Initiatives like Chat Control makes me pessimistic. They keep on coming in all sort of variations and we defend. Given enough of such iterations, at some point though they’ll eventually be lucky and god knows how long it will take to revert things. And what I don’t get is that this sort of proposed legislation is more than Stasi could've ever wished. And yet it’s openly discussed as if it’s good idea. And note that “they” are supposed to represent “us”.
It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.
They are appointed by the elected(the governments of the countries and the European Parliament, which are all elected).
When you say it like "they are not elected but appointed", you make it sound like some 3rd party is appointing them and you have no power on it but those who appoint the members of EC are the members of EP(elected every 5 years) and the national governments(elected accordingly to the local laws).
If you you want to make it sound undemocratic, you can say that the US president is elected by the electoral college and citizens of the USA have no way to vote for their president.
IMHO that’s about centralization of power, not the directness.
How many businessmen you see going around and promoting EU? if it’s that easy to influence they should love it.
Here’s a quote from Anthony Hilton about the media magnate Murdock:
I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’”
Lots of important jobs aren't elected. But got the job by being elected repeatedly for other things.
Many important EU figures have been elected repeatedly for national parliaments, as national ministers or for leadership positions in major national political parties, and only after that got an EU job.
I think it's by design: The jobs are put together as a nationally/politically balanced team, picked from from a large set of candidates who have generally been accepted by national voters over a period of time.
I am not a citizen of the UK nor from the US, if this system is enough for you, then by all means feel free to disagree.
In my book an elected official is someone who was voted in office. If you are not elected then you are appointed. If you are appointed you do not need to be accountable because the people cannot revoke your mandate nor can they vote you out.
To me it seems inconceivable that someone who was appointed can decide to bring forward such a law and not have to defend it.
As I said, EC members are appointed by the elected governments and EP and the EP members are directly elected. If you don't like it you can start or join a political movement to change it or political movement to exit the EU.
However it's not O.K. to go around claim that those people are appointees of 3rd parties and are agents of companies and rule with impunity and the EU citizens can't do anything about it. It's a misrepresentation of the reality.
It's like claiming that British PM and the US president are not elected. While technically true, it misrepresent the democratic system.
The commission has to defend their suggestions or they won't make it through council and parliament. And if an individual commissioner is only delivering suggestions that get voted down, they're
not likely to get reappointed.
Is there room for improvement? Sure. Is this specific suggestion a complete piece of trash? Sure. Will that be different if we have some kind of presidential election on the EU level? Not so sure.
They're repeatedly suggesting things like this until the MPs are confused enough and vote yes. At least that's what happened with the copyright directive.
Just like with the migrant quotas that Hungary and Poland are boycotting. Meanwhile, the far right gets more votes because people are fed up with this BS and naïve enough to vote for them.
Is there any country that directly elects their government and its ministers?
The commission is appointed by the European council (i.e. prime ministers and presidents of the member states) and approved by the parliament (your directly elected representatives).
They _should_ absolutely be held accountable in the same way we hold ministers accountable in the member states.
Yes, most EU countries directly elect the parliament and the government is formed from the parliament members - usually the winning party/coalition, but not always. In some it's a tradition that the winning party leader gets the first shot at getting their cabinet approved by the parliament, then a second shot, and if they can't do it the president appoints somebody else.
Most elected position have an unrevokable mandate, unelected positions are typically easier to revoke.
> If you are appointed you do not need to be accountable
They need to be accountable to who can revoke their position, which is generally elected officials.
I am not defending the EU here, I am not well informed enough in that regard; I am just criticizing the false dycothomy of elected/appointed when electoral systems create a much bigger variance of effects.
But they are not directly elected to ministerial positions.
In a parliamentary system (ie most countries in the EU) members of parliament are elected. Parliament appoints a premier. Premier appoints ministers with parliamentary approval.
EU commissioners are nominated by the member states subject to their own laws. Typically that means they are chosen by your elected government.
If you want a directly elected commissioner that’s a matter of national politics. Your country is free to change its laws to select a commission nominee via a national vote.
That would actually be a great idea, because then political parties and voting citizens would have a bigger reason to try to win European elections. Probably would make the parliament less liberal-conservative too.
While this is true in a practical sense for the British PM, it is only true in the most technical legal sense for the US President.
Yes; it is true that the Constitution provides for the election of electors, who will then choose the President.
But in fact, while the Electoral College makes the precise mechanism of election slightly indirect and the methods of weighting the votes byzantine, in any practical sense there's no question that the US president is elected, and not appointed.
Who cares? I don't live in UK or USA. They can have whatever disfunctional system they want, doesn't mean I will tolerate it at my home because of that.
There are dictators elsewhere, should I have one at home too?
> The executive (governments) should not become legislators, under the principle of seperation of powers of Montesquieu.
What if Montesquieu was just wrong and systems with fused or subordinated executive and legislative powers actually just work better in pretty much every way that separation-of-powers systems?
Yeah, the US unusually strongly applies Montesquieu in its Constitutional design, but the US isn't particularly well-governed among modern democracies. (Personally, I think the dominance of poor electoral methods and the resulting partisan duopoly is a bigger effect than separation of powers here, but...)
A quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that the main sponsor is Ylva Johansson, who is not presently an elected politician, because she stepped down in 2019 after being a member of the swedish parliament for 13 continuous years, for this party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Party_(Sweden)
I have the impression that this is often the case: EC members are recruited from members of national parliament, ministers and people who stepped down from either of those recently.
So technically you're correct, she's not elected. But she got the job by being elected.
Note that she left the Left Party in 1992, and instead joined the Social Democrats. So she's been a member of the national parliament as a representative of the Social Democrats.
This is relevant as the Social Democrats are pro chat control, while the Left Party is against chat control.
Small reminder that the left party described in your comment is actually formerly known as the communist party in Sweden and that they supported during WW2 the invading soviet forces vs Finland.
That may explain why she is interested in bringing this legislation forward. I think privacy is not at the forefront of preoccupations for communists.
When I grew up (far north in Norway) it was said that filling out a membership form in the communist party would get your phone tapped at once. She's older than I am and I'd be surprised of the Swedes treated their communists any different in first 30 years of her life.
Anyway, my point is that she's been repeatedly elected. She didn't get her present job in an election, but someone who's won three elections in a row recently is democratically legitimate, even if the current job isn't directly elected.
She joined the the so-called Vänsterpartiet when their full name was: Vänsterpartiet - kommunisterna (VPK) aka The left party - communists. At that time the party had ties to eastern germany and the Soviet Union. She was elected to parliament as representative for vänsterpartiet - kommunisterna.
It sounded as if GP meant to imply the Swedish communist party's attitude to privacy was equivalent to something, without stating what. The Soviet communist party's attitude, perhaps?
The Soviet one spied on everyone. The Swedish one was spied upon. That's not equivalent.
I didn't vote for Ursula, and if the shit gets really really bad, our government is a few kilometers away from where I'm now, and modern pitchfork analogs are easy to find.
This doesn't really help me with anything, and I still can't replace her in any way. Replacing local MPs is hard too, since (at least my country) doesn't have a legal basis for a referendum to remove the current government and hold new elections, but locally we at least have pressure tactics in the form of posters, grafitti, protests, granite road tiles and guillotines.
british prime minsters are chosen as the head of the party, by members of the party. This thread seems to not understand that members of the british public can vote for the leader of the party they wish to vote for.
We do not vote on individuals, but on a group at election time. That group is democratically elected, and within that group the leader is democratically elected by its party members (whoever wishes to join).
The EU by definition is anti-democractic (any centralization of power without accountability results in loss of democractic influence). The most important thing to understand is that the public do not have the same level of influence on the direction of the EU that say the public has in in the UK. With that said, the position of the UK and its dealings is irrelevant to the matter at hand. If we are are discussing an anti-democractic group we don't make it democractic by finding someone equally or more so anti-democratic.
The British Prime Minister needs to be an elected MP. She would need to be elected and then "promoted" for it to be an analogy.
They are not just "appointed", all the elected MPs get together and have a popularity contest as to who is going to represent them. That's all the PM does, they are not the head of state.
She is closer to the House of Lords, where people can suggest bills, and no one votes for them and even if they decide to be evil, it's virtually impossible for the people to remove them.
The House of Lords is also a terrible institution that is designed to remove power from those who vote.
And they can keep opposing it if they really don't want it.
However I agree that EU can also be used as a scapegoat when implementing unpopular policies, unfortunately. They can claim that they totally didn't want it but EU mede them accept it.
It's complex, they can be sued or funding can get cut but EU is not like the USA.
It's more like a club where the countries come together to decide how to do things and then they implement local laws to do it. They are not hostile countries brought together by force, the hostilities are usually between neighbours and EU acts as a way to resolve them. For example, countries close to the borders see large refugee influx and the countries further away don't want to have anything to do with that and EU tries to find a way to ease the pressure on the border countries(so far, not very successfully but managed to create a mechanism of keeping refugees outside of EU by paying the host countries like Turkey). Or let's say a country wants to join EU, an EU country might have long standing disputes and EU tries to find a common ground to mediate it(Bulgaria & Northern Macedonia is a vivid recent example). Or let's say there's ethnic issues causing wars and other tragedies, EU creates a law to guarantee the rights of the minorities so that the ethnic issues are no longer relevant those resolved.
If they can be sued for it, I wouldn't say it's accurate to say they can continue opposing it. Even cut funding, if they still have to contribute funds to the EU, would be coercive.
You miss the point, they can be sued after agreeing to it but not implementing it.
For example, let's say Poland agreed to GDPR but they went ahead and made itself a hub for data brokers with no respect to GDPR, then Poland gets sued and funds cut. Poland doesn't get sued or funds cut if they voted against GDPR and blocking it in first place.
Yes. But having local polititians whine against EU regulation and then vote for it is a common pattern to get easy wins with easily led people like the original posters here.
What if politicians who voted for an EU regulation get voted out? Would politicians who opposed the regulation have no choice but to comply or leave if the majority of EU countries continued supporting it?
The newcomers will have to start a new movement and make EU change it or exit EU. EU is very bad if your country suddenly wants to be a something completely different for a few years for example, it’s much more accommodating to gradual changes over the years.
Suddenly you decide that you want to collect all the private data online and sell it to the highest bidder? Decided that cancerogenic chemicals in the food are cool? It’s not going to happen fast.
The worst part of Chat Control is that they know this will be a privacy nightmare, but get this, some people most likely in the inner circles of the EU elites will have exemptions so that it doesn't breach their own security or confidentiality.
You should be glad EU exists not wishing to leave it. More than half of countries support this kind of control, and yet it probably won't pass because of a minority of countries. Seems like EU will actually end up preventing this from spreading across the continent.
Does the law require unanimity, or just a majority? This page[0] seems to suggest only a majority is necessary, but I can't find anything else to back that up; but I suppose we'll find out in a week or two.
The law will first have to pass the EU parliament which is a simple majority of the plenary (i.e. all MEPs). Then it needs to pass the Council which in this case would probably require qualified majority at the least and unanimity at the most.
Qualified majority would be at the least 55% of Council countries and Council representation from at least 65% of the population.
Unanimity is obvious; all EU Council members would have to agree.
Speaking as a Remain voter, I think that 2023 would look the almost the same post-Covid and Russia invading Ukraine. Brexit is a distant third in terms of damage done.
Brexit didn’t really help in terms of privacy though, the UK being one of the leading western anti-encryption countries politically.
At least within the EU you have the chance of having at least one member state be an adult about it and realise that mass surveillance won’t work out the way they hope.
Well, the UK government could still introduce a law of their own anyway. Unless you're saying the EU would've created an EU-wide law that mandated that member states couldn't do it, but that seems very unlikely based on what we know of the EU.
They kind of have one. The charter of fundamental rights of the EU contains privacy protections that has been used to shoot down at least the data retention directive and IIRC the EU-US data transfer frameworks.
It’s possible that the CJEU strikes down a chat control-style law based on that charter, but preferably we don’t have to test that.
My country, Sweden, is one of the ones pushing for this to be implemented so I am very happy to have the EU block it. What is the position of politicians in your country?
Luckily governments are not a monolithic and coherent block. France for example was an early backer of matrix..
So if the worst happens and a mandatory chat control will gets implemented by the government, then it is a good thing that other parts of the government helped making sure, there are working alternatives avaiable, that are not so easy to regulate.
> In a decree made public today [18. October 2022], French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has extended the temporary retention of communications data of all citizens in France for another year. The blanket retention obligation concerns identity data (surname, first name, date and place of birth, postal address(es), e-mail address(es), telephone number(s)) as well as payment information, connection data (IP addresses, port numbers, identification numbers of users and their devices, date, time and duration of each communication, data on supplementary services and their providers)
But isn't that precisely the problem with large supranational orgs like the EU, to which its member countries cede some of their sovereignty. Countries often HAVE to implement EU policy in their own laws, or else face sanctions. They can't just pick and choose.
Yes, but we as a society can then choose and pick decentral end to end encrypted solutions like matrix over centralised ones like whatsapp.
And then they will have to back off, if enough people and companies are doing it (likely legal, through loopholes, only big services have to implement it). Or being fine to only censor whatsapp and the mainstream.
for some issues it's the other way around: not all eu laws can be passed bc some countries vote against them. That's also the reason you can't vote out a country so you need to find compromises
If the governments vote laws that are aggressive towards the people, then the software developers need to make licenses for their software disallow government use until they start to be more citizen friendly.
There are a lot of software developers in this forum.
At a certain point you have to say enough is enough. The same for the cyber resilience act that spits in the face of millions of open source developers who collectively are the only reason governments have all their nice toys to play with.
But well, we all know that in the end this law will not be obeyed anyway? Everyone will blatantly violate it. It will only be used to punish political "wrongdoers" (say the social network that refuses to mute opposition to the ruling party).
It's not like the EU is some separate entity endowed by special stupidity. It's just "us", humans - some of us smart/informed, some of us less so. If you remove your country from the whole, one time you might be out of reach of some stupid idea from the outside, the other time you will be out of reach of the reasonable voices outside, fully exposed to your home-grown bad ideas.
And that is ignoring the fact that if your country left, you would in practice still adhere to those stupid rules because half of your country does business with the EU. You would just lose influence on those rules.
At least being a part of a large entity has some advantages on the world stage.
Because people don't care and governments can't help themselves wanting more power. It's sad state of affair. Like you say this is the Stasi's wet dream coming to fruition.
Soon , they'll expand it to wrong-think and who knows maybe disable your device if you dare criticize the EU or someone in power. I mean why stop at CSAM right? Any other reason will work. It's the ultimate power in the hands of politicians.
This woman, who is behind Chat Control is a former communist party member. I think that she must remember with fondness the time where the state has absolute power over it's citizens and decided now, was good time to bring this back to life.
Chat Control is really about Thought Control. Today a customs and border agent in France freaks out if he cannot see what's in your phone or laptop, but what he's really after is inspecting your thoughts and memories. When neuralink succeeds in its effort to make a brain reading device, it will be used frivolously in EU and US airports, and hiding your thoughts, or obscuring them with encryption-like methods, will be grounds for throwing you in jail. The idea that the strong must control the weak is rapidly spreading in Europe.
The problem is, they will enforce the scanning in the usual mainstream apps like WhatsApp and telegram. They will have killed privacy for everyone using those.
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source app that doesn't obey this scanning. Or they'll use some kind of overlay encryption. Like sending gpg encrypted files as you point out.
So, in a year or so the police will rightfully complain they can't filter those and there's too many apps to check for. So what will the EU do? They'll mandate client side scanning in the OS that scans everything being displayed on screen. It's the only way to catch everything. They just killed privacy for everyone using an off the shelf phone. And perhaps PC if they include those.
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source OS.
So, in a year after that the police will complain they can't check open source devices. So what will they do? They'll mandate running a signed OS and using attestation to access the internet. They just killed FOSS and privacy for everyone using technology.
And of course, no that won't be the end of it. The pervs will share their pics on paper or whatever. And everyone else will be under surveillance for the rest of our lives.
This endeavour will only lead to erosion of privacy and will not lead to prevention of sharing this material because they'll just find another way.
Whatever the EU will come up with, it'll either easily be bypassed, or it'll be unthinkably draconian. The former won't solve the problem and the latter will end society as we know it. There is no solution other than hard police work.
Just be sure that your country isn't one of the many voting for this proposal first, as only 3 countries have given a strict and clear "no". If so, leaving EU might just be letting go of the leash.
And then you'll finally realize it's your government that's fucked up, EU is just a reflection of it, because you'll end up with the same E2E control, like the UK.
But not a long-term solution. The brits had the right intuition. The EU is pretty much a globalist failure. The more it goes in the direction of an US of E, the less I want to be a part of it. Its slow and hopelessly naiv. The whole refugee situation and the russia thing made this very obvious.
lmao do you realise that if your country does not vote for it, it'll not be implemented. So if eu forbids e2ee, this means your country is ok with this
> “Ideally, in our view,” they say, “it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption.”
- Spain
It is hard to even comment on in idea that extreme. The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.
Spain has been traditionally and particularly idiotic about tech legislation. Some examples:
- There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive, SSD, printer... as a "just in case it happens to store/copy copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].
- They forced link aggregators to pay newspapers/sites for linking to their content, even just using their <og> tags. [1].
So such insane statement comes as an absolute non-surprise to anyone who's followed Spanish tech legislation for a while.
> - There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive and SSD as a "just in case it happens to store copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].
Sadly, Spain isn't the only country that does this. The copyright lobby has been very successful at making people fund their failing business model.
Yep. Unfortunately this is pretty normal. I would be fine with it, if it meant I get immunity from persecution when distributing pirated content. Unfortunately that would go against corporate rent seeking.
Spain, inheriting Franco's legacy, likes their own secret internal police and abuse of power. For exampel, Madrid was using Pegasus spyware to spy Catalonian politicians and separatists
Yeah, in a world where DMCA exists (guilty until proven innocent... with no process to prove that for normal people), whining about EU is really out of the line.
I am as much anti sureveillance as you get. There is abdifference so between end-to-end encryption of communications (all for it) and collecting user data (all against it). Usually I hate semantics, because most of the time people use it to nitpick on deffinitiom ignoring what people understand using a word, but here the differwnce between the two things is a) technical reality and b) relevant for topic at hand.
Well encrypted data is practically useless to the collector. They could just as well be a random noise. Metadata may be worth something, but not nearly as much.
I have one answer for that if the asker is based in the US:
I see Americans going on and on about denying warrantless searches of their house and car. It's everywhere. Assert your rights, don't consent to a search, remain silent, don't talk to the police. That position is logically inconsistent with then letting every random company you ever have any vague dealings with (like loading their web page) deeply investigate your life in excruciating detail. If you're arguing against the first of these, you should be arguing against the latter too.
I agree 80%, but it isn't logically inconsistent. Google can't arrest you, the odds of Google employees shooting anyone in their day-to-day work is extremely low, and Google (all capitalist enterprises, really) managers are heavily incentivised to ignore any beliefs I hold that aren't strictly impacting their ability to do business.
Any data that Google has is available to law enforcement, and that is a major problem, but in the abstract someone can object to government invasion of privacy without objecting to Google's dragnet.
The amount of data you generate and store about yourself is akin to everything you generate and store physically. Between the bills I pay, the notes I write down and the photos I take, I find it pretty reasonable to affirm "my data" are representative of what I am.
EU is a wide range of countries with very wide range of expectations on anything so all generalizations are wrong.
EU’s function is to create a mechanism to find a common ground but that’s very hard so that’s why EU is has made a name for being slow and ineffective.
Spain and Switzerland or Sweden and Italy would have very, very different understanding on what the state should be able to do and how much involvement they must have because the way they govern their countries and the problems they face are very different.
Spain or Italy would usually be arguing on preserving some traditional way of doing things, Finland and Denmark would attack the issue very pragmatically and have great ideas that can’t possibly work anywhere else and the France and Germany would propose something that would increase their power in the area and the original concerns would be secondary.
Sure, I'm giving it as an example of the extremes of the European mindset. IMHO, it would have been better to have Switzerland not only as a country that follows that EU laws as being in the single market but also contribute into regulating it.
Spain's central gov's been found to actively spy trhough malware politically opposing parties[1], so hearing they are against e2e encryption just sounds about right.
Well, it shouldn't be too surprising that a literal dictatorship would act this way. It may not be a dictatorship at the moment, but it was not too many years ago, and the only reason it's not a dictatorship today is only because the dictator died of old age. Spain does not have a very good track record with democracy, so of course such a culture isn't going to value freedom and liberal (in the classical sense) democratic values.
How comes people using the well-known "children protection" manipulation and the "I have nothing to hide" fallacy to legally (thogh unenforceably) destroy privacy creating a total surveilance dystopia and put everyone in iminent danger (because whatever secrets only a government agency has access to, will sooner or later leak anway) are allowed to shape EU policies? To me they clearly seem either intentionally malevolent or fundamentally ignorant (thus professionally inadequate for the job) actors. Or am I wrong?
Every legislative body has the option to try again on things they want to pass as we've seen in the US in the past year. At least the council doesn't have the capability to pass the laws without the cooperation of the EU parliament.
Arrant nonsense. The Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty. It was then amended to address Irish objections and then approved, not just by the Irish electorate (whose approval is constitutionally required for all constitutionally significant legislation) and then by 27 other EU member state parliaments.
Clearly, you have have no idea whatever what you're talking about, and subscribe to conspiracy theory BS without bothering to do any homework because it fits your prejudices
It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.