"The paper calls for “a harmonised EU regime on data retention” that is “technology neutral and future-proof,” covers all types of telecommunications service providers, includes measures ensuring both retention of and access to data, and is “in full compliance with privacy and data protection rules.”
"The EU’s previous data retention legislation was struck down by the Court of Justice in 2014, which found that the law allowed for “a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference” with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. The court has confirmed this interpretation in several cases about national data retention measures."
"the paper calls for retention of data from “service providers of any kind that could provide access to electronic evidence."
"agreed upon the need for law enforcement to have access to data en clair"
11. "The creation of a platform (equivalent to SIRIUS51) to share tools, best practices, and knowledge on how to be granted access to data from product owners and producers. Building further on SIRIUS, this should be expanded to include hardware manufacturers in its mandate and to create and map law enforcement points of contact with digital hardware and software manufacturers."
22. "Developing a technology roadmap that brings together technology, cybersecurity, privacy, standardisation and security experts and ensures adequate coordination e.g. potentially through a permanent structure, in order to implement lawful access by design in all relevant technologies in line with the needs expressed by law enforcement, ensuring at the same time strong security and cybersecurity and providing for the full respect of legal obligations on lawful access. According to the HLG, law enforcement authorities should contribute to the definition of requirements, but it should not be their role to impose specific solutions on companies so that they can provide lawful access to data for criminal investigative purposes without compromising security."
26. "Establishing a research group to assess the technical feasibility of built-in lawful access obligations (including for accessing encrypted data) for digital devices, while maintaining and without compromising the security of devices and the privacy of information for all users as well as without weakening or undermining the security of communications."
I could quote the entire PDF but it's too long. In short, they want to expand surveillance on all fronts and mandate backdoors both in software and hardware. Read the PDF.
amarcheschi · 17h ago
they're still saying the old thing about accessing encrypted data and protecting privacy while it's obvious that it wouldn't be possible to access encrypted data and for that data to still be "secure" at the same time
reliabilityguy · 16h ago
They can use homomorphic encryption to learn about the data without actually seeing it.
tsimionescu · 16h ago
No, they couldn't. Homomorphic encryption makes it possible for whoever holds the keys to the data to get certain kinds of processing done on it by someone who doesn't know what the data represents, and who won't know what the results represent.
It is very carefully constructed exactly to prevent what you're talking about: leaking any kind of information about the data to someone who doesn't already know what the data is.
josefx · 13h ago
The problem is that nobody outside of the people enforcing this would know what that "processing" is looking for either. Is it going to look for illegal content, political activists of women seeking an abortion?
reliabilityguy · 16h ago
You can design a system where FHE does the analysis, and then the result is available to the 3rd party as well. Nothing in FHE prevents you from doing that.
tsimionescu · 14h ago
Sure, if you have the private keys you can publish the result to whomever you want. But you don't need and wouldn't benefit from FHE in any way in this case.
reliabilityguy · 13h ago
You would benefit from FHE: the users would know that data never leaves the device, the inference is done locally, and only the result is shared.
I mean, I do not have a link to a paper with a system like that, but I think a combination of FHE and enclave of sorts can be good for such purpose (leaving aside potential performance issues with FHE).
wizzwizz4 · 8h ago
Do you mean because you can make the result a yes/no, and then brute-force it with a plaintext attack (encrypting "yes", encrypting "no", and seeing which it is)? Or is there some technique that'd scale to larger output sizes?
Yeah, I think their design won’t work, of course. It doesn’t mean that the technology cannot be applied.
falcor84 · 16h ago
That's interesting - is there anything relevant they could do under homomorphic encryption? For example, let's say that the government wants to only flag content with the substring "I am planning an attack" - is there any way to do that while keeping encryption intact?
reliabilityguy · 15h ago
The government alone couldn’t do it. The system has to be on device, otherwise the key is exposed rendering the whole thing moot.
Alternatively, the service providers like Meta can do it. We trust them with the end to end encryption anyway.
Gud · 13h ago
> We trust them with the end to end encryption anyway.
No we don't.
reliabilityguy · 13h ago
Well, maybe you do not,but the general public does.
7bit · 16h ago
Learn what exactly? Homomorphic encryption allows for mathematical operations on the data. X+1 can be applied to the data, but it still won't let you know whether x was 1, 2, 3 or any other value.
Despite all this, fuck the EU for consistently trying to undermined data privacy and introducing Kim Jong Um style mass surveillance. None of that shit protects privacy, as they claim.
No comments yet
Zealotux · 16h ago
Remember: "the EU is founded on core values including respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights."
No doubt we'll keep on giving lessons about these to non-EU countries anyway.
amarcheschi · 16h ago
The European court of justice could still deem such practice to be unlawful
hcfman · 15h ago
So long as you were quick enough to file within three months of exhausting all your local options. Too late? Oh, too bad.
amarcheschi · 14h ago
Well, I'm not saying that I want to see if it eventually gets there, I can only hope that it is not necessary to get there
nickslaughter02 · 16h ago
I am positive they will start attacking it on this front too. Changing the rules is just a vote away.
libertine · 16h ago
Out of curiosity, despite its flaws and setbacks, what countries or organizations are in a better position to lecture others on those matters?
Russia? China? Iran?
seydor · 16h ago
The US. The EU is a bureaucratic institution, not a democratic one, and arguably doesn't have more legitimacy than its current bureaucrats at any time. At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council.
Despite the flaws of its president, the US has democratic checks and balances
ChocolateGod · 15h ago
> The US. The EU is a bureaucratic institution, not a democratic one,
The US has a democratic system where the President is ultimately voted for by an unelected electoral college who can refuse to vote for the candidate their state voted for and has ended up with the candidate with most votes loosing.
Then said president can change the countries top court on obviously political lines and re-interpret existing laws and the constitution.
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council
The European Commission has no need to play popularity contests, it's accountable to the heads of governments, not randoms on social media.
lttlrck · 14h ago
The US doesn't have popular voting system. There are good reasons for it, and in no way does it make the US non-democratic.
I don't particularly like the Electoral College - but the history and the cases when members voted against the people are interesting and in some (many?) cases, examples of checks and balances.
Checks and balances don't always align with your desires. That's a feature of democracy not a failure.
dataflow · 13h ago
> The US doesn't have popular voting system. There are good reasons for it, and in no way does it make the US non-democratic.
Presumably if my votes counted a million times more than yours, you wouldn't say it's still a democracy, right? The extreme here is obviously a single ruler whose vote counts more than everyone else's combined. Where do you draw the line here?
MangoToupe · 7h ago
> There are good reasons for it, and in no way does it make the US non-democratic.
Sure, if by "democratic" you mean "people are allowed to file ballots".
Regardless, it's hard for me to see the senate and electoral college as very "democratic" in the sense of your vote mattering equally.
treetalker · 12h ago
> when members voted against the people …
Many states now have "faithless elector" laws that require the electors to vote according to the populace's expectations of how the elector will vote in the college.
ChocolateGod · 13h ago
> in no way does it make the US non-democratic.
I wasn't trying to claim the US is non-democratic, I was pointing out to the author of the prior comment that the US system isn't perfect either.
const_cast · 7h ago
> Checks and balances don't always align with your desires.
Sure, but that's not the issue with current US administration, and it's dishonest to say that.
The issue is that checks and balances are literally, indisputably, being ignored. Ignoring court orders and doing illegal things is bad, actually. When Jackson defied Congress we at least had the decency to try to impeach his ass.
The current US administration is not only grossly incompetent and unqualified, as seen by the signal scandals, but they're also openly hostile to the democratic institutions of this country.
seydor · 15h ago
> it's accountable to the heads of governments
The EU actively engages in selecting and canceling heads of governments in EU countries. There has been 0 cases where the head of the commision was held accountable for something. Actually the current head has been found guilty by the EU court for hiding text messages. Who is going to hold her accountable and how ?
I m all for the EU but defending its despicable leadership with arguments that reverse reality is not doing any favors to anyone
ChocolateGod · 15h ago
> The EU actively engages in selecting and canceling heads of governments in EU countries
Please link an example of the European Commission cancelling a government or election.
These two are questions asked by what I can infer members of the parliament. They are not official statements of the EU Parliament. Anyone can ask any question but that does not make it true.
Can you explain why you linked to these two links?a
nickslaughter02 · 14h ago
"Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview at the end of last week that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu."
Where does he says the CCR bowed to the EU pressure? I followed the link that says _admitted_ and there goes to a Romanian website and they make a similar claim but as far as I can see he talks about applying the laws to protect against interference and not about making CCR decide something.
A link to other website that also does not provide any evidence is not evidence even if it looks like a citation.
libertine · 14h ago
> It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.
You mean the fellow who illegally received undeclared external foreign funding? More concretely, from Russia, a declared state sponsor of terrorism?
libertine · 15h ago
Didn't the current president of the US say that his 2016 election was stolen and triggered an insurrection, and then proceed to pardon those who attacked democratic institutions? Isn't he now seeking to dismantle all the checks and balances, all while doing crypto dumps, enabling him to receive money from undisclosed sources?
This is your democratic reference?
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council.
What's with the cult of personality? Why do you need someone worth talking about? For example, everyone talks about Trump for all the wrong reasons, does that mean that's worth it?
It just sounds like you don't know much about the EU.
l11r · 15h ago
Trump will leave office in 2028 just like any other US president. The only difference between now and then is extreme polarization all over the world because a lot of emerging problems.
I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia. Those comparisons with Nazi Germany and other oppressive regimes are just insane. They devalue words, and you just won't find the right ones when shit really hits the fan.
archagon · 8h ago
I am also from Russia. Since this apparently gives me authority to speak on these matters, I can confidently say that what’s happening in the US today looks remarkably like Putin’s consolidation of power. How long until Congress is nothing more than an executive rubber stamp like the Duma? The judicial system is currently functioning as the only check against executive overreach, and it’s just a matter of time until injunctions are nullified or ignored as a matter of course.
hobs · 14h ago
There's been plenty of indications that's not true. Trump has been floating a third term and a Trump regime with his children. He said the election was stolen. He tried to steal it himself. You are basically saying "Well TODAY the United States is fine!" but if you look at the trendline Russia is basically still shit, and we now have an insurrectionist as a President whose spending a significant portion of his time destroying American institutions as far beyond repair as he can.
libertine · 14h ago
> Trump will leave office in 2028 just like any other US president.
Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term, and has spoken about ways of achieving this. What makes you so sure he will leave office in 2028?
> I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia.
I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with Russia, Nazi Germany or other oppresive regimes. I asked the question about what other countries and organizations are in a better position to lecture about democracy.
Acknowledging that the USA is currently in an institutional and democratic crisis doesn't mean they're Russia; it means they're on the wrong trajectory.
codedokode · 13h ago
> Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term, and has spoken about ways of achieving this.
Well given the ratio between what he says he would do and what he actually does I would not be much worried if I lived in US.
const_cast · 6h ago
This is a common debate tactic from Trump supporters and it just doesn't work. If your evidence for Trump being okay is that he's actually a liar so we shouldn't take threats seriously, that doesn't speak well on Trump. And, actually, it reflects very poorly on you. Why are you supporting someone who you knowingly admit is a liar? Why is your support founded on the assumption that what you're supporting will not be implemented? It makes no sense. It makes other's question your decision making abilities.
But, more to the point, much of what Trump has said and done has been downplayed until it actually happens. We can't just play pretend and cosplay Hellen Keller here. The insurrection, project 2025, these things are real and did actually happen. Despite being downplayed repeatedly. I mean, every Trump supporter on Earth has been calling Project 2025 anti-republican propaganda (but it's written by and for republican leadership?), and now that many part of it are being implemented verbatim - surprise! - it's what everyone wanted all along.
We cannot continue to downplay and underestimate this administration. They will do illegal things, they will threaten democracy, they will ignore court orders. If we cannot comes to terms with that reality, then we have no choice but to allow them to do these things.
l11r · 14h ago
> Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term
Because Trump is just a blabbermouth. Sorry, but people are just indoctrinated from both sides. You can check prediction markets and see the real odds of Trump not leaving the office. Yep, there is a chance, but IMO it's around 5% max.
> I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with ...
Yes, I understand that US has democracy crisis. And so has the Europe! The problem is that there are no longer healthy examples in the world, except maybe smaller countries. Democracy as a thing is dying, but US are still holding the torch IMO.
archagon · 8h ago
Prediction markets are nothing more than a vibe check. They do not have access to any more information than we do.
libertine · 13h ago
> Because Trump is just a blabbermouth... US are still holding the torch IMO.
Tell that to the deported people without due process for example, it's not blabbermouthing, these are concrete actions that affect people's lives.
I think there are plenty of healthy examples by all standards, other than the US, none of them are perfect, of course.
FireBeyond · 9h ago
> You can check prediction markets and see the real odds of Trump not leaving the office.
LOL what? Gambling odds have no relevance to this. Bookmakers are not working on any privileged information.
lawn · 15h ago
It's frankly laughable to claim that the US still has democratic checks and balances with all the shit Trump and his gang has done.
lttlrck · 14h ago
The checks and balances are there. But they don't always "check and balance" the way you want them to.
Same in the EU. In this very comment section there are people abdicating to the courts, saying they'll block this proposal. The EUs checks and balance also work slowly and not always in your favor.
hulitu · 6h ago
> Out of curiosity, despite its flaws and setbacks, what countries or organizations are in a better position to lecture others on those matters?
One should try living in more than one country. After some time, one might realize, that the adjective "better" has no place in one's sentence.
libertine · 4h ago
I find it odd that one needs to live in more than one country to be able to make a judgment on the use of the adjective better.
But I'll take the bait, let's say someone who lived in Syria during the Assad rule and then changed to the US, will that person come to that realization?
Gud · 13h ago
Switzerland.
Zealotux · 16h ago
None? I just think the EU should stop acting holier-than-thou when it has been actively attacking individual freedoms and privacy for years now.
libertine · 15h ago
But how are they acting holier-than-thou?
No comments yet
sdoering · 15h ago
Any institution that does not kill thousands every year:
Annual Deaths (Recent Years):
- Mediterranean Sea 2,000–3,000+ (60% drownings)
- Pushbacks/Frontex Several hundred (2,000 deaths linked to Frontex actions)
- Land Borders/Camps Dozens to hundreds (Winter peaks, underreported)
There are by far too few NGOs or journalists looking into the despicable practices of the EU - but we Europeans definitely should not sit oh the high horse and preach about human rights to anyone.
It is a disgrace what we as a European people let our elected officials get away with.
snehk · 13h ago
Australia hat a similar situation. They cut that number down to basically zero when they publicly announced that no one entering Australia that way would ever be able to settle in Australia in any way.
fuzzfactor · 7h ago
>founded on core values including respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights
For that reason it would be more embarrassing than anticipated if the authors were disclosed . . .
i've just yesterday uploaded my final essay for a uni course on ethics where i'm debating on chat control and i have to say that being unsatisfied with some commission moves is not enough. there would be a shitton to talk about, but i'll just leave here that:
-while chat control was being discussed, europol was already salivating at the thought of expanding the regulation scope to other crime areas (as they said, "all traffic is useful" or something like that)[1]
-the european commission bases his thesis on the efficacy on the data provided by thorn, but we don't have any actual information about the trustworthyness of this claims. the european commission refused to comply with a FOIA request and the ombudsman suggested to comply, but still the eu commission refused to protect commercial interest of thorn. eu ombudsman ruled the case as maladministration on behalf of the eu commission but it has no power to do anything else[2]. another foia request filed in a member state revealed some other documents that still do not give any insight to thorn software, so we can't trust it yet
-a few europol members moved to thorn, with one violating rules about conflict of interest [3]
> The EU Commission is hiding the participants of the #EUGoingDark group meetings. I have requested lists of participants several times, but so far have only received completely redacted documents. (My Toot on Mastodon.) All that is known is that police forces and secret services are represented. Despite the highly sensitive topics in terms of data protection and fundamental rights, the EU Data Protection Supervisor only has the status of an observer. NGOs are not allowed to take part in the group’s meetings. While fundamental rights are muted, the #EUGoingDark group is planning to influence the EU Parliament with targeted surveillance PR.
bondarchuk · 16h ago
> #EUGoingDark is our label for an EU working group set up by the EU Commission in June 2023.
Oh, at least he discloses upfront that "going dark" is an unofficial slogan from the opposition. Not sure if that's necessary, "High Level Group on Access to Data for Effective Law Enforcement" sounds sinister enough already.
nickslaughter02 · 16h ago
The official email of the High-Level Group (HLG) is EC-HLG-GOING-DARK@ec.europa.eu
I do have to say that eu gets the names right at least
bondarchuk · 16h ago
Interesting, thanks.
nickslaughter02 · 17h ago
To make things worse, Denmark will take hold of the Presidency of the Council of EU from July to December. They are one of the main forces behind Chat Control.
skrebbel · 16h ago
Got any source? I thought it was primarily a Swedish commissioner (Ylva Johansson) pushing it. EDIT: I don't mean this as "I don't believe you", I just want to know more.
> Swedish commissioner (Ylva Johansson) pushing it
She has retired since. She faced major criticisms after refusing to meet any of the privacy focused NGOs and had regular meetings with Thorn, the US company selling surveillance software.
amarcheschi · 16h ago
It is much more than just ylva Johansson, here's an interesting read about how she's just the "face" of it
> the efficacy on the data provided by thorn, but we don't have any actual information about the trustworthyness of this claims
Why would we doubt these claims? North Korea, China, (Soviet) Russia, all of them were and are very effective at using surveillance against their population. Feel free to expand the examples, the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
amarcheschi · 16h ago
Because thorn sells software to detect csam and has a commercial interest in making its software appear in the best way possible
We also doubt this claims because thorn might have published further data but guess what, we can't because there's no info about it
It is also reasonable to assume they use some kind of machine learning, (now we're entering speculation territory since we have few data about it) but the Ai act would require high risk ai systems - and I think a csam detection algorithm would be that - to comply with some requirements in regard to transparency for the product to be used
miohtama · 16h ago
Already in the EU Spain, Poland and Hungary are illegally using Pegasus spyware to spy their own opposition politicians. Why they should settle less with lawful means if they already use illegal means.
amarcheschi · 16h ago
That's some secret service or at least non public things though, what is being regulated is "clear day" practices
I know it's not the best, but still
miohtama · 15h ago
And why do you think this regulation would stop abuse if it were made available? Poland has corrupted judges who were onboard with opposition spying.
"But the commission cannot do much – CBA [Central Anticorruption Bureau] management and the Constitutional Tribunal, packed with PiS [judges], are obstructing its proceedings. In such an environment, any work based on facts and merit is pretty much impossible.”"
Regulation is not to stop abuse of the law, regulation is made to say what can be done lawfully
miohtama · 14h ago
But, in this case, we are not talking only about regulation, but having a law-mandated backdoor in the every device on the planet.
Stopping abuse is not to have that backdoor.
ahartmetz · 14h ago
Secret democracy, eh? Against the people, distrusting the people, and fuck the people.
I suspect von der Leyen. She has pushed similar crap in Germany, and the temerity of not telling who proposed it is completely in character for her. She has told straight lies about her intentions before.
DoingIsLearning · 15h ago
Is there any precedent in prior government bodies or other countries where you have a number of attempts or a moratory period to propose embodiments of the same law?
As in if you propose a law in a general area and gets shot down you cannot simply rewrite it slightly and once again pitch through attrition.
Something like 4 strikes and you can never bring it back to vote or for every proposal you lose a vote you cannot repackage the same core for the next 10 years.
Havoc · 16h ago
Is there any part of the world that isn't pushing orwellian stuff?
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
People in less developed countries are already more free. Some of their governments would like to or do push for laws like this but the infrastructure or power to force international companies to implement it is not there.
falcor84 · 16h ago
You reminded me of "Consciousness Explained" [0], where Dennett makes a metaphorical distinction between the Orwellian and Stalinesque approaches, such that in the former, "wrong things" are allowed to happen and are then reconciled by changing history, while in the latter, everything is enforced and handled on the spot, before wrong information ever reaches the news [1]. I am concerned that we're headed into both dystopias at the same time, with some countries going further into the Stalinesque approach.
Yes, it's interesting that whilst they're not happy with Trump's version of authoritarianism, rather than moving in the opposite direction, they've just decided to switch to a parallel track.
extreme capital concentration breeds this, and we had it happen everywhere.
spacebanana7 · 16h ago
The governments of North Korea, China, the EU and Australia are all trying to get as much surveillance as they can get away with, despite having radically different economic systems.
I suspect there’s a universal desire for governments to want to spy on the people they govern.
Etheryte · 15h ago
All listed parties have very strong capital concentration in the top small percentile, despite different economic systems and political backgrounds.
Jensson · 12h ago
You mean power concentration? These things aren't pushed by rich people, it is pushed by powerful people. It often overlaps but not necessarily, a lot of powerful people are not that rich, for example politicians in Europe often aren't wealthy but they have a lot of power still.
account42 · 14h ago
The only one of these that has a radically different economic system is NK.
1oooqooq · 15h ago
they are all catching up with the US, where capital accumulation was faster.
government is just a higher level cop, protecting property.
dgb23 · 16h ago
More generally it's concentration of power.
It's far more difficult to do these kinds of things when people have the direct vote.
1oooqooq · 15h ago
yet the country ahead on this is the bastion of democracy (without having direct vote, but still)
nickslaughter02 · 18h ago
original title: The EU Commission refuses to disclose the orchestrators behind its mass surveillance proposal, which would effectively end citizens’ online privacy
AnimalMuppet · 15h ago
See, the thing is, the reason that they want privacy for what they do, we want privacy for the exact same reason.
kmlx · 15h ago
how would those proposals work with these other initiatives that will go live in 2026?
They will complete each other. Large websites and apps will be forced to implement age verification and thus your online identity will be tied to your real identity. No privacy from government spying and the end of anonymous accounts.
furkansahin · 17h ago
Are you surprised with the extreme right being on the rise! No worries, they will loose their power like Geert of Netherlands does nowadays...
tgv · 17h ago
I don't see the connection. It's true, as others say, that extremist's use of surveillance tool poses the greatest danger, but the desire to monitor the population is present across the political spectrum. Since you mention Wilders: the centrist, and most liberal Dutch party D'66 actually supported a surveillance "drag net" for the Dutch intelligence services.
pveierland · 16h ago
As a data point, the largest political parties in Norway (Arbeiderpartiet / Høyre), are now both seeking to introduce age limits backed by national BankID login systems to access social media, which would be a massive invasion in the right to privacy online.
The same parties voted in 2011 to introduce mass data storage, where all international internet traffic can be stored and kept for 6 months by the state.
I see no reason to believe that either party would protect the right to private communication or internet use.
hhjinks · 16h ago
> international internet traffic
Which means all internet traffic that crosses the border at any point. So it practically includes all domestic traffic, too.
nickslaughter02 · 17h ago
Is Ursula von der Leyen "extreme right"? Because it was her (and her commission) who established the group responsible and it was the commission's decision to not disclose its members.
gizmo · 15h ago
Her personal politics are not extremist in the conventional sense. She is a center-right technocrat at heart. She believes people like her have to protect Europe against the idiot masses. When she dismantles European civil rights she does so for the "greater good". People can't be trusted to vote in their own best interest, or so the logic goes. She thinks she and people like her protect Europe against the rising populist right. I think she's badly mistaken and that the populist right is fueled by EU arrogance, and the GP probably shares that view.
anal_reactor · 13h ago
> People can't be trusted to vote in their own best interest, or so the logic goes.
Is this wrong.
postepowanieadm · 14h ago
Ursula "I won't show my emails from Pfizer" von der Leyen wold never do such thing.
holoduke · 16h ago
Ursula von der Leyen is the example of where things are wrong in the EU. She is powerhungry. Has a history of things close to corruption. And she creates a very toxic environment to work in. Anxiety amongst personnel around her is very common.
The balance between serving the people and serving the interest of corporations is very off.
nickslaughter02 · 16h ago
She has managed to create an environment where people (me at least) do not want to live and which corporations are eager to leave.
pjc50 · 17h ago
Yeah, I don't think enough of the centrists consider the question of how intrusive state powers might be used by a far-right government. Despite having several demonstrations at the moment.
collyw · 17h ago
The far left seem to be a far greater danger at present. They are the ones pushing for all the authoritarianism.
f_devd · 16h ago
I know a few examples of upcoming far right, who are the upcoming far left?
collyw · 16h ago
Are the far right in the room with you right now?
Because there are many in the UK parliament already.
archagon · 8h ago
You mean the “far left” Labour politicians trying their best to cosplay Tories?
Meanwhile, Reform — a populist far-right party — is clobbering everyone in the polls.
mytailorisrich · 16h ago
In France the largest party is Parliament is labelled "far right". That being the case then the third largest party is "far left" and could be in government depending on next elections and, especially, on possible coalitions.
collyw · 11h ago
Same in Germany.
It's not the right that are talking of banning the most popular parties.
williamdclt · 16h ago
We must be living in parallel universes with HN being our only interdimensional link.
On the far-right, we have authoritarian politicians openly mingling with fascists and neonazis. Le Pen in France, Reform in UK, whatever parties in Germany and Italy... Not to speak of the counties where they are _already_ in power like Hungary.
On the far-left we have... well actually, who is left enough that they'd be as "far" as the fascists and neonazis are on the right of the spectrum? I'm not aware of any party or politician with any sort of influence that'd be that far left. Is anyone proposing full-on marxism? USSR-style or chinese-style central planning (not that anyone on the left considers these a model to repeat)? The "communist" and "socialist" parties are wayyyy more centrist. The political horseshoe actually looks more like a hook.
collyw · 11h ago
Le Penn and Reform are slightly to the right of centre.
Anyone that goes againt the replacement of the native populations of Europe is being smeared as far right.
cbeach · 11h ago
Could you explain how Reform UK is "far right", and which neonazis and fascists Reform politicians are mingling with?
I am from the UK, and follow UK politics closely. Seems I missed these "far right" policy announcements and neonazi affiliations?
I read one mention of a local councillor who'd shared an inappropriate post and was immediately suspended from the party. Is that how you're concluding that Reform UK is a nazi-adjacent party?
mytailorisrich · 16h ago
Talking about "parallel universe", to claim that Le Pen or Reform UK are authoritarian and "openly mingling with fascists and neonazis" is pure fantasy.
But if that's what you think then surely many left-wing parties in Europe must be far left, too. For instance when the leader of the main left-wing party (and 3rd largest party in Parliament) in France says that he wants to get rid of capitalism.
MSFT_Edging · 16h ago
Since I can't reply to the person with cotton in their ears, here's an article about Reform UK politicians sharing Hitler memes.
If you use random social media posts and memes from a low level party member you can equally argue that Labour is a nest of dangerous communists and Hamas sympathisers, and make similar absurd claims against all parties.
theasisa · 16h ago
> who is left enough that they'd be as "far"
"Far left" is simply people who want free and functional healthcare, working social security and basic rights. The far right has gone so far from the centre that anyone left of the centre is far from them, and the right in general due to it being stretched so wide.
AlexandrB · 15h ago
You're posting this in a thread about an article where a bunch of "left" politicians are trying to pass sweeping surveillance legislation. Yet you expect people to take their proclamations that they just want "functional healthcare" at face value?
This doublethink is so weird.
rofo1 · 15h ago
I have yet to see a single communist that can discuss like a rational human being. They have no problem with contradiction, non-sense, things that plainly do not work, things that are false, things that are false sometimes (when they need them to be) but are otherwise true.
Not once, not in any debates, online, or in real life. It's truly a virus of the psyche. It is remarkable.
pjc50 · 14h ago
> bunch of "left" politicians are trying to pass sweeping surveillance legislation
The original article is that we don't know who's trying to pass the surveillance legislation, because it's all anonymous!
This sort of thing is much easier to discuss when you can say "person X from party Y made proposal Z" rather than just chucking allgations around.
Jensson · 12h ago
These measures have been pushed by the left any times before, so we know which group this is coming from but not the exact individuals.
glowiefedposter · 15h ago
Can they do the "free" healthcare without reading everyone's private conversations?
asimovfan · 16h ago
Whom do you mean by that could you please elaborate?
dgb23 · 15h ago
I don't think the extreme right is pushing this. They are typically anti-EU.
I speculate that this is a result of centrist/neoliberal establishment wanting to solidify control.
The extreme right is typically using failures like this as a political attack vector.
sbszllr · 16h ago
Usual reminder -- if you're an EU citizen, call up your representative.
hcfman · 14h ago
There's always a joker somewhere :-)
Try calling up, E-mailing or anything else with Dutch politians. No one will talk to you, answer your E-mails, allow you to call them. They make themselves unreachable.
emptysongglass · 8h ago
Tried that with MEPs for my country of Denmark: no reply.
ekianjo · 16h ago
Representatives don't care as much as you'd like them to, unfortunately.
cbeach · 15h ago
I tried that with my MEPs on the Copyright Directive. Nearly all of them replied with parrotted talking points from the EU Commission, as opposed to any kind of understanding of the issues I raised.
At the end of the day, EU Parliament representation is dilute and indirect. Unlike the democratic systems of most nations, elected EU parliamentarians cannot originate any new law. Only appointed (unelected) individuals within the EU Commission/Council can do so, behind closed doors if it suits them.
MEPs are on a lucrative gravy train and they generally don't want to rock the boat. If the Commission doesn't get a "yes" from Parliament, it simply makes superficial amendments and retries Parliament until the "yes" is received.
With the Copyright Directive, after a "no" vote in Parliament in 2018, the Commission literally put the same contentious articles (11 and 13) back in again for the second vote - this time under different article numbers (15 and 17), so all the public activism and criticism linked to the original article numbers would be orphaned. MEPs voted "yes" the second time, like the good, obedient MEPs they are.
sbszllr · 15h ago
Anecdata but I also had good experiences reaching out to MEPs, so not all is lost.
At its core, the core issue seems to be the lack of accountability between the MEP, and people that voted them in. Few people vote in the EU elections, and even fewer follow up on what happens there.
Chicken and egg problem but if you want your MEP not to be just "a good obedient MEP they are", the electorate needs to ask more of them.
cbeach · 14h ago
So we expect our public to care, and to engage with a Parliament in a foreign country, where elected representatives wield barely any power and cannot originate law?
Prior to Brexit, the UK had less than 10% of a stake in the European Parliament, so our 73 representatives had little effect on the overall system.
I didn't know a single person who could name their MEP.
Direct democracy at the national level is simply more engaging and relatable. It matters that the electorate, and their representatives are accountable for the outcomes of their decisions.
00__00 · 10h ago
Direct democracy in reality is people doing a mexican wave at a sports game.... anything more complex is doomed to failure!
00__00 · 10h ago
Those articles 13 and 15 may also protect you from AI thieving all your work!
jaoane · 13h ago
I’m sure they will have a good laugh. At your email I mean. They won’t pick up the phone.
otikik · 16h ago
Wow the irony is palpable
miohtama · 13h ago
A state where a police makes the laws is called a police state.
What is then called a state where a secret police makes the laws?
elric · 14h ago
The MEPs should put as much pressure as possible on them until the Commission stops this foolishness, abandons this proposal, and starts acting transparently. If they don't, the Commission should step down, as their Orwellian power grabby bullshit is not in the interest of their supposed constituents.
motohagiography · 16h ago
having seen this issue through the crypto wars and pgp, the patriot act, the FISA scandals, bullrun's various crypto backdoors and rng sabotage, the tls 1.3 foward secrecy controversies, twitter files, then vax passports and digital identity- these people just never go away, and there's always a new generation to replace them. it seems established now that people in tech need to be vigilant because that game is never not on.
transcriptase · 16h ago
There’s never a shortage of people who lacked a strong father figure and latch on to government authority to meet that psychological need.
weberer · 15h ago
Most of this stuff is done in secret without the consent of the public. Look at PRISM for example. Nobody voted for that, and it was a huge scandal when its existence was leaked.
account42 · 14h ago
Is something really a big scandal when no heads roll (metaphorically at least)?
bigyabai · 10h ago
Honestly, that's a prejudiced perspective and not even close to the reason surveillance persists anyways.
Go to your local Verizon store and try to find a product free from government surveillance. Anything that is more electronically complex than a phone charger will probably be spying on you. Portable hotspot? Backdoored. Modern tablet or phone? Backdoored too. WWAN laptop you installed Linux on? They collect your browsing data at the tower.
If Americans had en-masse daddy issues that encouraged surveillance then sufficient awareness could ostensibly "fix" the issue of privacy. But we can't fix it; the preeminent issue is that every business you spend your money on is unwilling to resist government coercion.
MangoToupe · 16h ago
Now that we have institutions devoted to spying on people and justifying it, there's no way this is going away through the normal mechanisms of government. You need to kill these things in their infancy or people accept them as normal. Folks working at the institution are invested in preserving it, and those jockeying to join the institution are incentivized to be more zealously bought in to the value of spying in the first place.
Are authors of proposals usually hidden? If not, why in this one? Where are the conservatives, that always argue that you don't need privacy, when you have nothing to hide?
nickslaughter02 · 16h ago
> Are authors of proposals usually hidden?
No and if they are not mentioned, you can request the participants via an information request. The Commission has failed at both. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44168505
rdm_blackhole · 14h ago
My biggest pet peeve in this whole thing is really the lack of foresight of these governments that want to create this dystopian future.
Think about it for a second, they would be creating a massive machinery intended to spy on all their citizens for dubious reasons, not thinking that if one day a madman/madwoman gets in power, they would have provided them with a tool that would enable this person to track and hunt down all potential political opponents.
By building this, they are effectively facilitating future political purges.
Hitler and Stalin would never have dreamed to have such surveillance capabilities.
aaronbaugher · 13h ago
They think they're far too clever to let that ever happen, so the tyranny (not that they'd call it that) of technocratic managerialism that they're pushing will never let other tyrants rise again. They also tend to buy into an "end of history" thinking that says the Smart People have figured out how to solve all the problems, so the only challenge is getting the dumb citizens to go along with it, or keeping them sated and sedated until it's too late for them to get in the way.
kaoD · 13h ago
They know. It's just their smugness telling them they will always be in power since they're the good guys and good guys prevail.
fuzzfactor · 11h ago
Sometimes what passes for "leadership" is "kind of" disappointing.
And when too many blind followers arise it can really get out of hand.
Exponential disappointment can be one ofthe most ominous things . . .
belter · 16h ago
I am all for the EU Commission mass surveillance proposals. Maybe then they will be able to find von der Leyen messages...
And then Europe/the EU commission has the gall to give lessons of democracy to other countries? What a joke!
seaourfreed · 15h ago
We need to build an encrypted internet to keep people secure.
* Secure version of Linux that keeps the end OS secure
* VPN companies tend to be owned by country intel services. Create a TOR equivalent for internet traffic
jrexilius · 15h ago
The main flaw is the enforced duopoly of iOS/Android for everyones favorite personal surveillance assistant. The secondary flaw is centralized control over transport layer access (internet really isn't decentralized anymore). And the last flaw is proprietary hadrware that controls the OS and transport layer access.
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
A technology based solution will only get you so far. You cannot win against people who control the law. What will you do when they decide to outlaw all VPN-like technology?
ekianjo · 16h ago
Some people get privacy at least!
perihelions · 16h ago
It's surreal, and dismaying, to contrast this surveillance push with recent Western reporting about North Korea digital surveillance[0,1]. Dismaying, because it shows (IMO) how our societal dialogues are helplessly stuck in a rut of doublethink—using one set of language to describe what the DPRK is doing, and entirely different language for the things the EU bureaucracy is doing, though they're the same things.
There's no daylight between North Korea's "dystopian reality" [sic] of capturing random screenshots of user devices, and the EU's mandatory data retention concept.
> In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance
Context: Under the EU's Chat Control proposal, your private messages (Signal, WhatsApp etc) will be scanned by an on-device AI agent. The current debate is around scanning images and videos but the original proposals called for analyzing all text too (I wish I was joking).
rdm_blackhole · 14h ago
You forgot to mention the best part, LEOs and MEPs and all militarily personnel would be exempt from this proposal thereby creating a two tier society where if you end up in the wrong tier, all your conversations will be watched by the government and in the other where you are free to say what you want.
This stuff is straight up out of 1984.
nickslaughter02 · 14h ago
Naturally. They know the agents will make mistakes and send your image or video to some underpaid cop somewhere along with all your details. It will be extortion galore.
amarcheschi · 15h ago
As far as I know, the latest draft of chat control doesn't include mandatory scanning anymore. I might as well be wrong though
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
It doesn't under the Polish presidency. Denmark is taking the lead from July and plans to push for the most extreme version (all scanning mandatory).
I wish there was more potent ways to veto suggestions like this. Perhaps people should, in a democratic way, have the ability to ban representatives that are pushing these ideas, and many other, from politics for life.
But perhaps there's no way to make that "democratic".
pmontra · 14h ago
Well, it's the core of democracy: the right of never ever voting for a given candidate again. What you are writing about is probably denying to some people the right of candidating themselves or even the right to vote. There are examples: one of them is Italy banning the fascist party after WW2 and the descendants of the royal family.
Excerpts of Provisions XII and XIII of the Constituton, easily googlable:
> It shall be forbidden to reorganise, under any form whatsoever, the dissolved Fascist party
> The members and descendants of the House of Savoy shall not be voters and may not hold public office or elected offices
I read that Germany banned a right wing party that recently won quite a large share of votes. I'm not sure about the extent of the ban and if it's a ban at all.
HPsquared · 14h ago
I wonder if it's a gambit to push for too much and sink the proposal. A compromise is more likely to pass, no?
nickslaughter02 · 14h ago
Even the original extreme proposal had wide support. The changes were offered only after Germany with Poland were against it IIRC. This is the state as of December 2024.
I don't like that Opposed / Abstaining are both green. Abstaining means they don't care.
amarcheschi · 14h ago
That's interesting. And sad
riffraff · 16h ago
Nitpick: doublethink is not about language, it's about keeping two contradictory ideas in one's mind and thinking them both true ("war is peace").
This is just plain "surveillance is bad when bad people do it, not when good people do".
amiga386 · 16h ago
Just rephrase as "surveillance is bad when bad people do it and surveillance is good when our guys do it" to get the self-contradictory doublethink.
If you want nuance, say that surveillance harms a person's privacy, and mass surveillance harms _everyone's_ privacy. You can then think up scenarios where you deem privacy invasion acceptable - for example, if you have reasonable suspicion a crime is being commited by a specific person, but not to put fear into the hearts of citizens and to spy on and thwart any organised resistance to your grip on power. You might then conclude that you should not perform mass surveillance as it's in keeping with the totalitarian approach.
sorcerer-mar · 15h ago
> "surveillance is bad when bad people do it and surveillance is good when our guys do it"
is not contradictory unless you assume everyone shares your premise that surveillance is intrinsically bad which, obviously, they do not.
amiga386 · 14h ago
It's contradictory because it posits "X is Y and X is not-Y" simultaneously.
Also, I did not say surveillance was intrinsicly bad. I said it harms peoples' privacy, which it does, even if you think that harm is justified or beneficial, even if you think privacy itself is harmful and people should have less of it.
sorcerer-mar · 14h ago
It is literally not contradictory.
"Surveillance-by-bad-people is bad. Surveillance-by-good-people is good."
We accept this for almost everything in society, FWIW. "Enslavement-by-bad-people is bad. Enslavement-by-good-people (i.e. of bad people) is good."
The moral valence of almost everything is conditional upon who is doing the action and why they're doing it.
You need better a better argument than that it's contradictory.
throwaway1004 · 14h ago
Distinction without difference: one would have to actually explain how surveillance is applied and leveraged differently across jurisdictions, allowing us to sub-divide into "good surveillance" and "bad surveillance", two different things.
Otherwise, we're talking about the inherit good-or-bad nature of surveillance as a whole and, thus, using the character of those applying it is irrelevant and contradictory.
The fact that many contradictory ideas are widely held or, at least, broadcast from the tallest proverbial hills, doesn't change the fact that they are contradictory. One thing all living generations seem to agree on is that politicians talk out of both sides of their mouth.
sorcerer-mar · 13h ago
> one would have to actually explain how surveillance is applied and leveraged differently across jurisdictions, allowing us to sub-divide into "good surveillance" and "bad surveillance", two different things.
You mean like... having laws written down by elected leaders and then having judges who are accountable to the electorate to evaluate specific instances...?
throwaway1004 · 13h ago
I mean examples in-practice of such a system being used for anything other than mass surveillance of citizens which flouts their constitutional and human rights.
>having laws written down by elected leaders
The EU commission is not elected by public vote.
>judges who are accountable to the electorate
Judges are not elected by public vote.
edit: neither are the think tanks, NGOs, and array of well-paid experts who tend to both guide legislation and/or justify it to the public. This discussion can go in circles indefinitely as long as you continue to ignore reality and defer back to abstract principles and the _stated_ values & goals of the regime.
amiga386 · 14h ago
Did you just claim slavery is good?!?!
There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
The ethic of reciprocity asks you to accept that "X harms Y" is the same as "Y harms X", while the totalitarian propaganda satirised in 1984 asks you to think of "them" and "us" and justifies immorality by claimimg it will benefit "us" and/or harm "them". The same theme ran through Animal Farm as well ("some animals are more equal than others").
It's still say it's doublethink to want to apply surveillance to some group of people but not others.
sorcerer-mar · 13h ago
> There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
Have you heard of prisons? We use a different word for it so as to not introduce the (obviously false) semantic "contradiction".
Perhaps if you want to say that forced labor is bad even after conviction, then let's say "kidnapping is bad when done by bad people, kidnapping is good when done by good people [to bad people]". Ta-da, you've invented prison.
throwaway1004 · 15h ago
True, though there is much emphasis placed on the link between language and thought in the book. As the parent comment suggests, there is a lot of tacit differentiation-without-distinction when it comes to issues of privacy, censorship, and governance.
I guess double-think is nothing more than an extreme form of cognitive dissonance being accepted by the masses, the interesting part is how this achieve in the book. Again, language & propaganda come first, then information control, followed by swift and brutal violence for dissidents.
mqus · 16h ago
If it helps: the EU ones are still just proposals (likely to ve struck down by courts), the north korean surveillance is already active(?)
account42 · 15h ago
And the EU ones will keep being proposals until they are implemented.
They absolutely shouldn't just be proposals. They should be scandals that make anyone involved have zero chance in future elections and unemployable anywhere near the political sector.
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
Unless news like this are all over mainstream media it's not going to happen. It doesn't make it even to most "tech" media.
rdm_blackhole · 14h ago
The last law that was deemed illegal (the data retention directive) took 8 years to be annulled by the courts. So the avenue of the courts is really not an option.
zx10rse · 14h ago
There is this scene from the movie Dark Waters that stuck in my head [0]
It's surreal and dismaying to see such a bogus comment at the top, especially since the BBC video about the North Korean phone is free of judgement, while they (and many other Western news) do report on Western surveillance critically, e.g. they called the Microsoft screenshots a "privacy nightmare" right in the headline...
MaxPock · 16h ago
Actually,reporting on NK or China's surveillance is usually because they are geopolitical adversaries not because they are dystopian.
So to think that the EU cares about freedom or privacy is to be naïve
wongarsu · 16h ago
The point is that reporting on NK's and China's surveillance of their own citizens is framed as dystopian. The framing only works if they claim that such surveillance is dystopian.
Of course elected representatives don't necessarily have the same opinions as news reporters. But you would expect consistency within the same publication
rapind · 15h ago
“This is absolutely horrific and they should be ashamed… so anyway, just out of curiosity, do you think we could do something like this?”
Hypocrisy at it’s finest.
chii · 16h ago
there's a chance that an EU citizen could fight back against these legislation.
And it is encouraged to do so. Privacy is agency.
MaxPock · 15h ago
The system is designed to make you think you have a chance.
Ask the 30 people arrested in the UK everyday for their social media posts what they think of this ability to "fight back".
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
It's not necessary to go outside of EU.
"In a despicable attack on the freedom of speech, a German right-wing journalist has been sentenced to seven months’ probation for mocking left-wing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser."
"The editor-in-chief of the news website Deutschland-Kurier was punished for sharing a satirical meme on his X account. The meme, which was posted by Bendels last February, shows Nancy Faeser holding up a sign, with the words: “I hate freedom of expression.”"
It's always funny (in a sad way) when a ruling should be admissible as clear evidence for the opposite ruling.
littlestymaar · 16h ago
> for the things the EU bureaucracy is doing,
While I agree with the rest of your comment, it doesn't make sens to talk about “bureaucracy” here, the Commission isn't a “bureaucracy” (which means unelected civil servants), and more like a government (the commission is proposed by head of European states and approved by parliament).
That doesn't change anything to the problem though, Western democracies have been doing creepier and creepier stuff year after years when it comes to mass surveillance.
stephen_g · 15h ago
You really seem to be reaching there. I think we should face it - the EC does anti-democratic stuff, and is appointed, not elected, and far enough removed from democratic control that it really can’t be (and shouldn’t have ever been) considered ‘democratic’.
Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
littlestymaar · 14h ago
> and is appointed, not elected
Like in pretty much every democratic government on the planet.
> Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
It is because the head of states kept that power for themselves (as the European Council).
If this nightmare of a bill passes it will be:
- 1. because the state leaders pushed for it as members of the European Council.
- 2. Because ministers of the Interior of all member states approved it in the Interior meeting of the Council of the ministers of the EU (also called simply “Council”, it's a distinct body from the “European Council” which regroups the heads of states).
- 3. Because the European Parliament approved it.
In all cases it won't be the fault of “bureaucrates” but of elected politicians (like how the Patriot Act or DMCA were bipartisan pushes detrimental to everyone's freedom).
stephen_g · 3h ago
> Like in pretty much every democratic government on the planet
What? Both houses of the Federal Government of my country (I’m not in the EU), as well as the state/province level and the local level are elected, and I know that is the case for many others…
account42 · 15h ago
> While I agree with the rest of your comment, it doesn't make sens to talk about “bureaucracy” here, the Commission isn't a “bureaucracy” (which means unelected civil servants), and more like a government (the commission is proposed by head of European states and approved by parliament).
This is at best a difference of degrees. Neither the commissioners nor the civil servants have their names on a democratic ballot or are otherwise considered in any real way during the election process but both are indirectly chosen by the elected government. The question is how many degrees of separation do you need before the democratic elections no longer have an effect on the rulers chosen at the end - and the answer is probably not that many.
littlestymaar · 14h ago
> Neither the commissioners nor the civil servants have their names on a democratic ballot or are otherwise considered in any real way during the election process
Neither is any minister in most democratic country. You don't get to vote for the Secretary of the Treasury or any member of the government directly in most systems. Presidential systems have an exception in the person of the president, who is personally elected, but everybody else is appointed and merely approved by the parliament.
In the European parliament, the EPP won the parliamentary elections last June, and they approved the nomination of the Von der Leyen Commission, like how the Starmer Cabinet got approved by the House after the Labour won the elections.
The real difference is that nobody really cares about the European parliamentary elections: in pretty much every country it works like some kind of intermediate election for national parties to assess their strength, and they don't really campaign as members of EPP or S&D and mostly as members of their own national body without any consideration for European politics. And that's quite a serious problem.
The EU has many institutional issues (most of them deriving from the fact that individual state leaders refuse to give more power to the EU), but the Commission members not being individually elected isn't one of them.
ReptileMan · 15h ago
You don't get it - in north korea is brutal dictatorship that oppresses their citizens. EU commission is fighting hate, discrimination, racism and disinformation. And protecting the children too.
p1dda · 15h ago
LOL funny! You really should end statements like that with sarc to make sure everybody understands though
ReptileMan · 15h ago
Where is the fun in that. And in a way a lot of the EU elite will sign under this statement with a straight face.
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
Their greatest achievement is that enough people actually believe that.
Geee · 14h ago
I think this is too serious issue to make such jokes.
Sadly this is their actual stance, and this is why everyone who opposes EU's overreaching policies are labeled as 'right-wing extremists'. In Germany they go as far as to try to ban these parties. It's an absurd repeat of history.
Such a law would in effect silence the voices who opposed the law, making way for even more totalitarian laws.
The situation in EU is incredibly sad and I'm not sure if it's possible to fight this.
rdm_blackhole · 14h ago
You forgot "Freedom of speech" as well but only the speech that is allowed otherwise you end up with the cops at your doorstep like in the UK when you post the wrong thing on social media.
ChocolateGod · 15h ago
> EU commission is fighting hate, discrimination, racism and disinformation. And protecting the children too
The ist and isms have been overused in both the media and social discourse to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 4h ago
They still mean something in serious discussions. If you find that media use seems to dilute the meaning of a term so as to be uselessly vague, consider the likelihood that it is intentional. (Very high, IMO.) The critical-thinking-not-allowed topics are especially interesting to pay attention to: who is served by devaluing the term?
locallost · 16h ago
It's not surreal, just human nature. Most people are not guided by principles. It might not even be that, but some people purposely have bad intentions and gaslight objections, and most of the rest are not interested to object and simply can't be bothered as long as their basic needs are met. If the answer to Stasi like espionage of citizens is outrage, but otherwise not because you have nothing to hide, then I conclude most people are content with living in a cage, as long as it's made of gold.
p1dda · 15h ago
Not saying you're wrong but that is pretty bleak.
jmyeet · 15h ago
I really feel like we'd all be better off if Manufacturing Consent [1] was required reading.
The media is complicit in pushing domestic and foreign policy, is selective in what it covers and how it covers it and intentionally uses very different language to describe the exact same thing (eg [2][3]).
I generally agree that what the DPRK does and what Europe (or the US) does isn't really that different. Dig a little deper and look at the role the West played in creating the DPRK and the intentional starving (ie economic sanctions) we enacted, just like in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Venezuela.
European (and US) history of the last century is the neoliberals siding with fascists to quash anything communist or communist adjacent (eg labor unions). Germany might've lost the war but Nazism won. Whatever you do, don't look too deeply into the background of Adolf Heusinger [4] who was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
Just to confirm, you believe the local media as perceived by their population (& by extension social media) has the same power to push back on policy in the DPRK as the EU?
nabla9 · 16h ago
>There's no daylight between North Korea's "dystopian reality" [sic] of capturing random screenshots of user devices, and the EU's mandatory data retention concept.
This is nihilistic BS and false equivalence.
EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.
stego-tech · 15h ago
> EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.
Take it from a gay American dinosaur: you cannot trust the courts to do the right thing. The court system of any country is the system of last resort to dealing with issues after they have caused harm or suffering, and by design they’ve been overloaded with grievances to make it harder to stop any institutional harms.
The right time to stop this sort of action is before it becomes law. Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career, nevermind letting it make it to an actual proposal or committee.
Stop putting faith in a court system operated by the same entities making the rules. You’re effectively waiting until the last possible moment to stop something after it’s done harm, which is highly irresponsible at the very least and does nothing to prevent harms from happening in the first place.
perihelions · 15h ago
> "Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career"
Well said.
It's a weak and stagnant variant of democracy, where people say (to paraphrase): it doesn't matter what the people think, or say, or believe; or how their elected representatives vote; because you can just count on the courts (or some other force external-to-democracy) to clean up and fix everything. That's not democracy. That's shirking the hard parts of civic participatory democracy—offloading the burden onto a small group of elites who aren't meant to be morally load-bearing.
You've *failed* at liberal democracy if you've reached the point where your popularly-elected representatives are floating the suggestion of North Korean-style panopticons. (Or anything else as antithetical to core human rights).
Liberal democracy, if it should exist, is a zeitgeist of strongly-held shared values—not (only) a set of legal technicalities codified in a document somewhere.
hcfman · 15h ago
The court system is zero integrity.
roenxi · 15h ago
Yes and that even seems to be missing the key issue - if a system's legislative body is hostile to basic tenants of liberal democracy then expecting the courts to act as a protective buffer is at best a stalling tactic to delay the inevitable by a few years. It is almost pointless fighting once that sort of law gets in, the powers that be think mass spying is OK and are committed to finding a way. The courts can't protect people from that sort of pressure, the only way to resist is to have people in power who think mass spying is bad. The US failed that test and it looks like Europe will too - very distressing for the prospects of the liberal project.
impossiblefork · 16h ago
But you say 'if it's not allowed', but not allowed by whom?
The courts aren't some kind of magic guarantors of justice and order, and something isn't okay just because the courts approve it. If this somehow is tolerated by the courts, the fact that we have them is irrelevant.
It's the policy itself that determines whether we are like North Korea.
mazurnification · 16h ago
"But you say 'if it's not allowed', but not allowed by whom?"
Not allowed by EU law obviously. Role of courts (in general) is interpreting law and thus deciding how said laws apply case by case. Law in EU flows down from EU treaties that where negotiated and signed by member countries. The big ones (treaties) needed also be "ratified" by country wide referenda.
numpad0 · 15h ago
My interpretation of parent comment is that, we shouldn't be just "themwashing" these powers, and start placing them under technical scrutiny more often.
impossiblefork · 15h ago
So laws are made by people, sometimes retired people, sometimes people.
So it's just another thing allowed by a person. Law isn't something magical with capability to make something not okay okay. Law is just someone allowing or forbidding something, with this having been incorporated into a sort of system.
sorcerer-mar · 15h ago
That... is exactly what [democratic] law is...
impossiblefork · 15h ago
I don't know exactly what you mean, since we have a representative democracy and since the governments enter the treaties and have strong influence over many parliaments it's really is very person focused in the end, even though it really shouldn't be.
A sensible world would have lots of referendums with the general public approving or disapproving of parliamentary decisions, à la Switzerland, but that is not the world we live in.
sorcerer-mar · 15h ago
But people can run for office on that change if they wanted to/felt like people actually wanted that.
The reality is most people don't want to think about governance all day every day, so we hire people to do it. Key thing is that we hire them.
Mtinie · 14h ago
> Key thing is that we hire them.
I do not feel heartened by this sentence, even though I should be. We're choosing from a pre-curated menu rather than truly "hiring" representatives. The real power lies with party gatekeepers, donors, and institutional barriers that determine who even makes it onto the ballot, not with voters making the final selection. It's more like being asked to pick your favorite from two restaurants that a food critic already chose for you, rather than having genuine choice over where to eat.
sorcerer-mar · 14h ago
In most democracies, you can literally go grab a clipboard and knock on doors and gather signatures to put your own name on the ballot.
Sure, power isn't evenly distributed and there are some obvious improvements we should pursue, but this does not a North Korea make
impossiblefork · 14h ago
and it's not incredibly practical. Instead those sit at the head of institutions, whether political parties, governments, etc. have real power.
It's a bit like saying 'so make your own Facebook', but that's pretty useless if it's a response to someone who feel that some big social media company is influencing public discourse and harming proponents of certain ideas.
You can't make your own Facebook, or organize a political party other than in response to slow phenomena, and here we're talking about something has until recently been seen as literally illegal-- against the founding principles of the EU, so this is a huge, sudden change which people have no chance of resisting in a representative system.
sorcerer-mar · 13h ago
Completely normal people win political power all the time, at least in the US where I'm familiar with it.
No they don't get elected to the highest offices in the land (nor should they), but you can absolutely work your way there from a clipboard.
josefx · 15h ago
The previous proposals ran into basic human rights issues. Changing laws related to those tends to be a lot harder than just passing jet another surveillance bill. Of course it still isn't perfect since those can be bypassed by "restricting" the use of the data to specific cases and then just ignoring the restrictions once the systems are in place.
ilumanty · 16h ago
Sure, but until the courts handle this, the damage is already done. Until that point, laws can be changed.
The problem is not that the EU doesn't have checks and balances, the problem is that politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place and drive the erosion of civil rights.
nabla9 · 16h ago
>politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place
That's always the case in well working liberal democracy. Or, Can you provide example when this is not a case.
That's why we have liberal democracy.
taylorius · 15h ago
"Liberal democracy". Have you tried voting out a member of the EU commission?
riffraff · 15h ago
You cannot vote out a single member of the government/parliament in many democracies, it is not an intrinsic characteristic of any system we call so.
nickslaughter02 · 15h ago
I would bet good money on that 90% of people from EU could not name a single member of the EU Commission.
account42 · 14h ago
I wouldn't bet on that. Zensursula is already a well known meme. Doesn't change the chance of her or anyone else in the commission facing any consequences.
nickslaughter02 · 14h ago
She is the president of the Commission, overseeing its work. I'm not sure if she's technically a member.
Anthony-G · 9h ago
I always figured that the president of the European Commission is a member of the European Commission but I wasn’t 100% sure if that is “technically” the case. I did some research and The list of Members of the von der Leyen Commission¹ clarifies that the president – along with the vice-presidents – are included among the 27 members of the “College of Commissioners”.
The ECHR and the EU charter have loopholes that basically say "unless stipulated by law and being necessary in a democratic society" or similar. This is why we already have extremely intimate surveillance by secret police laundered with some supposed petty crime as excuse.
The current regime demands too much bureaucracy and too many employees to be rolled out broadly, hence this push to do what they're already doing but on a much larger scale and just store the data until they want it. From the perspective of politicians it's already something that's being done, e.g. in the US surveillance programs and everyday policing and software from large US corporations and so on. They think the resistance from their subjects is infantile and stupid.
billy99k · 15h ago
...so I guess Brexit was a good idea after all.
nickslaughter02 · 14h ago
In a way. The UK has long waged war against encryption, mandating backdoors and weaking security of people. There's no doubt they would salivating over these proposals and voted for them.
The UK has implemented measures much more draconian than what this working group is even considering at the moment.
Perhaps it was a good idea, seeing as the UK was often a major supporter of plans like these, and that they are now no longer a threat to EU citizens, but Brexit certainly won't protect you if you're a UK citizen.
iamtheworstdev · 15h ago
are we pretending the UK isn't a pro surveillance state?
hulitu · 14h ago
> EU Commission refuses to disclose authors behind its mass surveillance proposal
They (the authors) pay well. Much better than some Huawei lobbysts or defence lobbysts. /s
"The paper calls for “a harmonised EU regime on data retention” that is “technology neutral and future-proof,” covers all types of telecommunications service providers, includes measures ensuring both retention of and access to data, and is “in full compliance with privacy and data protection rules.”
"The EU’s previous data retention legislation was struck down by the Court of Justice in 2014, which found that the law allowed for “a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference” with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. The court has confirmed this interpretation in several cases about national data retention measures."
"the paper calls for retention of data from “service providers of any kind that could provide access to electronic evidence."
"agreed upon the need for law enforcement to have access to data en clair"
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/1105a0ef...
11. "The creation of a platform (equivalent to SIRIUS51) to share tools, best practices, and knowledge on how to be granted access to data from product owners and producers. Building further on SIRIUS, this should be expanded to include hardware manufacturers in its mandate and to create and map law enforcement points of contact with digital hardware and software manufacturers."
22. "Developing a technology roadmap that brings together technology, cybersecurity, privacy, standardisation and security experts and ensures adequate coordination e.g. potentially through a permanent structure, in order to implement lawful access by design in all relevant technologies in line with the needs expressed by law enforcement, ensuring at the same time strong security and cybersecurity and providing for the full respect of legal obligations on lawful access. According to the HLG, law enforcement authorities should contribute to the definition of requirements, but it should not be their role to impose specific solutions on companies so that they can provide lawful access to data for criminal investigative purposes without compromising security."
26. "Establishing a research group to assess the technical feasibility of built-in lawful access obligations (including for accessing encrypted data) for digital devices, while maintaining and without compromising the security of devices and the privacy of information for all users as well as without weakening or undermining the security of communications."
I could quote the entire PDF but it's too long. In short, they want to expand surveillance on all fronts and mandate backdoors both in software and hardware. Read the PDF.
It is very carefully constructed exactly to prevent what you're talking about: leaking any kind of information about the data to someone who doesn't already know what the data is.
I mean, I do not have a link to a paper with a system like that, but I think a combination of FHE and enclave of sorts can be good for such purpose (leaving aside potential performance issues with FHE).
Edit "possible" as in very computationally expensive to do it on a mass scale
The links you provided are paywalled.
http://web.archive.org/web/20241210080253/https://www.ftm.eu...
Alternatively, the service providers like Meta can do it. We trust them with the end to end encryption anyway.
No we don't.
Despite all this, fuck the EU for consistently trying to undermined data privacy and introducing Kim Jong Um style mass surveillance. None of that shit protects privacy, as they claim.
No comments yet
No doubt we'll keep on giving lessons about these to non-EU countries anyway.
Russia? China? Iran?
The US has a democratic system where the President is ultimately voted for by an unelected electoral college who can refuse to vote for the candidate their state voted for and has ended up with the candidate with most votes loosing.
Then said president can change the countries top court on obviously political lines and re-interpret existing laws and the constitution.
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council
The European Commission has no need to play popularity contests, it's accountable to the heads of governments, not randoms on social media.
I don't particularly like the Electoral College - but the history and the cases when members voted against the people are interesting and in some (many?) cases, examples of checks and balances.
Checks and balances don't always align with your desires. That's a feature of democracy not a failure.
Presumably if my votes counted a million times more than yours, you wouldn't say it's still a democracy, right? The extreme here is obviously a single ruler whose vote counts more than everyone else's combined. Where do you draw the line here?
Sure, if by "democratic" you mean "people are allowed to file ballots".
Regardless, it's hard for me to see the senate and electoral college as very "democratic" in the sense of your vote mattering equally.
Many states now have "faithless elector" laws that require the electors to vote according to the populace's expectations of how the elector will vote in the college.
I wasn't trying to claim the US is non-democratic, I was pointing out to the author of the prior comment that the US system isn't perfect either.
Sure, but that's not the issue with current US administration, and it's dishonest to say that.
The issue is that checks and balances are literally, indisputably, being ignored. Ignoring court orders and doing illegal things is bad, actually. When Jackson defied Congress we at least had the decency to try to impeach his ass.
The current US administration is not only grossly incompetent and unqualified, as seen by the signal scandals, but they're also openly hostile to the democratic institutions of this country.
The EU actively engages in selecting and canceling heads of governments in EU countries. There has been 0 cases where the head of the commision was held accountable for something. Actually the current head has been found guilty by the EU court for hiding text messages. Who is going to hold her accountable and how ?
I m all for the EU but defending its despicable leadership with arguments that reverse reality is not doing any favors to anyone
Please link an example of the European Commission cancelling a government or election.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2025-0001...
Can you explain why you linked to these two links?a
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/former-censor...
A link to other website that also does not provide any evidence is not evidence even if it looks like a citation.
You mean the fellow who illegally received undeclared external foreign funding? More concretely, from Russia, a declared state sponsor of terrorism?
This is your democratic reference?
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council.
What's with the cult of personality? Why do you need someone worth talking about? For example, everyone talks about Trump for all the wrong reasons, does that mean that's worth it?
It just sounds like you don't know much about the EU.
I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia. Those comparisons with Nazi Germany and other oppressive regimes are just insane. They devalue words, and you just won't find the right ones when shit really hits the fan.
Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term, and has spoken about ways of achieving this. What makes you so sure he will leave office in 2028?
> I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia.
I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with Russia, Nazi Germany or other oppresive regimes. I asked the question about what other countries and organizations are in a better position to lecture about democracy.
Acknowledging that the USA is currently in an institutional and democratic crisis doesn't mean they're Russia; it means they're on the wrong trajectory.
Well given the ratio between what he says he would do and what he actually does I would not be much worried if I lived in US.
But, more to the point, much of what Trump has said and done has been downplayed until it actually happens. We can't just play pretend and cosplay Hellen Keller here. The insurrection, project 2025, these things are real and did actually happen. Despite being downplayed repeatedly. I mean, every Trump supporter on Earth has been calling Project 2025 anti-republican propaganda (but it's written by and for republican leadership?), and now that many part of it are being implemented verbatim - surprise! - it's what everyone wanted all along.
We cannot continue to downplay and underestimate this administration. They will do illegal things, they will threaten democracy, they will ignore court orders. If we cannot comes to terms with that reality, then we have no choice but to allow them to do these things.
Because Trump is just a blabbermouth. Sorry, but people are just indoctrinated from both sides. You can check prediction markets and see the real odds of Trump not leaving the office. Yep, there is a chance, but IMO it's around 5% max.
> I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with ...
Yes, I understand that US has democracy crisis. And so has the Europe! The problem is that there are no longer healthy examples in the world, except maybe smaller countries. Democracy as a thing is dying, but US are still holding the torch IMO.
Tell that to the deported people without due process for example, it's not blabbermouthing, these are concrete actions that affect people's lives.
I think there are plenty of healthy examples by all standards, other than the US, none of them are perfect, of course.
LOL what? Gambling odds have no relevance to this. Bookmakers are not working on any privileged information.
Same in the EU. In this very comment section there are people abdicating to the courts, saying they'll block this proposal. The EUs checks and balance also work slowly and not always in your favor.
One should try living in more than one country. After some time, one might realize, that the adjective "better" has no place in one's sentence.
But I'll take the bait, let's say someone who lived in Syria during the Assad rule and then changed to the US, will that person come to that realization?
No comments yet
Annual Deaths (Recent Years): - Mediterranean Sea 2,000–3,000+ (60% drownings) - Pushbacks/Frontex Several hundred (2,000 deaths linked to Frontex actions) - Land Borders/Camps Dozens to hundreds (Winter peaks, underreported)
There are by far too few NGOs or journalists looking into the despicable practices of the EU - but we Europeans definitely should not sit oh the high horse and preach about human rights to anyone.
It is a disgrace what we as a European people let our elected officials get away with.
For that reason it would be more embarrassing than anticipated if the authors were disclosed . . .
i've just yesterday uploaded my final essay for a uni course on ethics where i'm debating on chat control and i have to say that being unsatisfied with some commission moves is not enough. there would be a shitton to talk about, but i'll just leave here that:
-while chat control was being discussed, europol was already salivating at the thought of expanding the regulation scope to other crime areas (as they said, "all traffic is useful" or something like that)[1]
-the european commission bases his thesis on the efficacy on the data provided by thorn, but we don't have any actual information about the trustworthyness of this claims. the european commission refused to comply with a FOIA request and the ombudsman suggested to comply, but still the eu commission refused to protect commercial interest of thorn. eu ombudsman ruled the case as maladministration on behalf of the eu commission but it has no power to do anything else[2]. another foia request filed in a member state revealed some other documents that still do not give any insight to thorn software, so we can't trust it yet
-a few europol members moved to thorn, with one violating rules about conflict of interest [3]
[1] https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/189484
[3] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/200017
> The EU Commission is hiding the participants of the #EUGoingDark group meetings. I have requested lists of participants several times, but so far have only received completely redacted documents. (My Toot on Mastodon.) All that is known is that police forces and secret services are represented. Despite the highly sensitive topics in terms of data protection and fundamental rights, the EU Data Protection Supervisor only has the status of an observer. NGOs are not allowed to take part in the group’s meetings. While fundamental rights are muted, the #EUGoingDark group is planning to influence the EU Parliament with targeted surveillance PR.
Oh, at least he discloses upfront that "going dark" is an unofficial slogan from the opposition. Not sure if that's necessary, "High Level Group on Access to Data for Effective Law Enforcement" sounds sinister enough already.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/high-level-group-...
In autumn, the new Danish presidency will try to push through the original extreme version of #ChatControl 2.0"
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1145965873906841...
> Swedish commissioner (Ylva Johansson) pushing it
She has retired since. She faced major criticisms after refusing to meet any of the privacy focused NGOs and had regular meetings with Thorn, the US company selling surveillance software.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Why would we doubt these claims? North Korea, China, (Soviet) Russia, all of them were and are very effective at using surveillance against their population. Feel free to expand the examples, the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
We also doubt this claims because thorn might have published further data but guess what, we can't because there's no info about it
It is also reasonable to assume they use some kind of machine learning, (now we're entering speculation territory since we have few data about it) but the Ai act would require high risk ai systems - and I think a csam detection algorithm would be that - to comply with some requirements in regard to transparency for the product to be used
I know it's not the best, but still
"But the commission cannot do much – CBA [Central Anticorruption Bureau] management and the Constitutional Tribunal, packed with PiS [judges], are obstructing its proceedings. In such an environment, any work based on facts and merit is pretty much impossible.”"
https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/25/pegasus-in-poland-a-fli...
Stopping abuse is not to have that backdoor.
I suspect von der Leyen. She has pushed similar crap in Germany, and the temerity of not telling who proposed it is completely in character for her. She has told straight lies about her intentions before.
As in if you propose a law in a general area and gets shot down you cannot simply rewrite it slightly and once again pitch through attrition.
Something like 4 strikes and you can never bring it back to vote or for every proposal you lose a vote you cannot repackage the same core for the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
extreme capital concentration breeds this, and we had it happen everywhere.
I suspect there’s a universal desire for governments to want to spy on the people they govern.
government is just a higher level cop, protecting property.
It's far more difficult to do these kinds of things when people have the direct vote.
EU Digital Identity Wallet: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/E...
EU Age Verification: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
The same parties voted in 2011 to introduce mass data storage, where all international internet traffic can be stored and kept for 6 months by the state.
I see no reason to believe that either party would protect the right to private communication or internet use.
Which means all internet traffic that crosses the border at any point. So it practically includes all domestic traffic, too.
Is this wrong.
Meanwhile, Reform — a populist far-right party — is clobbering everyone in the polls.
On the far-right, we have authoritarian politicians openly mingling with fascists and neonazis. Le Pen in France, Reform in UK, whatever parties in Germany and Italy... Not to speak of the counties where they are _already_ in power like Hungary.
On the far-left we have... well actually, who is left enough that they'd be as "far" as the fascists and neonazis are on the right of the spectrum? I'm not aware of any party or politician with any sort of influence that'd be that far left. Is anyone proposing full-on marxism? USSR-style or chinese-style central planning (not that anyone on the left considers these a model to repeat)? The "communist" and "socialist" parties are wayyyy more centrist. The political horseshoe actually looks more like a hook.
I am from the UK, and follow UK politics closely. Seems I missed these "far right" policy announcements and neonazi affiliations?
I read one mention of a local councillor who'd shared an inappropriate post and was immediately suspended from the party. Is that how you're concluding that Reform UK is a nazi-adjacent party?
But if that's what you think then surely many left-wing parties in Europe must be far left, too. For instance when the leader of the main left-wing party (and 3rd largest party in Parliament) in France says that he wants to get rid of capitalism.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/newly-elected-reform-uk-counci...
"Far left" is simply people who want free and functional healthcare, working social security and basic rights. The far right has gone so far from the centre that anyone left of the centre is far from them, and the right in general due to it being stretched so wide.
This doublethink is so weird.
Not once, not in any debates, online, or in real life. It's truly a virus of the psyche. It is remarkable.
The original article is that we don't know who's trying to pass the surveillance legislation, because it's all anonymous!
This sort of thing is much easier to discuss when you can say "person X from party Y made proposal Z" rather than just chucking allgations around.
I speculate that this is a result of centrist/neoliberal establishment wanting to solidify control.
The extreme right is typically using failures like this as a political attack vector.
Try calling up, E-mailing or anything else with Dutch politians. No one will talk to you, answer your E-mails, allow you to call them. They make themselves unreachable.
At the end of the day, EU Parliament representation is dilute and indirect. Unlike the democratic systems of most nations, elected EU parliamentarians cannot originate any new law. Only appointed (unelected) individuals within the EU Commission/Council can do so, behind closed doors if it suits them.
MEPs are on a lucrative gravy train and they generally don't want to rock the boat. If the Commission doesn't get a "yes" from Parliament, it simply makes superficial amendments and retries Parliament until the "yes" is received.
With the Copyright Directive, after a "no" vote in Parliament in 2018, the Commission literally put the same contentious articles (11 and 13) back in again for the second vote - this time under different article numbers (15 and 17), so all the public activism and criticism linked to the original article numbers would be orphaned. MEPs voted "yes" the second time, like the good, obedient MEPs they are.
At its core, the core issue seems to be the lack of accountability between the MEP, and people that voted them in. Few people vote in the EU elections, and even fewer follow up on what happens there.
Chicken and egg problem but if you want your MEP not to be just "a good obedient MEP they are", the electorate needs to ask more of them.
Prior to Brexit, the UK had less than 10% of a stake in the European Parliament, so our 73 representatives had little effect on the overall system.
I didn't know a single person who could name their MEP.
Direct democracy at the national level is simply more engaging and relatable. It matters that the electorate, and their representatives are accountable for the outcomes of their decisions.
What is then called a state where a secret police makes the laws?
Go to your local Verizon store and try to find a product free from government surveillance. Anything that is more electronically complex than a phone charger will probably be spying on you. Portable hotspot? Backdoored. Modern tablet or phone? Backdoored too. WWAN laptop you installed Linux on? They collect your browsing data at the tower.
If Americans had en-masse daddy issues that encouraged surveillance then sufficient awareness could ostensibly "fix" the issue of privacy. But we can't fix it; the preeminent issue is that every business you spend your money on is unwilling to resist government coercion.
No and if they are not mentioned, you can request the participants via an information request. The Commission has failed at both. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44168505
Think about it for a second, they would be creating a massive machinery intended to spy on all their citizens for dubious reasons, not thinking that if one day a madman/madwoman gets in power, they would have provided them with a tool that would enable this person to track and hunt down all potential political opponents.
By building this, they are effectively facilitating future political purges.
Hitler and Stalin would never have dreamed to have such surveillance capabilities.
And when too many blind followers arise it can really get out of hand.
Exponential disappointment can be one ofthe most ominous things . . .
"EU's von der Leyen can't find texts with Pfizer chief on vaccine deal" - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-...
There's no daylight between North Korea's "dystopian reality" [sic] of capturing random screenshots of user devices, and the EU's mandatory data retention concept.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/108156-north-korean-smartphone... ("In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance")
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cewd82p09l0o ("Inside a phone smuggled out of North Korea")
Context: Under the EU's Chat Control proposal, your private messages (Signal, WhatsApp etc) will be scanned by an on-device AI agent. The current debate is around scanning images and videos but the original proposals called for analyzing all text too (I wish I was joking).
This stuff is straight up out of 1984.
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1145965873906841...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44168752
But perhaps there's no way to make that "democratic".
Excerpts of Provisions XII and XIII of the Constituton, easily googlable:
> It shall be forbidden to reorganise, under any form whatsoever, the dissolved Fascist party
> The members and descendants of the House of Savoy shall not be voters and may not hold public office or elected offices
I read that Germany banned a right wing party that recently won quite a large share of votes. I'm not sure about the extent of the ban and if it's a ban at all.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/sig...
I don't like that Opposed / Abstaining are both green. Abstaining means they don't care.
This is just plain "surveillance is bad when bad people do it, not when good people do".
If you want nuance, say that surveillance harms a person's privacy, and mass surveillance harms _everyone's_ privacy. You can then think up scenarios where you deem privacy invasion acceptable - for example, if you have reasonable suspicion a crime is being commited by a specific person, but not to put fear into the hearts of citizens and to spy on and thwart any organised resistance to your grip on power. You might then conclude that you should not perform mass surveillance as it's in keeping with the totalitarian approach.
is not contradictory unless you assume everyone shares your premise that surveillance is intrinsically bad which, obviously, they do not.
Also, I did not say surveillance was intrinsicly bad. I said it harms peoples' privacy, which it does, even if you think that harm is justified or beneficial, even if you think privacy itself is harmful and people should have less of it.
"Surveillance-by-bad-people is bad. Surveillance-by-good-people is good."
We accept this for almost everything in society, FWIW. "Enslavement-by-bad-people is bad. Enslavement-by-good-people (i.e. of bad people) is good."
The moral valence of almost everything is conditional upon who is doing the action and why they're doing it.
You need better a better argument than that it's contradictory.
Otherwise, we're talking about the inherit good-or-bad nature of surveillance as a whole and, thus, using the character of those applying it is irrelevant and contradictory.
The fact that many contradictory ideas are widely held or, at least, broadcast from the tallest proverbial hills, doesn't change the fact that they are contradictory. One thing all living generations seem to agree on is that politicians talk out of both sides of their mouth.
You mean like... having laws written down by elected leaders and then having judges who are accountable to the electorate to evaluate specific instances...?
>having laws written down by elected leaders
The EU commission is not elected by public vote.
>judges who are accountable to the electorate
Judges are not elected by public vote.
edit: neither are the think tanks, NGOs, and array of well-paid experts who tend to both guide legislation and/or justify it to the public. This discussion can go in circles indefinitely as long as you continue to ignore reality and defer back to abstract principles and the _stated_ values & goals of the regime.
There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
The ethic of reciprocity asks you to accept that "X harms Y" is the same as "Y harms X", while the totalitarian propaganda satirised in 1984 asks you to think of "them" and "us" and justifies immorality by claimimg it will benefit "us" and/or harm "them". The same theme ran through Animal Farm as well ("some animals are more equal than others").
It's still say it's doublethink to want to apply surveillance to some group of people but not others.
Have you heard of prisons? We use a different word for it so as to not introduce the (obviously false) semantic "contradiction".
Perhaps if you want to say that forced labor is bad even after conviction, then let's say "kidnapping is bad when done by bad people, kidnapping is good when done by good people [to bad people]". Ta-da, you've invented prison.
I guess double-think is nothing more than an extreme form of cognitive dissonance being accepted by the masses, the interesting part is how this achieve in the book. Again, language & propaganda come first, then information control, followed by swift and brutal violence for dissidents.
They absolutely shouldn't just be proposals. They should be scandals that make anyone involved have zero chance in future elections and unemployable anywhere near the political sector.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zoxxd6gM3oU
Of course elected representatives don't necessarily have the same opinions as news reporters. But you would expect consistency within the same publication
Hypocrisy at it’s finest.
And it is encouraged to do so. Privacy is agency.
"In a despicable attack on the freedom of speech, a German right-wing journalist has been sentenced to seven months’ probation for mocking left-wing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser."
"The editor-in-chief of the news website Deutschland-Kurier was punished for sharing a satirical meme on his X account. The meme, which was posted by Bendels last February, shows Nancy Faeser holding up a sign, with the words: “I hate freedom of expression.”"
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/proving-the-p...
While I agree with the rest of your comment, it doesn't make sens to talk about “bureaucracy” here, the Commission isn't a “bureaucracy” (which means unelected civil servants), and more like a government (the commission is proposed by head of European states and approved by parliament).
That doesn't change anything to the problem though, Western democracies have been doing creepier and creepier stuff year after years when it comes to mass surveillance.
Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
Like in pretty much every democratic government on the planet.
> Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
It is because the head of states kept that power for themselves (as the European Council).
If this nightmare of a bill passes it will be:
- 1. because the state leaders pushed for it as members of the European Council.
- 2. Because ministers of the Interior of all member states approved it in the Interior meeting of the Council of the ministers of the EU (also called simply “Council”, it's a distinct body from the “European Council” which regroups the heads of states).
- 3. Because the European Parliament approved it.
In all cases it won't be the fault of “bureaucrates” but of elected politicians (like how the Patriot Act or DMCA were bipartisan pushes detrimental to everyone's freedom).
What? Both houses of the Federal Government of my country (I’m not in the EU), as well as the state/province level and the local level are elected, and I know that is the case for many others…
This is at best a difference of degrees. Neither the commissioners nor the civil servants have their names on a democratic ballot or are otherwise considered in any real way during the election process but both are indirectly chosen by the elected government. The question is how many degrees of separation do you need before the democratic elections no longer have an effect on the rulers chosen at the end - and the answer is probably not that many.
Neither is any minister in most democratic country. You don't get to vote for the Secretary of the Treasury or any member of the government directly in most systems. Presidential systems have an exception in the person of the president, who is personally elected, but everybody else is appointed and merely approved by the parliament.
In the European parliament, the EPP won the parliamentary elections last June, and they approved the nomination of the Von der Leyen Commission, like how the Starmer Cabinet got approved by the House after the Labour won the elections.
The real difference is that nobody really cares about the European parliamentary elections: in pretty much every country it works like some kind of intermediate election for national parties to assess their strength, and they don't really campaign as members of EPP or S&D and mostly as members of their own national body without any consideration for European politics. And that's quite a serious problem.
The EU has many institutional issues (most of them deriving from the fact that individual state leaders refuse to give more power to the EU), but the Commission members not being individually elected isn't one of them.
Sadly this is their actual stance, and this is why everyone who opposes EU's overreaching policies are labeled as 'right-wing extremists'. In Germany they go as far as to try to ban these parties. It's an absurd repeat of history.
Such a law would in effect silence the voices who opposed the law, making way for even more totalitarian laws.
The situation in EU is incredibly sad and I'm not sure if it's possible to fight this.
The ist and isms have been overused in both the media and social discourse to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore.
The media is complicit in pushing domestic and foreign policy, is selective in what it covers and how it covers it and intentionally uses very different language to describe the exact same thing (eg [2][3]).
I generally agree that what the DPRK does and what Europe (or the US) does isn't really that different. Dig a little deper and look at the role the West played in creating the DPRK and the intentional starving (ie economic sanctions) we enacted, just like in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Venezuela.
European (and US) history of the last century is the neoliberals siding with fascists to quash anything communist or communist adjacent (eg labor unions). Germany might've lost the war but Nazism won. Whatever you do, don't look too deeply into the background of Adolf Heusinger [4] who was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://x.com/trtworld/status/1785959608168731091?lang=en
[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-how-media-langua...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
This is nihilistic BS and false equivalence.
EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.
Take it from a gay American dinosaur: you cannot trust the courts to do the right thing. The court system of any country is the system of last resort to dealing with issues after they have caused harm or suffering, and by design they’ve been overloaded with grievances to make it harder to stop any institutional harms.
The right time to stop this sort of action is before it becomes law. Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career, nevermind letting it make it to an actual proposal or committee.
Stop putting faith in a court system operated by the same entities making the rules. You’re effectively waiting until the last possible moment to stop something after it’s done harm, which is highly irresponsible at the very least and does nothing to prevent harms from happening in the first place.
Well said.
It's a weak and stagnant variant of democracy, where people say (to paraphrase): it doesn't matter what the people think, or say, or believe; or how their elected representatives vote; because you can just count on the courts (or some other force external-to-democracy) to clean up and fix everything. That's not democracy. That's shirking the hard parts of civic participatory democracy—offloading the burden onto a small group of elites who aren't meant to be morally load-bearing.
You've *failed* at liberal democracy if you've reached the point where your popularly-elected representatives are floating the suggestion of North Korean-style panopticons. (Or anything else as antithetical to core human rights).
Liberal democracy, if it should exist, is a zeitgeist of strongly-held shared values—not (only) a set of legal technicalities codified in a document somewhere.
The courts aren't some kind of magic guarantors of justice and order, and something isn't okay just because the courts approve it. If this somehow is tolerated by the courts, the fact that we have them is irrelevant.
It's the policy itself that determines whether we are like North Korea.
Not allowed by EU law obviously. Role of courts (in general) is interpreting law and thus deciding how said laws apply case by case. Law in EU flows down from EU treaties that where negotiated and signed by member countries. The big ones (treaties) needed also be "ratified" by country wide referenda.
So it's just another thing allowed by a person. Law isn't something magical with capability to make something not okay okay. Law is just someone allowing or forbidding something, with this having been incorporated into a sort of system.
A sensible world would have lots of referendums with the general public approving or disapproving of parliamentary decisions, à la Switzerland, but that is not the world we live in.
The reality is most people don't want to think about governance all day every day, so we hire people to do it. Key thing is that we hire them.
I do not feel heartened by this sentence, even though I should be. We're choosing from a pre-curated menu rather than truly "hiring" representatives. The real power lies with party gatekeepers, donors, and institutional barriers that determine who even makes it onto the ballot, not with voters making the final selection. It's more like being asked to pick your favorite from two restaurants that a food critic already chose for you, rather than having genuine choice over where to eat.
Sure, power isn't evenly distributed and there are some obvious improvements we should pursue, but this does not a North Korea make
It's a bit like saying 'so make your own Facebook', but that's pretty useless if it's a response to someone who feel that some big social media company is influencing public discourse and harming proponents of certain ideas.
You can't make your own Facebook, or organize a political party other than in response to slow phenomena, and here we're talking about something has until recently been seen as literally illegal-- against the founding principles of the EU, so this is a huge, sudden change which people have no chance of resisting in a representative system.
No they don't get elected to the highest offices in the land (nor should they), but you can absolutely work your way there from a clipboard.
The problem is not that the EU doesn't have checks and balances, the problem is that politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place and drive the erosion of civil rights.
That's always the case in well working liberal democracy. Or, Can you provide example when this is not a case.
That's why we have liberal democracy.
¹ https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-comm...
The current regime demands too much bureaucracy and too many employees to be rolled out broadly, hence this push to do what they're already doing but on a much larger scale and just store the data until they want it. From the perspective of politicians it's already something that's being done, e.g. in the US surveillance programs and everyday policing and software from large US corporations and so on. They think the resistance from their subjects is infantile and stupid.
"45 organizations and cybersecurity experts sign open letter expressing concerns with UK’s Online Safety Bill" https://www.globalencryption.org/2022/04/45-organizations-an...
"UK Government Denies U-Turn on Plan to Scan Encrypted Messages" https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/07/uk-government-plan-scan...
"UK’s secret Apple iCloud backdoor order is a global emergency, say critics" https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/10/uks-secret-apple-icloud-ba...
Perhaps it was a good idea, seeing as the UK was often a major supporter of plans like these, and that they are now no longer a threat to EU citizens, but Brexit certainly won't protect you if you're a UK citizen.
They (the authors) pay well. Much better than some Huawei lobbysts or defence lobbysts. /s