Quoting from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12... :

"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."

Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.

It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.

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.

I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?

The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.

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.

I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.

Past laws of this type are:

- The GDPR

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

There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.

You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.

Here is the regulation that will be voted on: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

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

I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...

There a practical reason for this? like more alignment with lobbyists, for whatever financial reasons?

Exactly what happened when Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, they were told to vote again until they voted the "right" way.

Heads I win, tails you loose. :(

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

Modern democracy

Or, as is also seen elsewhere, wildly popular ideas simply get curiously stuck.

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

They only have to win once. You have to win every time.

Of course. They literally spell their playbook out for you:

“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

It's not now or never. It's now, or the next attempt or the next.

Who is "they"?

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.

Epstein Union

The EU isn’t a single mind. There are a multitude of factions trying to get through all kinds of things.

"for sure"

People on HN but also criminals will know how circumvent this. But the average person will be completely lost in this surveillance apparatus. It's going to affect the wrong people.

It's client side scanning.

That's one of the tricks. The other trick is to vote in universal right for encrypted communication once and for all.

Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.

God I love politics

They aid the truth because the complete slogan was about EU's digital sovereignity. Not really your sovereignity nor mine.

To get around the "dupe" filter, it was trying to mark it as a dupe of a 7 month old post.

It's a web bug

EU is not a synonym of Europe. EU propagandists don't get to define what Europe means.

Second. Who gave you the right to define antieuropean union propaganda as a sin.

Some people may hate it, some people may love it, other want to change it.

It was created by vote, surely it can be whatever the fuck the way the people want by vote.

I don't follow EU politics that much, but I know that one of the strongest proponents for it has been from the Swedish Social Democratic party, which has dominated Swedish politics.

So, in my view this is not really a "left" or "right" thing, but something that is pushed by people you could call "the establishment".

European Commission is basically as close to being EU's government as it can be, it is fair to say these are the people that represent EU now. Much like it's fair to say that US is bombing Iran even if not all of the US is doing that.

Exactly. EU legislation is currently far more respecting of privacy than is legislation in the UK or the US.

For various, and unclear, reasons, there is substantial backing to change this.

The last version of chat control was pushed by Denmark, which presided the european council until december, and with a social democratic prime minister (coalition government with social democrats the majority). The "conservatives push for chat control" is not really accurate, a bit part of social democrats are also supporting it.

This is how political messaging has worked since I was born.

Yeah, it's like saying "USA wants to poison children still!" when a Republican files another deranged bill in their state.

It seems like it is bipartisan to me. Do you have the statistics to back up your claim?

Fight Chat Control is a website maintained by a European. It is no more anti-European than I, an American, speaking about the latest antics of our conservative-led government and saying, "The US government is attempting to ____".

Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?

This. There's a very specific group of twisted people that drive this, but equating that with the entire EU is flat out wrong.

Maybe...in a world where lawmakers didn't put huge exemptions into GDPR for governments and law enforcement etc. Which they did.

It’s a symptom of authoritarianism rising. It wouldn’t be rising if there wasn’t anyone who supports things like that.

Because social cohesion is also breaking down (which is also by design). People increasingly do not trust and can not rely on neighbors and their fellow citizens to share similar interests and look out for one another. And they have much less power to organize with other citizens to petition their government.

So they feel they must turn to the state for protection.

> Please, could the bootlickers of the European Union stop downvoting every single criticism of it?

Hey, let's call this "forum control" :)

I don't think criticisms of chat-control-like legislation attempts are downvoted here?