Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
Asking people to risk fighting from a throwaway account has to be the epitome of hypocrisy.
lucideer · 53m ago
A little context here since this website is highly misleading:
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
x775 · 25m ago
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
beberlei · 43m ago
Came here to say the same thing, confused how a website like this can be made, the people behind it must have not understood how the EU works.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
Disposal8433 · 1h ago
I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
lucideer · 59m ago
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
f_devd · 1h ago
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
tatjam · 1h ago
Looking at the supporting members, this appears to be supported by "both parties" across many many countries, what a sad thing to unite over...
Vinnl · 40m ago
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
medlazik · 37m ago
Not sure what you call the "so-called left", but the actual left (LFI) certainly doesn't support Chat Control
OldfieldFund · 24m ago
probably they call "so-called left" the liberals
wazoox · 35m ago
Actually no, every MEP doesn't support it, the government's position is attributed to all MEP from the country, which is silly.
dabber21 · 1h ago
what are the arguments?
realusername · 1h ago
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
KennyBlanken · 52m ago
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
rdm_blackhole · 38m ago
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
jraph · 12m ago
It's not because you personally hate the idea of having a state that people who want a strong state are helpless.
Let's keep the discussion respectful.
> in the end the state usually wins.
Yep, the current government couldn't not care less about listening to its people. And fails at putting enough money where it matters most: education and health care.
realusername · 24m ago
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
Centigonal · 1h ago
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
ragmodel226 · 1h ago
This is a defeatist and damaging attitude. It detracts from the core issue at hand, which is EU government forcing code being run in private messaging apps over data before it is encrypted. It defeats the security model of end to end encrypted messaging, and leads to a society that cannot trust its communications against government interference ever again.
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
nosioptar · 1h ago
I'm unaware of Sealand[0] engaging in surveillance against its citizen.
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
r33b33 · 23m ago
yeah, Japan
101008 · 1h ago
I was very pissed at this, and when I read this part I couldn't continue, it boiled my blood.
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy.
You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
amarcheschi · 1h ago
If it hasn't been changed, not only politicians but law enforcement officers too would be exempt
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
jaharios · 38m ago
A lot of actual pedophiles will be exposed if it was used on politicians, we don't want that.
echelon · 31m ago
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
Security is worth half a shit these days and Five Eyes can't remotely access everybody's phone without it getting noticed by people. So they need to keep transport insecure.
api · 23m ago
For over a decade now there’s been a huge global shift toward authoritarianism, and to some extent it’s grassroots. My speculation is that this is a time of unprecedented change and that scares people. We also have aging populations due to lower birth rates and older people tend (on average) toward nostalgic reactionary politics.
moffkalast · 23m ago
I would not be surprised if it's the US pressuring everyone else. Thiel is probably salivating to get a deal for Palantir to implement it.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Teever · 10m ago
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
r33b33 · 27m ago
They are gearing for WW3 and population control.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
cloudhead · 36m ago
This.
zwnow · 1h ago
What a surprise, they are also paid a handsome pension after having worked in EU parliament for a few years, 4 I think. Most of us have to work for 40+ years and dont even get good retirement money
lordnacho · 1h ago
Can't make this shit up.
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
whatevaa · 55m ago
You would get labeled a "potential criminal". See some comment from police labelling Graphene OS users as criminals.
Steganography exists and is undefeatable, though very low bandwith.
shark1 · 55m ago
It's like any other crime. They cannot stop you from stealing, for example.
By doing it, you will not be a lawful citizen.
AlecSchueler · 45m ago
You mean "an illegal?"
amarcheschi · 57m ago
It doesn't say how AFAIK, although it's been a few months from when I read the original proposal. If I'm not wrong it would delegate that to service providers - the organizations managing the apps, telegram, meta, whatever the name of the foundation for the signal app is ecc
dachris · 52m ago
Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.
rdm_blackhole · 52m ago
This is only the first step in the process. First they will force all messaging/email providers to implement the scanning. Those who refuse or decide to leave the EU as Signal said they would do, would end up being unlisted from Google Play or the Apple (EU) app store.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
cbeach · 25m ago
ProtectEU sounds incredibly dark. Do you have a source for the information regarding on-device scanning? I had a look but only found the bureaucrat-speak overview and they didn’t discuss details.
rdm_blackhole · 46m ago
Even if you compile your own version of Signal, will your friends do it too? Will your grandma/grandpa do it as well? It only takes one person in the chain to be compromised by using the "real" app and then all your efforts would be defeated because now your messages have been exposed by this other person unknowingly.
bqmjjx0kac · 33m ago
Do phones have trusted execution environments? I suppose you could require the recipient provide attestation that it's running the expected binary. Of course, this is pointless if the hardware manufacturer shares their root keys with the government.
JoshTriplett · 40m ago
> the "real" app
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
Who are the organizations fighting chat control which one could support with a donation?
lostmsu · 12m ago
Pick any decentralized IM project
isoprophlex · 1h ago
God fucking damn it not again
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
9dev · 1h ago
They only need to succeed one time. People are generally preoccupied with a lot of other things right now, so maybe this is their lucky shot…
impossiblefork · 25m ago
They actually did succeed once, with the data retention directive. That got annulled by the CoJEU.
zubspace · 1h ago
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
pessimizer · 1h ago
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
Telemakhos · 59m ago
Is there no way to codify a negative right, like “The right of the European people to privacy in their communications and security in their records through encryption shall not be infringed?” Negative rights reserved to the people should be more important than positive laws granting power to the government.
No comments yet
Stevvo · 31m ago
This rule can really hurt. e.g. Theresa May tried passing a deal to keep the UK in the Customs Union. The speaker wouldn't allow it because the same deal had previously been rejected, even though she now had the support for it in the house.
KennyBlanken · 1h ago
cough Patriot Act cough
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
dlcarrier · 20m ago
It's not even a partisan issue; spying on the constituency is one of few issues that has broad bipartisan support.
You could vote for a libertarian, but good luck.
swayvil · 16m ago
The arrival of AI has made mass surveillance pass a certain threshold. Now we're just a step away from aristocrat heaven.
ath3nd · 1h ago
They generally don't and won't stop until there are real repercussions for that, like losing your political career/being canceled in society over voting for it.
mantas · 1h ago
The problem is people behind the curtains will just pick another figure head. And we can’t even get the names who want to get rid of privacy. Since names of people pushing it were redacted for their privacy :D
morkalork · 1h ago
When the people orchestrating something like this can hide behind a veil of anonymity as well as bestow exemptions from monitoring upon the political class, it looks deeply wrong and conspiracy worthy. :D indeed.
Geezus_42 · 1h ago
The exemptions for politicians is straight out of 1984.
idiotsecant · 58m ago
The fascist, autocratic impulse is a big in the human firmware and will never go away. We exist constantly balanced on the razor edge precipice because we are capable of little else. Self-governing humans are not a stable system.
swayvil · 20m ago
Serfs and lords is pretty stable. But ya I get yr point.
mantas · 1h ago
As Juncker, ex president of European Commision said, you keep trying till it passes at some point. Good luck revoking it later…
uncircle · 1h ago
Ah, the marvels of modern democracy. No serious way to enact change, politicians still do whatever the hell they want, and we still believe that voting for someone else will change things.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
calvinmorrison · 1h ago
it effects lots of organizations. the left contingent of the PCUSA basically did the same for a decade to change rules. When they finally got the language passed it caused a large rift.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
croes · 1h ago
People don’t want change.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
mantas · 27m ago
People don’t want change, yet politicians are pushing sleazy changes left and right.
Change like straws ban and attached caps? Such change, wow.
charcircuit · 1h ago
You can keep trying to revoke it until it passes too.
mantas · 28m ago
Yeah, right. I wonder if revokers would have same privacy as those who try to pass it…
mustaphah · 44m ago
The EU: proudly defending human rights… unless you're trying to send a private message.
dachris · 49m ago
Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.
thesdev · 40m ago
The individual MEPs' positions are wrong, it's not 1:1 with the national government's position as the website suggests.
nomilk · 35m ago
Laws generally recognise the sanctity of privacy - for example, so much as looking at someone for too long can be deemed sexual assault in some jurisdictions - yet law makers wish to legislate they be able to view everyone's nudes (and much more)! Weird contradiction.
alphazard · 39m ago
So what is the real solution? Meaning the solution that an individual could use themselves, without further coordination, to insulate themselves from this policy. Is it an Android distribution? Jailbreaking? Custom builds?
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
r33b33 · 22m ago
Solution is to move or cause resistance obv
setnone · 58m ago
Excellent resources section [0] including "Digital technologies as a means of repression and social control" study from European Parliament
nitpick but the number of MEPs is not the same in some countries (Slovakia, Spain and a few more) on the summary card and on the representative list
latexr · 33m ago
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
shark1 · 52m ago
It's impressive how governments never quit trying to implement this harmful idea.
pmlnr · 1h ago
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
tough · 1h ago
you cannot enforce law globally online
there's no internet police
pessimizer · 1h ago
You didn't even need the word "online." There's no global police.
futurecat · 1h ago
Thank you for sharing.
midasz · 40m ago
As disappointing as my national government (NL) has been and still is, at least our MEPs oppose this dragon of a proposal.
rendall · 52m ago
The landing page really should have an open graph image! It would help with sharing and promotion.
cobbzilla · 1h ago
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.
grunder_advice · 1h ago
Europe never abandoned the elitist mindset of a ruling elite lording it over the masses.
RickS · 53m ago
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
Where is the difference to the US, China or the UK?
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
cobbzilla · 1h ago
The US, at least, has a Bill of Rights that would make this illegal, it would definitely violate the 4th Amendment and maybe the 1st too.
cobbzilla · 1h ago
That said, it’s not all roses in the US. There are many backdoors the government uses like issuing subpoenas to tech companies to get their data. Sometimes (like the notorious NSLs, National Security Letters) the order is secret and the company can’t even talk about it. This is also why the Snowden revelations were significant— arguably what the NSA is doing (mass, untargeted surveillance) is illegal, but so far (iirc) courts have said nobody has standing to challenge it. Various groups are still trying.
impossiblefork · 17m ago
The EU also has laws that make it illegal. It annulled a previous law with some of these provisions, the so-called Data Retention Directive.
rwyinuse · 52m ago
I'm not convinced the US will even have fair elections a couple of years from now. Do those amendments really matter, when those in power are doing everything they can to break down the rule of law, and turn the country into yet another autocracy?
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
NitpickLawyer · 1h ago
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
No comments yet
9dev · 43m ago
It takes a firm believe to still pretend the bill of rights would be adhered to. You have a convicted criminal as president with ties to child traffickers, taking foreign bribes on live TV, scamming voters with crypto, while punishing universities for teaching the wrong things and imprisoning people without due process for having the wrong opinion.
All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
Are you sure you want to make this point?
croes · 1h ago
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
pessimizer · 1h ago
> The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
Nifty3929 · 1h ago
I hope you're right.
lawn · 1h ago
The administration and the people will just shrug and move on, like they've done with all the other crap they've shrugged at.
ahoka · 1h ago
The difference is that PRISM was done as a black op, and this is out in the open.
ronsor · 1h ago
The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
rrr_oh_man · 1h ago
> The UK is politically, culturally, and geographically close to Europe.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
octo888 · 47m ago
> The latter is also debatable
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
peanut_merchant · 1h ago
I get that maybe you meant culturally, but Ireland is a member of the EU whereas the UK is no longer. This forces a tighter alignment so makes your point about Ireland redundant.
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>Closer than to the US?
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
pmlnr · 1h ago
> The UK is politically,
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
rdm_blackhole · 1h ago
This is the kind of shit that makes my blood boil. Privacy for thee not for me. The EU is not worth saving if this this is the kind of crap they pull. Fuck all the politicians behind this!
r33b33 · 12m ago
Leave the EU. Let them rot.
9dev · 39m ago
No, that’s the worst conclusion to draw. The EU is the only hope we have if we don’t want to become a toy for the US and China.
We need to save the EU from these people!
0x000xca0xfe · 23m ago
They already see us as a toy. Even Russia can't take EU serious.
We could have economic and military cooperation without this circus.
It's not even actually democratic and veto powers of tiny countries like hungary have turned common foreign policy into a joke.
actionfromafar · 11m ago
Wasn't Ireland threatened with not being allowed in (a hypothetical) EU 2.0 at some point, unless they backed down on some issue.
gardenhedge · 16m ago
there's no 'saving' the EU imo. I would consider voting to exit if given the opportunity
ukprogrammer · 22m ago
HN applauds this vibe-coded “privacy” site yet condemns decentralized messaging.
States control what’s centralized; incentives ensure they keep doing so.
Protesting it is like arguing with a thermostat—it can’t hear you, and it’s built to tighten control.
As technologists, we have a lot more power than we realise.
(Yes, I’m speaking to the blob, but the Venn overlap of anti-crypto and pro-this seems big.)
drapado · 6m ago
Genuely curious. What would the problem be if it was vibe-coded? It's an easy to read site that succeeds in communicating what it wants.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
- EU Council holds more power in Europe than EU Parliament
- EU Council is pushing this regulation
- this website misrepresents the positions of most members of EU Parliament - it shows "Supports" despite most of them being "Unknown"
Overall, while people should be encouraged to contact their MEPs, I suspect many are already very informed on this & strongly opposed. Whether Parliament will end up having enough power to stop it is a different question.
If Germany is listed as "Undecided" then this is in the Council. The 96 MPs are from a wide spectrum of parties and most of them will already be either for, or against this.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
Let's keep the discussion respectful.
> in the end the state usually wins.
Yep, the current government couldn't not care less about listening to its people. And fails at putting enough money where it matters most: education and health care.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
This is one of the many abuses by Leo(s), part why I don't love and trust police in italy: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatti_del_G8_di_Genova#p-lan...
I thought there was an English Wikipedia page but there isn't, translate it
America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.
We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.
We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
That said, the UK doesn't need much convincing in this regard I suppose, they've always had their fair share of extreme laws along these lines and Leyen has personally dreamt of this for ages.
Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?
Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?
The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.
Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
The Danish government (currently holding the rotating chair) also raised the pension age for everyone. Other than themselves.
But also, how does this get implemented? What's stopping me from using, say, Signal, which being OSS would likely have a single line I could comment out and compile for myself?
How would I get busted for that? Or I could get clever and have AI generate some random chat text to send to the government while I send the actual text to my friends?
Steganography exists and is undefeatable, though very low bandwith.
Then the second phase is coming by 2030. Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
This will be forced on Apple and other manufacturers directly.
The backdoored app will hopefully not be called Signal, since Signal themselves would never do this. I hope they own a trademark on it and could enforce it against anyone who would try to upload a backdoored version under their name.
People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.
What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.
That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
This is, what, the fifth time in ten years they try to pass shit like this?
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.
It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.
It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)
I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
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...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
You could vote for a libertarian, but good luck.
It’ll soon be like the UK, that if you campaign against this kinda stuff, the party in power publicly calls you a paedophile. Because only people with something to hide want privacy.
Privacy is a losing proposition. Governments have the perfect trojan horse (child safety) so it’s only a matter of time before massive surveillance is the norm.
The difference is that one is not obligated to be part of a presbytery and can leave. The presbytery doesn't have guns.
If really someone gets the power who wants to change things they fight them too.
People want that everything stays the same. Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
Change like straws ban and attached caps? Such change, wow.
It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.
Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
[0] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/resources
> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.
In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.
Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.
Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)
I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.
Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
there's no internet police
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtrNXdlraM
Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.
But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement
EU may be sliding towards feudalism, but America is definitely farther down that road than we are. Current administration's relationship with tech billionaires is a concrete proof of that. I have no faith in politicians of either part of the world.
1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.
4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.
5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
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All the while SCOTUS elevated him above the law; now he actually could shoot somebody on fifth ave and he’d really not have to fear prosecution.
Are you sure you want to make this point?
Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.
Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
I don't think they do. They have constitutions that guarantee "Freedom of Speech" or "Expression," but don't define those terms in any way. I don't know that any of them lack legally prohibited political speech laws.
I feel the US was the origin of this "Hate Speech" nightmare that has been growing to encompass all of Western politics over the past 30 years, but the irony is that you can do slurs all day long in the US, to anybody you want, whenever you want. You will probably be ejected from the premises, though. In the US, the speech still has to be connected to a crime. In the EU, the speech itself is the crime.
China has always been authoritarian (and hyper-centralized).
The US is working hard to copy bad ideas from authoritarians, but can't do it in exactly the same way, otherwise the ability to criticize the EU, UK, and China is lost.
Closer than to the US?
I'm not sure about the first two. The latter is also debatable, at least from the UK's point of view. Ireland feels closer to Europe than the UK does.
Only in terms of perception or semantics or applying a huge negative weighting to a bit of water and ignoring boats, trains and planes exist. But then you say...
> Ireland feels closer to Europe
So are you slyly conflating Europe and the EU?
Some crazy person might say this is really subtle "UK isn't part of Europe" propaganda similar to that in the lead of up Brexit
The UK has continuously been pulled between it's dying imperialist vision of itself as a world power, it's close but conflicted ties with the US, and it's similarly close and conflicted ties with the EU.
Much closer. It's a unitary state with a monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, it's highly centralized economically and culturally. It's more European than much of Europe. Post war Germany, republican and decentralized economically is structurally more like the US than Britain. The only reason people in the US tend to identify with Britain is Anglo-Protestant identitarianism.
Britain in reality operates a lot like France or Russia, an overwhelmingly strong capital and grand historical old world nationalism with relatively weak constitutional or formal limits on government.
Europe generally has constitutions, and not precedence laws, which is a massive difference.
> culturally
Debatable. As a Hungarian, living in the UK.
> and geographically close to Europe
This one is true.
We need to save the EU from these people!
We could have economic and military cooperation without this circus.
It's not even actually democratic and veto powers of tiny countries like hungary have turned common foreign policy into a joke.
States control what’s centralized; incentives ensure they keep doing so.
Protesting it is like arguing with a thermostat—it can’t hear you, and it’s built to tighten control.
As technologists, we have a lot more power than we realise.
(Yes, I’m speaking to the blob, but the Venn overlap of anti-crypto and pro-this seems big.)