The US Congress Judiciary Committee is pushing US tech companies, such as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and X, to provide access to ALL communications with European Commission officials that relate to the enforcement of EU digital rules, in letters sent Monday. 🚨🇪🇺
The committee said its subpoenas require that documents are not deleted or modified, and that it expects “full compliance.”
Behold, the CLOUD act in practice.
The trigger was a statement by Prabhat Agrawal, the EU Commission's lead Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcer, who told civil society groups in February that his colleagues had switched from email to Signal under US pressure, with messages set to auto-delete.
The Judiciary Committee states that its earlier subpoenas cover auto-deleted messages as well, and demands full compliance.
This is why we have to choose #opensource, European alternatives. 🇪🇺
There is a glaring non-sequitur here.
1) Yes, “[Prabhat] Agarwal said colleagues have also started sending messages via Signal, an encrypted app, rather than email, and many now have messages set to auto-delete, with the “auto-delete timings getting shorter.”“
2) Yes, USians are targeting and collecting communication among people in the EU. Both for profit and for power.
3) Yes, The US is demanding US companies surrender all communications with EU officials, which is what this news story is about.
But 1 protects against 2, not 3.
No way would US companies and EU officials collaborate on secure platforms like Signal, limiting the view of the US government. This would suggest the US companies want to secretly collaborate with the EU against the US.
All of the US companies are active participants in the fascist regime. They will happily surrender all communications, so the subpoenas are not a signal to them, but to us.
PS: using Signal (or Wire ;) always makes sense. For civilians. For civil servants, having official communications on auto-delete is probably an offence. https://www.heise.de/en/news/EU-admits-existence-of-signal-group-chat-of-EU-foreign-ministers-10353877.html
Yeah, the only problem with the completely reasonable agreement of transparent and auditable communications between parties, is that the US is very much unreasonable. I would argue under its current fascist regime, it is actually (hopefully temporarily) insane.
Still, we should in my opinion from our side, discuss amongst ourselves without US interference or access. So without a single piece of software which can give the US leverage or control.
And we should at the same time communicate with them in full transparency. No better way to expose fascists than in the full light of day.
@Gina The problem probably arose because Jordan and co-conspirators have no clue about how any of this works, or what words mean.
[skipping over “white (male) privilege is the opposite of meritocracy” rant, aka “most leaders are fools”]
So they saw that statement about the use of Signal by EU officials, and apparently assumed secret back channels with US companies.
Gina
â â µ avuko
caffetino
tyil