EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

blfr

First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.

elric

This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.

Lucasoato

This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors. In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China. This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker. A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.

peterspath

Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland. https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

roer

Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people. I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens

r721

Related recent discussion: >European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)

aquir

What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.

hoppp

They just can't let it go. Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?

Havoc

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

sandworm101

So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.

kachurovskiy

Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.

AAAAaccountAAAA

I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.

yownie

why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?

ChrisArchitect

Related: European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675

shevy-java

We see here how lobbyists undermine democracies. Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.

moniosi

The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will create further privacy for criminals such as pedophiles and mass espionage for the common man. It's also curious to notice that at every proposal stage, politicians are always conveniently exempt from the regulation, which is hilarious coming after the Files.

zkmon

A blanket control affecting privacy would be bad. However we need controls that can prevent criminals from hiding behind anonymity and being able to organize massive activities just with a few online posts. These days it is trivial to organize and radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels. You just need to say something that aligns with their problems, and most people get consumed by the divisive speech easily. The effect is already seen how the ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities during recent incidents in UK and other places. Something need to be done for this.

kristjank

I have two observations to make here. 1. It seems that most of the evil here is concentrated among the liberal right and liberal left. Both far right AfD types and the left are against this. 2. A lot of positions, when clarified, just want to keep the (bad) status quo of CC1.0, while opposing 2.0, which was the much more totalitarian one. This also includes the crucial shadow rapporteurs. This is still not good, but unless I've understood something very wrongly here, this isn't the same as just pushing the worst version of chat control 2.0 through.

Argonaut998

There is nothing redeemable about this union anymore.

AJ007

RIP all of the open source European software initiatives.