The "EU" is not "greenlighting" that proposal this week. The Council of the EU will vote on their negotiation stance, which is merely one step in the legislative process, after which the Commission (which is pro-scanning) and the parliament (which is broadly against it) will get involved.
> As the commission is the executive branch, candidates are chosen individually by the 27 national governments. Within the EU, the legitimacy of the commission is mainly drawn from the vote of approval that is required from the European Parliament, along with its power to dismiss the body.
So, the part of the EU appointed by member governments is the part driving this. The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by national governments.
>The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by national governments.
But if the representatives are chosen by the, presumably, democratically elected governments how are they "anti-democratic". Unless representative democracies are inherently undemocratic (and therefore most European government themselves undemocratic), I fail to see how this can be described as "anti-democratic".
In basically every democracy there is a way for the elected representatives to push through legislation which is unpopular or only supported by a small portion of the population. But this is an intentional feature.
The member states are as much a part of the EU as the parliament is.
It's disingenuous to say that this is not the EU, of course it's also disingenuous to say that the EU is a monolith who wants this at all levels, but two wrongs don't make a right
>And at every stage people will talk about how horrible EU is as if this has already passed, just like last time.
Even the idea makes me loose all faith in the institution. How can you be okay with people as deranged as this making rules about the future of your country?
"Not everyone is insane", just isn't a particularly strong point.
Passing is one thing. They waste everyone's time by threatening to pass idiotic legislation every 6 months. But perhaps that is the goal so people do not investigate why the EU is getting poorer and all money goes into housing and healthcare.
It is still possible to contact your EU permanent representative group via email. Op link in "what to do" section has a precompiled email which you can send to your permanent representation group.
As little as it may be, I sent it to the Italian representative group, to the team that oversees telecommunications
Technically the commission came first, after this vote it'll go to parliament and then if there's a need for mediation the commission will be involved together with parliament and council
Well apparently NL is clear in opposing it but I am a citizen of Ireland (it's not really clear who my representation is in that case) so will try them...
>If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?
No. An explicit feature of a representative democracy is that the will of the majority can be ignored.
The EU isn't a direct democracy where people can vote on particular issues, they vote on national parties, which send representatives to create EU wide parties.
Yes, some of the parties did. In Sweden for example, the government parties just decided to greenlight the EU proposal that is up for vote now, even though their EU parliament representatives (from the same parties) had said before the recent EU election that they were against it (they even celebrated publicly last autumn when the proposal was downvoted last time). It's a mess trying to keep track of the party politics to be fair and it's possible the EU parliament members are voting in one way while their "mother party" in the home land votes in another way. But it did feel like a rug pull here.
I guarantee you the number of people who voted in the EU elections thinking of this is negligible
And also the council has its own legitimacy which is not dependent on the EU elections, if the EP voted on this as a lame duck you'd have a point, but that doesn't seem to be happening
Voted and changed their mind for what though? What has this proposal to do with what people voted for? Most people have no clue this is going on; it wasn't in any party program 'for the layman' that said
[x] 'privacy invasive scanning of everything personal, BUT for the benefit of the children and Kutcher'
Most people (even tech people) didn't/don't know about this and also, most people really don't care in the face of other more urgent things (housing, immigration, climate, inflation, etc etc etc).
If you sit down with them and explain (something like: what if this happens and you agree to the scanning, 20 years from now Putin invades your country and you get dragged off the gulag on day #1 because 17 years ago you sent a derogatory image of him to someone; they said they would delete everything!?!), most would probably vote against, but no-one is doing that.
I find it very funny that this law's entire purpose could very well be defeated by another recent-ish EU law, namely the Digital Markets act.
This law is somewhat workable if you assume that App Stores are the only way for mobile apps to be distributed. If users are allowed to sideload, as an app maker from a non-european country, you can just refuse to comply.
This isn't possible with Apple's current implementation of this law, but that implementation is extremely likely to be ruled noncompliant anyway based on what the EU authorities are saying.
Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing. It might even have an adversarial effect.
If you want to be helpful, please consider more strategic alternatives such raising awareness among the general public, writing thoughtful arguments, or joining specialized non-profits or political parties.
> Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing
Nobody likes this. A concise, thoughtful call or message carries a premium in the states, but only if you’re demonstrably a constituent.
The reason is simple: it shows conviction. If you’re willing to pick up the phone, you might be willing to stump for an opponent. If you’re unwilling to do that, or are raving at the politician such that you would never be won over by them, you’re messaging you’re a lost cause.
The joys of representative democracy. The people are told they are free, but it's the oligarchy in their ivory tower that decide for you.
Every few years you get told you can vote for the next liar to do their bidding in your name, and we, the people, keep the circus alive by telling each other "your vote counts! It's your fault if they're all thieves!"
Government won't stop monitoring each and every citizen, and citizens have stopped any form of resistance, political or technological. Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams. We have lost.
>> Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams.
I agree.
The tendency to over-criticize and deride is part of the self-inflicted helplessness. Every attempt to improve things gets a fair deal of scorn and criticism...which is not exactly good.
Technically yes, but whether the implementations will work in perpetuity is another matter. Think how much resources are needed to keep legacy infrastructure running in the present day. Will these costs go down significantly once the next round of even more complicated bureaucratic management software comes into effect?
The heavy surveillance states of today will prove an interesting case study of software/data upkeep.
Has anyone in power thought through the scale of this? Even if it has a frankly exceptional error rate of just 0.001%, that still means tens of thousands of innocent Europeans will have their lives ruined every day. And, assuming there's a human in the loop, who are we going to traumatize to check The Machine's work? Is it going to be Kenyans again^, or Eastern Europeans this time?
In the proposal, they write that the service providers have to figure out a way to make the false positives reported to the police "minimal". This is obviously a major burden to put on the service providers, in effect completely excluding all small outfits (and I'm sceptical the large companies want to deal with this either).
Germany have had some similar tech in place according to Der Spiegel, but the entire increase in positives was found out to be legal dickpics and flirty messages between teenagers etc. The only result was that the police now have a huge database of teenager's naked pictures and kids on the beach, which can hardly be a good way to minimize pedophile activity.
It will be a shitshow beyond comprehension if this eventually gets implemented.
France managed to get in an exemption in the proposal for their police and security workers, who can keep their privacy. I think the wording is that this would only apply to apps available to "the public". So if "the public" can't download your app, you're safe...
I think it just shows it won't be possible to implement this in a useful way. Let's hope...
Life ruined as in being flagged and investigated? Or as in, you sent some medical pics of your son's crotch to the dokter and some sicko on the scanning program looks at that photo and spreads it in his network?
and permanently lose access to your google acount, even after lots of stress and the police declaring you innocent[1]. Replace google acount by some other important thing.
The folks over at Tuta interviewed Patrick Breyer about this yesterday and his explanation of Chat Control is downright sinister. Link here: https://youtu.be/wSEI-dg3Hpo
Let's keep spreading the word about this, the whole Chat Control debate seems to be ignored right now in the media.
ofc, some guy at every TV channel can't wait to call up his homie at that gov. institution that gets to process all that data. marketaching*can y'all here the cashier dancing?
Not for the masses. They cannot be bothered and most likely don't care until it is too late.
For the technologist, it is easy to circumvent in the private sphere of life at least.
I foresee however, a digital ID that will be tied to all your essential services, that you will be required to have in order to live, and that's the tracking and communication point that will be used to get a hold of you.
Kind of like the chinese social credit score, but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
> but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
I won't say that future will never happen only because "never" is a long time, but that's not happening in the foreseeable future.
I'm in Germany right now, and theoretically my ID card can be used online.
In practice, "Digitalisierung" is kinda a joke here, much like "paperless office".
For example, I have to visit an office to activate that feature of my ID card, and another to tell them I've moved.
During the pandemic, they briefly realised they didn't need to do that, then they forgot.
Likewise with health, there's more than one health insurance provider just in Germany, let alone the whole EU, and if I move country (not just travel, move) my previous insurance isn't likely to work in the new place anyway — it would take substantial improvements before it would even be possible for someone to corrut it the way you're afraid of.
Worked for deprioritizing biodiversity efforts for the sake of mass produced animal products, because, more processing steps => higher economic yield. Money talks.
You actually get them to use it? That's the problem with most of these ideas: sure, you can just roll your own encryption, chat program, etc., but getting the people in your life to use it is another matter. My mom has enough trouble using the popular and ubiquitous chat app we communicate through; something custom is going to be beyond her.
At the end, it could be a OS-based scanning, so no matter if the message is encrypted in transit, or self-hosted, then if the message is displayed it could be transmitted and scanned.
Many, and most of them are easy enough that anyone seriously concerned with privacy or secrecy will use them. They do take effort though, which means that while journalists, lawyers, corporations, governments, privacy nerds, and criminals will use them, the average person will not.
What we would lose is that secure communication is actually mainstream now. Billions of people, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encrypted" means use messaging services with strong encryption including WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, even Facebook chat in some cases. These services make mass surveillance difficult or impossible, and targeted surveillance of their users requires significant effort, such as installing malware on a target's device.
"All services normally provided for remuneration (including ad-funded services) are in scope, without no threshold in size, number of users etc."
"Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope"
Weird right? But it would be weirder if they would outlaw the application of mathematical operations on your own messages... oh wait that's what they are proposing... Try and stop me. Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
> Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
Them: "If you don't show us your messages, you are probably going to jail. So if you don't change your mind, and end up in jail without having shown us your messages, that means whatever was in those messages was way worse than going to jail. You probably knew you were going to get a longer sentence if you showed us those messages, and preferred to go with a shorter sentence of 'refusing to collaborate'."
Readit News
> As the commission is the executive branch, candidates are chosen individually by the 27 national governments. Within the EU, the legitimacy of the commission is mainly drawn from the vote of approval that is required from the European Parliament, along with its power to dismiss the body.
So, the part of the EU appointed by member governments is the part driving this. The EU (as often) is being used here as a scapegoat for anti-democratic policies desired by national governments.
But if the representatives are chosen by the, presumably, democratically elected governments how are they "anti-democratic". Unless representative democracies are inherently undemocratic (and therefore most European government themselves undemocratic), I fail to see how this can be described as "anti-democratic".
In basically every democracy there is a way for the elected representatives to push through legislation which is unpopular or only supported by a small portion of the population. But this is an intentional feature.
The member states are as much a part of the EU as the parliament is.
It's disingenuous to say that this is not the EU, of course it's also disingenuous to say that the EU is a monolith who wants this at all levels, but two wrongs don't make a right
Even the idea makes me loose all faith in the institution. How can you be okay with people as deranged as this making rules about the future of your country?
"Not everyone is insane", just isn't a particularly strong point.
Dead Comment
As little as it may be, I sent it to the Italian representative group, to the team that oversees telecommunications
Edit if you're Italian you can find the email(s) here, scroll to trasporti e telecomunicazioni https://italiaue.esteri.it/it/chi-siamo/
Dead Comment
Let your voice be heard! Contact your representatives (bottom of the page)!
I started here:
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
Then checked Netherlands under sublevels and wound up here:
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/who-is-who/organization/-/organi...
and that seems to have the email address bre@minbuza.nl ?
and finally I end up at https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/pr-eu-brussels which has no contact info.
I'll try that email address anyway.
I guess this is who I contact? https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/pr-eu-brussels
edit:
Well apparently NL is clear in opposing it but I am a citizen of Ireland (it's not really clear who my representation is in that case) so will try them...
If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?
No. An explicit feature of a representative democracy is that the will of the majority can be ignored.
The EU isn't a direct democracy where people can vote on particular issues, they vote on national parties, which send representatives to create EU wide parties.
And also the council has its own legitimacy which is not dependent on the EU elections, if the EP voted on this as a lame duck you'd have a point, but that doesn't seem to be happening
[x] 'privacy invasive scanning of everything personal, BUT for the benefit of the children and Kutcher'
Most people (even tech people) didn't/don't know about this and also, most people really don't care in the face of other more urgent things (housing, immigration, climate, inflation, etc etc etc).
If you sit down with them and explain (something like: what if this happens and you agree to the scanning, 20 years from now Putin invades your country and you get dragged off the gulag on day #1 because 17 years ago you sent a derogatory image of him to someone; they said they would delete everything!?!), most would probably vote against, but no-one is doing that.
People voted for the EU Parliament, which has a far more negative attitude to this proposal.
This law is somewhat workable if you assume that App Stores are the only way for mobile apps to be distributed. If users are allowed to sideload, as an app maker from a non-european country, you can just refuse to comply.
This isn't possible with Apple's current implementation of this law, but that implementation is extremely likely to be ruled noncompliant anyway based on what the EU authorities are saying.
Politicians in Europe generally do not appreciate mass, repetitive emailing. It might even have an adversarial effect.
If you want to be helpful, please consider more strategic alternatives such raising awareness among the general public, writing thoughtful arguments, or joining specialized non-profits or political parties.
Nobody likes this. A concise, thoughtful call or message carries a premium in the states, but only if you’re demonstrably a constituent.
The reason is simple: it shows conviction. If you’re willing to pick up the phone, you might be willing to stump for an opponent. If you’re unwilling to do that, or are raving at the politician such that you would never be won over by them, you’re messaging you’re a lost cause.
Send a handwritten letter to cuts through the noise because no one does it anymore.
tough luck, it's their job. if they lash out due to that they are unfit to be in positions of power.
Every few years you get told you can vote for the next liar to do their bidding in your name, and we, the people, keep the circus alive by telling each other "your vote counts! It's your fault if they're all thieves!"
Government won't stop monitoring each and every citizen, and citizens have stopped any form of resistance, political or technological. Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams. We have lost.
I agree.
The tendency to over-criticize and deride is part of the self-inflicted helplessness. Every attempt to improve things gets a fair deal of scorn and criticism...which is not exactly good.
I think people outside of tech (99% of people) are far more likely to support such a law.
You may argue that this is due to them not being sufficiently informed, but that's not to be blamed on representative democracy.
The heavy surveillance states of today will prove an interesting case study of software/data upkeep.
Dead Comment
^ https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-tr...
Germany have had some similar tech in place according to Der Spiegel, but the entire increase in positives was found out to be legal dickpics and flirty messages between teenagers etc. The only result was that the police now have a huge database of teenager's naked pictures and kids on the beach, which can hardly be a good way to minimize pedophile activity.
It will be a shitshow beyond comprehension if this eventually gets implemented.
Why would they? People in power and judges are always exempt from warrantless mass surveillance. They get actual privacy.
I think it just shows it won't be possible to implement this in a useful way. Let's hope...
Both I guess...
and permanently lose access to your google acount, even after lots of stress and the police declaring you innocent[1]. Replace google acount by some other important thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
Let's keep spreading the word about this, the whole Chat Control debate seems to be ignored right now in the media.
Maybe it is not purely by chance that the EU is dealing with this topic during the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Euro_2024 ? ;)
For the technologist, it is easy to circumvent in the private sphere of life at least.
I foresee however, a digital ID that will be tied to all your essential services, that you will be required to have in order to live, and that's the tracking and communication point that will be used to get a hold of you.
Kind of like the chinese social credit score, but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
I won't say that future will never happen only because "never" is a long time, but that's not happening in the foreseeable future.
I'm in Germany right now, and theoretically my ID card can be used online.
In practice, "Digitalisierung" is kinda a joke here, much like "paperless office".
For example, I have to visit an office to activate that feature of my ID card, and another to tell them I've moved.
During the pandemic, they briefly realised they didn't need to do that, then they forgot.
Likewise with health, there's more than one health insurance provider just in Germany, let alone the whole EU, and if I move country (not just travel, move) my previous insurance isn't likely to work in the new place anyway — it would take substantial improvements before it would even be possible for someone to corrut it the way you're afraid of.
Dead Comment
They're all insane and whining over the smallest things, except the ones aligned to my personal political vieuws, of course.
Nobody wants terrorists, right ?
What we would lose is that secure communication is actually mainstream now. Billions of people, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encrypted" means use messaging services with strong encryption including WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, even Facebook chat in some cases. These services make mass surveillance difficult or impossible, and targeted surveillance of their users requires significant effort, such as installing malware on a target's device.
I presumed self hosting a chat service becomes illegal with these laws?
"All services normally provided for remuneration (including ad-funded services) are in scope, without no threshold in size, number of users etc."
"Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope"
Weird right? But it would be weirder if they would outlaw the application of mathematical operations on your own messages... oh wait that's what they are proposing... Try and stop me. Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
Them: "If you don't show us your messages, you are probably going to jail. So if you don't change your mind, and end up in jail without having shown us your messages, that means whatever was in those messages was way worse than going to jail. You probably knew you were going to get a longer sentence if you showed us those messages, and preferred to go with a shorter sentence of 'refusing to collaborate'."