I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
zwnow · 3m ago
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
amarcheschi · 2m ago
If it hasn't been changed, not only politicians but law enforcement officers too would be exempt
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
Centigonal · 20m ago
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
ragmodel226 · 5m ago
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
nosioptar · 6m ago
I'm unaware of Sealand[0] engaging in surveillance against its citizen.
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
9dev · 43m ago
They only need to succeed one time. People are generally preoccupied with a lot of other things right now, so maybe this is their lucky shot…
zubspace · 21m ago
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
pessimizer · 6m ago
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
isoprophlex · 29m ago
Like a fucking sexual predator. Heyyyyyy, want me to grope you today? No? Don't worry, I'll be back to harass you again tomorrow!
ath3nd · 46m ago
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
mantas · 40m ago
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
morkalork · 25m ago
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
Geezus_42 · 4m ago
The exemptions for politicians is straight out of 1984.
mantas · 42m ago
As Juncker, ex president of European Commision said, you keep trying till it passes at some point. Good luck revoking it later…
uncircle · 37m ago
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
croes · 28m ago
People don’t want change.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
calvinmorrison · 26m ago
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
charcircuit · 27m ago
You can keep trying to revoke it until it passes too.
Disposal8433 · 32m ago
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
f_devd · 16m ago
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
tatjam · 20m ago
Looking at the supporting members, this appears to be supported by "both parties" across many many countries, what a sad thing to unite over...
dabber21 · 19m ago
what are the arguments?
realusername · 5m ago
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
kratom_sandwich · 10m ago
Who are the organizations fighting chat control which one could support with a donation?
pmlnr · 10m ago
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
tough · 8m ago
you cannot enforce law globally online
there's no internet police
pessimizer · 4m ago
You didn't even need the word "online." There's no global police.
cobbzilla · 33m ago
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
grunder_advice · 21m ago
Europe never abandoned the elitist mindset of a ruling elite lording it over the masses.
croes · 32m ago
Where is the difference to the US, China or the UK?
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
cobbzilla · 30m ago
The US, at least, has a Bill of Rights that would make this illegal, it would definitely violate the 4th Amendment and maybe the 1st too.
cobbzilla · 23m ago
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
NitpickLawyer · 7m ago
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
croes · 19m ago
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
Nifty3929 · 27m ago
I hope you're right.
lawn · 20m ago
The administration and the people will just shrug and move on, like they've done with all the other crap they've shrugged at.
ahoka · 6m ago
The difference is that PRISM was done as a black op, and this is out in the open.
ronsor · 29m ago
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
rrr_oh_man · 21m ago
> The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
pmlnr · 22m ago
> The UK is politically,
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
futurecat · 9m ago
Thank you for sharing.
rdm_blackhole · 19m ago
This is the kind of shit that makes my blood boil. Privacy for thee not for me. The EU is not worth saving if this this is the kind of crap they pull. Fuck all the politicians behind this!
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
This is one of the many abuses by Leo(s), part why I don't love and trust police in italy: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatti_del_G8_di_Genova#p-lan...
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
there's no internet police
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.