There is a reason why they added exemptions for themselves. Either they believe it is unsafe or perhaps there is a problem with child abuse on the EU legislator level which they want to cover up.

We are at a point where we shouldn't have to justify opposition to it. Just hold legislators of the EU accountable. If that isn't possible, hold the whole EU accountable and if that isn't possible, the EU has no legitimacy for such laws in the first place. Back to those responsible on a national level and repeat.

I don't think comparing it to something like camera surveillance inside your home is a good idea.

You kind of own your home – if someone places camera in your property, you can just remove it / obstruct vision / sound etc. If doing that will send you to jail then the level of dystopia around is so big it's irrelevant anyway – you're a slave with no rights and you will do that the shocking stick tells you to do.

Phones are different - you kind of don't own them by default because bootloader is locked so you are not free to execute the code you want on the device, as well as app store exists which it tells you what you can install and what you cannot install. The only leverage they have is to make Apple/Google remove certain apps from the EU stores.

How about we compare it with something more realistic? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON. Since 1971, the 5 eyes countries have been spying on people en masse and scanning communications.

You probably don't like the comparission because you want to be an alarmist who is acting like this is new. All the fears you have, have literally been proven to be...

Just because the EU is not as egregiously awful as some other places does unfortunately not make it a bastion of human rights. The same forces are at play there as everywhere else in the West.

>supposed bastion of human rights

Ever wondered why they position themselves like that? Because they repeated it so often that everyone believes it now.

> “The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer. “They seem to fear that even military secrets without any link to child sexual abuse could end up in the US at any time. The confidentiality of government communications is certainly important, but the same must apply to the protection of business and of course citizens communications, including the spaces that victims of abuse themselves need for secure exchanges and therapy. We know that most of the chats leaked by today’s voluntary snooping algorithms are of no relevance to the police, for example family photos or consensual sexting. It is outrageous that the EU interior ministers themselves do not want to suffer the consequences of the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption that they are imposing on us.”

EU ministers want to exempt themselves (https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...)

And if other governments see the EU get away with this, they'll also have a blueprint for success.

I always find it very ironic people apply the "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" principle to politicians, who are part of the government.

Have you ever had a really great mentor or teacher who was excellent at explaining things to you? Good news, you've now got a budget to hire several of them in full-time exclusively for yourself.

Unsure about something? Just ask and a huge apparatus of several departments, featuring dozens of expert panels with hundreds of domain specific experts each will sift through huge databases, many of them not available to anyone else but the government, of state-of-the-art research, current events, historic events, standards, whatever ..., they will analyze your problem from every possible perspective and make the result of these efforts available to you, together with several recommendations of actions according to the guidelines you provided.

I highly doubt that there are more than a hundred people on this planet who could be incompetent under these conditions. What we're observing is not incompetence, but a conflict of interests, between what they want and how often they need to throw you a little bone to keep you obedient.

I think they are not in a position where they have to actually solve the technical problem, but rather in a position where they decide what they believe is best for the society.

"If you were able to break encryption only for criminals, it would increase the security of the people. Please try to break encryption only for criminals" is not completely unreasonable.

The problem, of course, is that it's not possible. But for those politicians, cryptography is pretty much magic. Why wouldn't it be possible?

Same thing happens for climate change: instead of understanding the problem and facing reality, politicians (and honestly most people) stop at "scientists just need to find a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently". That's not how it works, but it doesn't prevent them from behaving as if it was possible. "It's magic, just do this one more spell".

Analyzing text is still debated and not ruled out completely.

> I am never sure if the people that wrote that law

No. Much of the legislation that gets introduced is provided as "model legislation" by political action groups (such as ALEC). This is why so many states seem to introduce the same legislation all at once.

The party whip tells them what to vote for. Sometimes, sensible people stop deranged legislation from getting out of committee (such as banning all mRNA vaccines (ID in 2024 & 2025, KY in 2025) or requiring blood banks to provide "pureblood" (from people who never had covid vaccines) at no additional cost to anyone requesting same (ID & KY in 2025). Or the one from ID in 2024 that would have made providing blood from a person who had a covid vaccine a felony.

You can follow along with the state legislatures at: https://www.billtrack50.com/info/

And the feds at: https://www.congress.gov/

For example, HR 22 passed the House of Representatives along party lines. The Senate has not scheduled the bill for hearing/vote yet. This bill is only 2 pages long, but I would like you to read it and take a guess at who they are trying to ban from voting in Federal elections. It has never been legal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22/t...

> A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.

This is called an Enhanced Driving License and only 5 states (MI, MN, NY, VT, and WA) issue these. From the front, they look just like the REAL ID compliant ID/DL from that state but with a cute little American flag on the front. The back has the funny OCR text like the page in your passport that has on the page with your picture.

They are trying to ban the following from voting in Federal elections:

1. Transgender people.

2. Non-citizens.

3. Women who took their husband's name upon marriage.

4. People who changed their name.

5. People who can't afford the $200 for a US Passport (if you never had one before, or lost yours like I did, this is about what you have to pay, otherwise it runs $110).

6. All of the above.

7. Something else (please explain)

> There are alternatives that will not be affected by this

An app, in an official app store no less, is not going to be a solution for long. If you want an actual technical attempt at a solution you first need to regain ownership over your computing devices.

> There are alternatives that will not be affected by this

For how long?

“The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer.

Not just Western, Chat Control affects whole EU, including Central / Eastern European countries. Fucking Hungary (i.e. Orbán) agreed to it, for one.

The politicians from all sides. It appears they want to solidify their power for years, and no matter how ridiculously this may sound like - also introduce some caste system where they're above law and we won't do anything but spend money and consume certified media because anything else is against the law.

We enjoyed a peaceful 'air pocket' in tech, but this is over. And it makes sense. Technology is rendering regular people useless. And when they eventually get destitute they will rebel. If I were the ruling elite I too would move fast to increase my control over the masses.

They haven't stopped trying continuously since late 2021. You don't hear about it for a few months only because some countries are more aggressive about it than others.

In a couple of years they have backdoors installed in the silicon directly.

They are breaking the idea that you can have a private conversation without the government spying on you. The how doesn't matter.

Yes, it doesn't "break" encryption, it just defeats it.

The client-side scanning means that some amount of your communication will be uploaded in clear text to the government. And unless the government keeps it completely secure (spoiler: they won't) this will leak. Therefore it defeats the point of the encrypted channel.

So sure, it isn't as bad as just removing encryption from these apps. But it is very similar to giving the government a backdoor key to all messages. Maybe you see it as slightly better because only the messages flagged by the automated scanning are made vulnerable or maybe you see it as slightly worse because previously you would need both the backdoor key and access to the original messages and now all of the data you want is in a single location.

But the point is that this significantly weakens the security properties that these E2EE messengers provide if implemented.

It's about to get worse:

New Pact on Migration and Asylum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pact_on_Migration_and_Asyl...)

'Women Are No Longer Safe': Critics Blame Surge in Migrant Crime Across Europe (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/women-are-no-longer-safe-critics-b...)

Say what you will, but I do not care who is pushing AGAINST Chat Control, as long as they are pushing AGAINST it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240101011830/https://blog.mozi... Looks like it was removed around Nov 2024, ie around the time it became clear American politics was turning tides and Trump would get elected. Regardless of political position, I have no respect for people or companies that have no principled position and pander to $CURRENT_POLITICS.

Breaking encryption of private messaging is not the same as not letting propaganda run rampant and to try to equate them is bad-faith propaganda itself.