EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eu-parliament-greenlights-chat-control-1-0-breyer-our-children-lose-out/

by rapnie • 14 days ago

1636 818 14 days ago

patrick-breyer.de

miroljub4• 13 days ago

And so, step by step, in the name of child protection and similar excuses, we lose liberties and rights one by one.

Welcome to the Brave New 1984 We World. Big Brother loves us.

We are living through the time best described by Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley.

Otek• 13 days ago

Slippery slope is fine and all but do you have any constructive argument?

ywvcbk3• 13 days ago

Slippery slope is not a "fallacy" by default. It can be occasionally but its a perfectly reasonably argument in plenty of cases.

netbioserror• 13 days ago

What "constructive" argument is anyone supposed to give about authorities having warrantless access to all private conversations?

ekjhgkejhgk• 13 days ago

"Slippery slope" does not by itself invalidate an argument, because slippery slopes do exist.

miroljub4• 13 days ago

Constructive argument? Just disband the EU as a whole, including all laws, treaties, contracts ...

Europe would be a much better place if the EU stayed what it was, a trade union of sovereign nations without any political power over the people.

netsharc2• 13 days ago

Man, the EU is supposed to be the beacon of liberal democracy (after the light of Reagan's shining city on the hill is now truly extinguishing), but with shit like this, it's really making enemies left and right (metaphorically and spectrally).

hsuduebc23• 13 days ago

Exactly. I consider myself euro federalist but bullshit like this creating a very strong antipathy.

If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.

I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.

dachworker• 13 days ago

Here's a thought: maybe liberal democracy was never very free.

graemep5• 13 days ago

The EU exists mostly to promote economic liberalism and free trade.

It started out as a purely trade arrangement, then evolved to become a broader union.

inigyou11• 13 days ago

Chat Control 2.0 is in the name of child protection. This one, 1.0, is just in the name of pleasing big tech.

petcat• 13 days ago

I don't want to hear about the EU's "strong digital privacy" laws and protections ever again.

Y-bar2• 13 days ago

Multiple things can be true at the same time.

There can exist strong consumer protections against misuse of their personal data by various entities.

And there can simultaneously also exist governmental overreach against citizens private data.

The world is complex, few things are truly binary.

3997531578• 13 days ago

No, "strong digital privacy" and "governmental overreach against citizens private data" is mutually exclusive.

BSDobelix5• 13 days ago

But now you have governmental overreach and legalized spying on European Citizens by (mostly) US Companies, so i would say that Law is truly binary bad.

Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.

But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.

joenot443• 13 days ago

In this case, the phrase “consumer protections” is almost insulting when the things it’s supposedly protecting us from are a triviality compared to the horror show being introduced.

phendrenad22• 13 days ago

There will surely be some people who applaud your post for pointing this out. But the vast majority of people don't see "government spies on me" vs "private industry spies on me" as a meaningful distinction and there are MANY MANY recent examples of this: the discourse around Flock, the discourse around ICE using personal information to trace dissenters, the discourse around DOGE and Palantir.

But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.

ibejoeb4• 13 days ago

There can be, but this isn't it. In the EU, a company can't send you an email, but it can read your email.

frollogaston2• 13 days ago

Already was done hearing that day 0, before the cookie banners started showing up.

Fizz43• 13 days ago

Do you think people should have privacy from the government? That exists in a completely different realm than privacy against a private company.

Squarex• 13 days ago

Secrecy of correspondence is a pretty old concept.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

Roberta Metsola's actions this week jeopardise the legitimacy of the EU project as a whole.

It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them

EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above

miroljub4• 13 days ago

Yes, this basically means the EU pushed a new censorship regulation using lawfare tricks without ever having a majority vote for the proposal.

If it's not a dictatorship, a regime, a shithole, a kleptocracy, or whatever name they use for a government they don't like, I don't know what it is.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

The regulation was rejected today with 314 votes against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions, but because of Metsola's lawfare that classified this regulation as under an "urgent procedure", an absolute majority was required to reject.

inigyou11• 13 days ago

Chat Control 2.0 is the censorship regulation. Chat Control 1.0 just legalized what Facebook was doing anyway.

dbdr2• 13 days ago

It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.

superloika• 13 days ago

it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them

Haha, no. As long as there is bread and circus, nothing wil happen.

riddlemethat• 13 days ago

This removes circus from the children.

bluebarbet• 13 days ago

This comment does not add any value to the discussion.

PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.

attila-lendvai5• 13 days ago

well, bread is running our at beakneck speed...

that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...

Vinnl4• 13 days ago

To understand whether/to what extent this is brazen, I'd be interested to learn the reasoning why urgency procedures are possible, and in particular, why the apparent majority against shouldn't have been enough, and what is needed to classify something as urgent.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

Afaik, EU rules provide for urgent procedure only for proposals at first reading, while here it was used to compress a second reading vote and skip committee, just perfectly timed for the last sitting before recess.

The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.

To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.

CrisMystik5• 13 days ago

The urgency procedure is not the issue here, the problem is that this was Parliament's second reading, and the treaties (article 294 TFEU) say:

Second reading
7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:
(a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;
(b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;
(c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.

nick486• 13 days ago

I'm really surprised at the hurry. The EU, and many EU governments, have been ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.

It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.

blame-laundering mechanism

Also, I'm stealing this.

lopis• 13 days ago

Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.

matly• 13 days ago

At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else). Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.

sReinwald• 13 days ago

at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.

This isn't surprising to me at all.

The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.

inferniac2• 13 days ago

for no apparent reason, lately.

for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do

this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)

obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent

attila-lendvai5• 13 days ago

for no apparent rason? the way they are preparing to bring the population into a war hardly can be any more apparent...

cess112• 13 days ago

It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.

strideashort• 13 days ago

The reason is more than apparent.

So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.

shevy-java2• 13 days ago

I'm really surprised at the hurry.

Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.

Lobbyists are winning the war.

znpy• 13 days ago

My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.

I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.

coldtea4• 13 days ago

with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn

They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.

elictronic3• 13 days ago

Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.

I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.

natebc• 13 days ago

Didn't Steve Bannon do a tour in Europe recently to dispense some of his strategy?

This smells like him, honestly.

ClumsyPilot5• 13 days ago

at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason

So many reasons: unpopular wars in the Middle East, repeated embarrassments in international arena, domestic unrest, decadent elites…

HeartStrings• 13 days ago

The reason they do this is preparation for war. Also, foreign influence bots and hostile active measures.

quotemstr• 13 days ago

ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately

It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.

sunshine-o• 13 days ago

What should worry everybody is the big picture (trying to abstract from politics, ideologies and specific situation). In recent years we had:

- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)

- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)

- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating

- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)

So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.

There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.

onemoresoop• 13 days ago

EU is doing some concerning moves but, looking at your points, Russia attacked Ukraine. EU is not at war with Russia, only supporting Ukraine.

Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.

lyu072824• 13 days ago

Isn't it interesting that if you remove the US from that list, it all aligns with US foreign policy? How fortuitous that EU interests just happen to coincide so well with our American friends.

koiueo• 13 days ago

There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around

Nukes

ClumsyPilot5• 13 days ago

- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating

For which there is no good reason and which is extremely stupid

There has been zero aggression from China towards Europe and zero chance of military confrontation.

Most of the sanctions that were implemented under pressure from Us have backfired on Europe (but not so much on US)

European politicians are going around the world and telling India not to trade with Russia while Israel trades with Russia, etc.

CrisMystik5• 13 days ago

The urgency procedure has nothing to do with the absolute majority requirement. It's necessary because, in the second reading, the Parliament should have an absolute majority to reject or amend the Council (i.e. the governments of the member states) position but only a simple majority to approve it

techpression• 13 days ago

They've been doing this with unpopular votes since the inception of the EU, nothing new and people definitely haven't woken up, unfortunately.

lyu072824• 13 days ago

Its honestly a bit sad that this in particular got people up in arms on social media, nobody gave a single shit when they sacrifice millions of people and entire nations on the periphery to their death cult of market orthodoxy.

The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.

tenthirtyam• 13 days ago

I think I'm one of those to whom you refer (except that I'm already "awake", or at least I like to think so). I'm normally pro-EU but this chat control is anathema to me. I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

zelphirkalt5• 13 days ago

Yeah, this is also a step too far for me. The EU has also done good things, like GDPR, right to repair, fining big tech again and again ... but it rarely follows up as much as it needs to.

The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at least contains the economically most powerful EU countries, so that we have enough economical weight, that the other big players cannot simply push us around. Currently, the EU seems to be hellbent on losing its support. But how to prevent that other union to go down the same road?

Anyway, it seems clear, that we can no longer allow EU decision makers to make rules for us. They are not to be trusted.

LtWorf8• 13 days ago

I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

You mean the far right that talks about EU all the time and loves when EU does things like this?

vaylian2• 13 days ago

I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

You shouldn't go that far. Simply don't vote for the EPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party_Grou...) in your country. They are the driving force behind this. Other parties have mostly voted against this (depending on the country)

__turbobrew__• 13 days ago

I don’t understand how a governing system requires a majority to reject a change to the status quo. The status quo must be maintained unless a majority decides to change the status quo.

It is the equivalent of having a gas pedal in a car that is fully activated unless you put your foot down.

largbae• 13 days ago

This article seems to make good points about how useless and invasive Chat Control 1.0 is, but then posits Chat Control 2.0 as the answer. Is the latter not also terrible for privacy, demanding backdoors in all encrypted chat tech?

londons_explore3• 13 days ago

The proponents argue that those backdoors are a good thing because then the government can keep you safe from people saying nasty things.

bigyabai3• 13 days ago

You're asking a community that couldn't decide if Client Side Scanning was safe and private at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741

Surveillance is a branding issue. If you wrap a shit in crepe paper and Corinthian leather, most people will admire what an artist you are.

londons_explore3• 13 days ago

The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services, where there is no company at the middle to tell you add backdoors.

Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.

hsuduebc23• 13 days ago

Or you can just host your own server like IRC. This is beyond idiotic, if they think that pedophiles will begin to suddenly use WhatsApp then I very much doubt about their basic literacy.

Such a weak reasoning and method which they used to push this is ridiculous agenda lead me to strongly suspect there must be something else behind it.

inigyou11• 13 days ago

Session was recently shut down due to lack of funding.

True P2P implies knowing the IP addresses of the people you're talking to.

Stagnant• 13 days ago

Session was supposed to be shut down at start of July but looks like they got enough funding from donations to keep going for now.

londons_explore3• 13 days ago

Or it can be many-server, with tens of thousands of server operators and one selected at random.

Only the server operators then know your IP, and they don't know who you are or what you're saying.

betaby2• 13 days ago

The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services

Spain would label you criminal for merely using alternative Android builds: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...

attila-lendvai5• 13 days ago

Simplex

https://simplex.chat/

dabber212• 13 days ago

Not P2P but Delta Chat

giobox• 13 days ago

I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.

https://meshtastic.org/

pbgcp2026• 13 days ago

The defence against this is to vote these MF MEPs out and kick asses of non–elected Eurocrats. Not going to happen. Tech solution: Open GPG with PQE protocols. There is nothing else left (other than One Time Pads.) And this is just the beginning. With LLMs and AI they will have resources to scan every character we type.

mrtksn2• 13 days ago

FTA:

What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:

*What is coming back:* US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.

*What remains unchanged:* Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.

*What is still NOT being scanned:* End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.

So, E2E is unaffected?

lrae• 13 days ago

Yes.

Chat Control 2.0 was the big one in those regards.

(Also, LOL @ Skype mention.)

mrtksn2• 13 days ago

Then I'm not very moved about this. I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another. What I care is not having a backdoor for E2E, i.e. like client-side scanning telling me what I am allowed to talk about like with the LLMs. CSAM excuse is a great excuse to turn every conversation to what we have with AI today.

raverbashing2• 13 days ago

Are my AIM chats safe?! /s

bombcar• 13 days ago

Don't downplay Skype, as Teams is still just rebranded Skype for Business (LYNC).

scotty792• 13 days ago

Are the messages to LLMs scanned (beyond normal collection for future training purposes) or is that just for human-to-human messenging?

KETHERCORTEX• 13 days ago

Yes. I see no reason to think otherwise.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

The Internet Watch Foundation, the group, funded almost entirely by big tech, who pushed for this vote to be held under emergency procedure, is already at work lobbying for the end of E2EE [1].

In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.

[1] https://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/end-to-end-encryption-and-k... [2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

ratorx• 13 days ago

Do you have source for IWF funding being by big tech?

Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)

Ruphin• 13 days ago

Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?

If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.

fnord123• 12 days ago

This is really strange since the European Commission strongly recommends that staff use Signal[1].

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26073615-c-2025-5430...

zrn9004• 11 days ago

At this point we have no choice but to conclude that the Eu has been subverted by megacorps as badly as the US political system has been.

phito• 13 days ago

Does this apply only to new messages or also to history?

nonethewiser• 13 days ago

Skype?

sneak2• 13 days ago

What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.

They are already allowed to do this, and already are doing this. When you provide data to the service provider in a non-e2ee fashion, it's their data as much as it is yours. They can scan it, data mine it, analyze it, whatever.

omnimus8• 13 days ago

This is the whole point though. They are allowed to do this because of the original chat control from 2021 which was temporary and expired in march. Without chat control it is very debatable what companies can legally thanks to eprivacy directive.

IanCal2• 13 days ago

They aren’t allowed to do whatever they want with your data, there’s strict restrictions on requiring consent for things you want to do with user data.

EagnaIonat• 13 days ago

So, E2E is unaffected?

Because its an extension of an existing bill.

After the whole internet lost its mind about Apple CSAM scanning and being horribly off target, I'd recommend to ignore news reports and go to the sources when making an opinion.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=COM...

The only issues I can see is the error rate for non-CSAM scanning and how the latest vote was conducted.

Although the scanning part, it is still law enforcement that has to review that information and determine if there is a case. Most of the those are teens sharing naked photos with other teens.

miohtama• 13 days ago

Guess what's coming next:

Overview
End-to-end encryption is a term used to describe blocking or preventing any third-party recipient from viewing, reading or becoming aware of information that one individual has sent to another. In response to growing concerns about online data security, many technology companies are adopting this strategy with potentially dire circumstances.
The use of end-to-end encryption would prevent the companies or any third-party from detecting illegal activity occurring on their platforms, including the activity of people who use the internet to perpetuate online demand for graphic sexual abuse material of children.
We believe personal security is extremely important and support efforts to improve online privacy. But, if this solution is implemented with no exceptions for detecting child sexual exploitation, millions of incidents of abuse will remain hidden, leaving these young victims without any help or protection from these horrific crimes.

https://ncmec.org/theissues/end-to-end-encryption

tomerlir2• 13 days ago

E2E is unaffected... For now

sylware2• 13 days ago

And your REALLY think E2E is going to "protect" you?

If the "services" want to watch, don't worry they will, "they don't need your password". But I guess they "do" that only for the very baddies, aka child exploitation, human trafficking, terrorists, killers, drug dealers, etc.

We all know here that "information system security" does not exist, this is a fantasy: there is only some "best effort" with a wide spectrum of compromises. If somebody talks to you about "deliverable security", that guy wants to sell you something.

E2E will protect you only against John Doh, "hacker only on Sundays". And we better keep that in mind.

exfalso2• 12 days ago

What are you talking about. You think service providers can backdoor aes-gcm? There will always be technology that they cannot get around. The only way to backdoor is to explicitly change the encryption.

pelagicAustral• 13 days ago

Rest assured, someone is already working on circumventing this. Necessity is the mother on invention.

one33seven• 13 days ago

Sure. The criminals and political enemies of the EU will just use illegal chat apps and hardened phones. What about the others though?

attila-lendvai5• 13 days ago

the rest? they comply, or get labeled a criminal.

innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

They don't need to use "illegal chat apps". They can just use Signal or Telegram, or any of the other ways that exist to send encrypted messages.

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

You don't need to do any work to circumvent this. This law is just continuing the status queue that's existed in the EU for 5 years.

To avoid being affected by this law, you can just download Signal, or use any other encrypted messaging service.

make_it_sure• 13 days ago

what are the actual consequences of that? they can read any Whatsapp encrypted chat? What changes?

hsuduebc23• 13 days ago

As far as I understand this. It basically gives the company providing chat services the possibility to scan your messages.

simiones2• 13 days ago

FTA:

What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.

inigyou11• 13 days ago

Discord recently had an AI malfunction that resulted in square grids getting detected as CSAM and reported to cops.

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

Literally nothing changes. This is the continuation of a temporary law that already existed.

like_any_other2• 13 days ago

In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding: [..] Strict security standards for messaging apps (“Security by Design”) to prevent cyber grooming.

It's dispiriting to see a supposedly pro-privacy politician launder backdoors as "strict security standards".

vrganj7• 13 days ago

I think they mean local scanning for CSAM - which feels like a reasonable solution that preserves privacy, but still addresses the real problem of, y'know, child abuse?

simiones2• 13 days ago

What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?

Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?

like_any_other2• 13 days ago

Weaponizing our own property against us, mandating that it spies and tattles on us, turning inanimate objects into policemen to construct the most total surveillance dystopia, is not in any way "reasonable". In no way does it "preserve privacy".

And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.

They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?

u80809• 13 days ago

Okay, since it is already working system - how could I verify it scans for CSAM, not my dissident books and saved eps*ein files?

ibejoeb4• 13 days ago

I have a question: who trains the CSAM model?

vrganj7• 13 days ago

Brought to you - as always - by the Conservatives. Conservatism is just fascism with a slightly nicer image.

marginalia_nu2• 13 days ago

Eh, the commies are pretty good at this too. Best analogy for Chat Control is really a digital Stasi.

vrganj7• 13 days ago

I mean sure, but there's no meaningful commie contingent in the EU.

The war on privacy at the EU level always comes from conservatives.

weberer• 13 days ago

This was overwhelmingly approved by "The Left in the European Parliament" (that's their actual coalition name) as well as the Greens. It was overwhelmingly rejected by the European People's Party (AKA "The Right"). And mixed among other groups (S&D and Conservatives).

https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775

mizaru• 13 days ago

No, it's the other way around. Quoting another comment:

"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject

vrganj7• 13 days ago

Indeed. The vote, however, was about stopping Chat Control. The key term is "derogation" in the title.

A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.

u80809• 13 days ago

EU conservatives are just moderate leftists, who cares.

vrganj7• 13 days ago

What are you even saying? As a leftist, I want nothing to do with those fascists.

Avicebron2• 13 days ago

I'm curious where I can go to see real regularpeople who support this, is there like a different side of reddit, comments section? I don't know anyone who is blatantly anti-privacy and I want to hear their reasoning. Otherwise this just seems to be the EU rolling into a weird distributed autocracy without anyone blinking an eye.

xienze3• 13 days ago

It's not so much "support" as "not caring." Most "regular" people, when they hear about measures like this, say "oh no, the government can see my boring text messages to grandma, who cares", much they same way they shrug off the dangers of having a robot vacuum live-streaming the inside of their house to China ("there's nothing interesting in my house, who cares").

expedited123• 13 days ago

The thing is... It's not even reported on the news here (Lithuania).

Just now I scrolled through our most popular news sites. 0 mentions. Wasn't on TV either.

The vast majority of the population didn't even have a clue that the vote was happening.

I checked the top 5 most popular local news sites. There was one article about chat control in April and then 2 more from 2025. That's it.

Imagine an issue as big as this and it's not even reported. Yeah I don't feel confident about the future at all.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back". -- Jean-Claude Juncker, VDL's predecessor

ben_w6• 13 days ago

(Based on https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/eu-to-extend-t... and https://www.euractiv.com/news/how-the-epp-pushed-the-chat-sc... as well as the stuff in the link).

Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments:

  "What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures."

As I'm not trained in law, I have no strong opinions on if this proposal is a net positive or negative, almost any big name LLM will do a better job than I can manage by looking at the legal text, stroking my goatee and saying "I recon…". But what I can say that I've just seen a headline about a class action lawsuit in the USA due to grok making CSAM and the company failing to assist the police in their investigations, and another about Meta facing a lawsuit in India for delivering advertising for CSAM on Instagram.

My steelman in favour of the legislation:

The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution.

My steelman against the legislation:

Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging.

Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.

u80809• 13 days ago

CSAM detection systems

Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.

ben_w6• 13 days ago

Yes, indeed.

In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.

Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...

Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...

Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354

flumpcakes6• 12 days ago

Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.

Well the criteria is CSAM?

Do you have any evidence that these systems have been used to imprison someone that wasn't CSAM related?

ajsnigrutin7• 13 days ago

Real time notifications here would solve a lot of issues...

Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.

Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:

"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"

And half an hour later

"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"

ben_w6• 13 days ago

I think you're probably wildly overoptimistic about the ratio of police officers to private nudes.

No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...

Jtarii• 13 days ago

I think a more realistic system would be hashing images and comparing them to known CSAM in some database.

I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.

teekert2• 13 days ago

This is a nice piece of democracy right here:

"a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028."

"Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!"

"Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?"

"Worth a shot!"

"It worked, should we also do this multiple times?"

"Of course not! Pass the law, quickly!"

xaitv• 13 days ago

What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around, with the majority being for. I'm guessing that site has it reversed then or I don't fully understand the proposal? Looking at which politicians from my country voted "no" on this site it seems to be mostly the ones that I'd expect to vote "yes", so that would support this site just having the options reversed.

dmichulke• 13 days ago

Found this, source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.

"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:

- European People’s Party and

- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

Countries in favor of chat control were:

Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus

If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):

France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg

sampo5• 13 days ago

What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around

They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.

fschuett• 13 days ago

Democracy is when you just try and try again and again until it passes with 51/49. Then its democratic and legitimized and only evil terrorists would oppose those laws we have all democratically agreed upon.

Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, they just accuse you of "collusion with Russia" and ban your bank account via "sanction policies". The ECJ doesn't have to provide any evidence of crime, you have to provide counter-evidence of the absence of crime (and good luck defending yourself without money). The ECJ judges, who interpret and impose these laws, are also not democratically really elected or anything, yet they hold power over your bank account. Makes ya think.

ivan_gammel2• 13 days ago

How did you connect the linked Wikipedia article to EU courts and ECJ?

This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.

gib4444• 13 days ago

Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, ...

This was done by the Council of Europe (an organisation made up of a mix of member state foreign ministers and member state parliament members)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...

No court was involved as far as I can tell...

crooked-v• 13 days ago

Except in this case it actually passed 49/51.

fer• 13 days ago

Redfish forced to cease operations as an official subsidiary of Ruptly/RT
Immediately after Red Media gets founded by the guy, but now in Turkey
Redfish social media presence gets renamed to Red Media
Red Media kept staff, equipment and reused content from Redfish

Tbh I'd be pissed if sanctions could be bypassed by simply changing your logo and handle.

I'd go further and suspect the Russian disinformation apparatus just threw them under the bus for "EU bad" points.

It's such a textbook and standard Russian propaganda practice to finance and push divisive and partial views I'm even surprised people keep falling for it.

Another "journalist" the far left (in Spain at least) considers a martyr. The whole coverage of his arrest was a shitshow (Freedom of expression! Poland is fascist! Freedom for Pablo!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Yag%C3%BCe

Then it was shown he spied on Nemtsov, Polish journalists... and he even hugged uniformed GRU officers upon arrival in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, while wearing a "my empire needs me" t-shirt.

But this doesn't affect only the far left:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Europe

Anti-immigration, anti EU narratives, solid antisemitic (not just anti-Israel) stances, interviews with all sorts of sketchy characters, the whole set. Luckily for de Vlieger, he had sold the operation to literal Viktor Medvedchuk (and then the platform took a further Russia victim, Ukraine bad turn), so he remains unsanctioned.

tormeh• 13 days ago

Is this the first court system you ever hear about? Judges are never democratically elected.

inferniac2• 13 days ago

This is a nice piece of democracy right here:

this is just eu in a nutshell, the irish were made to vote on both nice and lisbon treaties twice (both were voted no in the first vote)

sveme• 13 days ago

Well, the No vote triggered some adjustments, so this is indeed relatively democratic. What would be the alternative?

selfmodruntime6• 13 days ago

Any time now even the most pro-european EU defender will realise that what was once a trade union has slowly transformed itself into an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster.

ThatMedicIsASpy• 13 days ago

And then politician always wonder why nobody has any trust left.

spikels• 13 days ago

Not only was Chat Control 1.0 already rejected twice by the European Parliament but:

- This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation - 112 MEPs of 719 didn't vote.

- The vote was called only two days before as an "Rule 170 - Urgent procedure" - 73 MEPs missed the vote making it "urgent". Normally it takes months of procedure to come up for a final vote.

GiorgioG• 13 days ago

So 112 MEPs didn't do their job...got it.

bko• 13 days ago

That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote.

Even relying on people to vote no is not enough.

maxloh• 13 days ago

I think that means those MEPs are not doing their jobs. They are the representatives of their people, but somehow they left for vacation before the last day of the session. They failed in the most important part of their duty.

trinsic22• 13 days ago

Sounds like an unlawful law to me, but hey. Im an American, what do I know.

stingraycharles• 13 days ago

And then people wonder why there’s so little faith in the EU and why there is a perception of them being disconnected from the real interests of the people.

SV_BubbleTime• 13 days ago

This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation

Surely this was not by someone’s design. Maybe though… you don’t leave a day early for your vacation?

hintymad2• 13 days ago

Honest question: when Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government, isn't it natural that the government will try to implement more control? And it looks EU officials do not have to accountable for anything. They will not suffer personally even when their policies wreck havoc. I don't quite understand why Europeans can trust EU at all. Case in point, EU HQs shut down its air conditioning on floors 1 through 7 to prevent electrical overloads, leaving the upper levels used by top officials unaffected. Yet did anyone like Leyen get punished? Note I'm not naive enough to believe politicians don't have special treatment in other countries. But at least in some countries, politicians will not be so shameless that they'd do it in broad day light.

tadfisher• 13 days ago

Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government

This antecedent is far too broad; what regulations, benefiting whom? It's pretty obvious in this case that the majority of their representatives do not favor at least this type of regulation. In other cases, the majority of representatives favor regulation which prevents private corporations from selling their PII to the highest bidder. So you're going to have to reckon with the nuance of the real world if you don't want to make obviously leading statements like this.

greatgib2• 13 days ago

Just to be clear, here you see the EU, but behind this there are a few corrupt national government officials that are pushing hard for this.

HNisCIS2• 13 days ago

Yeah, it always strikes me when this crazy, obviously stupid stuff ends up "49 to 51" like either there are active forces fighting each other ending in an equilibrium, or the equilibrium is arising passively, everyone and their representatives are just randomly scribbling in the circles.

vixen99• 13 days ago

I don't understand either but just for reference on your point:

Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years

'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'

On the other hand look at who issued this report. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

sebastianconcpt2• 13 days ago

Adding the reminder that these votes and majority rejecting are of unelected bureaucrats, so the way that it was framed was approved from above while making practically impossible to reject but still theoretically possible so people are forced to swallow it.

Soviet Union 2.0

master-lincoln• 13 days ago

The members of parliament are elected every 5 years by the citizens of the european union. What do you mean with unelected bureaucrats?

rayiner15• 13 days ago

Wow does it become law if the majority of those present opposed it? The American Congress might be utterly dysfunctional, but we’ve never had a law pass despite the majority of members voting against it. What am I missing?

kypro2• 13 days ago

What am I missing?

Nothing really.

Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.

In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.

Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.

With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.

izacus6• 13 days ago

The fact that there was a second vote on a modified law which passed.

globalnode• 13 days ago

EU cant claim the moral high ground anymore with the way this was done. They've joined the rest of the world now. This was a win for foreign companies and makes me wonder if the EU has been infiltrated by outside interests.

RealityVoid3• 13 days ago

Oh, yes, thankfully the protections for privacy are much better in the US... right? Right?

rustystump• 13 days ago

Can it be undone? One of the key aspects of any society is that it can in fact change law/policy/leaders/etc without war/rebels. yes harm happens when bad crap gets in but if the system still supports change, it is working.

For all the bad in trump era like roe vs wade among many others. The same mechanism are what allowed roe vs wade to exist. A double edge sword but better than alternative variants of totalitarian multi decade long regimes.

RealityVoid3• 13 days ago

This has an expiration date baked in for 2028 so if no new legislation comes in until then, it will undo itself on its own.

izacus6• 13 days ago

Ah, "it's only democracy if you vote my way" argument. We usually call that type of governing something else.

truthbe• 13 days ago

Once you realise the age group that are in that bracket of european law making you realise it's gen X AKA the helicopter parent generation and it all becomes less shocking.

betaby2• 13 days ago

More interesting that that mostly childless politicians are in favor of such things. That's makes sense since those legislations are NOT about children.

pmontra• 13 days ago

apps that are safe by design for children

How do we design such apps? Let's rule out age attestation (to allow only some age ranges) or scan of content because they are orthogonal to apps. What are the design patterns that prevent adults to meet kids? No messaging?

mattstir4• 13 days ago

Depending on the app, you could also get away with limited messaging such as a wheel of predefined callouts in a team game.

wiradikusuma• 13 days ago

From Google: "The law seeks to require digital platforms and messaging services (like WhatsApp and Gmail) to automatically scan users' private messages, emails, and photos to detect and report illegal content"

-- EU policy makers are really honest people, hats off to them. There's no way politicians in my country allow their chats to be scanned, because they're very corrupt.

carlesfe• 13 days ago

EU politicians are exempt from this measure. They thought it all the way through.

(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)

preisschild• 13 days ago

Can you cite the text where it says this?

dabber212• 13 days ago

basically admitting they are pedos

sebastiennight3• 13 days ago

What are the criteria to be covered by this "secrecy" exemption?

flanked-evergl• 13 days ago

[flagged]

dTal• 13 days ago

Conversely, declaring a space "politics-free" tramples a hell of a lot more than curiosity.

Incidentally, the comment immediately below this one begins with the words "I'm curious". So I think we're good.

tomhow• 13 days ago

The passing of laws that affect technology platforms has always been on topic on HN. That shouldn't be surprising on a site that's specifically for people interested in technology and tech industry topics.

EGreg2• 13 days ago

I do not believe solutions to these issues will be found with government regulators. I believe they can be enabled by new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.

Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors.

Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too:

https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

More broadly, here is what needs to be done across the board:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

tryauuum5• 13 days ago

new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS.

They will just call your code illegal in law. And if you will run it anyway, use deep packet inspection to drop your protocol packets, like they do in Russia

EGreg2• 13 days ago

Unless they have backdoors to absolutely every form of encryption, including https certificates, etc. you can always use that to tunnel through.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/cukcaf/goog...

ChrisArchitect• 13 days ago

Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818311

Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008

thomas_witt• 13 days ago

If the EU just were to redirect the resources they're currently allocating to regulations like AI and Chat Control rather towards developing a genuinely competitive OpenAI or Anthropic alternative …

drnick12• 13 days ago

No, it's easier to put a tax on American AI companies.

codedokode• 13 days ago

There are at least two options to verify age without humiliating procedure of taking a selfie with a passport like a porn actor.

First, there are USB tokens that can hold a private key and sign messages. Such tokens could be sold at places accessible only to adults and verify that they are indeed adult. Obviously every token should hold the same private key.

Second, OS could implement "parent mode" which allows installing only white-listed, government approved apps (no Telegram or Whatsapp or other dangerous apps, but school apps are ok) and opening only white-listed government-approved websites. Put in jail the parents who did not set up a parent mode. Problem solved without passports and verifications.

If, however, the government insists on selfies, it means they just want to identify users and compile lists of "untrustworthy", "rebelious" and other persons of interest.

Also, employees who do verification, sometimes create internal chats where they post pictures of clients and mock their appearance. We had such case with Alfa-Bank in Russia, where the photo of a funny client with a passport and third-grader level comments leaked to Instagram account of employee's friend. The bank paid approximately $20 as a compensation.

pietmichal• 13 days ago

So much effort and emotions wasted. EU should have a mechanism that disallows repeatedly pushing for things until they are greenlit. Lack of this type of measure renders whole governance incapable of being taken seriously.

Telaneo• 13 days ago

I want to like the EU. In many ways I do. They're making it really easy to not like them.

All for a safe and secure society.

attila-lendvai5• 13 days ago

except it's hardly safe or secure anymore...

throw-the-towel6• 13 days ago

Something something essential liberty, something something temporary safety.

drybjed• 13 days ago

List of votes per MEP: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775

anthk• 13 days ago

To hell with children. Create a separate internet for them, no ICANN access unless they are parent-supervised until they hit 13 or so.

tosti2• 12 days ago

   > To hell with children.

Myeahno. To hell with draconian law disguised as child protection and to hell with the powers that be, who knowingly and willingly are ruining just about everything nice.

bramhaag• 13 days ago

Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes.

This vote was urgently scheduled for today, the last day of parliament before the summer break. 113 MEPs were not present for this vote, likely having taken vacation days to extend their break. It's hard to believe choosing to do the vote today was done accidentally.

mx7zysuj4xew• 13 days ago

Is there an EICAR file equivalent for CSAM? it seems like I'm going to busy preparing a mass messaging/mailing campaign to EU law makers

bradley13• 13 days ago

Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries. Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.

Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent

The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.

ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?

Ylpertnodi• 13 days ago

ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries...

Aren't they fucking paid to be there 'on the last day'?

poszlem• 13 days ago

Yeah, there are two scummy things happening here. This would not be possible if they did their job. What sort of weird example does it set, when they don't ever care enough to stay for all the voting?

encom• 13 days ago

The EU and corrupt politicians (that's most of them), will do what they want, regardless of your opinions. I have completely given up on participating in democracy. My country is going to hell, and I don't believe anyone is able to stop it.

parineum• 13 days ago

It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?

There are a lot of countries in the EU that aren't shining beacons of democracy.

The EU makes sense as an economic block but some of the countries in it are politically unaligned with what people think of when they think of the EU.

usrnm• 13 days ago

You really should check out the list of voters, you will be surprised who exactly voted "yes". The list can be found here: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...

pojzon• 13 days ago

Yea, like France or Germany or Belgium

You know Im right

jvidalv• 13 days ago

You will be surprised to discover that the most open pro-democracy and “leftist” are also the most fascist and speech controlling ones.

At least in Spain this is exactly the case, and is really scary how much people falls for it.

StingyJelly• 13 days ago

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ has a better way to sort by country and political party so you can see who woted for what. It is painful to see politicians I voted for supporting this, even after I have sent them a few emails. Honestly, based on the results from my country, in the upcomming euro-elections, I am seriously considering voting alt-right.

dyauspitr2• 13 days ago

The internet is pretty stupid now and needs to be reigned in so our sons and daughters aren’t wide eyed zombies. Most of you won’t agree with me but it’s true and something needs to be done so I laud this.

charlieyu1• 13 days ago

I heard about it 30 years ago

logicchains2• 13 days ago

Our parents are the zombies who keep voting for the destruction of their civilization just to keep their housing prices propped up.

thin_carapace7• 13 days ago

"give me a boy until he is seven and I will tell you the man he becomes"

there will be at least 1 entire generation of western kids that spectated short form content on screens since the moment of birth. based on aristotle, this entire generation is going to be retarded. the EU legislature in question enables legal spectation of content exchanged by a generation of the retarded. the optimal path forward seems to be ensuring that the next generation is not retarded, otherwise human extinction will be rapidly accelerated. I don't see how corporate destruction of individual privacy is going to help ensure that the next generation is not retarded.

josephg• 13 days ago

Chat control doesn’t make the internet any less stupid.

Scroll_Swe5• 13 days ago

The internet is not the problem, the algo is.

With the internet I have free MIT lessons, documentaries, debates on Youtube!

I have access to scientific journals.

I can access every book ever written in the world.

The internet is not the issue here. The homepages/fyp on youtube, tiktok, instagram is. Books and the correct asthetic needs to be prioritized.

int_19h8• 11 days ago

Your sons and daughters will still be wide eyed zombies, it's just that now your government will decide what mush to turn their brains into.

ololobus• 13 days ago

Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.

No pun intended, but how is this legal? I mean, if you don’t have a quorum, then shouldn’t you just wait for an Autumn session? It feels like having a democratic parliament with backdoors like this kinda undermines the whole idea

bloppe• 13 days ago

Sounds like they did have quorum (84% present). I'm assuming the "trick" is related to the fact that it was an expired law up for renewal instead of a brand new law, which sounds pretty dumb to me. Maybe I'm mistaken about the details tho. I'm just some guy

wartywhoa23• 13 days ago

Are so many so naive?

No, it's the clueless general public that is criminally naive and fails to recognize the revival of fascism in real time under their own noses.

It's something straight out of that 2015 German movie, "Er ist wieder da" ("Look Who's Back").

Same giggles, same reactions, same gaslighting of those who see where it's heading, same final effect.

krick3• 13 days ago

It's "not on the way", really. It is explicitly designed not to be democratic in any meaningful sense from the very beginning. It is not even a secret: the council work is intentionally opaque so that the actual people responsible for all this horrible stuff cannot be held accountable by the public. This is explicitly stated to be a feature, justified that it helps it all be more technocratic and less populist.

Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.

Xelbair• 13 days ago

Which would be fine, if it was just a trade union like originally designed. I really love the original idea of EU. I could even get behind more federation style, although trade union is vastly preferable for me - but I do understand people pushing for it.

Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.

Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:

- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.

- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.

- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.

And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.

- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.

- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?

and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.

All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.

solidsnack90007• 13 days ago

I don't understand how it is that the EU Parliaments votes to reject legislation. Presumably, this is not the default for most rules. Is this some special class of rule -- put together by a special committee, for example -- that has to be voted down rather than up?

xienze3• 13 days ago

Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries.

Maybe people should demand better of their representatives. Would YOUR job be OK with you not being able to perform your duties the day BEFORE your vacation starts? The time to go home is when your vacations STARTS, not one or more days before.

CrisMystik5• 13 days ago

One thing that should be noted is that, since the Parliament has been able to approve an amendment by absolute majority (which explicitly excludes E2E chats), the procedure is not over and the law is still not enacted, a third reading is still needed, after negotiations with the Council and the Commission, and in this case the Parliament will be able to reject the act by a simple majority

sebastiennight3• 13 days ago

I was looking for information about this. So this new reading and vote would happen after summer?

CrisMystik5• 13 days ago

The new reading will happen if the Council rejects the amendment approved by the Parliament. When it does they have 6 weeks to negotiate, and then 6 weeks to approve the result of negotiations, if any.

Basically, the hope is that the Council rejects that amendment in its second reading (but right, the probability of this is not really high, since it codifies what was already true). I should have explained it better in my comment

elAhmo• 13 days ago

This might get this control out, but people's anti-EU stance will just be increased by this and long-term this is a terrible move.

Just fueling material for right wingers who will take advantage of this and push for secessionist stuff.

EU is in dire need to have VERY POPULAR measures among people, not idiotic stuff like this which is a step in a wrong direction.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

You're asking too much from bureaucrats that stand to directly gain post-mandate by consulting the companies they legislate for, and also believe that the legitimacy of the EU as a whole should be driven by output (economic prosperity, etc), rather than input (democratic mandates, political participation of their constituents)

Gareth321• 13 days ago

Every day I grow less enamoured with the EU project. More and more, the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.

budududuroiu13• 13 days ago

the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.

Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals

thisOtterBeGood2• 13 days ago

Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular. Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.

z3ratul163071• 13 days ago

there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air

that's really cute

geysersam4• 13 days ago

If there's no shadowy cabal then why do our politicians continue to pass domestically unpopular laws? I mean, there doesn't have to be a literal shadowy cabal, the effective "cabal" could be a combination of corruption, lobbying and pressure from security agencies.

Fredkin2• 13 days ago

Maybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?

You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.

1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.

2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.

3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)

4) Bob sends the image to Alice.

5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.

(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)

Micrococonut• 13 days ago

Well when it comes to ending encrypted traffic, I would assume if they can’t read your traffic you will be in violation and the police will show up at your door to kindly imprison you for a few years

Fredkin2• 13 days ago

If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.

nullpoint420• 13 days ago

The effort required to do it

ajsnigrutin7• 13 days ago

Getting the criminals is not the point here, mass control is. How many of your friends do this now? The criminals might do it, but why, when they can just meet in person and talk there, without a digital recording of what they talk?

Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.

flumpcakes6• 12 days ago

Any evidence what so ever for the "mass control" claim?

I do not want E2E comms broken, but these posts on hackernews always bring out such outlandish claims.

You can't be applying the "mass control" claim for the attempts at stopping the spread of CSAM? So can you point to any evidence of wide spread "mass control" with Chat Control 1.0?

stackedinserter• 13 days ago

Mass adoption. Two IT guys can communicate completely secure with udp packets via SSH tunnel, but it doesn't scale to family and non-techy friends.

mattstir4• 13 days ago

or on the fly using stable diffusion

Steganography fundamentally requires you to be able to know where the data is, which requires you to have the original image to compare against. The only other strategy I'm aware of is setting known pixel positions to exact data, which is very easy for basic tools to spot and decode. Or to add the data to non-visual data blocks if the image format supports those, which is also quite easy to spot.

spwa43• 13 days ago

Majority AGAINST, passes anyway:

314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions

In case anyone wants to know: stopping it would have required 361 against.

hananova• 13 days ago

And more than a hundred did not vote, if they wanted to vote no they could have. But they didn’t so they’re implicitly in favor.

The fact that governments worldwide do not force either a vote for or against is a much greater issue as it allows representatives to launder their beliefs through inaction.

spwa43• 13 days ago

Well they explicitly hid the fact that there was going to be a vote, AND they had already said they were going to override parliament using more drastic procedures if it didn't pass here.

So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.

I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...

I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.

(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)

0x_rs• 13 days ago

EPP is a corrupt, authoritarian regime that will hopefully not last long. It is not a coincidence the union took a massive, noticeable turn for the worse in 2019 -- the von der Leyen presidencies have done immeasurable damage it will never recover from. They have also been complicit in crime and corruption from Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, for years, and that is even if you exclude the Pfizer disaster nobody was held responsible for. They are giving the opposing parties ammunition they need to take them and the dream of a stronger union down, and the only way they can fight back is banning those parties outright, one of which voted completely against this utterly insane, already repeatedly rejected mass scanning. It's hard to think of the union as anything positive when this is the direction it is taking.

petre2• 13 days ago

Well anything with people's in its name is basicaly authoritarian, just like the DPRK or PRC.

The EPP also gave us migrant quotas, chat control and punished Greece for its debt.

hoppp• 13 days ago

Great, so even if something is repeatedly voted down and doesn't get enough votes it can still pass.

It's a joke. The system is hacked.

lenerdenator• 13 days ago

So, private companies can't track you, but the people with the state's monopoly on violence (which very much exists in the EU member nations) can?

Is there any sort of warrant needed for accessing this sort of information on devices?

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

It's not accessed on devices. This is about people using messaging applications, like Messenger. Then, as the message isn't encrypted, Meta can read the message on their servers. And with this law they are allowed to scan and sometimes report it to the government.

nirui• 13 days ago

I mean, even the victims themselves came out and explicitly emphasized that scanning chat messages does not help.

I'm feeling these politicians was not doing it for the victims. Instead, it's almost like the victims are providing reasons to allow the politicians to expand their own power.

The Accelerationism (see note below) part of me think it's a good thing, because a heavily regulated country is often also a backward country. Doing things like this long enough, then you get out competed by everyone else, your population shrinks to zero and your land gets reused.

(Note: The word "Accelerationism" in the Chinese dissidents circle means that, if a bad future is certain and it trends to destroy itself eventually, we might as well just let it happen faster, so the pain maybe shorter. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-in-Chief)

Look, EU obviously have a few good regulations. But a regulation must be correctly designed and implemented, and it must not punish good people. Scanning private messages is a punishment to all.

If EU must scan something, I'd say scanning all messages/phone calls sent out by the politicians might do more good, consider how much trust people put on them (maybe they shouldn't).

tryauuum5• 13 days ago

That's cool and all but looks like we are running out of good countries

And if they all have censorship, they are not failing (when comparing them to each other)

shevy-java2• 13 days ago

The lobbyists won this round.

tasn2• 13 days ago

This, and other similar legislation, serve as a constant reminder of why the American founding fathers had to revolt against tyranny, and why constitution amendments like the 1st and 4th exist. The 4th in particular was written as a response to a British law similar to Chat Control (writs of assistance).

globular-toast• 13 days ago

Sadly doesn't seem to make much difference, though. If anything the UK is less authoritarian than the US now.

aliasxneo8• 13 days ago

At least I have still have a 2nd amendment - and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.

simplyluke• 13 days ago

How many people are arrested for social media posts and other speech in each country?

tryauuum5• 13 days ago

It's hard to compare US and EU internet freedom because a person usually spends most of their life in one place and is clueless about the life in other.

I've never lived in US, were there any cases of ISPs blocking websites in USA? Even DNS-level blocking counts

ajsnigrutin7• 13 days ago

And then you got the patriot act.

ibejoeb4• 13 days ago

That was terrible. But then the NSA just started surveilling everything illegally anyway, laws be damned.

aw124• 13 days ago

Instead of solving real problems, the EU Parliament supports the globalists' agenda for privacy and human rights violations — our fundamental rights

tjwebbnorfolk• 13 days ago

[flagged]

bigyabai3• 13 days ago

To be fair, lack of regulation didn't stop us in America from passing the Patriot Act.

goldenarm• 13 days ago

The US built mass surveillance by bypassing congress, at least in the EU we do it democratically /s

akimbostrawman4• 13 days ago

EU Parliament supports the globalists' agenda

word. thats the entire point of the existence of the EU

37374848• 13 days ago

free healthcare o algo

dejournal• 13 days ago

What can we do to try and stop this?

holoduke• 13 days ago

Really the west is currently at the wrong side of history. With the US bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the last decade. Europe with its hypocrite stance in literally everything. Slowly the west is becoming a much less free place to live than a Russia. And propoganda in the west makes people think they are free. It's bullshit. They are not free. You got more freedom to move around, start businesses, own stuff in China and Russia than in any western European country.

speedgoose• 13 days ago

This is a very disappointing news. It weakens democracy and makes the EU hypocrite.

Why should one care about GDPR or some privacy shield thingy when this is going through ?

Razengan• 13 days ago

God..why.. Do the citizens have no say in this??

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

The citizens do have a say: they vote in elections. This is a temporary law that was implemented 5 years ago so everyone had a chance to vote in the 2024 EU election and vote out those who supported this law. But most people don't care if a company like Meta is allowed to scan their messages. For those who care, they can always use an encrypted messaging service like Signal or Telegram.

krick3• 13 days ago

Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?

I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.

Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.

And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.

By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.

Foorack2• 13 days ago

We have European Parliament elections every 5 years. But usually the people who complain the loudest also don't bother to vote.

TomK32• 13 days ago

Wouldn't it be fun if those who are in favour of such measures were the first to behave their messages scanned?

sndgndgndgndy3• 13 days ago

If you so much as mention that this bill was passed to censor criticism of Israel, you will yourself be censored. Our politicians don't actually represent us.

drnick12• 13 days ago

Unhinged rant, this has nothing to do with Israel.

sndgndgndgndy3• 13 days ago

Wow, I guess governments of the whole western world just woke up one morning and decided to clamp down on the free exchange of information on the internet at the precise moment their citizenry was up in arms over Israel committing mass genocide and blackmailing their politicians. What a coincidence!

smashah3• 13 days ago

This is Pegasus by Policy. There is a reason why all Epsteinist Occupied Governments are pushing the same thing worldwide and that reason is so Israel can commit future Holocausts in peace and quiet.

Israel is the horcrux of Emnity towards Freedom. This is why they destroy freedom everywhere they infect the halls of power.

Yet people remain in denial because genociding third worlders is regular programming for Epsteinists.

flumpcakes6• 12 days ago

This is extending something that came into affect in 2011.

tangenter• 13 days ago

If no one actually stands up against this and puts an end to it, then it wasn’t that important to begin with.

ciefa• 13 days ago

It's so tiring. Fellow Europeans, you know what to do =)

krick3• 13 days ago

Are you kidding? No, I have absolutely no fucking idea what to do.

lousken• 13 days ago

Can people sue EU about this? This is ridiculous

shangofox4• 13 days ago

If they didn't for five years why would they start now?

zazaulola• 13 days ago

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't live in the EU. Sorry for the silly question.

Is there any EU law that prohibits minors from encrypting their messages or using, for example, PGP keys?

How can they protect children if the children deliberately encrypt their messages?

Pazzaz6• 13 days ago

No, there is no law preventing anyone from encrypting their messages. The thought is that children won't use encrypted services.

kraf• 13 days ago

What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, [...]

I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal

Beijinger• 13 days ago

Move to Jabber or Matrix. Maybe Signal.

whywhywhywhy• 13 days ago

Just so blatant that this was paid or bargained into existence, EU is a compromised system.

mbix77• 13 days ago

What a democracy we live in.

zanexGHG• 13 days ago

Anyone that thinks that this is a good Idea either didn't understand the internet or is just borderline stupid

tomerlir2• 13 days ago

This is so bad, honestly, I'm so let down

altern8• 13 days ago

I love how they framed it like this: "Temporary derogation from certain provisions of the ePrivacy Directive to combat online child sexual abuse".

Just--OF COURSE, think of the children.

tamimio• 13 days ago

End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp

What a bad example to bring for e2ee.

zuzululu• 13 days ago

EU's strong digital privacy branding is becoming satire

LtWorf8• 13 days ago

The italian constitution clearly states that citizens have a right to private correspondence. Good to know our crooked politicians don't care.

The sad thing is how we keep saying how bad China is, while doing exactly the same things.

monssooon4• 13 days ago

To me as a European, this is not only about the dystopia that is becoming the tech survailance of society but it is a perfect example of what I feel the EU is. It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.

This is what we have... Unelected bureaucrats using every opportunistic tool they can to, in my opinion get rid of democracy. What are we fighting for at this point? Personally I have lost all faith in the EU and I'm embarrassed to be living here. I'm so disgusted by politicians and the obvious de-route of democracy.

What the ** are we doing...

shangofox4• 13 days ago

As a European shouldn't you know this is just a renewal and nothing new. The weird voting system applies too.

monssooon4• 13 days ago

It is a renewel of something highly unpopular that was voted down already. It is how the EU operates look at the other comments here about "democracy". It is put to vote on last minute where they know MEPs are on vacation... Well the ** should not go on vacation before the vacation starts but that is just another thing about EU! Why are they in vacation before it starts?! It is so complicated rules that not even the news and experts totally understand what is going on.

thomassmith65• 13 days ago

  It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.

The EU successfully addressed some big issues that young people don't feel are relevant anymore because the EU successfully addressed them.

monssooon4• 13 days ago

What do you mean by this?

cenamus• 13 days ago

I don't agree with the decision, but what is this bull** about unelected bureucrats? That's literal Orban/Putin propaganda speak

MEPs are elected.

monssooon4• 13 days ago

I know MEPs are. But who ellected Ursula? Who as far as i understand is the mother of this survailance... Calling This orban/Putin propaganda is Low. It is removing focus from the fact that i point out democracy is slowly withering in EU and survaulance is growing. Just look at the survailance lad for cars that was accepted the other day. I have no love for either of Putin/orban im simply telling my experience not making propaganda!

michaelfm1211• 13 days ago

How is it that a most MEPs vote it down and it still passes? Can someone explain to me how the EU Parliament can do this?

blurbleblurble• 13 days ago

Wack

eth0up• 13 days ago

Man, and right on the heels of enforcing driver-facing cameras in all newly purchased vehicles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48823557

Are there any civilians left in the EU, or is it all bureaucrats and bankers?

mparramon• 13 days ago

https://exitchatcontrol.org/

p1dda• 13 days ago

If anyone still believes the EU is a democracy, you're a bloody fool

voodooEntity• 13 days ago

Some people say im rather pessimistic - but i still kinda hoped that the EU will not go down this path.

That said - i was obviously wrong.

I don't really know what else to say than : this breaks a fundamental foundation of privacy. Sure i was never 100% aligned with EU level decisions (neither with my residing country one's) but that's just... wrong on so many levels... how can i even still argue to people that EU and democracy are good if this is what its heading for?

Usually i try to explain stuff with common grounds, the bigger picture or whatever is fitting. You can't have everyone happy on every decision.

But at this point im lost of arguments. They just betrayed every citizen from my pov.

So whats my point of this comment? Maybe i need to vent in an environment where i think people might get how bad this actually is, since people IRL around me don't seem to remotly understand the impact....

flumpcakes6• 12 days ago

This is extending an existing law that expired.

Really you should have felt betrayed back in 2011.

This isn't Chat Control 2.0 - which is the thing that has been getting attention for the last few years.

E2E encryption should not be broken, we should find other ways to catch and find predators.

Scanning messages in platforms (Chat Control 1.0)? I honestly thought this has always been done, I don't consider any platform private.

A lot of Internet regulations are just catching up to ones that exist in meat space.

I think what scares people when the regulations come to the Internet is that they are highly automated, and I think there's potential for mass injustices when automated systems.

At the same time, the abuse of children has also been automated and amplified by the Internet. https://youtu.be/QYcAFanHwf8?t=1666

pharos92• 13 days ago

I no longer hold the belief that The West is moral or good-faith actor. In my lifetime I've watch the state go from being relatively benign, to maintaining face, to all-out racket, corruption and anti-democratic behaviour. I sympathise with both left-wing and right-wing sentiment. The system no longer works by-and-for the people. Call it elite capture, call it communism. My view is we're dealing with a Janus-like system.

sevenzero• 13 days ago

But this is the direct result of Europes shift to right wing parties and corruption? How can you sympathize with the right-wing sentiment?

RealityVoid3• 12 days ago

I would have expected the right wing parties to be against this, somehow, but... Nope, just checked my country's votes, and nationalists just love cc1.0 it seems.

Foorack2• 13 days ago

Statistically, half of the people in this thread didn't even show up to vote for EP elections.

applfanboysbgon• 13 days ago

Does it matter if they did, when this measure effectively bypassed Parliament via technicalities?

baalimago• 13 days ago

As if I wasn't apathetic enough about democracy. The only voting bill worth caring about is the one in the wallet. Then you can be the source of the corruption, instead of the sink. Every man for themselves.

nout• 13 days ago

With this level of spying it becomes important to learn to use technologies that are outside of this system that people on HN usually laugh at. Tor, VPNs, Bitcoin, Bitchat, Nostr based socials, Signal and get some extra clean hardware (phone, laptop...) to work with when you need to...

yuppiepuppie• 13 days ago

Can someone Change My View? That this is a bad idea (for all the reasons mentioned in this thread and elsewhere).

piokoch• 13 days ago

Sadly, European Union that could be really useful (all-EU, flagship AI model anyone? But no, better restrict AI development, what can go wrong?) so people would genuinely like it, chosen to fight the people and try to gag criticism.

Hesola• 13 days ago

Demo(crazy)

jonathanstrange• 13 days ago

Question about this from a EU citizen who doesn't know the details of how the EU works (who does?): Are there legal means to challenge this vote based on the procedure that was taking place?

21asdffdsa12• 13 days ago

Yank all the panopticon-levers that push social stability till the lever breaks, because that is all the levers you got.

Social Networks to push ideas and memes, that work against social-decomplexification parties and individuals.

There are also the other leviathan cybernetic levers- like implants- if you need insulin, or hearing aids- you are basically a deputy for social stability. Thus every prosthesis-citizen you can produce is a good citizen.

But it may still not be enough to prevent decomplexification events like Khemer Roughe or the Taliban.

Thus, push technology that allows for quick recovery, because somewhere some serverfarm with the most patient tutor survives.

Scenario-tree-root-hardening looks like this from the inside.

PS: Fuck you Peter - but its work that needs doing. The retarded don't herd themselves. Or they do, but if they knew- all the simulations would be worthless.

HackerThemAll• 13 days ago

My utopian vision would be to change the selection/voting process so that our representatives are chosen based on real achievements and scientific understanding of the world, and not based on popularity and ability to persuade the crowd on standup-like rallies lasting 20 minutes, with empty words, populist-like propaganda, and lies hitting people's emotions instead of critical thinking.

My another utopian wish would be to held them accountable for what they promised in the campaign and how they align with their constituents' needs.

Instead we get corrupted idiots who don't even know what they're voting for, why they're voting that way, and if it's important at all. Chat control is one blatant example, mandatory cameras inside cars constantly spying on drivers is another one. Whoever advises them idiots, they're in real control of what's happening in EU.

BatteryMountain• 13 days ago

This society is doomed.

fosk9• 13 days ago

The EU is a farce, an undemocratic virtue signaling organization, and this is why:

- The Parliament voted against the first reading of this proposal twice in 2026, the first time they only supported limited cases for it, while the second time they actually defeated it fully.

- The Commission didn't care, and kept the proposal on the table by refusing to withdraw it.

- Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority which is incredibly hard to pursue (you would think that we would need an absolute majority to PASS a proposal that was previously defeated on first-reading, not instead needing absolute majority to DENY a previously defeated proposal that was again forced to the table).

- Furthermore, absences in practicality count as "No" on the rejection. So of course they scheduled the vote in the summer when notoriously there will be many absences.

By never withdrawing a defeated proposal they can effectively and in practicality pursue any agenda they want (it requires a massive mobilization effort to find absolute majority to defeat any proposal, especially when absences for any reason effectively count against rejection).

In PRACTICALITY, the Commission can pursue any agenda whenever and however they want, and throw the votes down the drain.

EU's democracy is lipstick on a pig.

munksbeer6• 13 days ago

Please could you cite your sources for this.

I think what you've typed is not representative of what happened here. My understanding is that the EU Council forced this second-reading, not the Commission.

To provide evidence for my argument: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Look at "Timeline". This is the Council, not the Commission. This is your elected heads of state. This is "democracy" in action.

"Council and EPP attempting to bypass Parliament With negotiators still deadlocked on core issues, the Council and the European People's Party (EPP) are trying to sidestep Parliament by reviving the expired Chat Control 1.0. The Council plans to fast-track a rewritten proposal with identical content, effectively circumventing the Commission's right of initiative, democratic oversight, and a fresh opinion from the European Data Protection Supervisor (source)."

fosk9• 13 days ago

The Commission refused to withdraw the proposal after Parliament rejected it, leaving it on the table. The Council disagreed with Parliament’s rejection, formally forcing a second reading.

Both the European Commission and the Council itself are not DIRECTLY elected EU bodies. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.

lou13063• 13 days ago

The Council must go at some point. It is a "legislative" body... composed of members of the _executive_ branch of the individual countries. Granted, that's not the only problem with EU governance, but it is a rather glaring anomaly in terms of transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, at least in the case of Italy & other parliamentary systems, there's something like 3 levels of indirection between the people and their "representative" in the Council:

People elect members of the Parliament -> MPs decide who is the Prime Minister -> PM decides who sits in the Council

We should likely just replace it with either a "EU Senate", where each country elects the same number of senators, _or_ a chamber with truly European elections (as in, every EU citizen may vote for any candidate, regardless of their nation). But the latter option seems still out of reach as of today.

sampo5• 12 days ago

I think what you've typed is not representative of how EU works.

The Council [1], also known as the Council of the European Union and the Council of Ministers, does not consist of heads of state. The body that consists of heads of state is the European Council [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council

flossly2• 13 days ago

It's worse than a farce. It's actually evil. The way "they" are pushing chat control, and how Ursula is avoiding justice (she has a huge corruption case hanging over her head but manages continuously cancel court dates); this makes a all too clear.

The only way to fix this is EU member states become more critical: but for politicians in those states an EU position is the best promotion they can make. So almost nobody dares to speak out.

hk__23• 12 days ago

Her name is von der Leyen. "Ursula" is fine for your friends, but it’s awkward for a public figure. Do you write "Donald" as well?

gozucito• 12 days ago

Could you please give more detail about this for those of us less informed of EU things? What corrupt things has Ursula done? Or what has she been accused of, exactly? How long has she been cancelling court dates?

Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?

danielmeskin• 11 days ago

Who exactly are "they"?

ALLTaken• 10 days ago

Social context (pardon the subjective background, I'm trying to only provide what's collectively shared more or less in Germany):

Ursula von der Leyen is hated in Germany as an evil war-mongering gnome. She was previously appointed to replace a highly decorated military general of the Germany Army (Bundeswehr) without having any skills in that area, except being corrupt to the core. She miserably failed the military, cost the state large losses in tax-payer money and was promoted instead being removed. Then she "somehow" became the fierce and corrupt "Queen of the EU".

EDIT (I owe you sources at least):

I think it goes much deeper, I think it's not just corruption, she's a perfect traitor of the EU and Germany. Selling all 500 million europeans out to a foreign state.

- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/eu-abgeordnete-dr...

- https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article191310021/Urs...

- https://journalistenwatch.com/2026/07/11/ursula-die-skandal-...

- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ursula-von-der-le...

- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundeswehr-berater-von-d...

- https://www.zeit.de/thema/ursula-von-der-leyen

- https://trump.news-pravda.com/ukraine/2026/06/24/360828.html

vaylian2• 13 days ago

Hard disagree on the conclusion. I agree that the commission and the council have made very unfair moves and it's justified to call them out for it. But we have also seen that the parliament (except for the EPP) was for the most part eager to listen to what people had to say about chat control.

PunchyHamster• 13 days ago

AND IGNORED IT

zkmon2• 12 days ago

Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.

You need to specify which EU laws does this violate. "undemocratic" by your definition. There is no universally precise definition of "democratic". Because I'm sure EU council knows how to be democratic by their own definition of the term. They have an army of legal pundits who ensure that everything is done correctly within their legal framework.

fosk9• 12 days ago

Literally the voice of the EU voters has been suppressed on this matter despite the Parliament (elected by them) voted twice on denying this full proposal.

By any definition of the term, this is not a democracy and it's a technocracy at best.

Edit: I am Italian.

rayiner15• 12 days ago

Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.

The American system was mostly cribbed from Europeans to begin with. Montesquieu, etc. The structure of the EU is bizarre according to the principles of democratic governance articulated by Europeans themselves.

abc42• 12 days ago

Two things are not quite correct in your text:

1. The Council triggered the second reading by adopting its own position and sending it back. You made it sound like the Commission just steamrolled it unilaterally.

2. The scheduling conspiracy is false. Parliament itself voted (331-304) on July 7 to fast-track this. Also, the votes in March and July were pretty stable: 311 against in March, 314 against in July.

pfortuny• 12 days ago

That summurizes it pretty well. The Commission is essentially omnipotent, and there is no relevat judiciary to stop it.

This is farcical.

Yes, from a PURELY MONETARY viewpoint, Brexit was a disaster. But there are more important things than money.

I'm from Spain btw.

Roark66• 12 days ago

Exactly, also the ECJ is horribly corrupt (search for the corruption scandal revealed by a French journalist few years ago). Nothing happened back them.

This will never become law in my country(Poland). Last time they tried to push it people protested in the millions.

rayiner15• 12 days ago

I tried to explain to my wife (American lawyer) how the EU Commissioners are selected and she told me "I'm not having fun understanding this." I had thought it was just the heads of government from each member state. That would make sense given the immense power of the body. But that's apparently not how it works.

zrn9004• 11 days ago

Yes, the Eu basically morphed into a supranational institution that allows a minority to control entire Europe and use it as a private farm for the countries that dominate it.

hniscensorship• 12 days ago

Just like HN. Undemocratic and full of censorship and disinformation.

Unintelligent authoritarians run amok.

rayiner15• 12 days ago

- Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority

Wait, that's the rule? On the second go around, the default outcome is for a previously defeated proposal to pass unless you can muster an absolute majority?

This seems like if the U.S. President had a reverse veto: it could pass any law Congress rejected by forcing a second vote and the law would pass unless there was an absolute majority against. Didn't the EU people read Montesquieu about separation of powers? He was French!

mmarq2• 12 days ago

We, as humanity, really need to stop equating democracy with direct votes and referenda. There are reasons why some bodies are nominated indirectly and through convoluted procedures. In many countries these processes exist to prevent the rise of fascisms or totalitarianism in general.

The EU, in particular, is a community of relatively different states, where you can’t have just direct elections with proportional representation, otherwise the most populous countries will decide for everybody. This is why there is a zoo of directly elected bodies, bodies nominated by the Parliament, others expressing the will of countries’ governments, and complex voting procedures with qualified majorities and veto powers.

In practice the EU has struggled to make national governments ratify trade treaties because their devolved regions were worried about beef prices. It’s not an unstoppable dictatorial behemoth that decides against the will of the people, if 10 farmers in Wallonia can stop it. They still haven’t convinced Germany that an Italian baker can open a bakery in Bavaria without attending a local mandatory 5 year Meister training.

winterismute• 12 days ago

While I agree that this setup is not very good, the EU Commission is essentially the equivalent of a government in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, and almost all such democracies I know about either have or have developed "ways" for the government to "push through" the will of the "chamber(s)". However, we do not consider those as farces as well, or so it seems to me, I guess mostly because those governments are still more or less directly "bootstrapped", and needs to be supported, by the chambers, which is what happens in the EU parliament as well.

ktosobcy5• 12 days ago

It's mindbogling how ignorant people are when it comes to how the EU is structured and how it works ;(

boltzmann-brain2• 12 days ago

However, we do not consider those as farces as well

Speak for yourself. A lot of people do.

bulbar• 12 days ago

Without EU, the Europe countries don't really have leverage against super powers or FAANG companies, so we are stuck with it for now, for good and for bad.

KristianLentino• 13 days ago

Sad news

m4xp2• 12 days ago

Democracy has failed. Let's be honest here.

chris_explicare• 12 days ago

Chat Control 1.0 is the voluntary carveout rolled forward, nothing more. Breyer is right that this locks the door on stronger action against the real drivers. Even 'voluntary' scanning runs into ePrivacy Article 5(1) and CJEU jurisprudance on general monitoring. Providers keeping client-side scanning are exposed the moment a national court tests it against La Quadrature. The child safety framing keeps eclipsing case law that already limits mass processing of private comms.

jekuer• 9 days ago

If the EU would do the important things as good and fast as that, ...

illusion-drift• 8 days ago

demons are in charge and they're no longer hiding

EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

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