If you're ever unsure about whether a proposed EU regulation may be good or bad, just look at whether Hungary supports it: if so, it's bad; if not, it might be good. Egészségére!
I would like to share here that the author of this site made it very easy to call. If you read this and are in the EU, I urge you to try this.
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
That's the problem with electing too many people with law background to a parliament: They think it's a Model United Nations session and if they can get things their way despite many real world consequences, they celebrate with joy as our governance becomes literally ungovernable.
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
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!
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.
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
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
I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
I was reading an essay by Kant called “what is Enlightenment?” It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
What Kant, Locke or Hobbes imagined has only little to do with current societal environment. Our politics and structures are global and the age of internet has mixed it even more. The religions and christianity especially tried to control everything was said under their hemisphere by controlling who could print books or distribute them.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
I'm happy that the Netherlands is still against this. Our currently largest party (D66) was also always pretty strong on privacy. When I contacted them some time back (I think using this initiative), they ensured me that they remained against, but did feel that something must be done (ok fair enough).
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
I am not oblivious to the intent behind this push, but even if you focus solely on the technicalities the idea falls apart. Even with only client-side verification this will be a big privacy intrusion. I see current AI's flag prompts for the most stupid reasons for using words that might possibly occur in non-safe contexts too. The human experience is just too complex for a machine to understand.
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
It seems the vote passed [1], meaning the existing Regulation [(EU) 2021/1232] was _extended_ until August 3 2027, with some amendments to the previous text:
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
It's really hard to not become a euroskeptic, despite being involved with so many EU related things from my youth to now in which I believed wholeheartedly, but this is just... I know - they just need to win once, we need to win every time.
Let the damn politicans go first and make all their private messages public. Yes everything from boring I'm stuck in traffic honey over nudes to insider trading and lobbying.
The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Curious how they plan to handle encrypted attachments — scanning has to happen either before encryption (client-side) or after decryption (server-side). If E2EE is preserved end-to-end, there's literally no point in the pipeline where a third party can scan without the client's cooperation. So either E2EE breaks, or the law is unenforceable by design.
I love this. These are the same people who create think tanks and "international courts" to point fingers at "third world" countries for "authoritarianism," "freedom of speech."
Few days ago we had a guy explaining to us at the top of hn page that we should migrate data to europe. Sometimes I miss the internet of before mass surveillance abd ads everywhere
Do your part- photograph your ass every day, send the pictures to your representative and EU parliament member.. they need to know. Volunteer the knowledge they crave.
But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
it's probably best to go with client-side encryption and share keys with friends privately. that pretty much fixes all the privacy issues after the initial registration, but maintaining that extension with all the company and their updates is a bit of a headache.
They should just ask the Americans. If you are not a US citizen you have zero rights, and any old creep in Silicon Valley can riffle through your personal information with impunity.
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...
393 comments
Find a representative you think is at least somewhat likely to change their mind, and call their phone nr listed on the site. I tried one rep and couldn't get through, tried another (their Brussels phone) and I got someone on the line. The site helpfully suggests a call script, which you can take hints from.
I got a staffer on the line, who didn't want to share what my rep was planning to vote and generally wasn't very excited about calling with me, but I imagine that if lots of people call lots of these staffers, things actually do get through to these MEPs.
Please help.
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 Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
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.
> socialist, collectivist tendencies
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.
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
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
https://rsf.org/en/index
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws. that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
> The "Chat Control" proposal would legalise scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos.
How would this be enforced in practice? In other words, what would prevent E.U. users from using encrypted services outside of the jurisdiction of the E.U., to "illegally" encrypt their hard drives or to run their own private encrypted comms servers?
To properly assess something, you need to be bodied in reality, being related to the other human in the same human reality. All the datacenters of the world combined will fail the stated objectives, let alone a stupid phone chip. We should not allow computers to take on the role of policing actors in our human reality, because they even can't perform that role faithfully.
- added targeted scanning requirement
- scanning must be “targeted, specified and limited… where there are reasonable grounds of suspicion… identified by a judicial authority”
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2026-007...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
Either include everyone, or accept it’s an awful idea for security and exempt everyone.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Hypocrisy par supreme
The dark forces behind all this set to gain a lot of profits once it passes :(
You can find how present MEPs voted
There are 10 votings (not only one), some adopted and some rejected, I am not sure what that means, maybe someone can elaborate.
keep voting until you get the right answer
at least EU are voting I suppose. some governments just go ahead and mass-surveil illegally
Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.
So the priorities are clear:
1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused
2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same
3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections
4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans
...
n) protecting children
I realize I am just recapitulating the modus operandi of Five Eyes here...