End of “Chat Control”: EU Parliament Stops Mass Surveillance in Voting Thriller – Paving the Way for Genuine Child Protection!

The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe is coming to an end. After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterda

Patrick Breyer

> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.

> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.

[flagged]
They literally just voted it down. Twice in 2 days. Also compared to whom?

> They literally just voted it down. Twice in 2 days.

And they will try again tomorrow. Until it passes.

> Also compared to whom?

Why compare? The fact that there are worse regimes than the EU doesn't make the EU even a single bit better. Lesser evil is still evil. Let us strive for good.

"They" being the member states. The EU is the institution preventing them from implementing it, not enabling them.

You're inverting roles here.

Just look at the UK and how crazy they've gone now that the EU can't shoot their ideas down anymore.

> With every new proposal, every vote, they are closer to the totalitarian regime. Proposals can be declined a million times, but the EU regime is always finding sneakier and more manipulative ways to push again and again.

... I mean this is how all parliamentary systems work. It's more _visible_ in the EU than in others, I think, because the council/commission are more willing to put forward things that they don't really think the parliament will go for (in many parliamentary systems, realistically the executive will be reluctant to put forward stuff where they think they'll lose the vote in parliament).

But there's not really a huge difference; it would just be _quieter_ in most parliamentary systems, and you wouldn't really hear anything about it until the executive had their votes in place, brought it forward, and passed it. I actually kind of prefer the EU system, in that it tends to happen more out in the open, which allows for public comment. And public comment and pressure is a huge deal for this sort of thing; most parliamentarians, on things they don't understand, will vote whatever way their party is voting. But if it becomes clear that their constituents care about it, they may actually have to think about it, and that's half the battle.

> We should all just leave it and maybe try again in a few generations with entirely new premises.

Nice try troll. Given your views and username might it be a stretch to assume you align more with the eastern side of governance ?

> At this point, the EU can't be fixed. It has to be abandoned completely, both as an idea and as an implementation. EU requirements were wrong, architecture was worse, and the implementation was the worst.

Dying to see your citations for these.

"What did the Romans ever do for US?" :P

We already don't have free speech. There's nothing protecting it (and many laws already to the contrary.) There aren't really any such constitutional protections from what I can tell.

Once laws are passed they aren't revoked. So it's just a matter of political climate. Just wait for people to get a little more negative, a little more paranoid (which has historically been "helped along" in various ways)-- a law only needs to pass once, and then we're stuck with some stupid bullshit forever.

It doesn't really seem like how you'd want to design it.

"fascism" has a pretty well defined meaning, which is not whatever the EU would become if something like chat control ever passes. Towards totalitarianism, sure, but again not all totalitarianism is fascism. I wish people would stop using le mot du jour as a replacement for everything in an subconscious need to increase others' engagement.
The timing of having Meta dropping encrypted chats on Instagram is...interesting.

"Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification."

Trilogues should be burned down, closed doors meetings with Ministers writing laws from their own services.