The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.

It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!

I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.

Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.

>rejected

>let's vote on it again!

Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.

Note that the amendment was already amended on 11th March to set expiry to Aug 2027 and to also exclude E2E communications.

The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.

Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).

The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.

Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.

Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.

Yes, but who isn't? Not the other side of the pond for sure.

I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.

But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.

Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.

Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.

But they are first-class in acting like a victim

It's the same thing as with your republicans.

https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1162053712243153...

And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!

We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.

I mean nobody argues that the FED governor is voted in, right? In reality a lot of people argue that they're unelected and yet making decisions that affect everyone.

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...

https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...

It takes only one win to remove our rights but once they’re gone you’ll never get them back.

    while not pass:
        try to pass something stupid, malevolent or that hurts people and democracies

Either way those elected to supposedly serve are the only ones winning.

There’d be bunch of fat fucks who will write screeds on the internet but won’t get off their fat ass to do anything about it?

That's the key question!

There's a small group of very powerful people that keep pushing this agenda.

Who are those people?

Find out.

Publicize their names. Make their corruption visible and linked to their identity.

In case anyone has an issue with this: Remember! This is what they want! For you! Not for them. Only the plebs.

“We decide something, then put it out there and wait for a while to see what happens.

If there is then no great outcry and no uprisings, because most people do not even understand what has been decided, then we continue—step by step, until there is no turning back.”

— Jean-Claude Juncker

There have been EU laws which get struck down because they violated the Charter (e.g. Data Retention Directive).

These are literally the same process.

Hence, everything their government does is the opposite of what a typical European Union member would approve of.

This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.

> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.

I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.

But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.

23 Member States Supporting

0 Member States Undecided

While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying

The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)

The first goal of every bureaucracy is to guarantee its survival and power, all other goals are downstream this first goal.

But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.

Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.

Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.

- The GDPR

- The ePrivacy directive, which is explicitly derogated (sabotaged) by chat control 1.0

"Article 7

Respect for private and family life

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

Article 8

Protection of personal data

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."

Passing new ones that "you like" requires lawyers to write laws, get those laws in front of reps, get them to agree to try and pass it, stake some of their reputation on pushing it, get the ground swell to support it -- which might be difficult when the current law is "dont scan messages", you can easily say "hey dont scan anything! support that!" vs "hey scan somethings sometimes", cause many people will call that a slippery slope. I don't see how they are at all the same process.

Might be a different social circle, but I have not met a single European in my entire life of living in Europe who would blame Donald Trump or the US in general for the problems that we are currently facing. It doesn't take a genius to summarize that trans-continental geopolitics is much more complex than that

Speak for yourself. I don’t even think Trump is to blame for all the US’s problems (he’s a symptom of a much larger system), let alone the EU’s.

I also mentioned others outside the EU and US, as does the link I posted.

Furthermore, I don’t think I personally know anyone from the EU who blames “all our many problems” on the US.

Lots of places are socialist or collectivist and have a different set of problems, so the argument that EU problems can be solely attributed to that don't make sense.

I'm also not sure "collectivist" is the correct label. We can't describe Japan (and the PRC, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, a couple other SEasian nations) and the EU as both collectivist, considering Japan is the far more extreme version of it (I would say, only Japan is collectivist, not the EU). One or the other needs a different word.

https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189574

Surveillance would be a more "modern" (even if more natural or seemingly correct word), without this sort of the implied baggage.

How is that supposed to work with e2e encrypted chats?

Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.

And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.

this last part may just be my own bias in observing politicians, but I rarely feel like the top politicians in the EU (or any of their member states really) push for things they themselves actually care about or believe is right "for the people".

Makes me think about this clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhsLq3-ZWE

This is not about mandatory scanning.

Article 7 codifies "respect for [one's] private life" and "respect for [one's] private communications". Well, "respect" is a vague notion. This does not clearly imply that the government is not allowed to read your communications, or otherwise spy on you, if it believes it has good reason. It will do so "respectfully", or supposedly minimize the intrusion etc.

As for article 8: Here it is "protection of personal data" and "fair processing". It does not say "protection from government access"; and "processing" is when the government or some other party already has your data. In fact, as others point out, even this wording has an explicit legitimization of violation of privacy and 'protection' whenever there is a law which defines something as "legitimate basis" for invading your privacy.

You would have liked to see wording like:

* "Privacy in one's home, personal life, communications and digital interactions is a fundamental right."

* "The EU, its members, its bodies, its officers and whoever acts on its behalf shall not invade individuals' privacy."

and probably something about a non-absolute right to anonymity. Codified exceptions should be limited and not open-ended.

Passing it means organizing a sufficient number of yes votes.

They are the same process and they require exactly the same work. They take place at the exact same moment in time and space, although they are mutually exclusive.

You're free to describe things however you want, but your descriptions won't change the underlying reality.

With a server on the other side of a geopolitical conflict (actual conflict, not a mere discontinuity in legalscape) you trade a risk of the government reading your chats for a risk of the same government (which you don't trust for a good reason) locking you up for treason and espionage.

If it were it would have happened already.

Anyway, as far as human/fundamental rights go, the encryption and related issues in Chat Control tend to fall more on the Article 7 side of the Charter[2] like many similar questions related to different forms of (mass) surveillance, secrecy / confidentiality of (electronic) communications, including related national regimes with often diverse jurisdiction-specific histories, etc.

[1] The main difference between a Directive and a Regulation under EU law is that a Directive requires implementation on the national level to work properly (ie national legislation, usually with some room for discretion and details here and there), while a Regulation is directly binding and effective law in member states wholly in itself.

[2] And similar/corresponding language in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the related case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While these are not EU institutions, European human rights law is recognized and applied as constitutional / fundamental rights-level law both by the EU and member state courts.

Which is... okay? Government gonna government, that's what we pay it to do.

Last but not least, a number of EU countries enshrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence in their constitution.

Ditto the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its 'notwithstanding' clause. (Though they're presently litigating over that, so we'll see what happens!)

Any constitution or human rights instrument full of exemptions, 'emergency powers', 'notwithstanding' clauses, or 'states of exception' is not worth the paper it's written on.

EU Parliament can't propose legislation, only vote on proposals from the Commission. We'd have to convince the Commission to propose a law to prevent themselves from trying to pass this bullshit over and over.

You should be delivering this advice to your nearest mirror.

Trump etc are tearing down international order. The ramifications of this will be decades long.

- kicked out of the Schengen Treaty

- kicked out of the NATO

- fined under EU breach of contract proceedings

- withheld financial support as long as they do not pay these fines

- forced through customs policy, which is sole EU competence, to stop compensating lost EU support with Chinese money

Honestly, I'd be in full support of some above listed actions if the elections in April show the current will of the Hungarian people misaligned with shared EU values.

I do think we should make work of kicking them out somehow if Peter Magyar does not win the next elections indeed.

Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...

(That’s not to say laws shouldn’t make a better attempt to circumscribe exceptions)

Germany, for exmaple, has secrecy of correspondence that extends to electronic communications, but allows for "restrictions to protect the free democratic basic order" and outlines when intelligence services can bypass the right to privacy.

Italy, France, and Polan also have similar carve outs.

Having it as a right isn't enough. National security and "public safety" carve outs need to be eliminated. So long as those exist, we have no right to privacy.

Unfortunately large majority of parties in Finnish Parliament do not really care about that provision and have passed multiple laws which create exceptions to it. They do it via the proper protocol (which is essentially the same as modifying the Constitution itself) so it's technically legal.

But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute. It's a new thing and the balancers can't balance it against other rights of other people, so this happens.

No laws are absolute, some laws are more holes than cheese, but a law that says "A government must not punish you for doing X, except in accordance with duly passed criminal laws that make X illegal" is almost entirely pointless. It exists solely to make people feel fuzzy when reading the first half of the sentence, which is the only part you'll ever hear quoted, while not actually impeding anything a government may wish to do to you. This is intentional. Those carte blanche exemptions do not consistently appear across international human rights treaties by some accident.

It's incredible how even with the current surge of autocracy, most politicians can't see that the surveillance tools they crave for, could come under control of people much worse than them.

And can't see what they could do with them.

I think that many current governments in Europe are convinced that more surveillance will stop the autocratic surge. It's insane that they don't see how this is far from guaranteed, and how it will go if they're wrong.

People have real choice in EP elections. There are parties that will always stand up for citizens’ rights. If they had enough seats, they could have voted this item off the agenda.

Yet, people continue to choose the same conservatives and radical right over and over again, because they are enraged about immigrants and identity politics. Blame the voters.

This is overly absolutist, or maybe idealistic view. National security and public safety IS more important than individual right to privacy. As an extreme example, if your friend was dying, you had a password to my email, and you knew that you can use information in my inbox to save that person i really hope you would do it.

In general I think that police with a court order should be able to invade someone's privacy (with judge discretion). I mean they can already kick down someone's doors and detain them for several days - checking email doesn't sound too bad compared to it, does it? I think they should also be legally obliged to inform that person in let's say 6 months that they did it.

The problem is that modern world is drastically different than the old world when you needed to physically hunt down letters. Now you can mass scan everyone's emails, siphon terabytes of personal data that stasi could only dream of, and invigilate everyone. This is something that is worth fighting against.

There's still no procedural difference between passing laws by executive fiat, repealing them by executive fiat, or ignoring them by executive fiat. The first of those things is called an "executive order" and the others are called "prosecutorial discretion", and the culture traditionally views authority exercised as an "executive order" negatively while viewing "prosecutorial discretion" positively, but in the implementation, "prosecutorial discretion" is commanded by executive orders (the documents) in the same way that "executive orders" (new legislation from the president) are.

If you want to get a new executive order issued, or an old one rescinded, or an incipient one forgotten, the process is the same (you convince the president) in all of those cases.

As it should be. Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around. Not click a button and have the lives of everyone in the entire world revealed to them.

Rights are inherent to human nature, or they are nothing at all. If they could be granted by gov’t, then they can be taken away; they wouldn’t be rights. They allow individuals to fulfill their natural moral duties; you have a right to a good, because you have a prior obligation to pursue it. While the existence of these rights is universal and inalienable, their exercise is not absolute, as they are always limited by justice and the common good of the community. Because these rights are pre-political - they are not legal privileges; the state’s only legitimate role here is to recognize and protect what already exists by nature; any civil law that contradicts them is a perversion of justice rather than a binding law.

So…if privacy is a right (and I would say it is a derivative right, from more basic rights), then it does not follow that its scope is absolutely unrestrained. It’s not difficult to come up with examples where privacy is constrained or abrogated for this reason.

The trouble with broad privacy-violating measures is that they are sweeping in scope and unjustified, making them bad for the common good and a violation of a personal right. It is clearly motivated by technocratic design and desire for control, not the common good and the good of persons. Because it is unjustified, its institution is therefore opposed to reason. It effectively says that no vaild justification need exist. This is a voluntarist, tyrannical order.

The absolutist stance likes to claim that “having justification” is always how rights are violated, but this is wrongheaded. This is tantamount to claiming that we can’t tell a valid justification from an invalid one. But if that were true, then we are in much worse shape than such people suppose. If we cannot discern a valid justification from a bad one, then how can we have the capacity to discern when a right is being violated at all? Furthermore, it is simply not the case as a general political rule that gov’ts will violate rights if those rights are not absolute (which has never been the case anyway). The evidence does not support this thesis. And furthermore, if a gov’t wishes to violate a right, treating it as if it were an absolute doesn’t somehow prevent it from being violated. Some place too much faith in supposed structural elements of gov’t as ways to keep this from happening (like separation of powers), but there is nothing in principle to prevent these branches from cooperating toward such an end.

In this case, I see no reason that we would want to draft constitutional rights such that we consider a government's actions taken in pursuit of their national security to be, per se, legal — i.e. warranted, unable to be sued over, etc.

Imagine instead, a much weaker right granted to the state: the right to maintain laws or regulations which require/force government or military employees to do things that violate people's rights and/or the law of the land. But with no limit on liability. No grant of warrant. Just the mildest possible form of preservation: technically constitutional; and not immediately de-fanged the first time the Supreme Court gets their hands on it.

So, for example, some state might introduce a new law saying that soldiers can come to your house and confiscate your laptop. And then the head of that state might actually use that law to invade your home and take your laptop.

Given that the law exists, it would be legal for the head-of-state to give this order. And it would also be legal for the soldiers to obey this order (or to put it another way, court-martialable for the soldiers to disobey this order, since it's not an illegal order.)

But the actual thing that happened as a result of this law being followed, would be illegal — criminal theft! — and you would therefore be entitled to sue the state for damages about it. And perhaps, if it was still reporting on Find My or whatever, you might even be entitled to send police to whatever NSA vault your laptop is held in, to go get it back for you. (Where, unlike the state, those police do have a warrant to bust in there to get it. The state can't sue them for damages incurred while they were retrieving the laptop!)

The courts wouldn't be able to strike down the law (the national-security provision allows the state to declare it 'not un-constitutional", remember?); but since obeying the law produces illegal outcomes, you would be able to punish the government each and every time they actually use it. In as many ways as the state caused you and others harm through their actions.

There is absolutely zero reason why the state shouldn't be expected to "make people whole" for damages it has caused them, each and every time it does something against the people's interest in the name of national security.

And the simplest way to calculate that penalty / make the claiming and distribution of those rewards practical, would be to just not remove liability for these actions taken on behalf of the state, by not granting the state the right to do them in the first place. Just put them in the position of any other criminal, and force them to go to court to defend themselves.

Change my mind!

Also what you group as the radical right doesn't tend to be supportive of this idea. They full well know they are at times at the receiving end of web control legislation and drives atm. Same for 'radical left' groups.

It's the conservatives that at times make some fuzz about migration to draw votes from the former whilst keeping said migration going since it favours some of the companies they (and a load of other established parties) draw support from.

"Whether left-wing or right-wing terrorism – I see no difference there."

"Yes, yes," calls the kangaroo, "the ones set foreigners on fire, the others cars. And cars are worse, because it could have been mine. I don't own any foreigners."

I disagree.

Because as soon as you open the door to governments reading your mail, they will read your mail. They can't help themselves. [0]

The only way of stopping them from doing this to excess is to stop them doing it at all.

The "National Security and Public Safety" thing is what they say to justify it, but that's not what the powers will actually be used for. They will actually be used for far less noble purposes, and possibly actually for evil.

We are actually much more secure if we don't let the government read our mail.

[0] In the UK, anti-terrorist laws passed in the post-9/11 haze of "national security and public safety" are routinely used for really, really, minor offences: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anti-terror...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7369543.stm

What you describe is clearly not the only possible policy choice.

The opposite doom scenario isn't either.

Based on the past experience, government gonna do their government stuff

Take for example Article 3 of the declaration of human rights:

> Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

The article already has a collision set up in itself: You have the right to live in safety. But also, everyone has the right to live in liberty. If taken as an absolute, the right of liberty would prevent incarceration of dangerous individuals, violating the other individuals right to all life in safety.

Similarly, other fundamental rights get curtailed: The freedom of speech is in balance with the right to personal dignity of article one and other rights.

Not acknowledging that even fundamental human rights are in a tension with each other is just ignoring reality and will get you nowhere in a legal discussion.

The discussion is not which right is absolute, it is about how to balance the tension between the various rights. And different societies strike a different balance here.

Take for example the right to freedom and liberty. Lifelong imprisonment without parole as punishment is not a thing in Germany. There’s an instrument that allows the court to keep the perpetrator locked up in case the court considers the individual dangerous, but until 1998, this could not be retroactively be applied. There was a major legal upheaval with multiple rounds to the constitutional court to change that and it took until 2012/2013 to find a legal framework that wasn’t declared unconstitutional. To this day, however, Sicherheitsverwahrung is not a punishment, but a combination of therapy and ensuring the safety of society and it’s subject to regular checks if the conditions for the lockup still exist. The individuals are also not held in prisons, but in nicer facilities.

On the other hand, many US states still have the death penalty and are proud of it.

Yeah, because it's a made up self-contradictory notion with absolutely zero basis in reality. It's the people who believe in "rights" who are ignoring reality. Safety? The world is a dangerous place where you can be randomly killed if you take a wrong turn and no amount of "rights" is ever going to change that. Food and shelter? Simple economics are enough to defeat this, there isn't enough for everybody, rationing ensues almost immediately and suddenly you're forced to decide who's most "deserving" of these resources. Privacy? The FVEY get around it by spying on each other and sharing data because foreigners are always fair game. You can name virtually any right and the inherent contradictions in it are plain to see to anyone willing to go outside and see the world for what it actually is instead of what some "charter" says it should be.

It would be infinitely more honest if these governments simply decided to declare you guilty of whatever you're suspected of when they find your encrypted data. That's what they actually want to do. No need to engage in this song and dance about balancing "rights". If they did this, at least people would see things as they are instead of engaging in this constant abstraction in an attempt to rationalize and justify things by saying that you have the "right" to privacy but actually you don't when it's "in the interests of national security" for you to not have it. That sort of double speak is hazardous for my mental health and I'm tired of engaging in it.