favor of chat control were:
Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus
If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):
France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg
The selection of countries seems so random. The poorer countries seem to be in favor, no judgment there... It looks like a pay-off list, though.
The whole thing also played like a game. 6 months ago the vote was signaled as pretty safely against chat control. You could watch how one by one the MEPs switched their positions. I assume they realized the vote wont hurt them because it's under the radar of general population. So it was safe to follow the lobby money.
I don't know about the other countries, but in Romania most politicians are aligned with our secret service (quite a few even in the upper echelons are literally undercover agents - which sounds like a conspiracy theory but is well documented in some cases), so they are quite naturally aligned with this initiative.
Maybe the voters also got confused and that's why it passed?
They have one job (with a high salary), a lot of personal assistants and technical support from specialist from their own party. They only have to remember if they have to press the red or the blue button.
well... maybe color blindness?
Hmm most MPs from Renew, Greens and eurosceptics (ECR) from my country voted yes. I'm a bit surprised since some of those are hardliner Christian conservatives that I'd never vote for under any circumstances.
Democracy is when you just try and try again and again until it passes with 51/49. Then its democratic and legitimized and only evil terrorists would oppose those laws we have all democratically agreed upon.
Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, they just accuse you of "collusion with Russia" and ban your bank account via "sanction policies". The ECJ doesn't have to provide any evidence of crime, you have to provide counter-evidence of the absence of crime (and good luck defending yourself without money). The ECJ judges, who interpret and impose these laws, are also not democratically really elected or anything, yet they hold power over your bank account. Makes ya think.
How did you connect the linked Wikipedia article to EU courts and ECJ?
This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.
The court approved the sanctions when he tried to challenge them.
I do not think this is true. Do you have any proof? I‘m aware only of German court refusing to apply urgent procedure to unblock his bank accounts. The sanctions were applied not that long ago for him to get decision by German courts or ECJ.
Sounds like something a Russian colluder would say
No, this is a valid point. Court cases are usually playing out slowly amd carefully. So, in order to prevent harm to the parties involved caused by that slowness, injunctions can be issued by the court that can provide reasonable relief from immediate damages from the dispute that can't be compensated for or reversed later. In Germany, getting relief through an injunction really is about proving that lasting damage is caused while the case drags on. The full merrits of the case are explicitly excluded from consideration.
That’s not true. The case is still pending in the CJEU’s General Court.
https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/affair?publishedId=T-...
Is this the first court system you ever hear about? Judges are never democratically elected.
>Redfish forced to cease operations as an official subsidiary of Ruptly/RT
>Immediately after Red Media gets founded by the guy, but now in Turkey
>Redfish social media presence gets renamed to Red Media
>Red Media kept staff, equipment and reused content from Redfish
Tbh I'd be pissed if sanctions could be bypassed by simply changing your logo and handle.
I'd go further and suspect the Russian disinformation apparatus just threw them under the bus for "EU bad" points.
It's such a textbook and standard Russian propaganda practice to finance and push divisive and partial views I'm even surprised people keep falling for it.
Another "journalist" the far left (in Spain at least) considers a martyr. The whole coverage of his arrest was a shitshow (Freedom of expression! Poland is fascist! Freedom for Pablo!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Yag%C3%BCe
Then it was shown he spied on Nemtsov, Polish journalists... and he even hugged uniformed GRU officers upon arrival in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, while wearing a "my empire needs me" t-shirt.
But this doesn't affect only the far left:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Europe
Anti-immigration, anti EU narratives, solid antisemitic (not just anti-Israel) stances, interviews with all sorts of sketchy characters, the whole set. Luckily for de Vlieger, he had sold the operation to literal Viktor Medvedchuk (and then the platform took a further Russia victim, Ukraine bad turn), so he remains unsanctioned.
> Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, ...
This was done by the Council of Europe (an organisation made up of a mix of member state foreign ministers and member state parliament members)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
No court was involved as far as I can tell...
That’s even worse
Indeed
Except in this case it actually passed 49/51.
EU cant claim the moral high ground anymore with the way this was done. They've joined the rest of the world now. This was a win for foreign companies and makes me wonder if the EU has been infiltrated by outside interests.
Oh, yes, thankfully the protections for privacy are much better in the US... right? Right?
Ah, "it's only democracy if you vote my way" argument. We usually call that type of governing something else.
Can it be undone? One of the key aspects of any society is that it can in fact change law/policy/leaders/etc without war/rebels. yes harm happens when bad crap gets in but if the system still supports change, it is working.
For all the bad in trump era like roe vs wade among many others. The same mechanism are what allowed roe vs wade to exist. A double edge sword but better than alternative variants of totalitarian multi decade long regimes.
This has an expiration date baked in for 2028 so if no new legislation comes in until then, it will undo itself on its own.
Adding the reminder that these votes and majority rejecting are of unelected bureaucrats, so the way that it was framed was approved from above while making practically impossible to reject but still theoretically possible so people are forced to swallow it.
Soviet Union 2.0
The members of parliament are elected every 5 years by the citizens of the european union. What do you mean with unelected bureaucrats?
Wow does it become law if the majority of those present opposed it? The American Congress might be utterly dysfunctional, but we’ve never had a law pass despite the majority of members voting against it. What am I missing?
The fact that there was a second vote on a modified law which passed.
Did it pass because a majority voted for it?
> What am I missing?
Nothing really.
Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.
In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.
Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.
With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.
This is incorrect.
Meet the senate, where most stuff doesn’t pass unless you get 60 votes, not 51
Who is the "political class" of the EU?
In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
> Who is the "political class" of the EU?
Highly educated people, often from wealthy backgrounds, who are very globally orientated.
They are generally not representative of the average person in Europe.
They are the people who European government appoints.
> In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?
> I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I just added that to explain why it wasn't obvious who the political class is there because their incentives are more opaque to me.
What do you think is the main reason these highly educated people act against the interests of the common people?
For example with Chat Control, are they worried about preventing populism from taking hold? Or do they personally gain something financially?
Roberta Metsola's actions this week jeopardise the legitimacy of the EU project as a whole.
It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them
EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above
I'm really surprised at the hurry. The EU, and many EU governments, have been ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.
It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.
> blame-laundering mechanism
Also, I'm stealing this.
> at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.
This isn't surprising to me at all.
The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.
At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else). Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.
The reason is more than apparent.
So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.
Honestly where do you even go if you want to get out from under this? The US was the option, but is clearly circling the drain. The EU is democracy theater at best, a democratic mandate that can be set aside any time it's inconvenient for Ashton Kutcher, and speedrunning the rebuilding of a new Soviet Union. Feels like a matter of time until they start building a new wall to keep you from leaving.
In all these places I imagine the people making these decisions are members of the populace. They need to be gently reminded that they are not more equal than others and people do not like their decision-making habits. The way anyone else engaging in anti-social behavior would be reprimanded.
Maybe Latin America. Their governments are generally less powerful and have less resources to enforce laws like this.
Are you going to take your phone and laptop with you? If so, then it doesn't really matter where you're going. You'll be populating multiple surveillance systems regardless of where you choose to live.
> Honestly where do you even go if you want to get out from under this?
Mars is nice this time of year.
Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.
I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.
Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.
for no apparent rason? the way they are preparing to bring the population into a war hardly can be any more apparent...
War requires industry. But we've deindustrialised and outsourced the manufacture of almost everything to China.
Gee maybe they should prepare to avoid war then
They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that. They didn't anticipate the Ukraine invasion, or the Middle East blowing up again.
> They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that.
Did we though? At least in Germany a bunch of anti-climate-change projects and changes have been and are being canceled and we're going back to coal and diesel. It seems we're optimizing to have no results and negative progress at the moment.
Germany dismantled their nuclear reactors because russia would always be a reliable partner. European leaders have been absolute traitors.
Nuclear and Coal. What an optimistic nation. Both are coming back I think.
> They didn't anticipate…the Middle East blowing up again
Yes, interesting that the People dropping bombs did not anticipate blowing up.
Our elites have revealed many flaws recently, but one I did not expect is that they have surprisingly limited intelligence.
EU did not dropped bombs.
But they dutifully support those who do, materially and diplomatically. Carrying significant political cost, internally as well as externally.
That's why the EU is a neutral pushover bowing down to the whims and tantrum of US, China, Iran, India, Turkey, etc. because a lot of their industry, energy, exports/imports are from those countries so any disputes would be devastating to the EU economy.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
This narrative is a fabrication.
EU spends 33% of World’s military spending, once you exclude US. EU spends more on military than China.
How much do you need to spend to defend yourself, 60% of the world?
Mind you, many western weapons, like stinger and javelin, cost more than their weight in silver. Sounds like a scam
Military spending != military capability and will to use force. For example, Germany spends way more than France on defense but has a less capable military and with no nuclear capability to boot.
From force projection capability, the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage. It's a pushover despite all that military.
The reality is that you need to be willing to drop some bombs every now and then or at least threaten or blackmail those who threaten your interests and way of life, to be taken seriously and for other countries to never fuck with you. For example the Ukraine virtually admitted to blowing up Nordstream pipeline and sending Germany's manufacturing into the storage, just to disrupt Russia. Now do you think Ukraine or any other country, would ever dare to blow up a US pipeline or piece of their infrastructure? Probably not, because they'd get carpet bombed in retaliation and their leaders shot or kidnapped by delta force.
And since the EU never plays hardball like that it always gets taken advantage of by more ruthless and unscrupulous nations with smaller and weaker militaries because both its citizens and its leaders are too afraid to ever use force.
> the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage.
The rhetoric right now is just bizarre. Why should the EU force countries against their will using military? Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
> Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
Internationally agreed upon rules don't come from first principles, they're downstream from power. The world was, and will always be, might makes right.
International rules are meaningless without hard power to enforce them.
Your rules in your country are real because you have judges and police to enforce those rules.
But internationally, there's no planetary police force(other than the US when it wishes to act like one), so solving disputes is dependent to how strong your military is, or on you capability to inflict pain on the offending country through other means like economy or trade.
That why the US walks away unscalved from international conflicts and the EU keeps getting buried further.
Politicians don't gain their position by being smart and down to earth.
And then stop people from being able to afford cheaper stuff from china (without european middlemen) by implementinh a 3eur customs fee on an 1eur phone case!
That's a good thing. We complain about lack of industrialisation. China has historically protected their fledgling industries, if we want industrialisation back, we need to as well, to the detriment of mindless consumption of cheap stuff
But we want cheap stuff, we don't have unlimited money.
This law didn't open a phone case factory in europe, it just made the 1eur case cost ~5euros (vat is paid on customs too). The only alternative is to go to a local mall and buy a case there for 10-15euros, and it's the same chinese case, just more expensive, but the reseller pays a lot less tax, since they can buy 100 cases for 1eur and still pay just 3eur of customs on them.
So I, the consumer get 300% customs on that 1eur case (+vat on huge customs fee), while the mall kiosk gets 3% customs fee, how is that fair? And how will that build a phone case factory in europe?
Why not build the factory first instead? Have it make 2eur phone cases, and then the price raise would make me buy the european one, but for now, it's just makes me pay more for the same chinese stuff, and I can't spend the leftover money for a local beer at a local bar anymore, so stuff actually made in europe.
They will rapidly reindustrialize when the first shots are fired. The EU's goal is the strategic defeat of Russia. What the common people think or want is irrelevant. All environmental and climate legislation that gets in the way will be waivered indefinitely until the war is over 5+ years of drone warfare and 100s of thousands dead.
The drone war will be quite limited by chip production.
And once the chip fabs have been bombed, civilisation is set by by decades, and may end up fighting a lower-tech war.
There are thousands of strikes per day today. The chips needed to control a drone are not the same high cost ones needed for data centers or otherwise. Older fabs work just fine and countries can just eat into their other industries.
Beyond this, if you start attacking neutral fabs you lose out on anything from them. Your expectations are quite a bit off if you think striking fabs stops a conflict.
These chips are not the latest nvidia etc: false like this are relatively easy to set up compared to fabs that make the chips you seem to be thinking about.
There are many fabs using "last year's" fab processes for defense purposes. Wouldn't be surprised if they had quick and easy way to set up fabs for chip weapons production in bombed out buildings and warehouses. Defense doesn't need civilian fabs. In the end, we, the civilians, stand to lose tremendously.
Once the chip fabs get bombed much of modern society collapses and insurrection and civil uprising becomes everyone's #1 concern. Politicians are just too stupid to realize this because they live in a protected bubble of fantasy land where nothing they do usually ever directly effects them.
> The EU's goal is the strategic defeat of Russia
This does not even make sense as a conspiracy theory.
Had "EU" wanted to hurt Russia there were was a thousand ways to do that. But they didn't. Instead they traded and built infrastructure. Most EU countries saw Russia as a partner before they invaded their neighbour in the most gruesome way possible.
If anything, the EU should have reacted sooner. It was shameful they didn't. You can't really pretend like nothing while an all out war is taking place on the same continent.
>They will rapidly reindustrialize when the first shots are fired.
By WHO?! Russia is still stuck in 1/4 of the Ukraine and fear mongers make it sound like they're about to reach Paris any day now.
Apparent? Unless Russia attacks there will be no war, it is not the US who willy nilly attacks others.
War is less imminent now than ever. Ukraine has caused a ton of damage to Russia and at this point the Kremlin has more to worry about than EU countries (pretty much every Russian government ever is brought down from within).
No, leftist governments in the EU have failed to provide prosperity and failed in all their promises, now they're going for total control to try to stay in power.
Look at France, as soon as Le Pen was cleared to run for the presidency they start talking about anti "misinformation" laws...
> War is less imminent now than ever
You can always make your enemy. Current rearming efforts really remind historians of WW1 arm races.
At some point once so much interests and offers are at stake, that creating the demand is inevitable and just a matter of time.
It's true. Rearming and mobilizing troops will cause a reciprocal reaction in your neighbors. Whether or not war is or was imminent is irrelevant; europe will manifest it regardless.
Are you calling Macron a "leftist"? It does help your argument because it's a tautology that "the leftists failed to provide prosperity" if the entire political spectrum counts as such.
I don't share this outlook, sadly - given that military figures especially around the Eastern side of EU keep saying military conflict with Russia is "inevitable" in the next 4 years. Of course - they are in the military, their job is specifically to look at the worst case scenarios. But I wouldn't be so sure the risk is not there.
I do think there's the possibility Russia attacks a NATO country in an attempt to save face. I don't think they have the manpower or equipment to sustain an assault that would require any level of mobilization from EU countries.
The reason they do this is preparation for war. Also, foreign influence bots and hostile active measures.
>with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn
They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.
> I'm really surprised at the hurry.
Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.
Lobbyists are winning the war.
> ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately
It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.
Didn't Steve Bannon do a tour in Europe recently to dispense some of his strategy?
This smells like him, honestly.
My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.
I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.
If you look at who voted for chat control approval you would find that it's majority the currently in power centre right parties. The more far right or left you go the more likely they were against. It's like the one issue where AfD, die Linke and Greens are aligned. That suggests that it's most likely hard lobby that bribes the established class.
Nt being able to scan personal communications would break big tech platforms main monetisation strategy (selling peoples data).
None of these will be used to attack the far-right parties on the right though. They barely investigate those parties in the individual countries, but they focus more on the moderate left already.
To me it seems like the minority would be far more interested in implementing surveillance tools so they can target the majority in order to try and gain and maintain power.
It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.
I think that's a little naive. This sort of legislation is much more useful in terms of managing the local population and what they are allowed to talk about than it is in terms of profit—except, I suppose, in the sense that holding companies liable for what is said with their software is unprofitable.
I didn't mention profit.
Why mention the US if you're not referring to the GDPR?
> at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason
So many reasons: unpopular wars in the Middle East, repeated embarrassments in international arena, domestic unrest, decadent elites…
>for no apparent reason, lately.
for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)
obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent
Denmark was one of the main countries pushing for Chat Control 2.0 ...
In Canada, there's been a lot of talk about how immigration, "broke the Canadian consensus," around immigration as a good thing.
The problem is, there never was a consensus around immigration. The Liberals own stats prove that. What there was was a consensus around multiculturalism and tolerance.
Immigration itself, was always split evenly among three camps in Canada: those who want more, those who want less, and those who think we have the right amount.
Trudeau & his fake leftist brigade many have ruined multiculturalism for a large portion of Canadians, permanently.
The promise (for the non-insane majority) was that immigration was going to save our economic bacon. That's the orthodox economist viewpoint after all.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
I agree that it's justified. SOME immigration is needed in order to save "duh economy," but what we got instead was economic warfare against workers.
It's not even that some migration is need to save the economy. You'd need pronatalist policies or you're going to be doing that "some immigration" for ever and ever.
Hm well then perhaps it's time to focus on saving "people," over the economy. Perhaps...states are actually best used to serve their people, instead of endless growth.
upvote
> for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
This is completely BS. Nobody wants to let in unlimited migrants. This is not a goal of anyone, including the left-most left. In fact on the left we are very aware that our welfare systems can't support unlimited people.
The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers. There's processes in places to determine whether they deserve this. The right just want to turn their boats back as they approach (pushback) which is literally illegal.
It's important to realise though that asylum seekers are not the root cause of most of our issues even though they are portrayed as such by the right in deflection from the real issues. For example here in Holland the biggest societal issue is the farmers who pollute too many nitrogen compounds and that causes housing projects to be put on hold. The number of asylum seekers has been steadily decreasing over the years.
But farmers make up a huge piece of the right wing so they'll never take ownership of the problem. Better to deflect on someone else.
Numbers are going down, but in my area there are now 4 buildings with asylum seekers. Started with a hotel, then an office building, then some newly built expensive houses that were first up for rent and now rented for asylum seekers, and now another office building. Honoring existing treaties out of principle can also be put on hold when the situation changes.
From what I can tell, a big part of the problem in Europe is that people seeking asylum are prohibited from making a living (due to widespread belief in the lump of labor fallacy) and so have to be dependent on welfare.
Yes and when a government tries to do something about that (like Spain granting temporary permits so they can work and pay taxes) it angers the right even more.
The issues here are the same as they have been forever in every country; Spanish people simply are not going to do the jobs the immigrants are doing. This is the same in every country I lived in or visited, including the US. In Spain, most my uneducated neighbours feel too high to even work in bars, let alone pick fruit, shovel shit, pick up garbage etc. So who is going to do that besides immigrants who are eager to do it; a few generations later, they will vote right and complain about immigrants and will say they are too good to shovel shit, of course.
>asylum are prohibited from making a living
This is exactly how we got here. We allowed them to work to make temporary asylum permanent migration.
Look, you can either let people make a living and manage their own lives while contributing to society, or you can not let them make a living and ensure they're housed and fed. You can't be angry at A and also be angry at B.
Nice framing. How about C: not letting in a flood of financial refugees with completly different cultural values in the first place or at least send them back at some point instead of giving them free citizenship and all its benefits as justification for them working here or not being able to work?
Just admit then that it's not about jobs, housing or anything else but you just don't want to see brown faces in the street?
PS: Part of the issue with sending them back is that the countries they're from won't take them. They can't live at the airport like Tom Hanks either.
> just don't want to see brown faces in the street?
They could be green for all everyone cares about. The actual relevant distinction with real word implication is criminal statistics and per capita rates. Not to mention everyday real life bad experiences for people living outside of the sheltered silicon valley world.
>countries they're from won't take them
That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.
If they are only asylum seekers, it means they are still in the validation process.
Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').
> The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers.
But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.
If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.
(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)
The UK's system for processing applications is:
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run. 2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim. 3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
Well, don't forget some of these wars are caused by us. The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses so Dubya could make his Halliburton buddies happy. As a result and pure neglect to form a legit democratic government after the war a power vacuum ensued which caused the rise of ISIS which contributed to the war in Syria. Which directly caused the mass migration on foot from Syria.
In this way we do have responsibility towards them. The migration from Africa is a different issue but it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
> Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more.
Well exactly but nobody is talking about that. Everyone is talking about the asylum seekers. Which are only a small part of the issue.
And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market. So the parties backed by those with money are always obstructing new construction and other means to make housing cheaper. This is a much bigger problem when it comes to housing than those few apartments granted to asylum seekers.
Moral responsibility is not real responsibility that can be enforced at the point of a gun by anyone or any nation, and so this responsibility does not have to be assumed
> The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
That is true.
Surely those who need refuge from the worst Islamic regimes are the women, not the men?
As for the housing market, yes, it'd still be in a bad state with zero migration. But at the moment, it seems that we can't build enough to keep up with the migration alone. And when we do manage to build loads of homes, we completely neglect most of the infrastructure needed to support them.
We haven't built a reservoir since the 90s. Transport is a real problem, with the roads overloaded and in bad condition while rail projects seem impossibly slow and costly (HS2 is probably the last one the UK will ever attempt?). And then there's the NHS, policing+prisons, education system, and so on.
>for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
be warned citizen, you are committing a serious wrong and hate think and will hence be labeled nazi, fascist or any other dehumanizing word to legitimize violence against you. Please correct your mistake to protect our democracy.
Fascist and nazi are political movements. It is not dehumanizing to call fascist movements fascists
It is in the age of "everyone not agreeing with me is a nazi" and "punching a nazi is good". Just have a look at the black shirt antifa terrorist lynching people or at least intimidating everyone not agreeing with them.
You don't get called a nazi because they think you are one but because it's easier to justify violence against you that way.
unpopular with whom?
Every time HN posts another one of these privacy-invading EU regulations, a bunch of pro-bureaucracy people are in here cheering on regulations and knocking down anyone who suggests that maybe this time they've gone too far.
Do they? What I read now and in the past is mostly Americans being proud somehow (with Trump doing whatever he feels like to fill his family's pockets).
Are you in Europe? has TDS spread across the ocean somehow? It's amazing that people want to insert Trump into every single discussion
Is it not comparable in this case? Two western rich nations being undemocratic. At least in the EU there is voting (pointless in this case, but often effective); the US dude just does whatever he wants while the people are against it (ratings and wars which were promised would not happen etc).
> it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them
Haha, no. As long as there is bread and circus, nothing wil happen.
well, bread is running our at beakneck speed...
that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...
This removes circus from the children.
Children are politically irrelevant.
This comment does not add any value to the discussion.
PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.
Yes it does. Your comment does not add any value to the discussion.
Many of us find it difficult to be relentlessly positive as we watch organizations that constantly paint themselves as the epitome of democracy act in a way counter to the repeatedly-expressed will of the people. I cannot smile my way into fascism.
OK, but what does that have to do with the suggestion that saying “nothing will happen” adds no value to this conversation
If it's indeed the case, it adds more value than 100 comments explaining non-happening course corrections, and revolts, and backlashes they believe we'll see.
It's useful to add some cynicism in the mix (or in this case, pragmatism)
I think I'm one of those to whom you refer (except that I'm already "awake", or at least I like to think so). I'm normally pro-EU but this chat control is anathema to me. I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.
> I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.
You shouldn't go that far. Simply don't vote for the EPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party_Grou...) in your country. They are the driving force behind this. Other parties have mostly voted against this (depending on the country)
Yeah, this is also a step too far for me. The EU has also done good things, like GDPR, right to repair, fining big tech again and again ... but it rarely follows up as much as it needs to.
The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at least contains the economically most powerful EU countries, so that we have enough economical weight, that the other big players cannot simply push us around. Currently, the EU seems to be hellbent on losing its support. But how to prevent that other union to go down the same road?
Anyway, it seems clear, that we can no longer allow EU decision makers to make rules for us. They are not to be trusted.
The alternatives are also not to be trusted: if the EU falls we will have war between EU countries and hitlers and francos back in their seats but now with mass AI; Hello Frank, we detected in your email sent 21 years ago that you made fun of Mr Klein, his son, our glorious leader, has auto signed the documents for you to be sent to NeoWitz where you will spend the short remainder of your life.
> I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.
You mean the far right that talks about EU all the time and loves when EU does things like this?
To understand whether/to what extent this is brazen, I'd be interested to learn the reasoning why urgency procedures are possible, and in particular, why the apparent majority against shouldn't have been enough, and what is needed to classify something as urgent.
Afaik, EU rules provide for urgent procedure only for proposals at first reading, while here it was used to compress a second reading vote and skip committee, just perfectly timed for the last sitting before recess.
The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.
To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.
Thanks. Do you know then why of the majority that voted against today, enough people voted in favour of the urgency procedure?
Saving face before (saying "see, I voted against") then doing what's asked of them by the lobbyists anyway where it's less apparent.
Sure, but I'm interested in a steelmanned explanation before judging.
The urgency procedure is not the issue here, the problem is that this was Parliament's second reading, and the treaties (article 294 TFEU) say:
> Second reading
> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:
> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;
> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;
> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.
It was the second reading, but was it also treated as such? (Because if so, it sounds like this would have been a rejection?) If not, what is the steelmanned reason for doing so?
Yes, it was the second reading; because of that, the motion for rejecting the Council common position was not approved, since it received a majority, but not an absolute majority, of votes
I don’t understand how a governing system requires a majority to reject a change to the status quo. The status quo must be maintained unless a majority decides to change the status quo.
It is the equivalent of having a gas pedal in a car that is fully activated unless you put your foot down.
The urgency procedure has nothing to do with the absolute majority requirement. It's necessary because, in the second reading, the Parliament should have an absolute majority to reject or amend the Council (i.e. the governments of the member states) position but only a simple majority to approve it
They've been doing this with unpopular votes since the inception of the EU, nothing new and people definitely haven't woken up, unfortunately.
Its honestly a bit sad that this in particular got people up in arms on social media, nobody gave a single shit when they sacrifice millions of people and entire nations on the periphery to their death cult of market orthodoxy.
The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.
Yes, this basically means the EU pushed a new censorship regulation using lawfare tricks without ever having a majority vote for the proposal.
If it's not a dictatorship, a regime, a shithole, a kleptocracy, or whatever name they use for a government they don't like, I don't know what it is.
The regulation was rejected today with 314 votes against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions, but because of Metsola's lawfare that classified this regulation as under an "urgent procedure", an absolute majority was required to reject.
I wonder if the abstentions are counting "missing MEPs" or MEPs present but who did not vote
The EU parliament has 720 representatives (at the moment 719, one seat is vacant apparently), so 113 representatives didn't show up for the vote. The absolute majority would've been reached with 361 votes.
And there were a lot of them. Some i assume just couldn't give a fuck and are on vacation. The others for sure did it to help approval while keeping "clean" to their audience.
Chat Control 2.0 is the censorship regulation. Chat Control 1.0 just legalized what Facebook was doing anyway.
Sure, then just let the normal legislative process run its course, no need to bleed political capital and get an already polarised electorate to hate the EU even more by shoving this legislation through in this way.
> no need to bleed political capital
I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".
Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853746
https://www.alamy.com/16-july-2019-france-france-straburg-a-...
That's how multi-party parliamentarism usually works. A minority is not allowed to choose the leader just because they are a slightly larger minority than the others.
Because no party has an outright majority, there are weeks of negotiations after the elections, as the parties try to find a compromise acceptable to a majority. Once a deal has been reached, the parliament votes to confirm it. If the vote fails, the parties return to negotiations.
Von der Leyen was chosen to head the Commission, because she was an acceptable compromise. All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
All the European Council's negotiations were private.
No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.
> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?
All real negotiations are private. When politicians debate or negotiate in public, they inevitably start talking past each other to the general public.
Voting rituals would be a waste of time. The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions. If no party has a majority, no candidate can hope to get majority support before the whole package has been agreed on.
> The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions
It's two votes, not one; the President and the rest of the Commission are confirmed separately. In this case there was a four month gap between the two votes!
VDL was confirmed by the Parliament on 16 July 2019, by 383 votes to 327 against, with 22 abstentions[0].
Her Commission was approved by the Parliament on 27 November 2019 by 461 votes to 157 against, with 89 abstentions[1].
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190711IP...
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191121IP...
All of those should be voted directly by the people.
On the other hand people don’t all want for negotiations to happen in private: https://european-republic.eu/en/
I agree, my point about political capital was about the overton window shifting to allow a more mainstream EU-skeptic platform for national parties, platforms which up until recently were easily labelled Russophiles or European traitors for US money.
I was aware that VDL obtained her role by routing around the Spitzenkandidaten process, but I was never aware that her confirmatory vote was done in this way.
Her unpopularity at home also reinforces the idea that unpopular politicians can be sent to Brussels, because "in Brussels, you can't hear them scream".
It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.
Are you gullible or complicit?
Close vote?
They passed a regulation with 276 votes in favor, 314 votes against, and 17 abstained. The minority decided instead of the majority.
If this is not a dictatorship, what is it then? In any case, it has nothing to do with the democracy.
My point is that this was a minority of 46.7% making that decision (because of a technicality that has been pointed out already). In a dictatorship, a minority of 1 against a million or more makes all the decisions. Even though you can say 46.7% and 0.0001% are both below 50%, it's missing a lot of nuance to claim they are of the same nature.
What should worry everybody is the big picture (trying to abstract from politics, ideologies and specific situation). In recent years we had:
- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)
- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)
- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)
So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.
There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.
> There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around
Nukes
Isn't it interesting that if you remove the US from that list, it all aligns with US foreign policy? How fortuitous that EU interests just happen to coincide so well with our American friends.
US is now allied with Russia though. Or at least its president acts as if it was.
Then you are not paying attention, he satisfied his Murica-First Cult like a circus clown. The US is the biggest arms dealer in the world, the Europeans are delivering weapons from their stockpile to Ukraine, then the US is filling those stockpiles up. Works like clockwork, just like under Biden, there is no actual change in policy towards Russia/Ukraine.
> - Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
For which there is no good reason and which is extremely stupid
There has been zero aggression from China towards Europe and zero chance of military confrontation.
Most of the sanctions that were implemented under pressure from Us have backfired on Europe (but not so much on US)
European politicians are going around the world and telling India not to trade with Russia while Israel trades with Russia, etc.
EU is doing some concerning moves but, looking at your points, Russia attacked Ukraine. EU is not at war with Russia, only supporting Ukraine.
Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.
Yeah US is threatening to invade and take over Canada, Greenland, I mean no wonder the alliance is no longer strong right?
And the internal struggles are indeed a problem, this is due to the extreme right which has completely taken over America (and is sponsored by Russia). It was good to see the Hungarians came to their senses but it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now. Russia and America obviously not. Canada yes but they're not big. China just serves its own interests, they will never care about a partnership. They just want our money to buy their products, nothing else.
I think South America is another potential one and the EU is trying to connect there with eg Mercosur. But America is sponsoring the extreme right there too as you can see in Honduras and Colombia recently. And in Venezuela of course.
There is a considerable history of the US wanting Greenland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_acquisi...
> The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." ― Lord Palmerston
There are lots of possible allies, but no one single ally to depend on. India to counter balance China, Canada to have an ally in North America, etc.
> it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
Or it can become a federal state.
Well yes the US has wanted it but never actually threatened to invade it before.
And no I don't think it's a good idea for Europe to become a federated state. The US' current situation shows how bad that could turn if the wrong person is elected.
At least we have the national governments here as a safeguard and we can also leave the EU if needed.
And yeah I didn't name India as a possible partner because they're too close with Russia. The EU is trying to make some deals with them but it's a bad idea while Modi and the BJP in general is in power in my opinion. They're similarly bad to minorites as the Chinese.
Right wing populism is growing in EU as well. That is also sponsored by Russia but also by Trump/Vance etc..
It is popular because governments are failed to address legitimate issues and gaslight population.
But the populism doesn't address the issues either and and their incoherent points will make things worse. Just look at the US for example.
Indeed, this happens when you sacrifice public dialog for short-term gains calling everyone who does not agree with your points "far-right", "nazi", "russian asset". There will be literal fascists and people will support them just because they promise(probably bait-and-switch, but does not matter) to address public problems instead of gaslighting that problems are non-existent.
We call them that because it's true. The far right parties don't want to solve problems. They thrive on anger and hate. If they actually would solve something people would stop voting for them. Because anger and hate are the only things they have to offer.
They don't care about solving problems around migrants. It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
> It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
Its similar to Trumpism in that sense, if you ask afd voters for example they will talk about migration and crime. Must all be racists. The mainstream discourse ends there.
From a leftist pov I think its the dissatisfaction in the cartel party that makes this scapegoating popular in the first place. There are many meaningful ways that peoples material conditions are worsening, which is ignored by the establishment, then a new party comes along and blames it all on migrants. The fact the afd calls itself "alternative" is telling perhaps, it directly challenges the neoliberal "there is no alternative" (Thatcher) / "alternativlos" (Merkel) doctrine.
Germany almost 4x its defense spending, they spend hundreds of billions on defense while cutting social and infrastructure spending. Germany has neolib austerity literally written into their constitution since 2009 (debt break), interestingly the afd voters believe the inverse, that the german government has been over-spending for decades and there is no austerity which they actually want. But they also believe the cdu are leftists so there is that, just shit in their brains at the end of the day so how do you really make sense of it?
EU is at war with Russia, just that both sides are too cowardly to say it openly.
They didn't attribute any fault to these patterns, just said the pattern itself is concerning. It is bad for the EU to be mistreated by the US!
I don't want to hear about the EU's "strong digital privacy" laws and protections ever again.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
There can exist strong consumer protections against misuse of their personal data by various entities.
And there can simultaneously also exist governmental overreach against citizens private data.
The world is complex, few things are truly binary.
But now you have governmental overreach and legalized spying on European Citizens by (mostly) US Companies, so i would say that Law is truly binary bad.
Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.
But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.
Europe or EU has never looked at data protection against private companies and data protection against government as one and the same. Remember, that even GDPR has carveout for governmental use.
The americans did, but US isn't EU.
Except it isn't "now" it was a thing since covid.
And it's not overreach it's kinda more of a loose exception to the GDPR which actually allows companies to read messages. Which they would already do without GDPR
It still remains true that Mark Zuckerberg will get arrested if he is caught using the data for anything other than child porn scans.
Your a dreamer, no one in that position will ever get arrested (in the West) slap on the hand, 100M and the thing is forgotten.
I am not sure if the absurdity of that statement is intentional, or a result of just how far the Overton window has drifted.
First of all, private companies shouldn't be given that responsibility to begin with. Meta in particular, has a long history of unethical and immoral usage of personal data. I won't use the term "illegal", as the question of legality becomes moot when punishment can be factored in as a cost of doing business [1]. Given the long list of things Meta has been caught doing, together with the in grand total zero seconds of jail time. I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this would be any different. I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened, where in some room without windows and a lot of lawyers and business analysts, they have ran models and concluded that the cost of getting caught here is "a good financial decision". Wouldn't be surprised either if it also came with a guarantee of personal protection from prosecution, from NSA and other government entities, in exchange for a hand in that data pipe.
Secondly, for this to carry any plausibility for being motivated by "protect the children" arguments, it requires a minimal effort be enacted on more effective measures, and a measured balance with the cost this comes at. There are very good arguments for why this law would actively harm children. Throw in some Bayesian understanding, and you better have a state of the art system that somehow pretty much never has false positives, nor false negatives, where this was also the only way to detect and avoid said abuse. I don't know the numbers here, but I highly doubt this is a good idea, even with infinite generosity as to good intentions. We've all been children, we've all done stupid things. Now throw in the brilliant and surely-not-to-scar-a-child-for-life situations where parents and strangers looking at something they thought was private, and have a "grown up discussion" about. I shiver at the thought.
Thirdly, and aside from directly harming children in situations where they selves use technology and naively, and unwisely share pictures, consider how many take pictures of their own kids without clothes, because they are normal human beings, who do not consider there to be anything sexual about said depiction. You want to throw law enforcement in the mix here? Child protective services?
Fourthly, consider the possible negative for this abuse. If normal behavior (e.g. children being children, and e.g. normal parents otherwise sharing normal pictures if you are a normal person) can be selectively chosen as being a heinous crime, this should scare anyone, especially consider the political shifting trends towards fascism.
[1]: https://www.creativefuture.org/facebook-scandal-timeline/
Western Europe is a place where the political structures, for better or worse (mainly worse) still trust people to follow the law. Much EU politics makes more sense with this in mind. They consider a law saying "you may only use this capability to scan for child porn" to be a barrier against other uses, the same way they consider a law saying "you must get the user's consent before setting a tracking cookie" to prevent anyone from setting a tracking cookie without consent. They don't feel a need for hard fences like "chat must be encrypted" or "browsers must disable cookies on every website by default" because they consider the soft law to be an adequate solution.
>I won't use the term "illegal", as the question of legality becomes moot when punishment can be factored in as a cost of doing business.
Woah, that's such a good, on point statement. From Boing, FightClub (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes/?item=qt0479130) to Cambridge Analytica (Meta) and Pegasus as a small sample ;)
Yeah, I'm not bating my breath for the Silicon Valley Invasion Act.
There can be, but this isn't it. In the EU, a company can't send you an email, but it can read your email.
In this case, the phrase “consumer protections” is almost insulting when the things it’s supposedly protecting us from are a triviality compared to the horror show being introduced.
There will surely be some people who applaud your post for pointing this out. But the vast majority of people don't see "government spies on me" vs "private industry spies on me" as a meaningful distinction and there are MANY MANY recent examples of this: the discourse around Flock, the discourse around ICE using personal information to trace dissenters, the discourse around DOGE and Palantir.
But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.
I see a significant distinction between these two things. And I see chat control as a significant intrusion in my personal life.
Laws and democracy is a constant fight, no democracy was complete and perfect the day it was announced.
We lost a battle now. And unlike people like you who only resort to insults I am not willing to give up just because of this setback. I will continue to fight for these rights.
No, "strong digital privacy" and "governmental overreach against citizens private data" is mutually exclusive.
They're strong protections relative to most other jurisdictions, where there is no need to pass laws exceptionally allowing certain uses of private data, since such uses were never forbidden and sometimes are mandatory beyond what Chat Control 2.0 would mandate.
Already was done hearing that day 0, before the cookie banners started showing up.
Do you think people should have privacy from the government? That exists in a completely different realm than privacy against a private company.
Secrecy of correspondence is a pretty old concept.
Chat Control 1.0 is the voluntary carveout rolled forward, nothing more. Breyer is right that this locks the door on stronger action against the real drivers. Even 'voluntary' scanning runs into ePrivacy Article 5(1) and CJEU jurisprudance on general monitoring. Providers keeping client-side scanning are exposed the moment a national court tests it against La Quadrature. The child safety framing keeps eclipsing case law that already limits mass processing of private comms.
Instead of solving real problems, the EU Parliament supports the globalists' agenda for privacy and human rights violations — our fundamental rights
It's the EU, where regulation, not innovation, is what makes the world a better place.
To be fair, lack of regulation didn't stop us in America from passing the Patriot Act.
USA allows overreach from both government and corporations. But pretends to hate a strong government. EU allows overreach from government, but limits corporations. And pretends for it to be about rights, but in practice it's about keeping the overreach to themselves (the government).
>EU Parliament supports the globalists' agenda
word. thats the entire point of the existence of the EU
The US built mass surveillance by bypassing congress, at least in the EU we do it democratically /s
This, and other similar legislation, serve as a constant reminder of why the American founding fathers had to revolt against tyranny, and why constitution amendments like the 1st and 4th exist. The 4th in particular was written as a response to a British law similar to Chat Control (writs of assistance).
And then you got the patriot act.
That was terrible. But then the NSA just started surveilling everything illegally anyway, laws be damned.
I was just pointing out that the 4th amendment is not really helping the americans with tyranny and all the related stuff :)
Sadly doesn't seem to make much difference, though. If anything the UK is less authoritarian than the US now.
It's hard to compare US and EU internet freedom because a person usually spends most of their life in one place and is clueless about the life in other.
I've never lived in US, were there any cases of ISPs blocking websites in USA? Even DNS-level blocking counts
come on guys, stop upvoting me and answer the question please
How many people are arrested for social media posts and other speech in each country?
To be fair the other country routinely deploys military against citizens, and deports non-citizens for speech.
A guy was arrested for a joke he posted on social media about Charlie Kirk. He spent some time in jail but ended up winning a lawsuit. So the answer isn't exactly 0 in the US
It's actually quite hard to say, as there are no official figures on arrests specifically for social media posts in either country. And lot of the specific cases that people point to in the UK (e.g. Lucy Connolly) have parallels in the US:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-com...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...
(The figures that the American right give for "arrests for social media posts" in the UK are actually figures from certain police forces for arrests under various pieces of online communication legislation, many of which have nothing to do with social media.)
At least I have still have a 2nd amendment - and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.
> and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.
That's called "luck".
A friend of mine did likewise, and got a knock, then handcuffs, then a trial. He was acquitted because everything he said was allowed under the first amendment. In fact, several academics had published the same/similar stuff he did and not had any problems (or ever worried about them). But he was of the wrong race/religion...
There was never a time in the 20th-21st century where you can practice your 1st amendment rights and be absolutely sure you wouldn't get a knock on your door.
> That's called "luck".
I think it's actually called statistics. In 2026, it would seem I'm statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK. I mean it's not like the reason is hidden. Arrests typically require crossing into narrow unprotected categories under the First Amendment: true threats (Virginia v. Black standard), incitement to imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio), or specific crimes like credible harassment, cyberstalking, or extortion.
It's quite a bit different than the UK's hate speech laws and the comparative result makes complete sense.
Luck is statistical :-)
Then we agree that it's not unreasonable for me to feel confident I am unlikely to get arrested in the US over a social media post than in the UK, which is the whole point I was making all along.
For you, yes.
But not for some other folks in the US.
If you want to invoke statistics, I'm sure 99% of UK citizens are confident they won't get arrested over a social media post either. They probably worry about it a lot less than you would if you moved there.
Well, sure, I tend to ground my feelings about matters in statistics. If others don't do that, then it makes total sense they might feel worried about it. But I mean there's entire groups of people saying, quite loudly, that they don't like the social media arrests and how they feel draconian. You don't really need to "guess" about a sentiment. Clearly enough people are concerned that it's being talked about at a national level. I'm not aware of anything similar, or to the same degree, happening in the US.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251231145954/https://www.theti...
https://freespeechunion.org/archive/daily-mail-investigation...
Also, see E-petition 728715, which had 190,000 signatures from concerned citizens. Your 99% statistic is clearly going against the data.
190,000 is less than 1%, and anything from The Daily Mail is suspect anyway.
You seem to be trying to knock down a straw man, as I never claimed it was worse in the US.
No, was just pushing back at the idea that the social media arrest isn't a concern to 99% of the British population. Typically 190,000 is considered the floor because there's a wide margin of people either too busy or too scared to sign their signature. Same is true in the U.S.
But sure, obviously we're never going to agree here. I've provided my logic/evidence and you're not convinced. Fair enough. I'm content to let others review the same evidence and form their own opinions on the matter.
Got a link for those UK stats? Last time I went looking, even a Parliamentary report expressed that the stats are difficult to find, because the crime is eg malicious communications which covers a lot of acts.
Your links in another comment do not contain nearly enough detail to support the argument you're attempting to make. The 2 laws mentioned therein are broad and could cover many acts.
It's like a newspaper looking at the statistics for murder and creating a story that murder by asphyxiation with a pillow is on the rise.
n.b. I am not disagreeing that the police are policing social media. It's obviously an easy target. But we should be careful of newspapers pushing narratives, by asking for precise data
Well, that presents a problem when the news organizations that did investigate are just outright dismissed. The Times did a FOI request and are the ones who published the 12,183 figure which ultimately demonstrated the massive increase year over year.
The fact that there were signed petitions, two reports from supposably untrustworthy news organizations (that I could fine, there's probably more), and that it's been discussed at the national level multiple times, will either convince someone that it's 100% fabricated if they lean one way politically or that it's true if they lean the other way.
More and more I've found that it has nothing to do with data anymore. People will just ignore whatever isn't suitable to their beliefs.
You don't have the data on arrests specifically over social media posts, because they don't exist, so you chose to dismiss my reply and attempt an ad hominem.
I am not leaning one way or the other 100%, as indicated in my earlier reply. You are just reading what you want to read
I agree when there is not precise data available, inferences can be made from other data, but you must not state things like "statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK" when you don't have the actual, relevant statistics.
If you wish to argue with statistics, you must present them. And they will be cross examined, as is right and proper.
It was an observation, based on my own experiences, of how more and more people are dismissive based on their existing preferences. A refrain if you might. I have no idea what you believe or what your motivations are and I wasn't trying to guess.
But I digress. I'm the only one who has even attempted to provide any sort of data in this thread - which is typical of HN. Cast doubt and force the other party to continue to provide information until some unstated goal is satiated (and I often find the goal tends to move as well). It's a brilliant tactic, basically no effort and you can continue to feel confident in your assumptions. I miss when conversations were reciprocal.
Tens of millions of Americans, usually supporters of the 2nd, have openly declared that having a firearm on you while at a protest is a crime punishable by death, and have done nothing to stand up against Trump, who has openly declared his hostility to the 2nd amendment multiple times now.
Bringing a rifle to a protest you expect to get hot, brandishing it about, and then shooting someone in self defense is perfectly fine, but having an every day carry firearm, getting held down by the president's personal paramilitary org, and being shot execution style is apparently fine.
I'm sick and tired of the stupid claims about how important the 2nd is while the very advocates of it only bring it up to talk about how much they want to shoot democrats.
There's idiots on all sides. Plenty of sane people who are too busy working and raising families instead of loudly participating in politics that still hold a balanced view on the subject.
I can hold the situation you cited as an example that should be shown in training in how not to handle a situation like that while at the same time vehemently pushing back against the bureaucrats trying to disarm me. It's why I've always identified as an independent my whole life.
Some people say im rather pessimistic - but i still kinda hoped that the EU will not go down this path.
That said - i was obviously wrong.
I don't really know what else to say than : this breaks a fundamental foundation of privacy. Sure i was never 100% aligned with EU level decisions (neither with my residing country one's) but that's just... wrong on so many levels... how can i even still argue to people that EU and democracy are good if this is what its heading for?
Usually i try to explain stuff with common grounds, the bigger picture or whatever is fitting. You can't have everyone happy on every decision.
But at this point im lost of arguments. They just betrayed every citizen from my pov.
So whats my point of this comment? Maybe i need to vent in an environment where i think people might get how bad this actually is, since people IRL around me don't seem to remotly understand the impact....
This is extending an existing law that expired.
Really you should have felt betrayed back in 2011.
This isn't Chat Control 2.0 - which is the thing that has been getting attention for the last few years.
E2E encryption should not be broken, we should find other ways to catch and find predators.
Scanning messages in platforms (Chat Control 1.0)? I honestly thought this has always been done, I don't consider any platform private.
A lot of Internet regulations are just catching up to ones that exist in meat space.
I think what scares people when the regulations come to the Internet is that they are highly automated, and I think there's potential for mass injustices when automated systems.
At the same time, the abuse of children has also been automated and amplified by the Internet. https://youtu.be/QYcAFanHwf8?t=1666
(Based on https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/eu-to-extend-t... and https://www.euractiv.com/news/how-the-epp-pushed-the-chat-sc... as well as the stuff in the link).
Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments:
As I'm not trained in law, I have no strong opinions on if this proposal is a net positive or negative, almost any big name LLM will do a better job than I can manage by looking at the legal text, stroking my goatee and saying "I recon…". But what I can say that I've just seen a headline about a class action lawsuit in the USA due to grok making CSAM and the company failing to assist the police in their investigations, and another about Meta facing a lawsuit in India for delivering advertising for CSAM on Instagram.My steelman in favour of the legislation:
The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution.
My steelman against the legislation:
Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging.
Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.
>CSAM detection systems
Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.
Yes, indeed.
In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.
Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...
Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...
Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354
> Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.
Well the criteria is CSAM?
Do you have any evidence that these systems have been used to imprison someone that wasn't CSAM related?
>Well the criteria is CSAM
Could you confirm that in any way?
Real time notifications here would solve a lot of issues...
Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.
Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:
"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"
And half an hour later
"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"
I think you're probably wildly overoptimistic about the ratio of police officers to private nudes.
No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...
I think a more realistic system would be hashing images and comparing them to known CSAM in some database.
I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.
Such systems are unfortunately trivially defeated by, for example, adding rings of colourful blocks around the edges of the image. If the scanning systems are then updated to notice rings around the image, bad actors will start cutting images in half and adding the colours there, etc. It's a never-ending arms race that's bound to leave regular people worse off.
Don't you think modern image analysis tools such as llms will be easily defeated by measures such as adding colored rings?
A couple of years ago you could add some pixels to an image to change it's automatic classification from cat to ostrich. But the tech has improved and I think the race has now firmly been won by the side trying to de-obfuscate images, and only in rare scenarios can images actually be obfuscated efficiently and consistently.
> Don't you think modern image analysis tools such as llms will be easily defeated by measures such as adding colored rings?
The LLMs think one specific mystery plant in my garden hiding behind the hedge is velvetleaf; no, wild cotton; no, linden; no, hibiscus; no, mulberry; no, knotweed; no, paulownia; no, catalpa; no, hydrangea; no, grape vine; no, pokeweed.
Many of these claims were trivial for me to falsify with a quick image search, they don't look much like each other or my mystery plant. The things the AI "identified" were often simply not true of the photo.
Basically, even with current tech, you go straight back to false positives and false negatives: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628
That assumes no new material is being created.
"But the call was coming from inside the house": https://www.robertkinglawfirm.com/mass-torts/grok-lawsuit/
I don't really want governments, Apple or Google to build databases of CSAM, thank you :/
It already exists. Most CSAM tools are checking against a hash database.
Why would you NOT want this to exist? This seems the only method to not raise false positives.
One thing that should be noted is that, since the Parliament has been able to approve an amendment by absolute majority (which explicitly excludes E2E chats), the procedure is not over and the law is still not enacted, a third reading is still needed, after negotiations with the Council and the Commission, and in this case the Parliament will be able to reject the act by a simple majority
I was looking for information about this. So this new reading and vote would happen after summer?
The new reading will happen if the Council rejects the amendment approved by the Parliament. When it does they have 6 weeks to negotiate, and then 6 weeks to approve the result of negotiations, if any.
Basically, the hope is that the Council rejects that amendment in its second reading (but right, the probability of this is not really high, since it codifies what was already true). I should have explained it better in my comment
This article seems to make good points about how useless and invasive Chat Control 1.0 is, but then posits Chat Control 2.0 as the answer. Is the latter not also terrible for privacy, demanding backdoors in all encrypted chat tech?
The proponents argue that those backdoors are a good thing because then the government can keep you safe from people saying nasty things.
You're asking a community that couldn't decide if Client Side Scanning was safe and private at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
Surveillance is a branding issue. If you wrap a shit in crepe paper and Corinthian leather, most people will admire what an artist you are.
> Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes.
This vote was urgently scheduled for today, the last day of parliament before the summer break. 113 MEPs were not present for this vote, likely having taken vacation days to extend their break. It's hard to believe choosing to do the vote today was done accidentally.
Every day I grow less enamoured with the EU project. More and more, the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.
> the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.
Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals
If there's no shadowy cabal then why do our politicians continue to pass domestically unpopular laws? I mean, there doesn't have to be a literal shadowy cabal, the effective "cabal" could be a combination of corruption, lobbying and pressure from security agencies.
Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular. Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.
> there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air
that's really cute
With this level of spying it becomes important to learn to use technologies that are outside of this system that people on HN usually laugh at. Tor, VPNs, Bitcoin, Bitchat, Nostr based socials, Signal and get some extra clean hardware (phone, laptop...) to work with when you need to...
If you so much as mention that this bill was passed to censor criticism of Israel, you will yourself be censored. Our politicians don't actually represent us.
Unhinged rant, this has nothing to do with Israel.
Wow, I guess governments of the whole western world just woke up one morning and decided to clamp down on the free exchange of information on the internet at the precise moment their citizenry was up in arms over Israel committing mass genocide and blackmailing their politicians. What a coincidence!
Although it would be much more exciting to have some world conspiracy, try to consider what that would mean. That conspiracy's so powerful it can singularly decide votes across a union of dozens of countries, and yet still feels the need to enact a law to invoke that power in the first place.
No, this is a much more benign form of government overreach, one born out of a normal desire to suppress citizens, and perhaps a healthy amount of regulatory capture by large corporations.
You don't think Jeffrey Epstein blackmailing US and UK celebrities and politicians on behalf of the Israeli government qualifies as a conspiracy? Or that Epstein was one of many similar influence assets operated by Israel? Hell, AIPAC even brags publicly about buying elections here in the US.
Next you will tell Arendt that The Banality if Evil had no host ideology at the time.
What did you see in The Zone of Interest? Just a documentary about a benign family?
Or are some humans worthy of more analysis than others?
Shame.
Some people would happily set a bonfire to our collective rights and freedom and democracy if it meant Israel could continue the harvest of children in the third world. Instead of admitting that, they feign denial.
This is Pegasus by Policy. There is a reason why all Epsteinist Occupied Governments are pushing the same thing worldwide and that reason is so Israel can commit future Holocausts in peace and quiet.
Israel is the horcrux of Emnity towards Freedom. This is why they destroy freedom everywhere they infect the halls of power.
Yet people remain in denial because genociding third worlders is regular programming for Epsteinists.
What a vomit burger. “Evil”exists everywhere, not just in your biases
This is extending something that came into affect in 2011.
The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services, where there is no company at the middle to tell you add backdoors.
Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.
> The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services
Spain would label you criminal for merely using alternative Android builds: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.
> https://meshtastic.org/
Simplex
https://simplex.chat/
Session was recently shut down due to lack of funding.
True P2P implies knowing the IP addresses of the people you're talking to.
Or it can be many-server, with tens of thousands of server operators and one selected at random.
Only the server operators then know your IP, and they don't know who you are or what you're saying.
Session was supposed to be shut down at start of July but looks like they got enough funding from donations to keep going for now.
The defence against this is to vote these MF MEPs out and kick asses of non–elected Eurocrats. Not going to happen. Tech solution: Open GPG with PQE protocols. There is nothing else left (other than One Time Pads.) And this is just the beginning. With LLMs and AI they will have resources to scan every character we type.
Not P2P but Delta Chat
Or you can just host your own server like IRC. This is beyond idiotic, if they think that pedophiles will begin to suddenly use WhatsApp then I very much doubt about their basic literacy.
Such a weak reasoning and method which they used to push this is ridiculous agenda lead me to strongly suspect there must be something else behind it.
From Google: "The law seeks to require digital platforms and messaging services (like WhatsApp and Gmail) to automatically scan users' private messages, emails, and photos to detect and report illegal content"
-- EU policy makers are really honest people, hats off to them. There's no way politicians in my country allow their chats to be scanned, because they're very corrupt.
EU politicians are exempt from this measure. They thought it all the way through.
(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)
basically admitting they are pedos
What are the criteria to be covered by this "secrecy" exemption?
Can you cite the text where it says this?
In Chatcontrol 2.0 not this one:
>*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not.
https://8bitsecurity.com/posts/chat-control-2-0-%E2%80%93-ho...
https://exitchatcontrol.org/
I find it amusing HN the degree to which wears horse blinders. Some of us have been raising concerns with EU for many years and we get shut down, called right wingers, Nazis and whatever other derogatory term is popular.
If it took this much for you to realize EU is bad, I wonder how much it will take before you’ll do something. As it stands, it sounds like everyone is complaining, but are still bending over and taking it. Thoughts and prayers.
Good luck.
Great, so even if something is repeatedly voted down and doesn't get enough votes it can still pass.
It's a joke. The system is hacked.
I no longer hold the belief that The West is moral or good-faith actor. In my lifetime I've watch the state go from being relatively benign, to maintaining face, to all-out racket, corruption and anti-democratic behaviour. I sympathise with both left-wing and right-wing sentiment. The system no longer works by-and-for the people. Call it elite capture, call it communism. My view is we're dealing with a Janus-like system.
But this is the direct result of Europes shift to right wing parties and corruption? How can you sympathize with the right-wing sentiment?
I would have expected the right wing parties to be against this, somehow, but... Nope, just checked my country's votes, and nationalists just love cc1.0 it seems.
There are at least two options to verify age without humiliating procedure of taking a selfie with a passport like a porn actor.
First, there are USB tokens that can hold a private key and sign messages. Such tokens could be sold at places accessible only to adults and verify that they are indeed adult. Obviously every token should hold the same private key.
Second, OS could implement "parent mode" which allows installing only white-listed, government approved apps (no Telegram or Whatsapp or other dangerous apps, but school apps are ok) and opening only white-listed government-approved websites. Put in jail the parents who did not set up a parent mode. Problem solved without passports and verifications.
If, however, the government insists on selfies, it means they just want to identify users and compile lists of "untrustworthy", "rebelious" and other persons of interest.
Also, employees who do verification, sometimes create internal chats where they post pictures of clients and mock their appearance. We had such case with Alfa-Bank in Russia, where the photo of a funny client with a passport and third-grader level comments leaked to Instagram account of employee's friend. The bank paid approximately $20 as a compensation.
List of votes per MEP: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775
Maybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?
You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.
1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.
2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.
3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)
4) Bob sends the image to Alice.
5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.
(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)
Well when it comes to ending encrypted traffic, I would assume if they can’t read your traffic you will be in violation and the police will show up at your door to kindly imprison you for a few years
If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.
> or on the fly using stable diffusion
Steganography fundamentally requires you to be able to know where the data is, which requires you to have the original image to compare against. The only other strategy I'm aware of is setting known pixel positions to exact data, which is very easy for basic tools to spot and decode. Or to add the data to non-visual data blocks if the image format supports those, which is also quite easy to spot.
Getting the criminals is not the point here, mass control is. How many of your friends do this now? The criminals might do it, but why, when they can just meet in person and talk there, without a digital recording of what they talk?
Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.
Any evidence what so ever for the "mass control" claim?
I do not want E2E comms broken, but these posts on hackernews always bring out such outlandish claims.
You can't be applying the "mass control" claim for the attempts at stopping the spread of CSAM? So can you point to any evidence of wide spread "mass control" with Chat Control 1.0?
Because it's control of what we send and it's done en-masse.
I was born in a communist country (with red stars, a communist party and a dictator), and even back then, the government requiring post office workers to read (and photocopy) our mail would seem absurd, but now, somehow it's ok, because "it's on the internet". And yes, CSAM could be sent via normal mail too.
Same for every repressive thing... if you went to a bar, and had to show your id, have it logged, and someone would write down when you came, who you sat with and how long you've talked, that would seem absurd even then... but now, since "it's on the internet", storing metadata is somehow ok.
Stop protecting the governments, if they wanted to stop pedos, they have the whole epstein list, and they don't care about it.
Mass adoption. Two IT guys can communicate completely secure with udp packets via SSH tunnel, but it doesn't scale to family and non-techy friends.
The effort required to do it
Statistically, half of the people in this thread didn't even show up to vote for EP elections.
Does it matter if they did, when this measure effectively bypassed Parliament via technicalities?
As if I wasn't apathetic enough about democracy. The only voting bill worth caring about is the one in the wallet. Then you can be the source of the corruption, instead of the sink. Every man for themselves.
EPP is a corrupt, authoritarian regime that will hopefully not last long. It is not a coincidence the union took a massive, noticeable turn for the worse in 2019 -- the von der Leyen presidencies have done immeasurable damage it will never recover from. They have also been complicit in crime and corruption from Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, for years, and that is even if you exclude the Pfizer disaster nobody was held responsible for. They are giving the opposing parties ammunition they need to take them and the dream of a stronger union down, and the only way they can fight back is banning those parties outright, one of which voted completely against this utterly insane, already repeatedly rejected mass scanning. It's hard to think of the union as anything positive when this is the direction it is taking.
Well anything with people's in its name is basicaly authoritarian, just like the DPRK or PRC.
The EPP also gave us migrant quotas, chat control and punished Greece for its debt.
> apps that are safe by design for children
How do we design such apps? Let's rule out age attestation (to allow only some age ranges) or scan of content because they are orthogonal to apps. What are the design patterns that prevent adults to meet kids? No messaging?
Depending on the app, you could also get away with limited messaging such as a wheel of predefined callouts in a team game.
I mean, even the victims themselves came out and explicitly emphasized that scanning chat messages does not help.
I'm feeling these politicians was not doing it for the victims. Instead, it's almost like the victims are providing reasons to allow the politicians to expand their own power.
The Accelerationism (see note below) part of me think it's a good thing, because a heavily regulated country is often also a backward country. Doing things like this long enough, then you get out competed by everyone else, your population shrinks to zero and your land gets reused.
(Note: The word "Accelerationism" in the Chinese dissidents circle means that, if a bad future is certain and it trends to destroy itself eventually, we might as well just let it happen faster, so the pain maybe shorter. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-in-Chief)
Look, EU obviously have a few good regulations. But a regulation must be correctly designed and implemented, and it must not punish good people. Scanning private messages is a punishment to all.
If EU must scan something, I'd say scanning all messages/phone calls sent out by the politicians might do more good, consider how much trust people put on them (maybe they shouldn't).
That's cool and all but looks like we are running out of good countries
And if they all have censorship, they are not failing (when comparing them to each other)
How is it that a most MEPs vote it down and it still passes? Can someone explain to me how the EU Parliament can do this?
So much effort and emotions wasted. EU should have a mechanism that disallows repeatedly pushing for things until they are greenlit. Lack of this type of measure renders whole governance incapable of being taken seriously.
If the EU just were to redirect the resources they're currently allocating to regulations like AI and Chat Control rather towards developing a genuinely competitive OpenAI or Anthropic alternative …
No, it's easier to put a tax on American AI companies.
Democracy has failed. Let's be honest here.
Once you realise the age group that are in that bracket of european law making you realise it's gen X AKA the helicopter parent generation and it all becomes less shocking.
More interesting that that mostly childless politicians are in favor of such things. That's makes sense since those legislations are NOT about children.
Can someone Change My View? That this is a bad idea (for all the reasons mentioned in this thread and elsewhere).
Is there an EICAR file equivalent for CSAM? it seems like I'm going to busy preparing a mass messaging/mailing campaign to EU law makers
I want to like the EU. In many ways I do. They're making it really easy to not like them.
All for a safe and secure society.
except it's hardly safe or secure anymore...
Something something essential liberty, something something temporary safety.
> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, [...]
I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal
Sad news
Anyone that thinks that this is a good Idea either didn't understand the internet or is just borderline stupid
Can people sue EU about this? This is ridiculous
If they didn't for five years why would they start now?
To me as a European, this is not only about the dystopia that is becoming the tech survailance of society but it is a perfect example of what I feel the EU is. It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.
This is what we have... Unelected bureaucrats using every opportunistic tool they can to, in my opinion get rid of democracy. What are we fighting for at this point? Personally I have lost all faith in the EU and I'm embarrassed to be living here. I'm so disgusted by politicians and the obvious de-route of democracy.
What the ** are we doing...
I don't agree with the decision, but what is this bull** about unelected bureucrats? That's literal Orban/Putin propaganda speak
MEPs are elected.
I know MEPs are. But who ellected Ursula? Who as far as i understand is the mother of this survailance... Calling This orban/Putin propaganda is Low. It is removing focus from the fact that i point out democracy is slowly withering in EU and survaulance is growing. Just look at the survailance lad for cars that was accepted the other day. I have no love for either of Putin/orban im simply telling my experience not making propaganda!
As a European shouldn't you know this is just a renewal and nothing new. The weird voting system applies too.
It is a renewel of something highly unpopular that was voted down already. It is how the EU operates look at the other comments here about "democracy". It is put to vote on last minute where they know MEPs are on vacation... Well the ** should not go on vacation before the vacation starts but that is just another thing about EU! Why are they in vacation before it starts?! It is so complicated rules that not even the news and experts totally understand what is going on.
What do you mean by this?
Wouldn't it be fun if those who are in favour of such measures were the first to behave their messages scanned?
Move to Jabber or Matrix. Maybe Signal.
If no one actually stands up against this and puts an end to it, then it wasn’t that important to begin with.
This society is doomed.
Question about this from a EU citizen who doesn't know the details of how the EU works (who does?): Are there legal means to challenge this vote based on the procedure that was taking place?
Rest assured, someone is already working on circumventing this. Necessity is the mother on invention.
You don't need to do any work to circumvent this. This law is just continuing the status queue that's existed in the EU for 5 years.
To avoid being affected by this law, you can just download Signal, or use any other encrypted messaging service.
Sure. The criminals and political enemies of the EU will just use illegal chat apps and hardened phones. What about the others though?
They don't need to use "illegal chat apps". They can just use Signal or Telegram, or any of the other ways that exist to send encrypted messages.
the rest? they comply, or get labeled a criminal.
innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.
It's so tiring. Fellow Europeans, you know what to do =)
Are you kidding? No, I have absolutely no fucking idea what to do.
Yank all the panopticon-levers that push social stability till the lever breaks, because that is all the levers you got.
Social Networks to push ideas and memes, that work against social-decomplexification parties and individuals.
There are also the other leviathan cybernetic levers- like implants- if you need insulin, or hearing aids- you are basically a deputy for social stability. Thus every prosthesis-citizen you can produce is a good citizen.
But it may still not be enough to prevent decomplexification events like Khemer Roughe or the Taliban.
Thus, push technology that allows for quick recovery, because somewhere some serverfarm with the most patient tutor survives.
Scenario-tree-root-hardening looks like this from the inside.
PS: Fuck you Peter - but its work that needs doing. The retarded don't herd themselves. Or they do, but if they knew- all the simulations would be worthless.
Man, and right on the heels of enforcing driver-facing cameras in all newly purchased vehicles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48823557
Are there any civilians left in the EU, or is it all bureaucrats and bankers?
My utopian vision would be to change the selection/voting process so that our representatives are chosen based on real achievements and scientific understanding of the world, and not based on popularity and ability to persuade the crowd on standup-like rallies lasting 20 minutes, with empty words, populist-like propaganda, and lies hitting people's emotions instead of critical thinking.
My another utopian wish would be to held them accountable for what they promised in the campaign and how they align with their constituents' needs.
Instead we get corrupted idiots who don't even know what they're voting for, why they're voting that way, and if it's important at all. Chat control is one blatant example, mandatory cameras inside cars constantly spying on drivers is another one. Whoever advises them idiots, they're in real control of what's happening in EU.
I love how they framed it like this: "Temporary derogation from certain provisions of the ePrivacy Directive to combat online child sexual abuse".
Just--OF COURSE, think of the children.
EU's strong digital privacy branding is becoming satire
> End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp
What a bad example to bring for e2ee.
Demo(crazy)
What a democracy we live in.
Sadly, European Union that could be really useful (all-EU, flagship AI model anyone? But no, better restrict AI development, what can go wrong?) so people would genuinely like it, chosen to fight the people and try to gag criticism.
what are the actual consequences of that? they can read any Whatsapp encrypted chat? What changes?
FTA:
> What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
> What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
Discord recently had an AI malfunction that resulted in square grids getting detected as CSAM and reported to cops.
Literally nothing changes. This is the continuation of a temporary law that already existed.
As far as I understand this. It basically gives the company providing chat services the possibility to scan your messages.
The lobbyists won this round.
To hell with children. Create a separate internet for them, no ICANN access unless they are parent-supervised until they hit 13 or so.
> In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding: [..] Strict security standards for messaging apps (“Security by Design”) to prevent cyber grooming.
It's dispiriting to see a supposedly pro-privacy politician launder backdoors as "strict security standards".
I think they mean local scanning for CSAM - which feels like a reasonable solution that preserves privacy, but still addresses the real problem of, y'know, child abuse?
What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?
Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?
If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?
Pedos would definitely know what job to work in.
Okay, since it is already working system - how could I verify it scans for CSAM, not my dissident books and saved eps*ein files?
I have a question: who trains the CSAM model?
Weaponizing our own property against us, mandating that it spies and tattles on us, turning inanimate objects into policemen to construct the most total surveillance dystopia, is not in any way "reasonable". In no way does it "preserve privacy".
And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.
They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.
If anyone still believes the EU is a democracy, you're a bloody fool
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't live in the EU. Sorry for the silly question.
Is there any EU law that prohibits minors from encrypting their messages or using, for example, PGP keys?
How can they protect children if the children deliberately encrypt their messages?
No, there is no law preventing anyone from encrypting their messages. The thought is that children won't use encrypted services.
I'm curious where I can go to see real regularpeople who support this, is there like a different side of reddit, comments section? I don't know anyone who is blatantly anti-privacy and I want to hear their reasoning. Otherwise this just seems to be the EU rolling into a weird distributed autocracy without anyone blinking an eye.
"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". -- Jean-Claude Juncker, VDL's predecessor
It's not so much "support" as "not caring." Most "regular" people, when they hear about measures like this, say "oh no, the government can see my boring text messages to grandma, who cares", much they same way they shrug off the dangers of having a robot vacuum live-streaming the inside of their house to China ("there's nothing interesting in my house, who cares").
The thing is... It's not even reported on the news here (Lithuania).
Just now I scrolled through our most popular news sites. 0 mentions. Wasn't on TV either.
The vast majority of the population didn't even have a clue that the vote was happening.
I checked the top 5 most popular local news sites. There was one article about chat control in April and then 2 more from 2025. That's it.
Imagine an issue as big as this and it's not even reported. Yeah I don't feel confident about the future at all.
State owned news will follow orders or people be removed. Arrrrr! They will have their incentives, even if people at the top of news reporting institutions are highly paid. Wouldn't want that dirt they have hidden be uncovered, now would they? Better dance to the tune and keep an overpaid job living by leeching off the tax payers.
Example: Look at Germany and how many Rundfunk Intendanten there are and how much they make a year, plus how little coverage such topics get.
What can we do to try and stop this?
Wack
God..why.. Do the citizens have no say in this??
The citizens do have a say: they vote in elections. This is a temporary law that was implemented 5 years ago so everyone had a chance to vote in the 2024 EU election and vote out those who supported this law. But most people don't care if a company like Meta is allowed to scan their messages. For those who care, they can always use an encrypted messaging service like Signal or Telegram.
Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?
I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.
Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.
And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.
By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.
We have European Parliament elections every 5 years. But usually the people who complain the loudest also don't bother to vote.
So, private companies can't track you, but the people with the state's monopoly on violence (which very much exists in the EU member nations) can?
Is there any sort of warrant needed for accessing this sort of information on devices?
It's not accessed on devices. This is about people using messaging applications, like Messenger. Then, as the message isn't encrypted, Meta can read the message on their servers. And with this law they are allowed to scan and sometimes report it to the government.
Majority AGAINST, passes anyway:
314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions
In case anyone wants to know: stopping it would have required 361 against.
And more than a hundred did not vote, if they wanted to vote no they could have. But they didn’t so they’re implicitly in favor.
The fact that governments worldwide do not force either a vote for or against is a much greater issue as it allows representatives to launder their beliefs through inaction.
Well they explicitly hid the fact that there was going to be a vote, AND they had already said they were going to override parliament using more drastic procedures if it didn't pass here.
So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.
I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.
(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)
This is so bad, honestly, I'm so let down
Related:
Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818311
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008
I do not believe solutions to these issues will be found with government regulators. I believe they can be enabled by new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.
Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors.
Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too:
https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...
More broadly, here is what needs to be done across the board:
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
> new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.
They will just call your code illegal in law. And if you will run it anyway, use deep packet inspection to drop your protocol packets, like they do in Russia
Unless they have backdoors to absolutely every form of encryption, including https certificates, etc. you can always use that to tunnel through.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/cukcaf/goog...
Today they already analyze the SSL handshake and traffic patterns in Russia. And if your valid https traffic crosses the border but doesn't behave like https (I don't know how they do it. Frequency of TCP packets and their size and the delay between?) your IP-address will be blocked
I want to stress that I'm speaking from experience. I personally installed a telegram proxy project which aimed to mirror the pattern of traffic and fool the censors
free healthcare o algo
Just so blatant that this was paid or bargained into existence, EU is a compromised system.
And so, step by step, in the name of child protection and similar excuses, we lose liberties and rights one by one.
Welcome to the Brave New 1984 We World. Big Brother loves us.
We are living through the time best described by Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley.
Man, the EU is supposed to be the beacon of liberal democracy (after the light of Reagan's shining city on the hill is now truly extinguishing), but with shit like this, it's really making enemies left and right (metaphorically and spectrally).
The EU exists mostly to promote economic liberalism and free trade.
It started out as a purely trade arrangement, then evolved to become a broader union.
Exactly. I consider myself euro federalist but bullshit like this creating a very strong antipathy.
If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.
I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.
Here's a thought: maybe liberal democracy was never very free.
This "thought" is like a fart... No substance, leaves the receiver wondering "What am I meant to do with that?", and also asking "Do I care to ask for an elaboration?".
Chat Control 2.0 is in the name of child protection. This one, 1.0, is just in the name of pleasing big tech.
Slippery slope is fine and all but do you have any constructive argument?
Slippery slope is not a "fallacy" by default. It can be occasionally but its a perfectly reasonably argument in plenty of cases.
Sure, it's not a fallacy, but it does erode nuanced conversations and so it shouldn't be used without caution.
It is a fallacy by default. The existence and slipperiness of the slope must be justified to make it not a fallacy.
The slipperiness comes from the fact that the EU already admits that scanning of private messages didn't improve the catching and prosecution of perpetrators. Also, the biggest lobbyists for breaking E2EE argue that criminals are moving to encrypted platforms, and targeting encrypted platforms is actually the thing we need to finally put a dent in stopping the dissemination of CSAM
In plenty of cases it's absolutely self evident (especially when there are plenty of historical precedents for similar or analogous situations).
Yes you can get involved in extended arguments with people arguing in bad faith or whose world view is fundamentally incompatible with your but that's usually just a waste of time (I mean you wouldn't argue with Nazis either just the same as with people trying to institute a Stasi style surveillance apparatus through slow boiling)
"it's absolutely self evident" is usually code for "I have no evidence so you must take this on faith"
Constructive argument? Just disband the EU as a whole, including all laws, treaties, contracts ...
Europe would be a much better place if the EU stayed what it was, a trade union of sovereign nations without any political power over the people.
How would this have worked in practice though? How could things like trade standards been harmonised or a common currency adopted without the trade union being able to do legislation?
And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.
It still is. Countries can ignore EU laws if they want to.
I'm not sure what you try to achieve:
>For example, Poland was hit with massive daily fines when it was embroiled in a dispute over rule of law measures, as well as a separate case linked to environmental permits at a coal mine on the Czech border.
>The Commission is allowed to take these fines out of that country’s EU budget allocation, preventing governments from simply refusing to pay up.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1568198/how-the-eu-punishes-it...
they can subtract the same amount from what they pay towards the EU, and then what?
The EU was never just a trade union.
"Slippery slope" does not by itself invalidate an argument, because slippery slopes do exist.
What "constructive" argument is anyone supposed to give about authorities having warrantless access to all private conversations?
The italian constitution clearly states that citizens have a right to private correspondence. Good to know our crooked politicians don't care.
The sad thing is how we keep saying how bad China is, while doing exactly the same things.
This might get this control out, but people's anti-EU stance will just be increased by this and long-term this is a terrible move.
Just fueling material for right wingers who will take advantage of this and push for secessionist stuff.
EU is in dire need to have VERY POPULAR measures among people, not idiotic stuff like this which is a step in a wrong direction.
You're asking too much from bureaucrats that stand to directly gain post-mandate by consulting the companies they legislate for, and also believe that the legitimacy of the EU as a whole should be driven by output (economic prosperity, etc), rather than input (democratic mandates, political participation of their constituents)
This is a very disappointing news. It weakens democracy and makes the EU hypocrite.
Why should one care about GDPR or some privacy shield thingy when this is going through ?
Really the west is currently at the wrong side of history. With the US bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the last decade. Europe with its hypocrite stance in literally everything. Slowly the west is becoming a much less free place to live than a Russia. And propoganda in the west makes people think they are free. It's bullshit. They are not free. You got more freedom to move around, start businesses, own stuff in China and Russia than in any western European country.
Brought to you - as always - by the Conservatives. Conservatism is just fascism with a slightly nicer image.
This was overwhelmingly approved by "The Left in the European Parliament" (that's their actual coalition name) as well as the Greens. It was overwhelmingly rejected by the European People's Party (AKA "The Right"). And mixed among other groups (S&D and Conservatives).
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775
No, it's the other way around. Quoting another comment:
>"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject
Indeed. The vote, however, was about stopping Chat Control. The key term is "derogation" in the title.
A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.
EU conservatives are just moderate leftists, who cares.
What are you even saying? As a leftist, I want nothing to do with those fascists.
Okay, I am not EU citizen, let's see EPP's manifesto:
As a central part of its campaign for the European elections in 2009, the EPP approved its election manifesto at its Congress in Warsaw in April that year. The manifesto called for:[16]
- Creation of new jobs, continuing reforms and investment in education, lifelong learning, and employment to create opportunities for everyone (govt universal social investment, left)
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies (pro-federal pro-centralisation)
- Increased transparency and surveillance in financial markets(more regulation on market)
- Making Europe the market leader in green technology. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave. (Pro-Worker's rights, social security)
-A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven (Pro-migration)
Could you explain how that's considered right-wing?
> - Creation of new jobs, continuing reforms and investment in education, lifelong learning, and employment to create opportunities for everyone
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies
- - Making Europe the market leader in green technology.
Market ideology -> Right wing
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020.
Done through incentives, not nationalized industry -> market ideology, right wing.
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave
Classic birtherism -> right wing
- A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven
Importing cheap labor for European capitalists -> right wing
>Market ideology -> Right wing >Done through incentives, not nationalized industry -> market ideology, right wing.
Yeah, compared to communists they are right, but even socialists does not push against market economy and if you consider socialists right-wing - we have a huge de-sync on definitions level I guess.
I have some bad news for you, the Chat Control was originally brought up by the left. Mainly by Ylva Johansson (Swedish Social Democrat, S&D group). Leftist origin via Johansson/S&D, but later sustained by mainstream centrists and now a watered down version is partly supported by conservatives too.
Left fascism was not so long ago. Think of the woke hysteria, black lives matter, cancelling on twitter, people losing their jobs because of them saying something the left ideology did not like etc.
Left have been and still are viciously hateful and racist towards white people. So if you are left and while, you are basically destroying your own livelihood.
Conservative Poland, Italy and Ireland are strictly against Chat Control. Well, at least against the worse version of it.
Liberals are not leftists ffs. S&D are liberals, if you go to the wiki page you can see that they are labeled centre-left. Centre-left in this case stands for left wing of liberalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_England_and_Wal...
This is an example of party which can be called leftist. It's actually even listed as that on wiki. Minimal condition in general is to be anti-capitalistic.
Eh, the commies are pretty good at this too. Best analogy for Chat Control is really a digital Stasi.
I mean sure, but there's no meaningful commie contingent in the EU.
The war on privacy at the EU level always comes from conservatives.
Not true. A lot of the left voted in favor for it. Ylva Johansson, the person behind all this who introduced Chat Control since the very beginning, is a literal ex-Communist and she's now at the left wing of the Social Democrats in Sweden and EU parliament.
[flagged]
The passing of laws that affect technology platforms has always been on topic on HN. That shouldn't be surprising on a site that's specifically for people interested in technology and tech industry topics.
Conversely, declaring a space "politics-free" tramples a hell of a lot more than curiosity.
Incidentally, the comment immediately below this one begins with the words "I'm curious". So I think we're good.