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ChatControl: EU ministers want to exempt themselves

426 points by Sami_Lehtinen 3y ago

postepowanieadm 3y ago
Related: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-find-texts-with-pfizer-chief-vaccine-deal-letter-2022-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-...
- urduntupu 3y ago
  Ha! Just thought about and posted the same. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063256
dantondwa 3y ago
Obviously, this is about creating the infrastructure for a continent-wide surveillance program, using children pornography as a troy horse. The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.
- soco 3y ago
  I'd call this a failure of the elected officials - elected just as the national ones yet feeling quite remote to their voters.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > I'd call this a failure of the elected officials You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace. Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.
    - soco 3y ago
      Oh but lobby and communications and meeting the commissioners and and and. I don't hear any that all too often, but maybe it's on me?
- mrtksn 3y ago
  >The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing What is the base of this claim? There are EU elections this year FYI.
  - elric 3y ago
    Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace. There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest. In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.
      - Detrytus 3y ago
        You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately). EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.
        mrtksn 3y ago
        It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  > The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control. Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics. Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.
  - techcode 3y ago
    This. It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things. Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc. Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Eh, partly. But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages. Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on. And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that. Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.
    - 3y ago
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states How exactly is it detached? The EU parliament is elected. The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government). I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.
  - 3836293648 3y ago
    They're socially detached. Yes, people vote for them; no, people do absolutely not follow anything the EU does until it reaches national parliaments.
    - surgical_fire 3y ago
      This socially qualifier completely changes the original meaning. One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population. That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.
  - aembleton 3y ago
    I don't even know what language the Wednesday morning meetings that the commission have are held in. The official minutes are in French; are they conducted in French? At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.
- harywilke 3y ago
  It still boggles my mind that it's not obvious how much of my tax bill go to the EU. This aids in the feeling of detachment.
  - unilynx 3y ago
    With the EU having a total €150B budget in a €19.350B GDP economy it's probably still noise in your total taxes.
    - scoot 3y ago
      I can't help thinking that you must have the decimal point in the wrong place...
      - pasc1878 3y ago
        Or else they are European and use . as the thousands separator.
        scoot 3y ago
        I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.
        pasc1878 3y ago
        I see many Europeans write in English but still use European number formatting - they are sort of different things.
        scoot 3y ago
        I'm not so sure they're separate, or at least that they should be treated as such. Either way, it's a shame that this isn't standardised, regardless of the language spoken. Likewise units of measurement (weight, distance, time etc.).
YPPH 3y ago
Whenever things like this come up with the non-tech folk I deal with, the conversation tends to turn to "Oh, well, I don't have any of that sort of stuff, so nothing to worry about", or "Good, child abusers should be in jail". What are people's talking points against these views?
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  Well, what are your own arguments against those views? You can just use those.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  There are much better longer argumentations and essays out there which are easy to find.. two badly rephrased prime args for me: - It is not about you but fundamental rights in our society that are important. Argueing like "I don't have any of that sort of stuff" is like saying "I'm not gay, so what do I care about gay rights" (replace with any disadvantaged group and don't blame me for bad example please). - Things can quickly change, even when done with nothing bad in mind. You find countless misuses with collected data, prime example is again the Nazis that rolled into Dutch (or Belgium?) and abused the recorded religions. However, today in almost any democracy imagination has not to be taken too far that another worse power comes to real power. Just look at threats Trump, or mostly right wing parties in Europe already made.
  - andrelaszlo 3y ago
    "Would you like the people on the far [left|right] to have full access to your communications, and to those of their enemies, in case they end up in a position of power (or access to this data some other way)."
- arghwhat 3y ago
  "You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?" "Would you mind if all your online activity and chat histories were sent to ChatGPT live, with it deciding if you're a suspect or a criminal? If not, why are you okay with a vague system designed by politicians?" "If you or your partner is short and look young relative to the average Caucasian, for example due to being from certain Asian countries with low average height, would you trust that ChatGPT wouldn't erroneously classify pictures as being of a minor and mark you a criminal?" People tend to get sensitive when you expand the idea a bit and give them an example of the technical part that they can relate to.
mrtksn 3y ago
IIUC, this is why it's good to have separations of power and slow legislation. EU ministers can keep wanting stuff, courts and the parliament keeps rejecting it and the public keep pushing back. Pretty much it's what divides the free world from the dictatorships. Its pretty scary when you start seeing politicians attacking courts, judges etc. Every country that went ahead with steamrolling courts has become a dumpster fire. When politicians start saying that they have mandate to do this one thing but the courts are not allowing it, it's a huge red flag. When institutions or politicians say that something is slowing them down, it's a huge red flag.
- xiphias2 3y ago
  It would be great if this was that simple (and in general I agree with you), but Bukele taking over El Salvador was an exception: the whole judicial system was captured by criminals that enabled killing people on a mass scale, he got rid of it all, and crime rate went down significantly. He also changed the (otherwise unfair) constitution that prohibited him from going for reelection, although at that point I believe a referendum would have been a much better solution. I'm seeing the same taking over court happening in other countries, so I just don't think there's a simple solution that can be applied in all cases.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    I guess this rosy view depends on viewing constant martial law as a positive thing, and not counting the tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests as a downside.
  - earthnail 3y ago
    Bukele is not an exception. He's not replacing a functioning democracy. As you describe, the old system had no true separation of power - criminals had already captured it and made it dysfunctional. As everything in live, just because it says X on the label doesn't mean it has X in it. Same with democracy. To have a functioning democracy, you not only need to have separation of power, you also always have to make sure it is maintained, and a society has to constantly re-educate itself on why that is so important. When we take things for granted, they are up for grabs from people who just want power.
urduntupu 3y ago
Makes sense. So that von der Leyen, president of the EU, can just continue deleting her SMS containing secret vaxx purchase deals with BigPharma [0]. SMS is somewhat a chat, too, right? But good that she can be now exempted from ChatControl. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-union-ursula-von-der-leyen-pfizer-texts/ https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-...
- _ink_ 3y ago
  Yeah, or that lady, that fled her office in Brussel with bags full of cash. What was her name again? I wonder what happened to her. Edit: Eva Kaili. They found 1.5 Million in cash. She lost her immunity, but is still member of the parliament with full voting rights. Excellent. -- https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/eu-parlament-hebt-immunitaet-der-ehemaligen-vizepraesidentin-kaili-auf-a-a8312b22-8235-4833-98eb-a19b075710f0 https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/eu-parlament-hebt-immunitaet-...
  - ragazzina 3y ago
    They did not find Eva Kaili with 1.5 Million in cash.
teekert 3y ago
Some animals are more equal than others.
dindresto 3y ago
> The EU governments want to adopt the chat control bill by the beginning of June. Just in time for elections...
bidon_don 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
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prof-dr-ir 3y ago
The actual proposed regulation [0] is definitely worth having a look at. For example: 5. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent the provision of end-to-end encrypted services. [0] page 36 onwards of https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-11-conseil-csam-compromis-9-avril.pdf https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/202...
- dsign 3y ago
  4a in page 37 is most tellingly crossed out. So I’m going to copy and paste 4a and instead of crossing it out invert its meaning: This Regulation shall lead to the general obligation to monitor the information which providers of hosting services transmit or store, to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. It’s a good summary of the purpose of the law, I should say. Welcome to China… I mean, to the EU.
perihelions 3y ago
I think the best way to get rid of a horrible law like this is indeed to enforce against the people who wrote it. Enforce equitably, and enforce equally: the same misery everyone else already knows. If ministers worry about their private communications being read by strangers—if that makes them feel fearful, paranoid, violated—then let them feel fearful, paranoid, violated, just like the hundreds of millions of other people they would enforce those feelings on. "Laws are to govern all alike — those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." –Ulysses S. Grant (1869)—often misquoted and misattributed to Lincoln, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugural_Address_(1869) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugur... https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  When working for a large company, everyone was miserable with bad IT support outsourced to India (not about India). Then I learned, that one level above me, there was special director level IT support inside the country. When working for a large company, when moving, my boss praised the virtues of the new open office and how our current team rooms were bad. Then we learned, that he had a private office in the new setup.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    "Whataboutism". Brushing away hypocrisy is way to easy nowadays. It would be way better for morale if they just said that offices are a benefit then pretending to defend something they don't believe in.
- javajosh 3y ago
  I'd go further and say the more power you have the less privacy you should have.
  - sirdvd 3y ago
    Or at least, the more public resources you manage the less privacy you should have.
mustafa_pasi 3y ago
We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe. It is really sad to see. There is basically no free speech anymore and now they want to even track and control our private communication. And what's worse is, everyone is so high on moral superiority over other cultures that they cannot even admit to themselves that this could be happening.
- ufocia 3y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of good.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  The commission are certainly deranged, and the UK is certainly deranged, but overall I don't agree that the situation is bad. Maybe in Germany.
  - mustafa_pasi 3y ago
    Well Germany is were I live, but if you are any EU citizen you are technically free to come live in Germany, but then you will get your mouth shut and your thoughts policed by the very many German bodies, governmental and otherwise. So in a way even as a non-German you are still affected.
    - ranulo 3y ago
      What are you talking about? There is literally only one opinion that is illegal in Germany and that is to deny that the holocaust happened. Everything else can be published (there can be civil lawsuits later of course, but the state won't stop you unless you are actively treating people).
      - zrn900 3y ago
        https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:text=He%20was%20also%20banned%20from,former%20finance%20minister%20of%20Greece https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:....
ufocia 3y ago
Sounds like the QAnon may garner more support.
metalspoon 3y ago
I'd prefer the EU to be dismantled just because of this.
- elaus 3y ago
  Laws like this don't appear out of thin air, those ideas come from member states and are voted on by politicians from all those member states. So without the EU stuff like this would have to be fought against in each individual state, because of course every government loves surveillance and will sooner or later try to increase it.
  - abecedarius 3y ago
    That alternative seems better on the whole. We're far from the margin where more competition in governance is inefficient.
  - ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
    The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck. It's similar to how in the US you have people complain about the flyover states, though I'd argue that people from Spain don't think of people from Poland as even close to the same. The difference between the two peoples ideologies is fundamentally great. But at the same time, the 49% did vote to join a union where this could happen so could you argue they must be fine with it? I don't know.
    - jakub_g 3y ago
      > if 51% of the other countries don't Laws in EU don't get passed if just 51% of countries agree.
      - aembleton 3y ago
        They also don't get revoked if just 51% agree
    - 3y ago
earthnail 3y ago
Holy shit... I wasn't even aware such a surveillance program was on its way. Sneaky. Jesus, I hope it can still be stopped.
earthnail 3y ago
I just mailed my local newspaper about it, asking them to write about this (Süddeutsche Zeitung - basically the German NYT). If you live in the EU, I encourage you to do the same.
luke-stanley 3y ago
Wow, imagine if governments correctly checked if children were actually psychologically safe and healthy, even once a year. That must be totally different from ChatControl, and a it could be a hard problem, with lots of last mile problems. Doing this for all humans would be nice. I'm reminded of instructions postal delivery people had to check on elderly after it turned out an elderly person was found dead, months after dying if I recall correctly. Maybe it's a human network connectivity mapping problem with a lot of tricky user experience / delivery/ last mile problems. I dream of this being solved. Is anything like this being done in the EU, or elsewhere on a reproducible scale? That and reliability predicting and relieving suffering seem like important projects to me.
Macha 3y ago
Huh, I thought ChatControl plans were dead, have they just rebranded and restarted?
blibble 3y ago
ah yes, like they exempt themselves from pesky things like income tax
PreInternet01 3y ago
Lots of doom-speculation here, but I think the whole "ChatControl" controversy could be contained with One Single Measure: "If >X% of messages in a given group contain the term(s) 'Y', auto-report that group, and silently-add verified LE to said group if requested."
- redeeman 3y ago
  or hows about the government stays the hell out of my chat groups?
  - PreInternet01 3y ago
    Yeah, and then it turns out your chat group was all about breaking into all cars in neighborhood Z, or spearfishing all elderly in e-mail domain D, and you're all like "why didn't the police stop this?" Well, guess what, the police is the government, and they need some intel to go on... (And, yeah, they also need to be restrained. But that's not what this particular submission, nor your reply, makes a strong point for)
    - redeeman 3y ago
      thats an ugly accusation. Whats next, they need assistance installing hidden microphones in EVERYONES home? perhaps we start with yours? maybe cameras? dont think the bedroom or toilet is excluded. How about police get to doing actual oldfashioned police work?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zoobab 3y ago
The executive becoming legislators, Montesquieu told you so with his principle of "Seperation of Powers", but the EU was built after WW2 as an inter-governmental organisation, critized in the 60s/70s for being a group of Ministers sitting in a closed room, and taking decisions for their own ministries. The European Parliament was born out of those critics (and some German Const Court decisions). But that does not solve the core problem that the executive should not become legislator.
obynio 3y ago
The website recommends to contact the permanent representation of my country, and more importantly by phone which is apparently more effective. Not that I'm worried about it but I wonder if anyone here already did this, is it an accepted practice to reach out with such a method ?
wkat4242 3y ago
Lol I'm so not surprised. PS: When it was shot down a few months ago, I told everyone it was only temporary and they will keep trying again and again but people downvoted me for not celebrating :/
mardifoufs 3y ago
I don't get it, I thought an EU court decided that encrypted chat was a human right a few weeks ago.

426 points by Sami_Lehtinen 3y ago

Related: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-find-texts-with-pfizer-chief-vaccine-deal-letter-2022-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-...

urduntupu 3y ago
Ha! Just thought about and posted the same. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063256

dantondwa 3y ago

Obviously, this is about creating the infrastructure for a continent-wide surveillance program, using children pornography as a troy horse. The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.

soco 3y ago
I'd call this a failure of the elected officials - elected just as the national ones yet feeling quite remote to their voters.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > I'd call this a failure of the elected officials You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace. Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.
  - soco 3y ago
    Oh but lobby and communications and meeting the commissioners and and and. I don't hear any that all too often, but maybe it's on me?
mrtksn 3y ago
>The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing What is the base of this claim? There are EU elections this year FYI.
- elric 3y ago
  Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace. There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest. In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.
    - Detrytus 3y ago
      You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately). EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.
rickdeckard 3y ago
> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control. Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics. Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.
- techcode 3y ago
  This. It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things. Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc. Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Eh, partly. But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages. Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on. And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that. Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.
  - 3y ago
surgical_fire 3y ago
> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states How exactly is it detached? The EU parliament is elected. The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government). I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.
- 3836293648 3y ago
  They're socially detached. Yes, people vote for them; no, people do absolutely not follow anything the EU does until it reaches national parliaments.
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    This socially qualifier completely changes the original meaning. One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population. That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.
- aembleton 3y ago
  I don't even know what language the Wednesday morning meetings that the commission have are held in. The official minutes are in French; are they conducted in French? At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.
harywilke 3y ago
It still boggles my mind that it's not obvious how much of my tax bill go to the EU. This aids in the feeling of detachment.
- unilynx 3y ago
  With the EU having a total €150B budget in a €19.350B GDP economy it's probably still noise in your total taxes.
  - scoot 3y ago
    I can't help thinking that you must have the decimal point in the wrong place...
    - pasc1878 3y ago
      Or else they are European and use . as the thousands separator.
      - scoot 3y ago
        I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.
        pasc1878 3y ago
        I see many Europeans write in English but still use European number formatting - they are sort of different things.
        scoot 3y ago
        I'm not so sure they're separate, or at least that they should be treated as such. Either way, it's a shame that this isn't standardised, regardless of the language spoken. Likewise units of measurement (weight, distance, time etc.).

YPPH 3y ago

Whenever things like this come up with the non-tech folk I deal with, the conversation tends to turn to "Oh, well, I don't have any of that sort of stuff, so nothing to worry about", or "Good, child abusers should be in jail". What are people's talking points against these views?

bondarchuk 3y ago
Well, what are your own arguments against those views? You can just use those.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
There are much better longer argumentations and essays out there which are easy to find.. two badly rephrased prime args for me: - It is not about you but fundamental rights in our society that are important. Argueing like "I don't have any of that sort of stuff" is like saying "I'm not gay, so what do I care about gay rights" (replace with any disadvantaged group and don't blame me for bad example please). - Things can quickly change, even when done with nothing bad in mind. You find countless misuses with collected data, prime example is again the Nazis that rolled into Dutch (or Belgium?) and abused the recorded religions. However, today in almost any democracy imagination has not to be taken too far that another worse power comes to real power. Just look at threats Trump, or mostly right wing parties in Europe already made.
- andrelaszlo 3y ago
  "Would you like the people on the far [left|right] to have full access to your communications, and to those of their enemies, in case they end up in a position of power (or access to this data some other way)."
arghwhat 3y ago
"You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?" "Would you mind if all your online activity and chat histories were sent to ChatGPT live, with it deciding if you're a suspect or a criminal? If not, why are you okay with a vague system designed by politicians?" "If you or your partner is short and look young relative to the average Caucasian, for example due to being from certain Asian countries with low average height, would you trust that ChatGPT wouldn't erroneously classify pictures as being of a minor and mark you a criminal?" People tend to get sensitive when you expand the idea a bit and give them an example of the technical part that they can relate to.

mrtksn 3y ago

IIUC, this is why it's good to have separations of power and slow legislation. EU ministers can keep wanting stuff, courts and the parliament keeps rejecting it and the public keep pushing back. Pretty much it's what divides the free world from the dictatorships. Its pretty scary when you start seeing politicians attacking courts, judges etc. Every country that went ahead with steamrolling courts has become a dumpster fire. When politicians start saying that they have mandate to do this one thing but the courts are not allowing it, it's a huge red flag. When institutions or politicians say that something is slowing them down, it's a huge red flag.

xiphias2 3y ago
It would be great if this was that simple (and in general I agree with you), but Bukele taking over El Salvador was an exception: the whole judicial system was captured by criminals that enabled killing people on a mass scale, he got rid of it all, and crime rate went down significantly. He also changed the (otherwise unfair) constitution that prohibited him from going for reelection, although at that point I believe a referendum would have been a much better solution. I'm seeing the same taking over court happening in other countries, so I just don't think there's a simple solution that can be applied in all cases.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  I guess this rosy view depends on viewing constant martial law as a positive thing, and not counting the tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests as a downside.
- earthnail 3y ago
  Bukele is not an exception. He's not replacing a functioning democracy. As you describe, the old system had no true separation of power - criminals had already captured it and made it dysfunctional. As everything in live, just because it says X on the label doesn't mean it has X in it. Same with democracy. To have a functioning democracy, you not only need to have separation of power, you also always have to make sure it is maintained, and a society has to constantly re-educate itself on why that is so important. When we take things for granted, they are up for grabs from people who just want power.

urduntupu 3y ago

Makes sense. So that von der Leyen, president of the EU, can just continue deleting her SMS containing secret vaxx purchase deals with BigPharma [0]. SMS is somewhat a chat, too, right? But good that she can be now exempted from ChatControl. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-union-ursula-von-der-leyen-pfizer-texts/ https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-...

_ink_ 3y ago
Yeah, or that lady, that fled her office in Brussel with bags full of cash. What was her name again? I wonder what happened to her. Edit: Eva Kaili. They found 1.5 Million in cash. She lost her immunity, but is still member of the parliament with full voting rights. Excellent. -- https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/eu-parlament-hebt-immunitaet-der-ehemaligen-vizepraesidentin-kaili-auf-a-a8312b22-8235-4833-98eb-a19b075710f0 https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/eu-parlament-hebt-immunitaet-...
- ragazzina 3y ago
  They did not find Eva Kaili with 1.5 Million in cash.

teekert 3y ago

Some animals are more equal than others.

dindresto 3y ago

> The EU governments want to adopt the chat control bill by the beginning of June. Just in time for elections...

bidon_don 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

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prof-dr-ir 3y ago

The actual proposed regulation [0] is definitely worth having a look at. For example: 5. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent the provision of end-to-end encrypted services. [0] page 36 onwards of https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-11-conseil-csam-compromis-9-avril.pdf https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/202...

dsign 3y ago
4a in page 37 is most tellingly crossed out. So I’m going to copy and paste 4a and instead of crossing it out invert its meaning: This Regulation shall lead to the general obligation to monitor the information which providers of hosting services transmit or store, to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. It’s a good summary of the purpose of the law, I should say. Welcome to China… I mean, to the EU.

perihelions 3y ago

I think the best way to get rid of a horrible law like this is indeed to enforce against the people who wrote it. Enforce equitably, and enforce equally: the same misery everyone else already knows. If ministers worry about their private communications being read by strangers—if that makes them feel fearful, paranoid, violated—then let them feel fearful, paranoid, violated, just like the hundreds of millions of other people they would enforce those feelings on. "Laws are to govern all alike — those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." –Ulysses S. Grant (1869)—often misquoted and misattributed to Lincoln, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugural_Address_(1869) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugur... https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed

KingOfCoders 3y ago
When working for a large company, everyone was miserable with bad IT support outsourced to India (not about India). Then I learned, that one level above me, there was special director level IT support inside the country. When working for a large company, when moving, my boss praised the virtues of the new open office and how our current team rooms were bad. Then we learned, that he had a private office in the new setup.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  "Whataboutism". Brushing away hypocrisy is way to easy nowadays. It would be way better for morale if they just said that offices are a benefit then pretending to defend something they don't believe in.
javajosh 3y ago
I'd go further and say the more power you have the less privacy you should have.
- sirdvd 3y ago
  Or at least, the more public resources you manage the less privacy you should have.

mustafa_pasi 3y ago

We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe. It is really sad to see. There is basically no free speech anymore and now they want to even track and control our private communication. And what's worse is, everyone is so high on moral superiority over other cultures that they cannot even admit to themselves that this could be happening.

ufocia 3y ago
Perfect is the enemy of good.
impossiblefork 3y ago
The commission are certainly deranged, and the UK is certainly deranged, but overall I don't agree that the situation is bad. Maybe in Germany.
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  Well Germany is were I live, but if you are any EU citizen you are technically free to come live in Germany, but then you will get your mouth shut and your thoughts policed by the very many German bodies, governmental and otherwise. So in a way even as a non-German you are still affected.
  - ranulo 3y ago
    What are you talking about? There is literally only one opinion that is illegal in Germany and that is to deny that the holocaust happened. Everything else can be published (there can be civil lawsuits later of course, but the state won't stop you unless you are actively treating people).
    - zrn900 3y ago
      https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:text=He%20was%20also%20banned%20from,former%20finance%20minister%20of%20Greece https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:....

ufocia 3y ago

Sounds like the QAnon may garner more support.

metalspoon 3y ago

I'd prefer the EU to be dismantled just because of this.

elaus 3y ago
Laws like this don't appear out of thin air, those ideas come from member states and are voted on by politicians from all those member states. So without the EU stuff like this would have to be fought against in each individual state, because of course every government loves surveillance and will sooner or later try to increase it.
- abecedarius 3y ago
  That alternative seems better on the whole. We're far from the margin where more competition in governance is inefficient.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck. It's similar to how in the US you have people complain about the flyover states, though I'd argue that people from Spain don't think of people from Poland as even close to the same. The difference between the two peoples ideologies is fundamentally great. But at the same time, the 49% did vote to join a union where this could happen so could you argue they must be fine with it? I don't know.
  - jakub_g 3y ago
    > if 51% of the other countries don't Laws in EU don't get passed if just 51% of countries agree.
    - aembleton 3y ago
      They also don't get revoked if just 51% agree
  - 3y ago

earthnail 3y ago

Holy shit... I wasn't even aware such a surveillance program was on its way. Sneaky. Jesus, I hope it can still be stopped.

earthnail 3y ago

I just mailed my local newspaper about it, asking them to write about this (Süddeutsche Zeitung - basically the German NYT). If you live in the EU, I encourage you to do the same.

luke-stanley 3y ago

Wow, imagine if governments correctly checked if children were actually psychologically safe and healthy, even once a year. That must be totally different from ChatControl, and a it could be a hard problem, with lots of last mile problems. Doing this for all humans would be nice. I'm reminded of instructions postal delivery people had to check on elderly after it turned out an elderly person was found dead, months after dying if I recall correctly. Maybe it's a human network connectivity mapping problem with a lot of tricky user experience / delivery/ last mile problems. I dream of this being solved. Is anything like this being done in the EU, or elsewhere on a reproducible scale? That and reliability predicting and relieving suffering seem like important projects to me.

Macha 3y ago

Huh, I thought ChatControl plans were dead, have they just rebranded and restarted?

blibble 3y ago

ah yes, like they exempt themselves from pesky things like income tax

PreInternet01 3y ago

Lots of doom-speculation here, but I think the whole "ChatControl" controversy could be contained with One Single Measure: "If >X% of messages in a given group contain the term(s) 'Y', auto-report that group, and silently-add verified LE to said group if requested."

redeeman 3y ago
or hows about the government stays the hell out of my chat groups?
- PreInternet01 3y ago
  Yeah, and then it turns out your chat group was all about breaking into all cars in neighborhood Z, or spearfishing all elderly in e-mail domain D, and you're all like "why didn't the police stop this?" Well, guess what, the police is the government, and they need some intel to go on... (And, yeah, they also need to be restrained. But that's not what this particular submission, nor your reply, makes a strong point for)
  - redeeman 3y ago
    thats an ugly accusation. Whats next, they need assistance installing hidden microphones in EVERYONES home? perhaps we start with yours? maybe cameras? dont think the bedroom or toilet is excluded. How about police get to doing actual oldfashioned police work?

deleted 3y ago

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zoobab 3y ago

The executive becoming legislators, Montesquieu told you so with his principle of "Seperation of Powers", but the EU was built after WW2 as an inter-governmental organisation, critized in the 60s/70s for being a group of Ministers sitting in a closed room, and taking decisions for their own ministries. The European Parliament was born out of those critics (and some German Const Court decisions). But that does not solve the core problem that the executive should not become legislator.

obynio 3y ago

The website recommends to contact the permanent representation of my country, and more importantly by phone which is apparently more effective. Not that I'm worried about it but I wonder if anyone here already did this, is it an accepted practice to reach out with such a method ?

wkat4242 3y ago

Lol I'm so not surprised. PS: When it was shot down a few months ago, I told everyone it was only temporary and they will keep trying again and again but people downvoted me for not celebrating :/

mardifoufs 3y ago

I don't get it, I thought an EU court decided that encrypted chat was a human right a few weeks ago.