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End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

patrick-breyer.de

131–140 of 324 posts

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-elected representatives from my country keep pushing for chat control via the council. How do I, as a citizen, hold them accountable?

Vote against the ruling party in your smaller national election

That's a system of accountability in name but not in practice.

Even if there was an option in the national elections that didn't want this stuff, convincing a majority of voters to disregard national politics for an election cycle to have an imperceptibly small impact on the council members is such an unlikely outcome the council or comission would de facto be committing genocides before voters would be mobilized, and even then it's unlikely they'd face any repercussions.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#132

This is a clear case of a terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism fully). Chat Controls would be illegal in Germany. This is sad that this has gotten this far. If they wanted to pass a law to blow up citizens, do you think European Parliament would seriously consider it? It is exactly the same calibre of idiocy. I would expect German authorities to issue arrest warrants and properly inv…

I agree that it's an act of state sponsored terrorism. Don't let the down votes make you feel alone.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#133

I’m confused by > This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU It had already passed and started?

> It had already passed and started?

Facebook and others have been scanning your private messages for many years already. Then someone discovered that this practice is illegal in Europe. So they passed the temporary chat control 1.0 emergency law to make it legal. The plan was to draft a chat control 2.0 law that would then be the long-term solution. But negotiations took too long and the temporary law will expire on the 4th of April (not the 6th) which means that it will be illegal again for Facebook and others to scan the private messages of European citizens without prior suspicion of any wrongdoing.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#134
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> They literally just voted it down. Twice in 2 days. And they will try again tomorrow. Until it passes. > Also compared to whom? Why compare? The fact that there are worse regimes than the EU doesn't make the EU even a single bit better. Lesser evil is still evil. Let us strive for good.

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

You're inverting roles here.

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

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-elected representatives from my country keep pushing for chat control via the council. How do I, as a citizen, hold them accountable?

Ask your government why they're sending those representatives. As a citizen you vote for your government, right?

How badly would you say the council or commission have to mess things up before they saw any voter-initiated repercussions what so ever with a system of accountability that requires voters to consider punishing the council or comission more important than their own national elections?

If accountability is to work, it has to be more than an abstract theoretical possibility.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much how it works; there's generally no way, in a modern parliamentary democracy to say "no, and also you can never discuss it again". You could put it in the constitution, but honestly there's a decent argument that parts of chat control would violate the EU's can't-believe-it's-not-a-constitution (the Lisbon Treaty is essentially a constitution, but is not referred to as such because it annoys nationa…

Constituional cours are a last defense against bad laws though and should not be the first one - they are not designed to be fast enough to prevent a lot of damage being done before they strike something down.

If something in 'Chat Control' is so fundamental that it should lead to the law not even being brought up for discussion (privacy), then that 'right' should be more clearly defined in the constitution, or constitution like structure.

It's when laws can exist, but simply have bad implementations, where you obviously can't jump to an amendment process.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189270 , the outliers who seem to want this, would be France, Hungary, Poland and Ireland, all other countries seems to had the majority MEPs voting against it.

It's way more complicated. For instance according to this vote Denmark is overwhelmingly against it. However Denmark most recently was the country that pushed heavily towards this, in fact, under Denmark's leadership the whole thing was revived last time around. If you look at local politics and news they are all lobbying massively for it (or some people do). The reason is usually "for sake of the children". Parents…

While the EU council is composed of people from the respective country's government, the European Parliament is directly voted in by citizens and has a lot of people for whom politics is not their main career.

You could interpret the results as the Danish government being for Chat Control, but "normal" Danish people not following the same trend

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#138
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU is fundamentally flawed. There are no checks and balances You're missing a [citation needed] on that.

Non-elected representatives from my country keep pushing for chat control via the council. How do I, as a citizen, hold them accountable?

It isn't popular, but they have a name and address right? Not talking violence, but the number one way of dealing with these sorts is to usually talk things out. If you're really concerned about, get a group of similarly minded people and make it unambiguously evident that this person is championing something a lot of people are not behind. It becomes much harder to ignore or wave off something when people start making themselves known on your doorstep.

And no, this isn't dog whistling violence. It is simply applying signal. The only other message I can think of is engaging an investigative journalist/PI and starting to figure out who is lobbying the person, and start pressuring them.

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So in summary: because the law was avoided today, the EU needs to be abolished? Weird take. There are many reasons to abolish the EU, but the topic here is chat control. > You can see it the other way around, without the EU, Denmark and others would have already implemented ChatControl in their country. This is driven by member states (Denmark), not the parliament, after all. Would they? We don't know. Would the go…

Isn't the UK a perfect control group? Didn't the EU push back on similar legislation, until Brexit? > insisting again and again on something so unpopular? Didn't the UK do exactly this?

[flagged]

Re: End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189270 , the outliers who seem to want this, would be France, Hungary, Poland and Ireland, all other countries seems to had the majority MEPs voting against it.

Hungary can be explained by Victor Organ's desire to spy on the opposition by any means necessary. France has had really strange tendencies lately, e.g. when they arrested Telegram founder.

Let’s make very clear that "France" here stands for MEP sent by France.

Only 51% of people able to vote in European elections actually vote (with 2,81% white ballot), so it’s not even a majority of electors sustaining them, despite abstention being at record low level in decades.

Elites being disconnected from people day-to-day reality and needs is a recurrent topic leaking even in the mainstream media which almost all owned by oligarchs by now.

European institutions are notoriously opaque and byzantine, which doesn’t really help with feeling represented, even before Qatar gates and the 1/4th of MEP revealed "implicated in judicial cases or scandals."

https://www.touteleurope.eu/institutions/elections-europeenn...

https://vote-blanc.org/europeennes-2024-la-repartition-par-d...

https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2024/06/10/euro...

https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/gouvernement/gerald-darmanin...

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/02/02/o...

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