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...
We will protect your sensitive personal documents so that only trusted government institutions and ones held to the highest standards of privacy (such as banks) may have access to it. This is to prevent abuse and identity theft.
Also please upload them to BigBootyXXX.com if you want to have a wank
Speaking of which, the EU is also working on a "free speech" law for journalists and against them being arbitrarily banned by platforms. One would think this law could easily be extended to everyone since it is not at all trivial to determine who gets these benefits and who doesn't.
Most outlets today are some form of court reporter in one way or another. That trust in media is sinking is quite expected and in many cases reasonable too.
Or, put another way:
if(maxTerm >= 1) {
// law implementation OK!
}If the max is one year, it can't be more?
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
I think people at Experian should have gone to jail, for example, for their incompetence and negligence in regards data breaches.
Oh look, now you've got me doing it to you. Drat.
Foreign websites will be solved the great EU firewall that will inevitably come "to protect the rule of law" once these legislations are passed.
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
I agree with you that people should avoid using it, but I agree that the state should but out here. If you want to enforce this sort of thing, make it at the parental level.
Again malicious or lazy.
So this is a pretty practical solution to protect the kids without infringing on adults freedom per se, because even if some adults lose access, as I said, nothing of value is lost.
What's so bad about it? Production if often unethical and that's a problem but is there more? (and if production was the problem they wouldn't just put an age limit)
Is this about religion beliefs?
We're already seeing the massive over-blocking and encroachment starting, just weeks into the age blocking in UK's Online Safety law coming into effect.
Privacy is of no value because you decided that porn is bad for me?
By your logic, any laws that restricts or controls the supply, sale, or advertisement of any kind of material or content to children is against freedom of speech.
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
Stupid dumb law.
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
This effect can be clearly seen in that pornography websites promote this extreme, vile and obscure content, such as incest, exhibitionism, and even depictions of non-consensual interaction and physical abuse.[2] Obviously, these matters have no place in a healthy relationship, and it's pretty basic psychology that regular consumption of this content causes the normalization of such practices, especially in impressionable teenagers whom do not yet have legitimate experience in healthy, normal relationships.
A majority of adults watches pornography.[3] And we're dealing with a massive loneliness epidemic under younger generations, together with a significant rise in "hook-up culture" over forming serious relationships. Coincidence?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5039517/
[2] Just go to one of those websites. I'm not going to do that, neither am I going to link to that here.
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1402222/us-adults-pornog...
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
I think there are good arguments for claiming porn is more harmful than actual sex at that age, or at least some types or porn.
I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
But if latter's really the case, then why?
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.
It will be a sad day when that comes.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
Everyone (except China) failed to regulate that. So now we see overcorrection.
The solution is to regulate Meta and TikTok and YouTube. Until that is on the table we’ll get performative stupidity from both sides.
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
It's more a thing like "boomers who can't install stuff in their phones themselves (except for suspicious apps apparently) vs people who actually understand privacy with the normies on the side"
The Roman Empire banned private clubs, seeing them as a source of revolution.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
-----
That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14945805/Online-Saf...
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
In other words, your claims say more about you than France.
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.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
No. Most of the country professes no religion.
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.
- 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.
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
I think that's misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1]. Meaning that the Parliament can neither change nor reverse course - it is completely decided by the Council. All the Parliament can do is limit how fast that course is followed.
Edit: Sorry, what I wrote about the "Council" should have been about the "EU Commission" instead. The Council may in fact have equal power, as you wrote.
[1] Which I think (but was unable to explicitly confirm) extends to removing old legislation. I.e. the Council only has to get its way once, and then we're stuck with a law, unless the Council proposes to remove it. A ratchet.
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
EU Commission: Proposes legislation
EU Parliament: Approves legislation
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
The European Council is the heads of each member state. They are literally the people elected by each nation state domestically. If they don't represent the people, then that means national democracy is broken (which I agree with in cases like the UK) but I'm making a more general point.
Point is that these people are very far removed from elections and political consequences. They also seem to be the types who have no idea what "normal" people are like.
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.
If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.
IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.
In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.
Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
No, in the 1980s, dissident voices had platforms. They weren't "mass media" platforms but they definitely had radio shows, periodicals and various publishing channels to disseminate their publications and broadcasts. They were incredibly important in those days, and those sources held some amount of power, in that they could expose a story, and effectively force the rest of the media to cover a subject or event they otherwise would have ignored.
This is worse in every way as it /completely/ locks them out the modern market of ideas that is the internet and ensconces prior restraint into law in a way that violates the civil liberties of every citizen, whether they are the publisher, or the consumer.
We have lost control of the internet. Those who have control intend to turn this world back into a fiefdom with their newfound power. They are otherwise working to keep the rest of the population in fear and distracted. I'm genuinely afraid our past luck will fail to hold out. They've spent 20 years to get to this point. I don't see them giving up.
This would just end anonymity for normal people. All of the bots and bad actors will have no problem with comitting a crime because they are literally criminals.
In no way do I support this surveillance society, or legislation, but I just wanted to make a casual point. I'm from a country where the internet first came through universities, and I was privileged to be there at the time. Those early days when it was just university students (and other staff) communicating over IRC were, nostalgically, wonderful. And everyone knew who everyone on IRC actually was in real life. Sure, there were the usual flame wars and some trolls, but it felt personal and, just good.
I'd love to go back to those internet days - bit of course I'm aware that is an elitist attitude, because I was part of the "in group" at the time.
The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
This alone tells me which way I should weigh in on this law. They know what they're doing.
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.
Just as you must work each day if you want money, you must oppose tyranny each day if you want liberty.
They will always want more power over you and you will always have to fight them because of that.
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
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").
The one where citizens don’t regress into comfortably lazy nihilism as a first response.
Join Vatican City!
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
America has been trashed not by Covid but by the precedence being set that partisan violence can and will be pardoned.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
I don't care about either side's excuses to ignore civil rights and freedom.
One side seems busy with taking democratic institutions down, I wouldn't be surprised if freedom is next anyway. (well freedom of opinion is already disappearing)
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
https://gagliardoni.net/#20250805_chatcontrol
Big politics is not my thing, so for me the big effort was: 1) understanding who, among the zillions of politicians we have, could have a direct role in the decisional process and how; 2) searching and collecting the email addresses; and 3) funnily enough, picking the right honorifics (for example, I was not aware that "Onorevole" is reserved only to certain figures in Italian politics).
I shared the resulting effort on my website, in the hope of making life easier for fellow Italians who want to do the same.
> *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.
These guys have been at it for a while.
The Establishment really don't like how they're not in control of what everyone hears or sees any more. It used to be so cozy for them.
It's a tremendous opportunity, presently.
Power is never before so easily gotten.
Fight: Collaborate, Empathize, Reject division.
Just a friendly reminder that it was millenials who brought us censorship, cancel culture and other totalitarian bs. People who are older today, saw nearly absolute online freedom and miss that, not some "nostalgic reactionary politics".
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.
F that noise.
This is obvious.
Get out of EU.
Now.
Now they just need to find a reason to brainwash the general public to sleepwalk into fighting another war.
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.
Many of them support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Notable_s...
They're afraid of losing their job or being painted as someone who supports terrorists, pedophiles, or other criminals.
After all exempting some police, that work on investigating child molesting, from the scanning, that is understandable.
Exempting prime minster Mette Frederiksen, on the other hand. Means either that they understand that it undermines security, or that she or some other top politicians are child molester. So which is it?
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.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"
Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
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.
That is what a scam looks like.
In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.
As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
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.
So there might be a right to privacy or freedom of speech enshrined in law, and the only way to change it would be for 90+% of the population to agree to change it. That way, it'd only take a minority disagreeing with a bad law to make it impossible to pass said law. Reactionaries and extremists would basically be defanged entirely, since they'd have to get most of their opponents to agree with any changes they propose, not just their own followers.
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.
...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.
Having empathy for your neighbor, and working with those whom you disagree, are precursors. This gives power.
Then using power to enact consequences for businesses and governments (the people therein), fixes the problem.
1984 would be incomplete without the hypocrisy of "rules for thee not for me".
Watchlist? Easy.
Mislead? Easy.
We need to isolate this bad behavior ASAP.
Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".
Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.
But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
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.
> Problem is climate change and other problems make change inevitable.
That's a convenient argument for people who want to push unpopular changes.
What's more sad is that the general public has also responded that they are OK with this. Dissenters have become to be though of as a problem that needs to be corrected instead of as an indicator that what the government is doing is wrong.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/preparatory-bo...
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
[2] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/mpo/2025/9/law-e...
[4] https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVIII/EU/26599/imfname...
I encourage everyone to at least contact your MEPS, x775's effort makes that part easy.
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If so, that is the real solution, because it works in all cases.
Encrypt your data locally before it is uploaded to a service that scans your private communication. This is most likely how the child abusers will do it too. And therefore the law will be ineffective at fighting sharing of child abuse material on the internet.
Not sure any purely wireless system would scale that well either since every message floods the entire network. Ideally for wireless you just want wireless to the closest grid connected node to connect to the internet.
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.
Just putted it here, for easier reading.
Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
Why is this Thought Policing tolerated?
Are we so End Stage Growth Economy that EVERY power broker see now as the time to employer (IC)Enforcement?
Gestapo much, anyone?
Because it's what everyone and their mother was calling for during covid to fight the dangerous <label> for opposing authoritarian policies.
Because we have to stop Russia, the republicans, extremists, anti war protests who are actually just <label>, because we have to protect kids, or fight racism...
It was all bullshit and people loved it. Now it's almost too late. If you don't reject it all and fight authoritarianism regardless of party alignment, you're not going to change any of this.
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
Beautiful land and country, but they're destroying their cultures with the third world and seem to just not care about the rights of their citizens.
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
Ultimately the US government's key escrow fixation largely faded away, and it was never clear whether it would stand up in the courts, but it still shows up from time to time.
It's quite possible that this would conflict with the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon treaty) if passed, too; for a prior example see the defunct data retention directive, which was nuked by the ECJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
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.
The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
For now.
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 went deep into this rabbit hole and did a lot of reading on how this org is pushing it's agenda in EU.
I hate this Hollywood idiots with burning passion.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
After all Chat Control hasn't actually passed yet.
Lets just put everybody in the world in prison except for the people with net worths over some unattainable threshold… perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. Then we’ll just make everyone work for and take all of it for ourselves. That way we cam destroy their cultures and the genetic lineages and we can just kill all the people we dont like dont agree with especially if theyre skin color is one we dont agree with. The world will be a better place because the clearly superior people will be on top. We can breed the rest of humans and just eat them. We’ll call them eloi and we’ll be the morlocks.
Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.
It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.
Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
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.
On a serious note, I think EU was a good idea but it has decayed a lot, especially after how the Greek crisis was handled and because of multiple legal design flaws. It needs a big restructuring, otherwise it will continue to decline and be used as a dumping ground for unpopular laws like Chat Control.
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.)
This doesn't help, Chat Control scanner run directly on your device. It doesn't matter which chat program you use.
> ... providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content [1]
Even if that were the case, the answer is the Framework phone
And scanning end-to-end encrypted is only possible on-device.
And of course the next step is that the EU will mandate that every device needs to implement this scanning, they are very aggressive with this stuff. Framework phone won't help you in this case, this is obviously the next step. That's why we have to fight against it. Reminder that soon online age verification with an app that can only be downloaded from the Play Store and used within a "trusted environment" (e.g. SafetyNet) will be mandatory.
The point is that the site, contacting your local MEP, and all the discussion in this thread, is pointless to affect some kind of durable societal change
Pointing out that it's vibe-coded just emphasises that all of the above actions are just low-effort cope
Can't enforce everyone to scan
What are you going to do? Arrest everyone?
Just like in any other authoritarian state, you make examples. People will quickly learn how to self-police (and to turn enemies in).
> 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.
Regulate the politicians.
Can someone explain how they could read my e2e Sessions chat message sent via TOR to my wife about what I'm cooking for dinner?
Genuinely curious. Can those that are in power break this encryption?
That doesn’t break your comms today - but later, you replace your phone, can you get a current copy of the app?
That comes later with ProtectEU.
"Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption"
https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...
Effectively it causes the same loss of security and trust as if they broke the encryption, but it allows them the fig-leaf of pretending that you're still secure because they "haven't broken the encryption".
I wasn't expressing an opinion in that comment but I do find the whole concept terrible.
I think the way it could work is to send a letter to each of the messaging apps saying that they are now legally required to use the EU’s encryption keys and make the messages available to the EU.
Then they would make it so that the apps that don’t comply are not available in the app stores by pressuring google and apple respectively.
I think this is the reason why for example telegram is not end to end encrypted by default - as some regions require them to be able to access users info.
Software you’re using on your own wouldn’t be effected, but wouldn’t necessarily be legal either.
People who are technically savvy could get around it, but the vast majority of people just assume that their private messages are private.
They can break encryption by stealing keys from your device, or by pwning your device, or by introducing backdoor into the chat client for every user.
Purely P2P communication isn’t affected.