The thing that depresses me about offhand references to bilderberg group is it's a missed chance to name real names. I don't know who they are, but from chat gpt'ing it looks like there's some particular agencies regularly behind these. One is "DG Home," an EU department on security that drafts legislation.

Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.

And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.

Perhaps targeted reform of these bodies is in order so they don't keep producing this legislation over and over. The blocking minority shouldn't just oppose the legislation itself, but make sure that their representation at those bodies is stopping those recommendations from moving forward. The legislating infrastructure needs to be challenged as much as any particular bill.

People have been talking about this for years. Corruption, authoritarianism and fascism is eating the EU from within and people who warned about it were called from tin foil hatters to just nutters.

That's the fun part, they are all public conferences, like: https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital...

It doesn't have to be in secret, they can and do plan and coordinate these efforts in the open. When we hear about it, it was already planned for many years.

> seemingly unrelated efforts

What are the odds

I mean, "the police should have the power to read your communication" is not some fringe view. It's been the view of every state in the history of forever.

If the developer is in the EU, they can come after them. If not, the EU can direct Google to revoke the verification. The commission has a big lever to pull with fines which are pretty much arbitrary.

The point is, before, you could run apps on your Android phone without anyone's permission. Now, you need Google's permission. You're relying on Google authorizing a Signal build which circumvents laws, and that's not at all a given.

If you do this with Apple they will deny it as “too similar”.

They have no obligation to sign anything, and they aren’t in the business of fighting city hall. Quite the opposite.

Is there any indication that Google will obey the laws of the EU when they have no vested interest in the outcome?

They only break the law when it earns them bundles of money.

> Couldn't someone just build that Signal APK without spyware and then get it signed/verified by Google?

The Signal CEO aid that they would pull out entirely from the EU if Chat Control comes to pass.

> Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that?

In this scenario, Signal will still be allowed to be distributed outside of the EU so you could get it from the Play store hosted out of the EU.

True, but there are apps, as reported in other threads in this forum, that will not run on rooted phones. E.g. banking and government apps. Most people will not go around with a rooted phone, much less with two phones.

> Coincidentally they are also likely to be easily rootable, so you can still have full freedom.

Also easily remotely ownable, so you can be spied on without even having to install any software at all. And any that aren't now will be a couple of years after they fall out of support. Which, by the way, is very hard for the community to step in and do, since they're full of undocumented proprietary binary blobs.

> Just don't "upgrade" and ignore all the propaganda telling you bad things about that.

... and when your fully owned device finally breaks completely?

Why is it so hard to run virtual android on your Android as a sandbox for these kinds of things.

Since the right people are here, can anyone explain to me why its so hard to "root" (in reality, obtain basic filesystem / networking etc. control) with that OS?

It already took a mountain of resisting the network effect to get at least some half of my friends to chat with me on Signal. The chances to get them to move to something more obscure, that has any additional friction is low and the effort in convincing them will be high. That's not to say I won't try, but man I hope it doesn't come to that.

> If you must use Android

the reasonable alternative being... ?