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Posted by xyzal 9/11/2025

Germany is not supporting ChatControl – blocking minority secured(digitalcourage.social)
1128 points | 359 commentspage 2
sensanaty 9/11/2025|
I'd support this if and only if we ran a trial where all public officials had all their messages and emails publicly readable by citizens. Surely the good people adamant on spying on their constituents en-masse has nothing to hide, right?
deafpolygon 9/11/2025||
Happy to see the NL here in opposition to ChatControl! The political climate here is slowly pushing to the right, which I'm not happy about. But there seems to be voices getting louder from the left. So that leaves me with hope!
darqis 9/11/2025||
The fascists will continue to bring it back again and again, just like Microsoft TCPA and TPM different name same shit
palata 9/11/2025|
I'm against ChatControl like most tech-savy people. But because someone is in favour doesn't mean they are a fascist. Usually they just don't understand why it is a problem.

"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".

dev1ycan 9/11/2025||
The real question to me is, why is Europe and Europeans okay with America and American software companies having access to their logs (encryption can be bypassed take whatsapp for example, do you honestly bellieve that Facebook does not have access to whatever is typed on whatsapp and/or can give it to authorities if necessary?) or discord, which if you are on mobile tells you via a title what the conversation you're having is about, is automatic message scanning not involved there? but the EU and or European countries cannot?

If we go by the idea that America should not either, then go ahead and do something about it, all this seems to me is just some weirdly motivated "activism" that may or may not be originated from the source that actually has access to said data at the moment. I am going to go with the belief that people are not naive and instead they are acting maliciously about this knowing very well that this already occurs, but only for a specific side.

egorfine 9/11/2025||
Excellent win!

See you next time.

teekert 9/11/2025|
Next time, when the proposal is worse, when less people care, and the methods to stop it no longer exist.
latexr 9/11/2025|||
“Next time” is preferable to now. Giving up and bringing others down is not the answer. If you want to give up, that’s your prerogative, but please don’t drag others down with you, you’re working against your own best interests. The thing you said right now is exactly what the bad actors want, don’t play into their hands. Thankfully not everyone has that defeatist attitude, or the law would have passed the first time.

And the proposal has not been worse, it’s more crippled with every attempt. Maybe we can’t stop the problem indefinitely, but we can mitigate the harm. Or maybe we can stop it long enough that the people making these proposals are replaced and we eventually win.

Don’t give up. You don’t have to fight along every one else, but if you’re not actively helping, I humbly ask that you also don’t actively make it worse.

portaouflop 9/11/2025|||
The struggle never stops, that is part of the human condition - you should embrace this endless cycle with confidence instead of cynical defeatism
antonvs 9/11/2025||
Dormammu, I've come to bargain
munksbeer 9/11/2025||
What should actually happen is that adversaries of this policy should challenge those backing chat control to a test. Those backing it get to attempt to make it work for a year in a control environment, and if at the end of that year, they still can't read every message that actors within that control environment send to each-other (which they won't), we abandon the whole thing for good.

"Bad guys" will always find a way around any attempt to stop them communicating privately. And the rest of the population will be left with governments spying on all of our interactions. The fact that this is even getting this far is absurd.

Anamon 9/15/2025|
Why not? They should then also be forced to red-team the heck out of it. If they claim so confidently that it can be done securely, ask them to prove it and set up a bug bounty program. Then watch them scramble for excuses when the first person releases all recorded messages within an hour of the system going up.
GardenLetter27 9/11/2025||
This is good, but we do need some sort of progress somehow. As that case with the fake drug dealer "privacy-focussed" mobile phone company was crazy, when they had all the messages from Swedish death squads, etc. - https://www.404media.co/watch-inside-the-fbis-secret-phone-c...

Obviously monitoring everyone's messages is making things way too easy for authoritarian dictatorships later on, but there does need to be some progress so these groups can't keep acting with complete impunity.

jansan 9/11/2025||
Even if they did, I am sure this would have been toppled by our constitutional court. You have to know that our police is not allowed to scan number plates of cars entering or leaving the country due to privacy concerns. How on earth would anyone think that lifting our dearly held fundamental right of "mail privacy" is ok?
freehorse 9/11/2025||
If this was becoming an EU regulation, constitutional courts can decide to overrun constitution to uphold it (as has happened in the past plenty).

What this implies for the democratic values eu is supposed to represent is an interesting discussion.

doikor 9/11/2025|||
This isn’t how EU regulation/directives work as they are not laws.

Only way this can come into force in a member country is that country making their own law implementing it. It is at that point that constitutionality should be checked and the law stopped from being implemented.

freehorse 9/11/2025||
In the case it is declared unconstitutional, there are two options: take the fight to the eu/amend the law, or change the constitution. The latter is more probable than the former in the political climate of our times. So we are talking at best for some delay in implementing it.
doikor 9/11/2025||
Or just never approve it and ignore any demands eu makes about it.

Just take a look at Orban with Hungary how many years you can keep doing this without anything actually happening.

EU in general works only to the extent that member nations want it to work and finding a concensus is always the first goal and split decisions are heavily discouraged (and pretty much anything that matters needs a supermajority at minimum).

If one of the member nations just goes "ah fuck it I don't like this" EU really does not have many tools to fight it (especially for things that effect internal things in the country not trade between them). This is also why directives like this are very unlikely to ever go through without unanimous support from the council (heads of state of the member nations)

I mean literally at worst EU could keep some of the benefits away from a country over not implemeting some directive (what EU is finally after years thinking about doing to Hungary) but that does not really work with a country like Germany that pays more then it gets as they could just go "fuck it we are not paying our dues then".

Basically unlike in the US where the federal government has police, army, etc to actually enforce its rulings EU has none of those. All it can really do is try to take money away which again does not really work all that well.

izacus 9/11/2025|||
The claim that this can "overrun constitution" has not been true at all which we've seen in examples of other directives.
freehorse 9/11/2025||
These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.
ManBeardPc 9/11/2025|||
It would probably be toppled by courts, yes. Anyway, meanwhile they already start implementing it, developing the technology and infrastructure they can base on the next time where they basically reintroduce the same illegal laws in a new name. So companies and governments already have to spent huge sums of resources to introduce it and may fall into the sunken-cost fallacy. "If we now already have it we can also use it (for something else)"?
uyzstvqs 9/11/2025||
Even if it's EU regulation? My experience is that you get told that EU regulation and international treaties are "above our national democratic/justice system", and that we can't do anything about it.
nickslaughter02 9/11/2025|||
That's how it works.

> Primacy of European Union law

> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law

klinch 9/11/2025||||
IANAL - but when EU regulation and national law regarding civil rights conflict then the citizen has the "union set" of all guaranteed rights. Or in other words: A member state can grant additional civil rights (on top of the EU charta) but can't take them away.
3np 9/11/2025|||
Germany specifically seems to have an out if it comes down to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_la...

DerWOK 9/22/2025||
Time to buy a MeshTastic node?
Hamuko 9/11/2025|
Glad that my country (Finland) is also on the correct side of this. Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though. Would've expected more, especially from Estonia.
jeltz 9/11/2025||
Sweden and Denmark are some of the main drivers of this proposal. As a Swede I am a bit unclear why as while our politicians are quite pro-survelliance they have spent much more political capital than reasonable.

One possible reason seems to be lobbyism and shady connections to surveillance tech companies and various shady non-profits

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

ahartmetz 9/11/2025||
> Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”

Literal "Won't anybody think of the children" moment.

supermatt 9/11/2025||
> Disappointed that our Nordic and Baltic neighbours are not though

Why do you think the Baltics are in favour? Are there some announcements they have made?

BoredPositron 9/11/2025|||
Edit: You were totally right Matt. Brain fart.
supermatt 9/11/2025||
[flagged]
inamorty 9/11/2025||
Sweden has been at the forefront of this iteration: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/regeringen-gar-vidare-med...
supermatt 9/11/2025||
Sweden isn’t one of the Baltics
Hamuko 9/11/2025|||
Because that’s what the link says.
supermatt 9/11/2025||
What link?
Hamuko 9/11/2025|||
The one in this submission? The one that we're commenting on?
supermatt 9/11/2025||
The link in the submission is saying that the representatives position is mostly unknown for all the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).

For Finland it says only 3 of 15 have opposed - which is clearly not a majority.

The “assumption” based on government position has no reference to any stated government position (I know for a fact Lithuania have expressed no such opinion, and can’t find anything related to Latvia or Estonia having done so either) - and also “assumes” all representatives (that are from different parties) are aligned, which they most likely aren’t.

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