Posted by rapnie 6 hours ago
"a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028."
"Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!"
"Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?"
"Worth a shot!"
"It worked, should we also do this multiple times?"
"Of course not! Pass the law, quickly!"
They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.
On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.
"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:
- European People’s Party and
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
Countries in favor of chat control were:
Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus
If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):
France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg
this is just eu in a nutshell, the irish were made to vote on both nice and lisbon treaties twice (both were voted no in the first vote)
Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, they just accuse you of "collusion with Russia" and ban your bank account via "sanction policies". The ECJ doesn't have to provide any evidence of crime, you have to provide counter-evidence of the absence of crime (and good luck defending yourself without money). The ECJ judges, who interpret and impose these laws, are also not democratically really elected or anything, yet they hold power over your bank account. Makes ya think.
This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.
What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
*What is coming back:* US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
*What remains unchanged:* Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
*What is still NOT being scanned:* End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
So, E2E is unaffected?
In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.
[1]: https://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/end-to-end-encryption-and-k... [2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)
Chat Control 2.0 was the big one in those regards.
(Also, LOL @ Skype mention.)
The people pushing for this under the guise of protecting children are the same people who went on The Island, or at least protect those who did. They never cared about children's safety.
The biggest criminals of all are the very same people pushing for these laws, this surveillance, this control. Don't be fooled.
You mean some kind of resistance against tyrannical policies, then those "other means", if I understand what you're saying, are often illegal. True resistance that causes true societal change isn't parading the streets with signs or talking to your local representative. It's sabotage, vandalism, and in extreme cases, violence. True activism. The surveillance state's main goal is disrupting such initiatives before they can even get off the ground.
Yeah we don't mean frogs, that's obvious. Calling people maxxers being offensive is surprising. Maybe you should consider offended for being called cancer instead?
The truth is not always somewhere in the middle. If one group wants to serve water and another wants to serve cyanide, the right answer is not to mix the two, it's to serve water and to end the careers of the people who wanted to serve cyanide.
For IRC there is irssi-otr. There was weechat-otr but I think it may have gone unsupported as their script did not work in python3.
There is also ejabberd [0] that has OMEMO [1] preferred over OTR and PGP and supports many to many E2EE.
Someone tried to MitM Jabber, discussion here on HN [2].
[0] - https://ejabberd.im/
They are already allowed to do this, and already are doing this. When you provide data to the service provider in a non-e2ee fashion, it's their data as much as it is yours. They can scan it, data mine it, analyze it, whatever.
word. thats the entire point of the existence of the EU
It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them
EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above
It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.
> blame-laundering mechanism
Also, I'm stealing this.
This isn't surprising to me at all.
The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.
I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.
So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.
Mars is nice this time of year.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
And once the chip fabs have been bombed, civilisation is set by by decades, and may end up fighting a lower-tech war.
Beyond this, if you start attacking neutral fabs you lose out on anything from them. Your expectations are quite a bit off if you think striking fabs stops a conflict.
By WHO?! Russia is still stuck in 1/4 of the Ukraine and fear mongers make it sound like they're about to reach Paris any day now.
No, leftist governments in the EU have failed to provide prosperity and failed in all their promises, now they're going for total control to try to stay in power.
Look at France, as soon as Le Pen was cleared to run for the presidency they start talking about anti "misinformation" laws...
You can always make your enemy. Current rearming efforts really remind historians of WW1 arm races.
At some point once so much interests and offers are at stake, that creating the demand is inevitable and just a matter of time.
The point is that the actual far right is rising all over Europe and will likely be ascendant in the next round of elections, the establishment is trying to stay in power.
Every time HN posts another one of these privacy-invading EU regulations, a bunch of pro-bureaucracy people are in here cheering on regulations and knocking down anyone who suggests that maybe this time they've gone too far.
Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.
Lobbyists are winning the war.
They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.
I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.
Nt being able to scan personal communications would break big tech platforms main monetisation strategy (selling peoples data).
for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)
obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent
be warned citizen, you are committing a serious wrong and hate think and will hence be labeled nazi, fascist or any other dehumanizing word to legitimize violence against you. Please correct your mistake to protect our democracy.
The problem is, there never was a consensus around immigration. The Liberals own stats prove that. What there was was a consensus around multiculturalism and tolerance.
Immigration itself, was always split evenly among three camps in Canada: those who want more, those who want less, and those who think we have the right amount.
Trudeau & his fake leftist brigade many have ruined multiculturalism for a large portion of Canadians, permanently.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
This is completely BS. Nobody wants to let in unlimited migrants. This is not a goal of anyone, including the left-most left. In fact on the left we are very aware that our welfare systems can't support unlimited people.
The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers. There's processes in places to determine whether they deserve this. The right just want to turn their boats back as they approach (pushback) which is literally illegal.
It's important to realise though that asylum seekers are not the root cause of most of our issues even though they are portrayed as such by the right in deflection from the real issues. For example here in Holland the biggest societal issue is the farmers who pollute too many nitrogen compounds and that causes housing projects to be put on hold. The number of asylum seekers has been steadily decreasing over the years.
But farmers make up a huge piece of the right wing so they'll never take ownership of the problem. Better to deflect on someone else.
Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').
But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.
If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.
(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run. 2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim. 3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
In this way we do have responsibility towards them. The migration from Africa is a different issue but it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
> Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more.
Well exactly but nobody is talking about that. Everyone is talking about the asylum seekers. Which are only a small part of the issue.
And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market. So the parties backed by those with money are always obstructing new construction and other means to make housing cheaper. This is a much bigger problem when it comes to housing than those few apartments granted to asylum seekers.
Do we have to figure out which caveman first figured out that a big stick was more effective than a fist, initiating the entire history of armed conflict?
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
That is true.
But this anger and hatred you demonstrate so well is exactly what the right feeds off. That's why they are gaslighting you. Anger activates and motivates more than happiness.
Unfortunately it's a dead-end road, it doesn't solve anything, because immigrants and asylum seekers in particular aren't the cause of our problems. The hatred just serves to distract from the real problems. The richest getting ever richer, environmental pollution, issues nobody wants to solve because they touch their voter base (like the farmers in Holland I mentioned).
Well, that didn't happen. As to whether that's to blame on immigration ... I would argue it's to blame on the rate and the source of immigration. At a slow rate, selective immigration brings welfare, certainly. At this rate? Of course not. Infinite, mostly fake, refugees? No they don't bring welfare. Of course not.
Haha, no. As long as there is bread and circus, nothing wil happen.
that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...
PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.
It's useful to add some cynicism in the mix (or in this case, pragmatism)
The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.
To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.
> Second reading
> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:
> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;
> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;
> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.
If it's not a dictatorship, a regime, a shithole, a kleptocracy, or whatever name they use for a government they don't like, I don't know what it is.
I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".
Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853746
https://www.alamy.com/16-july-2019-france-france-straburg-a-...
Because no party has an outright majority, there are weeks of negotiations after the elections, as the parties try to find a compromise acceptable to a majority. Once a deal has been reached, the parliament votes to confirm it. If the vote fails, the parties return to negotiations.
Von der Leyen was chosen to head the Commission, because she was an acceptable compromise. All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.
> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?
Voting rituals would be a waste of time. The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions. If no party has a majority, no candidate can hope to get majority support before the whole package has been agreed on.
I was aware that VDL obtained her role by routing around the Spitzenkandidaten process, but I was never aware that her confirmatory vote was done in this way.
Her unpopularity at home also reinforces the idea that unpopular politicians can be sent to Brussels, because "in Brussels, you can't hear them scream".
They passed a regulation with 276 votes in favor, 314 votes against, and 17 abstained. The minority decided instead of the majority.
If this is not a dictatorship, what is it then? In any case, it has nothing to do with the democracy.
The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.
- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)
- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)
- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)
So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.
There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.
Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.
And the internal struggles are indeed a problem, this is due to the extreme right which has completely taken over America (and is sponsored by Russia). It was good to see the Hungarians came to their senses but it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now. Russia and America obviously not. Canada yes but they're not big. China just serves its own interests, they will never care about a partnership. They just want our money to buy their products, nothing else.
I think South America is another potential one and the EU is trying to connect there with eg Mercosur. But America is sponsoring the extreme right there too as you can see in Honduras and Colombia recently. And in Venezuela of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_acquisi...
> The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." ― Lord Palmerston
There are lots of possible allies, but no one single ally to depend on. India to counter balance China, Canada to have an ally in North America, etc.
> it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
Or it can become a federal state.
They don't care about solving problems around migrants. It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent
The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.
ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?
Aren't they fucking paid to be there 'on the last day'?
There can exist strong consumer protections against misuse of their personal data by various entities.
And there can simultaneously also exist governmental overreach against citizens private data.
The world is complex, few things are truly binary.
Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.
But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.
First of all, private companies shouldn't be given that responsibility to begin with. Meta in particular, has a long history of unethical and immoral usage of personal data. I won't use the term "illegal", as the question of legality becomes moot when punishment can be factored in as a cost of doing business [1]. Given the long list of things Meta has been caught doing, together with the in grand total zero seconds of jail time. I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this would be any different. I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened, where in some room without windows and a lot of lawyers and business analysts, they have ran models and concluded that the cost of getting caught here is "a good financial decision". Wouldn't be surprised either if it also came with a guarantee of personal protection from prosecution, from NSA and other government entities, in exchange for a hand in that data pipe.
Secondly, for this to carry any plausibility for being motivated by "protect the children" arguments, it requires a minimal effort be enacted on more effective measures, and a measured balance with the cost this comes at. There are very good arguments for why this law would actively harm children. Throw in some Bayesian understanding, and you better have a state of the art system that somehow pretty much never has false positives, nor false negatives, where this was also the only way to detect and avoid said abuse. I don't know the numbers here, but I highly doubt this is a good idea, even with infinite generosity as to good intentions. We've all been children, we've all done stupid things. Now throw in the brilliant and surely-not-to-scar-a-child-for-life situations where parents and strangers looking at something they thought was private, and have a "grown up discussion" about. I shiver at the thought.
Thirdly, and aside from directly harming children in situations where they selves use technology and naively, and unwisely share pictures, consider how many take pictures of their own kids without clothes, because they are normal human beings, who do not consider there to be anything sexual about said depiction. You want to throw law enforcement in the mix here? Child protective services?
Fourthly, consider the possible negative for this abuse. If normal behavior (e.g. children being children, and e.g. normal parents otherwise sharing normal pictures if you are a normal person) can be selectively chosen as being a heinous crime, this should scare anyone, especially consider the political shifting trends towards fascism.
[1]: https://www.creativefuture.org/facebook-scandal-timeline/
Woah, that's such a good, on point statement. From Boing, FightClub (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes/?item=qt0479130) to Cambridge Analytica (Meta) and Pegasus as a small sample ;)
But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.
Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments:
"What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures."
My steelman in favour of the legislation:
The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution.
My steelman against the legislation:
Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging.
Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.
Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.
In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.
Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...
Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...
Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354
Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.
Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:
"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"
And half an hour later
"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"
No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...
I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.
Surveillance is a branding issue. If you wrap a shit in crepe paper and Corinthian leather, most people will admire what an artist you are.
Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals