Posted by xyzal 2 days ago
I recently heard a political discussion about this topic and was disappointed by the lack of technical competency among the participants. What we're talking about here is the requirement to run a non-auditable, non-transparent black box on any device to scan all communications. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Chat control has already been voted down more than once in the past.
They will keep at it until they succeed [1]. The playbook was copied from the tobacco & oil industry and perfected by hollywood.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
Is there any EU process to codify principles (e.g. Human Digital Rights) that need to be upheld in future attempts?
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his
private and family life, his home and his
correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public
authority with the exercise of this right except
such as is in accordance with the law and is
necessary in a democratic society in the interests
of national security, public safety or the economic
well-being of the country, for the prevention of
disorder or crime, for the protection of health or
morals, or for the protection of the rights and
freedoms of others.
I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of some kind of encryption backdoor, but hearing it put like this genuinely horrifies me. Like a vulnerable keylogger on every device.
If you need a specialized vacuum to collect shit from the floor, how about... not shitting on the floor in the first place.
This isn't quite accurate. It's hard to ban things that are widely used.
Because of its design, it's very difficult to censor email. You could order some large provider to do it but then people could use a different one. You can get email for free from a provider in another jurisdiction. It's not that hard to start a new one. Trying to ban interoperability with mail servers in other countries would cut you off from the world. It creates a cost for a government that wants to do it, which is a deterrent, and even if they try it's hard to enforce.
That isn't what happens when everyone is using Facebook, because then a sufficiently major government can just order Facebook to do whatever authoritarian thing under threat of criminal penalties and there is no switching to another provider or operating your own Facebook server while still being able to communicate with the people using the existing system.
You want authoritarianism to have legal friction and technological friction against it. They're not alternatives to each other, they're checks and balances.
We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.
Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.
VPN's provide privacy by blending your traffic with others. If you stand out...
It's not your cat videos they're interested in. When people are protesting against the government it's vitally important that they're able to get information out as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. If the government can slow that momentum down then opposition fizzles out. Chat Control would do a great job in service of that goal, it's large scale crowd control, not a targeted attack.
Most people obey the law most of the time. Doing a technical end-run around the law (a) leaves you with very few people to talk to (b) makes you stick out like a sore thumb, at which point you're vulnerable to the $5 wrench.
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.
It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
> We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal
In the USA free speech rights defeated that law.
> Encryption is just maths.
But nothing in those maths guarantee you the ability to use them legally.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
Who will host the code? What App Store will you publish in?
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
I don’t think this protects us. I view the “encryption is maths” position as referring to backdoor keys.
But this time they figured out client-side mandated spyware is a viable way of breaking e2e without contradicting mathematics.
I hate to get dystopian but we can all see where this is going; “Trusted Hardware” is mandated to run your Government ID app and Untrusted Hardware is illegal because it’s only for criminals and terrorists. Your Trusted Device performs client-side content scanning, it’s illegal to install an untrusted app, and all app developers are criminally liable to monitor for Harmful Content on their services.
This is what we are fighting against. They keep trying and they are getting closer to succeeding. And none of this is incompatible with mathematics; it’s a pure rubber-hose attack on the populace.
Like, breaking encryption is just not possible if the encryption is set using a proper algorithm. Governments try, and they try to pass laws, but it's literally impossible. No amount of political will can change that. Ultimately I can write an encryption algorithm or use GPG or something and nobody on Earth, no matter how motivated or how rich, can read what I encrypted, provided I do not let out the key. If I just keep the password in my head, it's impossible.
So, until we invent technology to extract secrets from a human brain, you cannot universally break encryption. Its just not possible. Doesn't matter if 7 billion people worldwide vote for that. Doesn't matter if Elon Musk wants it. Doesn't matter if the FBI, CIA, and the NSA all work together.
It's also not a technical problem because technical solutions (like GPG) already exist. The problem is political (stopping these authoritarian laws) or should that fail, social (convincing people to inconvenience themselves with alternative communication apps that aren't available on app stores)
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
This statement is meaningless. You can’t finance, develop, build, sell, and operate an OS and phone in a vacuum outside the reach of “politics”.
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math.
They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem.
People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school
It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities.
The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try.
If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts.
And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it.
Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.
No! It is not my job to appease your fantasies. It is your job to first and foremost prove that Chat Control will effectively curb child abuse, which proponents of the legislation have completely failed to do. Secondly it is your job to ensure that your solution doesn't break the EU charter of fundamental human rights.
Here is a solution for you: All children must be accompanied by their legal guardian at all times - a child must never leave their sight. Unlike Chat Control, this solution would actually work and prevent all cases of abuse except those perpetrated by the guardians themselves.
> Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
By all means, I support your decision to run government code on all of your devices. Just keep mine and everyone else's out of it.
They certainly shouldn’t have always online devices capable of accessing social media platforms.
US father of three here and if they’re younger than 15 just hand them a Nintendo switch… if you hand them anything at all.
You will never win the arms race you’ll be fighting- against both your children and the platforms.
Just opt out.
Does your school not force them to have some sort of laptop? I was using my middle school provided laptop to do things I probably shouldn't have on my parent's network with them none the wiser, and the school not caring what I did, and utterly unable to stop me even if they wanted. In fact, the IT department basically drafted me and a few other students to be repair techs.
I was only superficially technically inclined at the time.
Parents will want control over their 16-18 year olds too, that's kind of a critical time.
"Just don't let them use the internet at all" is a great way to ensure your kid cannot develop any sort of healthy relationship with the internet once they become an age where they can just buy their own stuff, and sets them up nicely to be fresh, naive meat to whoever wants to exploit them.
My family is all experiencing this.
You have simply given parents a lose lose lose lose situation, and then complain when they turn to the only remaining group claiming to offer assistance.
Normies won’t start using PGP. Normies will use whatever popular app their friends are on.
Those apps can have their encryption made illegal, kicked off stores, and their developers jailed. The thing protecting the developers from this isn’t the strength of their encryption, it’s the laws saying the encryption is legal.
That said, I think doing both is sensible. Always good to have a fallback and feasibility of such surveillance attempts is part of the political discussion. Fait accompli through pervasive encryption, which some politicians might read as perverse encryption.
That said, chat control isn't the only problem. Removing anonymity through age or general ID checks is the other.
I'll also note that nothing here is per se undemocratic. Both the Parliament and the Council are made up of elected members. The members of the Council (as members of the national governments) are indirectly elected, but elected all the same. Direct election is not a requirement for a democracy (see election of the US president or the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment or the Senate of Canada right now).
That does not mean that there isn't plenty of valid criticism of the EU's current structure, but claiming that it is not "actually democratic" falls far short of a meaningful critique.
You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.
Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.
OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.
And as shown in the last two terms of Von der Leyen, saying no doesn't actually do anything, because the same candidate can be proposed again.
Over the past decade I went from a big fan to someone very troubled about the political goals of the elites.
And, having lived in Brussels, you can sorta see why they're disconnected from the “will of the people”…
Ironically, we managed to re-create a Forbidden City full of mandarins and eunuchs, or a new Versailles, only now they wear modern suits.
Scaling power institutions is always tricky, and this is the main risk.
Eventually it gets on your nerves how much worse the city has to be to cater to the Institutions.
There's something about non-taxed coddled elites eating oysters and drinking champagne at 9AM on a Sunday that makes you a bit of a cynic.
And then, of course, all your friends works for the research companies that get paid a fortune to provide advice to the Eurocrats. But well, your friend has a Bachelor's in Marketing and she's being considered an expert on Soil Research because… eh, the agency is getting paid.
The Bubble is there and you'll be exposed to it. It's not a good Bubble. It's mostly young MBAs and Political Science majors that think they know how to fix everything.
(And some very talented people, of course. It's not all bad.)
Elected officials, elected judges and binding referenda would make it democratic.
Did we not?
I voted for the EU parliament. I voted for my government, which forms the council and appoints the commission.
* the Council of composed of ministers and heads of government. Ministerial posts are distributed among the winning party members in pretty much every country, and only presidential systems have a direct election for their head of government. In constitutional monarchies, the head of government is commonly assigned to the largest party leader, but it's not a directly electable position.
A Californian did not vote for the Senator from North Carolina.
A Londoner did not vote for the MP from Edinburgh.
A Berliner did not vote for the Bavarian Bundesrat member.
The Londoner is completely out of luck if their seat is a safe seat but not their party.
Not that German politics isn't pretty hosed too.
A problem for the US is that /both/ chambers of parliament are skewed that way.
And, despite certain bills having to originate in the House, the Senate is more powerful since all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert or the Senate alone (except for electing the President when there is an electoral tie, which the House does but with a voting rule of one-vote-per-state-delegation which gives it the same undemocratic weighting as the Senate has normally.)
Come again? MT and RI have the same approximate population (1.1M) and the same number of representatives (2). I’m talking about the state level here.
> all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert
Right, they act as checks and balances upon one another. Equal-sized representation to give smaller states a way to avoid being steamrolled by the will of the largest states — why would states want to stay in a union where they have no hope of representation? Methinks if Alabama and Mississippi kept everything about themselves politically the same yet were both the size of California and New York you’d probably be of a different mind about the importance of the senate.
Note they wrote "Start by removing...", not "Finish with". You could remove Council of the EU and then create another "upper house". But its personnel would have to be nominated differently. Perhaps directly elected? But that would be tough.
Re the direct vs indirect election, note that in some countries governments do not have to consist of MPs. Like currently in France, you have a directly elected president who then nominates whoever to be his head of government and ignore the parliament for a while. And that government has a say in the Council. And at that point it's good to answer the question, at which level of indirection can we say there is a deficit of democracy?
Also note that it's quite unusual for a democracy that the 'lower house' (EP) does not have legislative initiative, can't propose laws. Is that a deficit of democracy yet?
Of course I understand it's all because national governments do not want create another centre of power, but the issues are very real.
The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.
It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.
Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.
Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.
The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.
It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.
For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.
But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.
What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.
America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.
The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.
In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/ron-desantis-florida-elim...
You have a very valid point in that if you narrow it enough the argument loses weight.
In Poland for example you can't get to EU parliament if you are not chosen by centralized party committee to run. You can't get in as an independent because your party needs to get 5% of the votes in the whole country. This means we not only can't vote on issues but we can't even choose people to represent us unless they get a nod from the party. Guess whose interests they are going to defend once in power.
This makes power completely detached from the voters. The only politics is inside the party. This is not democracy by any reasonable measure.
I appreciate that the phrase is self-referential and contains its own void.
I'm strongly in favor of giving the parliament the ability to propose laws (directives). Currently only the comission can do that.
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
I’m just highlighting inefficiencies and inflexibilities where I see them to start a dialogue
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
A common currency without a common fiscal policy has already proven not to work well.
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
The Treaties haven't changed since 2011 or so, and I don't expect any changes in the next decade at the very least.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
On the other hand, I'm thinking can we find 9 unpaid volunteers on HN to do the same?
the "obvious" solution seems to be to make these meetings open, sure industry wants to push their thing, put it on the calendar, and let civil society delegate someone, and industry pays for that too.
And it has a major problem: There is no European public. Cultural differences ad language barrier make it hard to follow debates and issues. It is a lot simpler to follow my elected governments behavior.
Also the parliament would lose its style of working. Currently there is cooperation accross parties and a less strict "government vs opposition" than in most other parliaments, which means that MEPs actually got a vote (in the areas where the parliament matters) instead dof being whipped by party leaders.
And then: Most decision power is with the council, which is made of democratically elected governments (if we ignore the Hungary problem ...)
With it's 24 languages the EU debates have interesting interpretation challenges, as they don't have interpreters for going from any language to any language, but often the translate first into one language (say from Latvian into German) and then some other language (German to Portuguese), which loses a lot of nuance and color from the language.
Also media can cover it better, with few languages and politicians can provide their press statements in those few languages.
And then culture is a lot more similar, which helps to identify the "relevant" topics and way to talk about it.
And every time I push a bit the answer seems to be "EU didn't follow my preferred decision". :P
The answer is simple. The EU institutions cannot be both directly elected and have executive authority over member states.
The reason is that by doing so one would create a conflict between the "democratic legitimacy" of the EU executive and the "democratic legitimacy" of national parliaments.
In the current model, the member states retain ultimate authority and democratic legitimacy through their delegates to the Council of Ministers.
Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.
EU is setup like it is on purpose. Parliament represents the people, council the member countries and commission EU itself.
The one with most power is the council as nothing really goes though without their (heads of state of the member countries) approval as EU has no legislative powers of its own but instead member countries have to implement the directives.
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
Anything else is green washing.
Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.
Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.
> Anything else is green washing.
you mean "democracy-washing"? ;)
The world is not perfect. Striving for perfection is futile...
I'm not necessarily picky with every word we use informaly. As you noticed with green washing, which here was colloquially used as "bullshit to pretend to be virtuous because manipulating public opinion open some hope to control its behavior".
But when it comes to the official fundamental statement of what the government ruling people is pretending to be, I do expect something more aligned with the first degree interpretation of the words.
Republic means there is no State secret.
Democracy means that citizen rules and decides the laws.
I have the firm conviction that asking better than newspeak level nomenclature is not asking for perfection. That just mere basic honesty.
Consenting that utter lies to serve as base political denomination with the excuse that nothing is perfect is just lazily opening doors to broader harsher lies for those willing to gain carte blanche on exercising political power with a flow of void sentences.
- candidate needs to be proposed in country
- EU wide elections are held, candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country.
- Votes are weighted by amount of seats in EU parliament.
What we have right now does not work at all, EC has 0 responsibility(towards EU citizens) for their own actions and is basically a magical black box.
Few people would do the homework of researching hundreds of candidates from other countries.
For goodness sake, you are sending people on goose chases instead of the real problem.
What happened here falls under the exact definition of representative democracy. There are some politicians from certain nation states pushing for the policy. They request the commission (the civil service type group) to work on the proposals, and then elected MEPs vote on it.
Again and again I have to keep repeating the same message:
This is NOT some random bureaucrats in some EU group deciding they want to push a policy. This is our elected politicians being influenced some some other agency to push chat control. They're pushing it through the EU commission, because that is how it works.
Please people, inform yourselves, or you're going to get this all wrong and fight the wrong fight.
Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!
Notably ChatControl is not one of them.
The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.
The US have that. The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.
This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.
This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.
In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power and they often overstep their role... We're seeing clearly on issues like Ukraine and, lately Israel.
What specific example are you thinking of where additional power was handed to Brussels through an amendment of the treaties?
> That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power...
If you are worried about the executive trying to expand its power (and something that should be kept in check), may I suggest that the US is not actually a great example right now for how to avoid that?
The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.
The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.
Plenty of Europeans, including me, disagree with you on the very existence of a "European cause".
"There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states."
I don't want federal EU, many others don't either. At least hold a referendum before running your fix. I suspect that most member countries would vote against being reduced to provinces of a centralized state.
We don't have the luxury of waiting for endless referenda. The enemy's at the gates.
Let us say that I don't consider your prophecy very accurate. Czechia, in some form, exists for about 1100 years. The EU probably won't match that record.
As for the Russians, molon labe, and I wouldn't count on Brussels to help us efficiently in such situations, if they cannot even enforce law in local Arab neighbourhoods.
Even today, the southwestern part of Europe is mostly obsessed with Gaza and I have to remind my Spanish and Italian colleagues that there is an actual shooting war on this very continent.
That said, we gained sovereignty and precisely because we still remember being treated as subordinates, we don't want to lose it again to another hodgepodge.
There won't be a federal EU, live with it. The optimal time for federalists has passed, and people are more distrustful of centralization than ever before. Not just because of naked power grab attempts like Chat Control, which would perfectly fit into China, but not to a continent where multiple constitutions forbid this sort of mass surveillance.
You may find it funny, but people actually fought and died for freedom of their nations, and their legacy won't be disposed of just because the Brussels bosses would find it practical in their quest for more power and money.
Look at what EU wants to do. I would be glad if nothing got done but unfortunately a lot of their horrible regulations do and Europeans suffer for it.
> The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU.
No.
A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.
My wild guess it will voted for with overwhelming majority using "times changed" argument.
That doesn’t seem likely, because every time this fails the new version is compromised from the previous one. For example, in the last revision you would be able to refuse the monitoring but it would mean you would be unable to send files or links. Still bad, but not worse.
In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls, so even political parties who would otherwise oppose it just stay silent, because the public narrative
You have to shift the narrative. Farage does this - he's finally after 20 years managed to get elected to parliament, he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens, about the same as the nationalists, yet for 20 years he has steered the conversation and got what he wants time after time
It is of course unfortunate that a big part of the population is heavily influenceable by almost anything that has some scary perspective, in whatever size, over-considering dangers to opportunities to the extremes (want to eliminate dangers, hopelessly), also can only hear what is too loud, so the real democratic conversations and resulting decisions are distorted a lot. Better focus on improving this, than put a self centered ass on the pedestal to follow!
The electoral system has been working against him. At the last general election Reform got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems, yet the result is that they got 5 MPs while the Lib Dems got 72.
The Brexit referendum and the current national polls that put Reform in first place at 27% (YouGov) show that they are not just "steering the conversation". When people's concerns keep being ignored at one point someone will come up to fill this "gap in the market", this is legitimate and how democracy works.
(There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against)
Once the boats are all blasted to bits or whatever, and things still don't get better, who will be the next person to blame.
To me your reply exemplifies my previous point: You dismiss those concerns. This is what happened with Brexit and this is what has been happening for a long time over immigration. This can only end badly.
> There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against
They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
People voted for brexit was all about stopping Iraq and Turkey from sending millions of people to the UK. -- I remember the leaflet, I remember the voxpop of people saying "Europe, fair enough, but not from Africa, Syria etc".
People voted for Brexit to stop immigration. It decreased European immigration, but more than replaced it with African and Middle Eastern immigration) because they believed that being in the EU meant. This was inevitable.
They were wrong based on their own beliefs, and its difficult to argue against that viewpoint.
> They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
One major policy was implemented which massively increased immigration, illegal or not, was Brexit. Farage's flagship policy.
Brexit means we left agreements which let us send people on boats back to France. It also means that rather than having local europeans with similar culture doing work, we have people from further afield, and people aren't happy.
The last 5 years shows what a lie brexit was, it delivered exactly what brexit voters were voting against. We already had what they wanted.
Of course Vote Leave knew this, they went door to door to non-european communities saying "vote leave and europeans won't be able to come in and instead your friends and family will".
But sure, keep voting for the liar. Will be interesting to see what happens next.
Actual election results:
2010: 3%
2015: 13%. He was the only party to endorse leaving the EU in that election.
2016: (52% vote to leave the EU)
2017: retired
2019: 2%
2024: 14%
Yet his prime policy was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2019.
You don't need people to vote for you to get your policies passed. You need people to just believe in what you say, and other politicians will see that and implement them. The most successful politicians see all sides "steal their policies" and implement them. That's assuming your goal is the policy, not the power.
The playbook that was overwhelmingly successful for making Brexit happen is being used again, but this time for immigration.
The fact he got elected as MP only serves to give credibility to his backers' narrative, given that he does not serve his constituency and is too busy schmoozing the US right wing. At one point in time he would have been forced to resign in disgrace for backroom dealing like this (as previous MPs have before).
This couldn't be further from the truth.
People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing, but don't support the implementation at all.
> This couldn't be further from the truth.
> People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing
So pretty close to the truth then?
Can we do that ethically? No. Of course not. The implementation must necessarily require death and theft.
Age verification is a similar problem. I support the idea of minors not accessing bad data. Okay, cool.
Is there an ethical way to implement that? No, of course not. It would require extreme surveillance and said surveillance would necessarily be used for evil.
I mean, imagine this. New law: children can never smoke law. Great! 100% support! Now you must upload a video of you smoking every time you smoke so the government knows a child isn't smoking. Uh... Not great, very bad.
Its all about how you ask the question: "do you support children never smoking" => 100% support. "Do you support requiring video uploads to the government of every time you smoke" => 0% support.
We're actually asking the same question, it's just a matter of how favorably we show the issue.
Secrecy of Correspondence[1] is something that desperately needs to be extended fully to mobile devices.
Compare how many letters you get vs how many chat messages you send.
Secrecy of (mobile) communications should be recognized as a (natural?) right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
(edit: unbreak formatting)
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
Article 8: Right to privacy
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Privacy needs to be an absolute right. Any invasion of privacy of any individual is a violation of their rights and needs to be treated as such with actual repercussions following misconduct.
Ultimately it’s the articles depend on the court judges to weigh the rights of the state against the rights of the individuals, when there isn’t a clear and obvious answer provided by the text.
"Everyone has a right to privacy expect for all cases where government decides for any reason for any that it should not apply."
The spirit of the laws is all fine and good but combing through them it's not uncommon to find these little loopholes.
I just find it hard to imagine the right to privacy encoded in to law in a way that would block this. For instance there is a right to privacy in the US, but it's in a completely idiotic way. The 14th Amendment doesn't talk about privacy in any way, and it's some legal contortions and mental gymnastics that are upholding any right to privacy there.
Let's take international law[1]. Right to privacy is defined as protection from arbitrary interference with privacy.
Is this definition problematic? Privacy itself has a short definition too: the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public[2].
I don't see what is unclear or verbose here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#International [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define because they're an entirely abstract category relying very much on cultural consensus for their practical definition
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
> Is this definition problematic?
Yes, very much so. By qualifying that the interference must not be unlawful it essentially makes any interference by law (like what was proposed here in the first place) fine
> privacy, family, home or correspondence
This is very restrictive, for instance there's nothing in it about online storage or your laptop / phone since they're neither your home, family or correspondence
> unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation
This manages to be so unclear that if applied strictly it'd ban any criticism of a politician or anyone else as long as you can construe it as "attacking their reputation"
Compare the right to privacy with other human rights, and I find it as clear and succinct as its counterparts (if not clearer and more succinct in some cases).
At the same time, given the international nature of these laws, I disagree with you on their problematic nature. They are (in my view) meant as a basis of diplomatic debate and not enforcement (which would be impracticable). They are to be complemented by organic law, because on their own they are unenforceable.
Actually, not really. Just apply the "desert island" thought experiment to any given "human right." If you're not afforded that "human right" should you wind up on a desert island one day, it's not really a "human right" but rather a "right" that requires state backing to exist (and subject to its whims as you pointed out).
This feels like just a reflexive regurgitation of the distinction between positive and negative rights that has no relevance to the discussion at all
That's not my questions at all. My question is, is there some good clear framework for what should and shouldn't be private. B/c otherwise it's kind of some meaningless platitude, like "everyone should be nice to each other"
>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]
Edit: source [0] https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356
On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.
If you as much as give the "think of the children" crowd an inch, they'll take a mile. And giving them on device scanning was way more than "an inch".
"Private communication needs to stay private"
I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.
This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.
The first step really is just getting the politician to think about what they're voting on.
They also don't actually necessarily get _that_ many letters.
Yes, writing letters to these people is unlikely to help. The only language they speak is in votes. They have to be convinced that they will lose reelection over the issue. A conditional prediction market for their reelection given they vote a certain way would be the most effective tool.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/08/return-of-chat-cont...
Our government did this because they love control. A hard hand is what got us through COVID and it's been effective at curtailing a lot of the issues our neighbor to our north has faced with uncontrolled immigration of refugees. Our government has also been pushing through expansion of surveillance capabilities for our police, including predictive policing and expanded facial recognition.
Now kindly stop passing the buck and blame for us. This is on us, on Denmark. We are to blame.
[^1]: Which I think was about car companies and pre-trump, pre-disel-gate. Also not the only time where it's known that the US engaged on industry espionage against close allies or Germany specifically.
She is not called Zensursula without a reason.
I remember all the nerds going "That's a slippery slope to blocking other stuff as well though", and being dismissed. Now we got the CUII blocking libgen, scihub, piracy sites and as I recently read on HN, russia today(that's not the cuii I'm pretty sure, but same mechanism).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz
Edit: I think I mixed it up with her game censorship [1] (which I guess also contributed to her nick name).
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/von-der-leyen-sofortp...
The genocide happening is a terrible thing, but for most people here there is nothing actionable about it beyond voting and protesting. It's an important issue, but there is no reason for it to be the only issue on people's mind at all times. People dying in Palestine does not mean, people with no stakes or say in the matter need to be constantly consumed by its horror. There are many similar conflicts going right now, btw.
Climate change, social justice, digital freedom, queer liberation, ... it's all getting overshadowed by the Palestine issue. If you care about anything, someone wants you to care about Palestine in that moment. And quite frankly, a lot of these advocates are not even informed beyond their Instagram information warfare bubble.
This habit of injecting the topic into other political movements, effectively kills those other movements.
Mobilisation for every issue is increasing everywhere, and there is strong solidarity across movements. Because the genocide support is radicalising an entire generation who then join the other movements as well.
I'm very interested to hear if you have personal experience to the contrary. However if you are not involved in anything, then you have no right to criticise those who are.
I also want to note that the genocide is only possible because of our silence on the matter.
I do. Am I allowed to speak now? There is no wide solidarity in both directions. If the Palestine block joins a queer demonstration and uses dog-whistles like paraglider symbolism in their communication, the messaging surely isn't solidarity with queer people. And soon thereafter, all you will see is Palestine flags, hear "Palestine 43" until the demonstration gets dissolved because someone says something wildly antisemitic, gets removed by the police, which causes riot. But hey, queer life got no reason to have their voices heard these days. Somebody may get a whole lot less free, until everyone is free, I guess.
But in any case, how fucking dare you, I have every right to criticize whatever I want. You don't know anything about the person you casually guilt-tripped above, maybe you should take that into consideration when talking speech rules.
Yes sorry a correction: you can criticise of course, but it carries no weight unless you are doing something too and have strategic advice to share.
Arguing online accomplishes nothing, but taking to the streets (even if non-optimally) just might.
Why are you so upset about this?
A) held in contempt of court, if the authorities do not find what they expect for some reason and accuse you of using such techniques or
B) if you specify that such behaviour by law enforcement is overreach, have a clean way out for criminals, codified in law, heavily damaging the impact you may expect of such a law.
"If it helps the good guys, I don't see a problem" is easy to say. And if you tell them "yeah but if it helps the good guys, it helps the bad guys", they will simply answer "well, make it such that it doesn't help the bad guys".