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Posted by amarcheschi 9 hours ago

End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance(www.patrick-breyer.de)
474 points | 245 commentspage 3
whywhywhywhy 8 hours ago|
It doesn’t matter they can just keep trying and paying people off until it gets through.

Someone somewhere really really wants this and has the time and resources so it’s an inevitability.

latexr 8 hours ago|
It does matter. Even if it eventually passes, the later and more gutted it is, the better.

Saying that it doesn’t matter is just defeatist (and unfortunately always parroted on HN) and plainly wrong. Defeatists have been proven wrong time and again.

wongarsu 7 hours ago|||
Also making sure this is as painful and costly as possible to pass will discourage future attempts. If we just rolled over and let it happen that would signal that it's easy to pass legislation like this and we would get a lot more like it
whywhywhywhy 8 hours ago|||
Perhaps a system where that can happen is broken
Fargren 1 hour ago||
A system where this can happen is healthy. The alternative is a system where once legislation fails to pass you are forbidden to modify it and try again. _That_ would be a broken system, where compromise is impossible, and attempting to make any change is a very risky move because you might fail, forever. There would be a chilling effect, legislation would take longer to change, and laws would become frozen in the past.

What we are seeing here is checks and balances, working as intended.

dethos 8 hours ago||
That was a close one. This is getting harder and harder. It is important not to be naive to the point of thinking this is over.
fleebee 8 hours ago|
One would think that the same thing getting denied over and over would make future votes about it easier to decide.
astrashe2 9 hours ago||
Here's a mirror link: http://archive.today/CJlNk
amarant 2 hours ago||
I feel like someone ought to dramatise this seemingly endless struggle in a seemingly endless series of movies.

-The Spying Menace

-Attack of the conservatives

-Revenge of the marketing conglomerate

-A new hope

-Chat Control strikes back

-Return of the Pirate Party

Etc,etc.

Havoc 8 hours ago||
They’ll keep trying.
layer8 7 hours ago||
That’s why we need to keep voting for the MEPs who oppose it.
Ms-J 8 hours ago||
Until we stop them.
cbeach 8 hours ago||
In 2016 the UK demonstrated that there is a way for the public to vote down the corpus of bad EU legislation.

Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.

Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.

This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.

wongarsu 7 hours ago|||
The UK has shown that they can vote down bad EU legislation, and pass a lot of pretty awful legislation that's worse than anything the EU ever produced

But I'm sure voting for Nigel Farage one more time will fix everything

moorebob 4 hours ago||
Interesting you blame Farage for the bad legislation passed by the Tories and Labour? Why is that? I thought he was one of the most vocal contrarians to Tory and Labour policy?
throwaway132448 7 hours ago|||
People who think reform are anti establishment genuinely fascinate me.
gmuslera 9 hours ago||
Its time to start trying to push Chat Control 2.0. With enough money and infinite retries eventually all the bad regulations with a power group behind will end being approved.
zoobab 5 hours ago||
Same for software patents in the EU, it came back through the Unified Patent Court.

Told you so.

mantas 8 hours ago|||
Or it will get a new name. Just like „Chat Control“ is far from the first name for this BS.
nickslaughter02 8 hours ago|||
Sweep it under ProtectEU.

> The European Commission wants a backdoor for end-to-end encryptions for law enforcement

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...

Hamuko 8 hours ago||||
It's not named "Chat Control". It's just what it's commonly known by. It's basically the same as "Obamacare".
latexr 8 hours ago||
Exactly. Its real name is “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.

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

wongarsu 8 hours ago||
Perfect name. Who in their right mind would ever vote against the Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse? Imagine if your voters heard that
stavros 7 hours ago|||
What's perfect is the marketing campaign to call it by what it actually wanted to do, ie Chat Control. Whoever did this was so successful that we didn't even know the bill's official name, instead knowing it by what it actually wanted to achieve.

Good thing the EU didn't take a page out of the US' book, because things like the PATRIOT act are already pithy and hard to outmarket.

If RPCCSA were actually called PROTECT, the nickname "Chat Control" would have been fighting a losing battle.

miki123211 6 hours ago||
It's just a HN thing though.

Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about. Maybe they will today specifically, this vote is bound to get some press, but in general, mainstream media doesn't care much about this bill.

Even Europeans in tech who aren't in the "tech equivalent of gun nuts" culture that HN seems to exemplify are 50/50.

latexr 5 hours ago|||
> It's just a HN thing though.

It’s not. People on Reddit, Mastodon, and other websites are also aware (of course not everyone, but not everyone on HN either).

> Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about.

People who haven’t heard about Chat Control haven’t heard the bill’s real name either. That’s true of the overwhelming majority of EU regulation, Chat Control isn’t special in that regard.

stavros 5 hours ago|||
Yeah but that's the intended audience. The Europeans who aren't in tech weren't likely to know about this anyway.
nazgulsenpai 8 hours ago|||
Yep, and it will make it more difficult to pass legislation designed to actually help combat child exploitation when a large(ish) portion of the population immediately equate "for the children" with a power grab.
btilly 7 hours ago||
Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab.

Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.

For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.

But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?

Such discussions simply can't be had.

r_lee 4 hours ago||
> The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?

am I like misunderstanding or what does this mean exactly? I'm so confused. "reoffend" what kind of offense are we talking about here?

kitd 5 hours ago||||
Call it `chatctl` and give it a CLI.
pnt12 4 hours ago||||
"Save the children", or "if you oppose this you're ugly".
integralid 8 hours ago|||
we can learn from our American friends and call it something like CHILDREN SAFETY ACT. So you want to hurt children, huh? I hope not
latexr 8 hours ago|||
That’s already (kind of) the name it has. “Chat Control” is a name given by critics.

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

saidnooneever 8 hours ago||||
this is litterally what they do. point at opposition and try to imply they are pro child abuse. actually really sick to use such a method. I suppose that is what u get for decades long degradation of education and other things. A bunch of childish freaks in power who can only try to chuck eachother under the bus instead of doing something actually good.

they care less and less about it being obvious too.

our new prime minister (NL) was asked about some campaign promises recently (ones important to a lot of his voters actually) and he justs plainly said somethin like: yeah well sometimes u just gotta say shit to get votes.

i mean, its not news ofc... but now they dont even care to mask it. They know the public will just bend over and take it anyway.

zamalek 5 hours ago|||
Don't forget the pointless backronym.
raffael_de 6 hours ago||
Any event E with P(E) > 0 will eventually happen.
ramon156 8 hours ago||
See you next year!
glenstein 7 hours ago|
Is the snow melting? Do you hear birds? Must be chat control season.

Someone should sell calendars based on when this typically gets proposed as well as dates throughout the year when past instances of check control came up against key procedural hurdles.

AJRF 8 hours ago||
See you again next week!
greenavocado 8 hours ago||
That margin is really small
rvz 6 hours ago|
Until next time.
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