There have been a few incidents that make me think Snapchat private chats are monitored. The one with the guy joking to his friends about blowing up a plane or something is the first that comes to mind.
Tell me how private messaging gets you taken off a plane otherwise. It’s not private. Big tech has put a camera and microphone in everyone’s pocket and they’re monitoring everything.
The government and big (American) tech are very likely lying to us IMO. How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent?
> How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent
With the pure awareness that Men do not act out of convenience, and that this whole situation of declining societies was born out of already-fascist-material that acted out of convenience, with complacency.
> Although the Council emphasizes that the *scans will be limited to the absolutely necessary extent* and that no general, indiscriminate surveillance will take place
I'm 100% sure that this is the case and about the good intentions of the proposers.
The same as every other fascist control measure. Voted down. Voted down. Voted down. Then forced through through some obscure mechanism bypassing the will of the people and becoming law forever.
According to GDPR it’s illegal to condition content on tracking approval. This is VERY clear if you read the law. I can’t understand why this has become very popular just recently.
Personally I do agree, but enforcement is unfortunately behind DPAs and it's pretty clear that they are trying to avoid ruling on it.
In theory someone could directly sue some company which engages on this via Article 79, but this can be expensive and depending on jurisdiction the plaintiff can end up with personal liability on defendant's legal costs if court ends up finding that this is actually legal (e.g. Finland has "loser pays" rule in civil suits).
Additionally this does also touch ePD and in some countries there might be different agency which handles ePD complaints compared to GDPR, like in Finland Data Protection Ombudsman handles GDPR, but Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) handles ePD. If there is something that touches both the Ombudsman usually lets Traficom take care of ePD aspects before they give any GDPR ruling. Both of these can take years.
> The EU's own government websites have these same cookie banners.
Most of them decidedly don't have the same cookie banners. E.g. in vast majority of cases they don't prevent you from seeing content, and have an easy opt-out mechanism without dark patterns.
The result matters, which is why regulations should be considered carefully. The whole cookie fiasco is exactly that: they created a whole industry of shitty compliance and the rules are complex enough that every engineering team is like "just use the off-the-shelf shitty thing". And here we are.
As a reminder "EU cookie banners" are not required if you use cookies for site functionality. They are only required if your site uses these to track users.
This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.
> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
This is the reason why these are usually separated to "strictly necessary" and "functional" cookies. Functional cookies are things which enhance the functionality, but are not strictly necessary. These would generally include things like persistent cookie for language choice rather than just session one.
This gets repeated a lot, but is not my experience after having worked with both in-house and contracted lawyers to understand how functional cookies are handled. We end up wanting something more durable than session cookies to track user preferences so we can set them next time they visit. This is super standard light/dark mode, region, language type of stuff. But that's considered “tracking" in many of these discussions, which never made sense to me.
It is a bit strange why EU countries allow their own credibility and legitimacy get steadily dragged down, bit by bit, by all these thousands of dubious statements, tricks, manoeuvres, and so on.
Do they just not care about weakening their own societies?
Much the same reasons why the UK, US etc. do much the same. It is slowed down a bit in some countries with strong constitutions or resistance to it, but the governments all want it.
> "You have to understand that times have changed, it's not like before... Now we have children, the children, the children, children, children and the t-word."
~~ keir starmer
(I'll see if I can still find the source. If anybody beats me to it, appreciated.)
I guess I'm not sure what's dubious here. The article says they're circumventing "democratic control bodies", but I don't know what that means (perhaps it's a more common phrase in German?), and it sounds like the European Parliament can still vote to reject Chat Control if they don't want it. The article strongly implies there's something dubious going on here, but to me what would be dubious is a procedure that prevents the parliament from voting on Chat Control.
The simple fact is that a law that existed since 2011 and expired in April is now back in effect. So we are back where we were on February.
I don't remember moving from an anti-democratic hell scape to serene democratic beauty back in April so it's probably a nothing-burger.
I often see news articles that trade on the fact the general populace aren't professional bureaucrats and so frame anything happening in unpopular ways.
But why should we think EU democracy is in decline in the first place? Is there some evidence that EU citizens oppose CSAM scanning and political institutions aren't responsive to that? I'm not an expert, but my understanding from polls and such is that CSAM scanning generally has popular support, and the only reason it's controversial is the passionate advocacy and lobbying of privacy groups. (Of course, that's not necessarily anti-democratic, if the privacy groups have important information about Chat Control they think the general public might not have realized.)
They hold all the cards, and have means - above-board or questionable, but effective nonetheless - to enact their will. Do you remember the Treaty of Lisbon referendumS, plural? Just keep asking the question until the plebs answer correctly.
Just because it's criminal, it doesn't mean that every private entity has to help to prevent it at costs of your privacy.
If there are people that host parties in their homes to share CSAM, does that mean that it should be mandatory to install surveillance cameras in your house?
Also as if people that are seriously sharing CSAM, wouldn't encrypt the data before sharing it.
Wait until you see who's in charge of deciding who to prosecute! My first experience with German police was reporting a crime and then then discussing if they should arrest me for being involved with the crime, since I was there at the police station and therefore easier to arrest than the actual perpetrators.
In the UK, when I reported a crime, I had to pull out the book and read the verse what constitutes an assault for Police to record it, because they didn't know. That said, 3 weeks later case was closed because they couldn't find the perpetrator. That is despite me giving them video evidence and address of that person. Looks like our taxes are well spent.
Do, because already there nuances (towards the better or worse) are revealed, which are not evident in journalism as we have it. The whole story needs more investigation than the stubs.
But the way they are managing it in the workflow does not seem too linear...
The central bank, council, and commission have to get thoroughly investigated. The amount of questionable decisions coming from those three in the recent (15) years is extremely unsettling. The parliament and courts are practically the only institutions preventing things from hitting the fan at this point, and struggling to do so, it seems.
Ironically, those are two separate cases of one high-profile EU politician (in fact, the very head of the same parliament that pushes for mass scanning of private messages) BOTH involving secret text messages that the mentioned politician refuses to reveal.
I’m convinced of widespread corruption here. We need to follow the money. Who is funding and pushing this agenda to blanket spy on all Europeans? I guess my question is rhetorical.
I genuinely don’t think such folk have as much influence and power as everyone thinks. In my (direct) experience it’s just a complete mess and they’re reacting naively to every problem.
They’re fighting a battle against the real problem which is the paid up influence campaigns that give them problems to defend. Start at the press, the social media companies and the think tanks.
All the polling data I've seen suggests that scanning private messages for CSAM has overwhelming public support, and the only reason it's even in question is because of passionate advocacy by privacy advocates. What makes you think there's corruption and money on the other side of the debate?
I was told by Brussels insiders a few decades ago the Commission people are not really corruptible. They are guaranteed a very comfortable life and the sanctions are harsh. That might have change, I don't know.
What I was explained is the system is designed for lobbying. The main input is by the lobbies, not the people.
Most of us assume the EU is designed like the US system or individual countries like Germany, Italy or France but it is not. The power of the Parliament is very limited, but we see here that little power has become too much of an inconvenience for the people in power.
For anyone daring to look into the boring design of that thing will come to the conclusion it is absolutely not democratic.
Also the democratic systems like Germany are not known for their pro people / worker law decisions, the opposite actually in the last couple of years.
This Democracy does not equal "what people want". It's a system designed to make people feel like they have the power for change. Knowing that, many people just vote to stop the far-right party from gaining power.
The EU similarly is working as designed. It's a symbiosis between State and Capital and in hard times it has to regulate peoples rights in order to maintain stability.
I'm not against Democracy, just want to lay out it's limitations as it is applied.
They’re indirectly elected through national governments and parliament. That’s different from being directly elected by citizens. Being appointed by elected politicians doesn’t make someone directly accountable to voters. Citizens don’t vote for commissioners, and it’s much harder for voters to remove or reward them based on their policies.
It has never happened, but if there once would be enough faithless electors to swing the election (choosing a different president than what people voted for) it would be a huge scandal and it would be widely condemned as undemocratic.
In the US the President explicitly does not represent the people. It is the President of the States and only the States vote for President. Until the 20th century people weren't even involved in selecting who their State voted for.
Many people are confused by the fact that only States can vote for President. The most a person's vote can do is provide input into their State's votes for President.
That's not the point. Voters generally can't vote for their preferred EU policies because they come bundled with internal policies which are obviously much more important for voters.
It's a bit like with replacing senators in the US with state governors (except actually worse since US is way more centralized and local and federal parties are much more aligned).
If voters actually voted for council representatives directly they could actually influence it in meaningful ways. Now e.g. in Germany a CDU voter won't suddenly switch to AFD or Greens just because they prefer their stance on Chat Control (or whatever else).
Honestly, this is a criticism I agree with. I really would prefer if the EU councilor for my country was either voted for (or even indirectly picked by the EU parliament members for my country). At least this would ensure some sort of alignment with EU policies I care about.
The fact that the head of state is on EU council sort of sucks, because when I vote on national elections people are looking at internal issues, and EU policy is more of an afterthought.
But that doesn't align with morons claiming that those are "unelected officials" or that the EU is somehow undemocratic.
The candidates for prime minister and similar positions tend to be front and center during an election.
From what I remember the head of the european commission was picked from a group of people that weren't even up for election after the official candidates that were paraded around during an EU wide election where dismissed.
The government will investigate the government and find that the government did nothing wrong. A subsequent government review of the government's investigation of the government will find no wrongdoing on the part of the government. Ain't democracy grand?
Not really - all of these have been happening in the past 5-6 years, since the surprisingly London-linked von Leyen and her cadres somehow ended up at the helm.
So it's not a surprise that whatever law the UK passes has been carried over to the Eu recently - the social media ban, digital ids, chat control and everything.
What frightens me is, as usual, the assumption of conformism that may just remove people from services.
"Present a document" // "No, certainly not to you" // "Do without then"
The straight will say "no", but their lives will be extremely complicated, possibly in the unawareness of those that just take compliance to the absurd for granted - as the weak call survival paramount and cannot see that their modus is subjective. That we won't have it is something that they cannot even conceive. Adults are noise to them.
Governments don’t work for people. Yet they use terms like democracy all the time. The repeated attempts at chat control are so blatantly anti civil rights but also disrespectful of democratic principles. Why do EU citizens tolerate this? Are they okay being made a fool of or is this just not an issue for them after all?
How do you suggest people be intolerant? Essentially all the parties work toward these goals, so voting is ineffective. Speech is (more-or-less) allowed until it turns into strident protest, at which point the water cannons are brought out and a few token agitators are prosecuted for their instigation. I wouldn't want to call this tyranny, because I might get a knock on the door.
I wonder if they would still be for it if they weren't lied to. No one would be for this if they would clearly state they want to scan all of your messages, but they say "We want to protect the children" instead.
Because they don't understand this is mass surveillance. I bet not even some of the politicians do, or they don't grasp the full consequence. They see the child narrative and fall for it.
There is no way to stop these so just lets get going. The sooner we have age and ID verification on every single website and app the sooner we will have a working decentralised internet that avoids it.
I doubt that. They cannot stop me from downloading movies and series. They cannot stop me from betting or using crypto. It's kinda hard to find a single thing they are able to stop me from doing online and I'm not even trying that hard.
For context, this refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law).
This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.0 that would weaken end-to-end-encrypted messengers like Signal is not being discussed here.
Not to diminish the gravity of the new development, but the defeatist "no way to prevent this" narratives that are already popping up here are getting old -- when in fact it looks like 2.0 is off the table for good because protest against it has proven effective.
Those narratives pop up from users that have a clear anti-EU bias (and I suspect they might not even be from the EU considering how ignorant they seem to be about how it works, its function ans structure, etc.
The EU already has in place, apparently, a Digital Services Act that basically stops access to some part of the web. That the slope may bring to enlarged web inaccessibility - and an unlivable eu ("What do you mean you have no internet, no web access?! We take it for granted").
That some actors may ride it, is not their stain, but the eu's.
You see an article about how the EU tries to force a law after it got struck down by forcing it through with a legal trick and all you can think of is how any comment that critizes this is propaganda? Get a grip
It's strongly connected to the structure of the EU though, and the weak control that voters have over appointments to the commission, and every level of indirection is one at which the appointer can be influenced.
If EU institutions are used to push this sort of thing, we must treat that as what they are for. Systems do not get a pass because someone external is 'using them', but must be treated holistically.
Even if it is foreign propaganda, the problems it exploits are real. Either you're solving the problems, or you're pushing people into the arms of said propaganda.
It is quite disturbing that more and more ofent critique of policy or a political system like the EU is framed as some convinient boogey man's propaganda.
Due to lack of transparency. The way the EU is structured makes it way easier for national governments to push policies under the radar and avoid any type of responsibility by deflecting any backlash to the EU (due to fundamental flaws in how it's functioning).
In that case you're against the people currently in government, not the body itself, i.e. some people against Chat Control ask for the dissolution of the EU, but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
I've never seen anyone ask for the dissolution of the EU in chat control threads, and I read every one of them.
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
Something particularly ironic is that much of the EU's undemocratic nature comes from features designed specifically to prevent the EU from subsuming its member states. The best path to making Europe democratic again... would be a federal EU, with all the protections for individual member states stripped out, because member states are not a protected class.
The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.
The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.
I can entertain that this idea could be a solution IF done well, but what would be the path to democratic decision-making in this integrated EU? I strongly believe in people organising against the government, I think this is what can lead to change, or at least maintain the fighting spirit going.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
>The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this.
Thousands of yes of cultural heritage can't be steamrolled just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their globalist goals where every person on the planet is an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and should just be cattle pulling their corporate and real estate empires.
> but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.
That exemption had an expiration date for a reason. That they failed to consolidate that practice into a better law does not make forcefully overriding that expiration any more democratic.
"If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states."
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
Exactly. As demonstrated by several countries pronouncing themselves against it every time this comes up.
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.
Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.
The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.
Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.
I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.
If the majority of national governments didn't want this, the Council wouldn't push for it. That's literally who the Council is composed of.
I think a good step for transparency would be forcing Council votes to be open so the ire could be redirected at the appropriate national governments instead of letting them EU-wash their unpopular ideas.
That's a completely backward way of seeing it. "Nations" want nothing. The EU council is obviously an EU institution, the institution least accountable to the people of the EU. They want it and force it through as best they can. The parliament, the EU institution most accountable to the people of the EU (not that it's saying much) tried to stop it.
The Council represents state governments, not nations. A nation consists of all the people in it, not just those who appointed themselves to speak on its behalf.
... appoint themselves? You are aware how governments are chosen in all member states? Are you calling into question the democratic processes of national governments?
Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.
Far from it. This is a classic example that national governments use EU to launder unpopular policy at home. "We have to, it's a EU requirement". It's hard to think it's not by design, that indeed EU is made to "curb the excesses" of popular accountability.
UK played that game for decades, and it went as it had to go.
I think the problem is really that law enforcement have got used to outsourcing this kind of policing to private operated platforms (at least here in Germany). I was actually at the local police station because I notified them via an online mechanism about sth that looked very CSAM to me in a random forum tracking some gossip/Internet meme (actually I did not really look further than a title because that can be already illegal). Just dropping the link (which I thought would be just auto scanned and sent into some central pool), led to the fact that I had to go there in person, wait and had to listen to a speech about the fact that it can be easily illegal to be in certain places in the Internet and that I should be careful because I had a daughter in the age. It was almost that they are threatening me. They told me that all the CSAM stuff anyways comes through the provider and that they would do raids if needed. They cannot do much anyhow on the state level if they do not get the local ISP and IP delivered.
It felt rather absurd and somewhat scary/dystopian that there are Internet companies that sent cops out to do raids based on some IP. According to the police officer it seemed very effective.
You wouldn't be the first person to try reporting a crime and then discover that police care about arresting people a lot more than they care about arresting the right people, as they threaten you with arrest yourself. That was my first experience with police too. I was under investigation for a year before they dropped the charges.
Would be interested in seeing your sources for this. I've yet to see evidence that this has the significant upsides that would, definitely not justify, but at least explain, the push towards limiting fundamental freedoms.
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
The whole Epstein sage is very closely tied to the current US administration, I haven't seen much of it being tied to anything about the EU Council. I think you might confuse the government ties Epstein had, at least the ones we knew about.
Ahh, to be that naive again. Those were the times. One definitely sleeps better.
If you haven't done any digging, don't make such claims. This is a network that goes way beyond the current US administration. I'm sorry you're still trusting whatever media you consume.
(I'm not gonna debate this. It's not that difficult to find some investigative research on this.)
This means the council has systematically overridden the will of both EU parliaments and states' objections in pushing this legislation. TLDR: there are, roughly and not 100% accurately speaking, 4 ways to make legislation at the EU level
1) commission + parliament (meaning the EU commission has initiative (veto rights over any law, like the US president), and parliament can only "propose amendments", which pass with 50% of votes, or deny). This is what normally happens.
Parliament denied the law. Twice.
Member states vetoed the legislation at least 3 times (it doesn't technically work like this but member states can force the commission to veto legislation, and Belgium, Hungary and Denmark have done so) (technically member states can force the EU commission not to introduce legislation and because nobody else can do so either, this is normally effectively a veto)
2) council + parliament. This is where we are. If the executives of the member states (NOT parliaments) want to push through a vote, they can use this path. The difference is that only 2/3 majority of parliament can stop the law from passing or put in amendments.
Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
3) council + commission. This completely overrides any legislative involvement in ... well, legislation. They have already threatened to do this.
4) the council can just force legislation through without anyone's approval
Normally "democracy" in the EU means that legislation requires BOTH a majority of Europeans to agree (Parliament) AND no executive government. Both have already been bypassed.
This refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law). It means current scanning is illegal.
Just so we're clear, this basically means that all messengers (not any specific one) will have to intercept everyone's messages, scan for specific words, and if found report the whole chat history to the police.
Of course, it already turned out "BTW carrousel" (an illegal tax avoidance strategy) is one of the sentences they scan for to "protect the children".
The article itself also contains evidence against the idea that this protects children (that child protection investigations keep increasing despite the scanning not taking place anymore)
>Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
Excuse me? That is quite an assertion. You're saying the EU Commission, the civil servants appointed by the EU Council, are somehow controlling the EU Council to push this agenda?
I don't believe that is true. Please provide evidence.
In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
> The member states want to reactivate the transitional regulation for voluntary monitoring of messages by technology groups, which expired on April 3, in an expedited procedure. The Council adopted a corresponding position for a “new” regulation on Thursday via written procedure to close a looming legal loophole and increase pressure on MEPs.
This is the EU Council pushing it. The elected heads of state of the member nations. The Commission just do their bidding.
This is completely wrong. Under the ordinary legislative procedure (used for Chat Control 1.0 & 2.0) the Commission proposes an act, then the Council and Parliament can approve it, reject it or amend it.
The act can be approved only if and when the Council and Parliament approve the exact same text
Hn is a goofy place. It feels like on odd days we see posts like this, about the EU creating this legal framework for the destruction of privacy. On even days we see posts about quitting American saas in favor of Europeans on the basis of privacy. Somehow the dots never connect.
The main argument for this seems to be that they catch many pedos by using image recognition tech on facebook etc.
Thus, discontinuing the permit to use these techniques did have enforcement numbers of those crimes found drop significantly.
I'm wondering if they've given up real policing of these crimes completely?!
Spreading pedo content on Facebook, those people have to be the dumbest of the dumb? Everyone spending even a single critical thought on their crimes won't be caught by this.
And they say enforcement numbers drop significantly? Meaning they don't catch many other people? What the fuck are they even doing? Did they completely give up trying to find the real criminals, and instead fall back on sugar-coated figures to conceal that failure?
These pro-surveillance narratives don't even attempt to look plausible, they are aimed at the average Joe/Mohammed/whoever with attention span of 10ms and IQ of a guppy.
This would be illegal in Germany. I wonder why law enforcement is not looking into this. It is similar to having abusive husband control wife's communication - just at scale and for ideological reason. This is a violent act against whole population, applied indiscriminately. It fulfils updated definition of terrorism in Germany and it is exploiting legislative apparatus of the EU to enact this violent act. German people should report this and these people behind it should be investigated and presumably arrested.
Sort of, if the EU were a country. But the council doesn't consist of separate senators to determine the weight of the vote. And there's also the Commission and Parliament, which are closer to the American government structure as it stands now. The three bodies have different procedures or different decisions and law making processes.
But generally, the council represents the governments currently ruling the EU member states. A council of member states pushing for laws the comission opposes makes for a very interesting but confusing situation, where the EU is opposed to this legislation but the individual member states are not.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadTell me how private messaging gets you taken off a plane otherwise. It’s not private. Big tech has put a camera and microphone in everyone’s pocket and they’re monitoring everything.
The government and big (American) tech are very likely lying to us IMO. How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent?
With the pure awareness that Men do not act out of convenience, and that this whole situation of declining societies was born out of already-fascist-material that acted out of convenience, with complacency.
I'm 100% sure that this is the case and about the good intentions of the proposers.
/s
The reaction may not be tied to a single event.
It was extending a recently expired law that has existed since 2011.
I don't think your comment is reflecting on what has actually happened. "Chat Control" as people know it has not passed into law.
I know the EU cookie banners have basically ruined the internet, but this seems like a whole 'nother level of obnoxious.
> Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling (Consent required for free use)
very frustrating because especially a tech magazine like heise should really know better
There is one case where DPA ruled in favor of the company, but it's currently being appealed: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-ok-der-spiegel-noyb-sues-hamburg-d...
Another one ruled against company and court agreed: https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-i...
In theory someone could directly sue some company which engages on this via Article 79, but this can be expensive and depending on jurisdiction the plaintiff can end up with personal liability on defendant's legal costs if court ends up finding that this is actually legal (e.g. Finland has "loser pays" rule in civil suits).
Additionally this does also touch ePD and in some countries there might be different agency which handles ePD complaints compared to GDPR, like in Finland Data Protection Ombudsman handles GDPR, but Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) handles ePD. If there is something that touches both the Ombudsman usually lets Traficom take care of ePD aspects before they give any GDPR ruling. Both of these can take years.
Both in incognito and normal modes. I bet you'll get the same fingerprinting ID in both.
So yes, they can track you in incognito mode, too.
Workarounds include:
- reader mode
- "behind the overlay" extension (and others like it)
- archive.is
- probably many others
EU made bad laws that has encouraged this kind of behavior.
Look at the CCPA in California for legislation that accomplishes largely the same goals, but doesn't break the web due to "malicious compliance".
Most of them decidedly don't have the same cookie banners. E.g. in vast majority of cases they don't prevent you from seeing content, and have an easy opt-out mechanism without dark patterns.
This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.
> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
This is the reason why these are usually separated to "strictly necessary" and "functional" cookies. Functional cookies are things which enhance the functionality, but are not strictly necessary. These would generally include things like persistent cookie for language choice rather than just session one.
Extremely common practice for newspapers websites, unfortunately.
Do they just not care about weakening their own societies?
~~ keir starmer
(I'll see if I can still find the source. If anybody beats me to it, appreciated.)
The simple fact is that a law that existed since 2011 and expired in April is now back in effect. So we are back where we were on February.
I don't remember moving from an anti-democratic hell scape to serene democratic beauty back in April so it's probably a nothing-burger.
I often see news articles that trade on the fact the general populace aren't professional bureaucrats and so frame anything happening in unpopular ways.
These pithy remarks don't really extend the debate or have any nuance - they just sound conspiratorial.
There are plenty of reasons to "scan" communications.
There are plenty of reasons to have limits on communication "scanning".
What part of the spectrum do you fall on?
The European Commission, which drafted and has continued to promote the proposal
If there are people that host parties in their homes to share CSAM, does that mean that it should be mandatory to install surveillance cameras in your house?
Also as if people that are seriously sharing CSAM, wouldn't encrypt the data before sharing it.
# Italy warns against Chat Control mass surveillance, but votes in favour of it (digitalcourage.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783340
Do, because already there nuances (towards the better or worse) are revealed, which are not evident in journalism as we have it. The whole story needs more investigation than the stubs.
But the way they are managing it in the workflow does not seem too linear...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-secret-gr...
Ironically, those are two separate cases of one high-profile EU politician (in fact, the very head of the same parliament that pushes for mass scanning of private messages) BOTH involving secret text messages that the mentioned politician refuses to reveal.
Why are we ignoring the other side of the transaction? The side responsible for taking the money.
Giving bribes for lobbying is bad, but that would not be an issue if those found taking the bribes would be guillotined or hanged.
They’re fighting a battle against the real problem which is the paid up influence campaigns that give them problems to defend. Start at the press, the social media companies and the think tanks.
I might not be corruption, it might be worse.
I was told by Brussels insiders a few decades ago the Commission people are not really corruptible. They are guaranteed a very comfortable life and the sanctions are harsh. That might have change, I don't know.
What I was explained is the system is designed for lobbying. The main input is by the lobbies, not the people.
Most of us assume the EU is designed like the US system or individual countries like Germany, Italy or France but it is not. The power of the Parliament is very limited, but we see here that little power has become too much of an inconvenience for the people in power.
For anyone daring to look into the boring design of that thing will come to the conclusion it is absolutely not democratic.
This Democracy does not equal "what people want". It's a system designed to make people feel like they have the power for change. Knowing that, many people just vote to stop the far-right party from gaining power.
The EU similarly is working as designed. It's a symbiosis between State and Capital and in hard times it has to regulate peoples rights in order to maintain stability.
I'm not against Democracy, just want to lay out it's limitations as it is applied.
By WHO?! They are THE (unelected) ruling elite. Who's gonna prosecute them?
The commissioners are picked by the heads of state (elected) and the EU parliament (also elected).
This does not absolve them from wrongdoing, but you should understand where your complaints should be directed at.
Their opposition is ideological, democracy is just an excuse because their true views would be too unsavory to say out loud.
It has never happened, but if there once would be enough faithless electors to swing the election (choosing a different president than what people voted for) it would be a huge scandal and it would be widely condemned as undemocratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
Many people are confused by the fact that only States can vote for President. The most a person's vote can do is provide input into their State's votes for President.
I am still to see as many people getting riled up about how those countries are not democratic.
Nobody really knows or cares who is going to be appointed to the commission since domestic issues always completely over shadow it.
Are you really trying to imply that voters don't know who the fuck their heads of government are?
I mean, this is a rhetorical question. I don't really expect people who keep repeating misinformation about EU to be arguing in good faith.
It's a bit like with replacing senators in the US with state governors (except actually worse since US is way more centralized and local and federal parties are much more aligned).
If voters actually voted for council representatives directly they could actually influence it in meaningful ways. Now e.g. in Germany a CDU voter won't suddenly switch to AFD or Greens just because they prefer their stance on Chat Control (or whatever else).
The fact that the head of state is on EU council sort of sucks, because when I vote on national elections people are looking at internal issues, and EU policy is more of an afterthought.
But that doesn't align with morons claiming that those are "unelected officials" or that the EU is somehow undemocratic.
From what I remember the head of the european commission was picked from a group of people that weren't even up for election after the official candidates that were paraded around during an EU wide election where dismissed.
Not really - all of these have been happening in the past 5-6 years, since the surprisingly London-linked von Leyen and her cadres somehow ended up at the helm.
So it's not a surprise that whatever law the UK passes has been carried over to the Eu recently - the social media ban, digital ids, chat control and everything.
"Present a document" // "No, certainly not to you" // "Do without then"
The straight will say "no", but their lives will be extremely complicated, possibly in the unawareness of those that just take compliance to the absurd for granted - as the weak call survival paramount and cannot see that their modus is subjective. That we won't have it is something that they cannot even conceive. Adults are noise to them.
Some EU citizens want it? You'd be surprised on the views of some people.
Except for the times they've tried before and public outrage stopped it. So this defeatist attitude works against us.
This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.0 that would weaken end-to-end-encrypted messengers like Signal is not being discussed here.
Not to diminish the gravity of the new development, but the defeatist "no way to prevent this" narratives that are already popping up here are getting old -- when in fact it looks like 2.0 is off the table for good because protest against it has proven effective.
I would be utterly shocked if facebook et al. were not scanning all of your messages (either in transit or at terminus to get around 'E2E' claims).
That some actors may ride it, is not their stain, but the eu's.
If EU institutions are used to push this sort of thing, we must treat that as what they are for. Systems do not get a pass because someone external is 'using them', but must be treated holistically.
You know what the Council consists of? The heads of national governments.
You know who they're having to force it through against? The EU parliament, an actual EU-level institution.
The more accurate read would thus be "national governments are trying to force this against the will of the EU".
The fact that you come away with the exact opposite read is a good demonstration of said propaganda's effectiveness.
It is quite disturbing that more and more ofent critique of policy or a political system like the EU is framed as some convinient boogey man's propaganda.
If a government body wants to interfere in your privacy and take it away, isn't it normal to be against that government?
It's not a bias, it's a normal common sense reaction to tyrannical behavior
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.
The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
Thousands of yes of cultural heritage can't be steamrolled just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their globalist goals where every person on the planet is an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and should just be cattle pulling their corporate and real estate empires.
?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.
You can't separate the EU from what people use it to do.
The institution that forced this through is the EU Council, the body that represents national governments and is composed of heads of government.
The reason they have to force it through and couldn't do 2.0 is because the EU Parliament stopped them.
In other words, it's the nation states that want this and the EU institutions that are blocking it, not the other way around as often framed online.
If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states.
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.
The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.
Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.
I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.
I think a good step for transparency would be forcing Council votes to be open so the ire could be redirected at the appropriate national governments instead of letting them EU-wash their unpopular ideas.
Who else is in the Council? You are saying "nuh-uh", but not addressing any of the substance of my comment.
Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
If you haven't done any digging, don't make such claims. This is a network that goes way beyond the current US administration. I'm sorry you're still trusting whatever media you consume.
(I'm not gonna debate this. It's not that difficult to find some investigative research on this.)
I have, that's why I am claiming things.
> I'm not gonna debate this
Same! Gonna go outside and enjoy my Monday, I suggest you do the same friend :)
1) commission + parliament (meaning the EU commission has initiative (veto rights over any law, like the US president), and parliament can only "propose amendments", which pass with 50% of votes, or deny). This is what normally happens.
Parliament denied the law. Twice.
Member states vetoed the legislation at least 3 times (it doesn't technically work like this but member states can force the commission to veto legislation, and Belgium, Hungary and Denmark have done so) (technically member states can force the EU commission not to introduce legislation and because nobody else can do so either, this is normally effectively a veto)
2) council + parliament. This is where we are. If the executives of the member states (NOT parliaments) want to push through a vote, they can use this path. The difference is that only 2/3 majority of parliament can stop the law from passing or put in amendments.
Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
3) council + commission. This completely overrides any legislative involvement in ... well, legislation. They have already threatened to do this.
4) the council can just force legislation through without anyone's approval
Normally "democracy" in the EU means that legislation requires BOTH a majority of Europeans to agree (Parliament) AND no executive government. Both have already been bypassed.
This refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law). It means current scanning is illegal.
Just so we're clear, this basically means that all messengers (not any specific one) will have to intercept everyone's messages, scan for specific words, and if found report the whole chat history to the police.
Of course, it already turned out "BTW carrousel" (an illegal tax avoidance strategy) is one of the sentences they scan for to "protect the children".
The article itself also contains evidence against the idea that this protects children (that child protection investigations keep increasing despite the scanning not taking place anymore)
Excuse me? That is quite an assertion. You're saying the EU Commission, the civil servants appointed by the EU Council, are somehow controlling the EU Council to push this agenda?
I don't believe that is true. Please provide evidence.
In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
> In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
Did you miss that the article talks explicitly about it being in the second reading already?
> The member states want to reactivate the transitional regulation for voluntary monitoring of messages by technology groups, which expired on April 3, in an expedited procedure. The Council adopted a corresponding position for a “new” regulation on Thursday via written procedure to close a looming legal loophole and increase pressure on MEPs.
This is the EU Council pushing it. The elected heads of state of the member nations. The Commission just do their bidding.
The act can be approved only if and when the Council and Parliament approve the exact same text
Thus, discontinuing the permit to use these techniques did have enforcement numbers of those crimes found drop significantly.
I'm wondering if they've given up real policing of these crimes completely?!
Spreading pedo content on Facebook, those people have to be the dumbest of the dumb? Everyone spending even a single critical thought on their crimes won't be caught by this.
And they say enforcement numbers drop significantly? Meaning they don't catch many other people? What the fuck are they even doing? Did they completely give up trying to find the real criminals, and instead fall back on sugar-coated figures to conceal that failure?
For others, it is explicit in the Articles.
> these people behind it should be investigated and presumably arrested
Are you talking about the eu organs? (Because it does seem linear, but paradoxical, and surely not outside a thought legal framework.)
But generally, the council represents the governments currently ruling the EU member states. A council of member states pushing for laws the comission opposes makes for a very interesting but confusing situation, where the EU is opposed to this legislation but the individual member states are not.