EU Chat Control: Germany's Position Has Been Reverted to Undecided
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Germany's position on EU Chat Control has reverted to undecided, sparking controversy and concerns about mass surveillance and privacy in the European Union.
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I think it is also about catching criminals. And they should change their wording to make it more correct, otherwise they will certainly lose this fight.
Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.
That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.
Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.
I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).
Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.
Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.
My point is that "this isn't about catching criminals" is the wrong wording.
You don't start a debate by twisting the words of the other party. No matter how right you are. Otherwise you will be seen as a pariah.
If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.
The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated goal is statistically self-defeating.
The “catching criminals” line is deliberate gaslighting. It’s crafted to reassure people who don’t understand how these systems work, while the real function is mass surveillance of everyone.
You're acting like I'm trying to derail the argument. That is not the case.
You are putting a lot of assumptions in your wording. This will not help you.
There is no discussion here other than how to best bring the point across to those who do not agree.
Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.
Because ostensibly good people do not want to see the CSAM material, they believe what algorithm/first reporter stated, and ofc nobody "good" wants to let a pedophile go free.
And so the algorithm tries to hang a parent for making photo of skin rash to send to doctor (happened with Google Drive scanning) or a grandparent for having a photo of their toddler grandkids playing in kiddy pool (happened in UK, computer technician happened upon the photo and reported to police, if not for lawyer insisting to actually verify the "CSAM material" the prosecution would not actually ever check what the photo was of)
But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.
Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.
Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.
Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.
This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.
Chat control does not allow the government to read anyones messages for any reason, so no that is not true.
> Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.
But storing these messages is illegal.
I wasn't very clear in my original post always included an assumption that false positives were involved and that messages being stored were a result of that and not all messages being stored at all times.
The images and links that are scanned and is deems potentially problematic will be stored for up to 6 months or until they are deemed unproblematic. There is still a potential 6 month paper trail here, and in politically turbulent times that paper trail could still be damaging retroactively even if the report contains non CSAM.
> We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,
https://www.ft.dk/samling/20231/almdel/REU/spm/1426/index.ht...
What they want is everyone to be watched, all of the time. Crimes will be determined later.
It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?
edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.
On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..
While Germany has arrested many thousands of people for online speech, similar to the UK. But the UK gets much more media attention over it.
> Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...
The optics are chilling: yesterday it was door-to-door searches under authoritarian regimes; today it’s device-to-device searches for wrongthink. That isn’t protecting against extremism - it’s repeating it with new tools.
It is also part of the Treaty of Lisbon via the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is the closest thing to a constitutional level law for the EU.
Not that this has ever stopped anybody.
Because that would technically make any present day wiretap illegal too.
So the detail is written in normal law tract...
What does "supremacy class" mean?
False.
> The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
That is sort of like a supremacy clause, and of course it's valid for the EU.
But that doesn't mean that a Swedish or German etc. court can let that override our basic law. Our basic law is after all the foundation of our law, so if something conflicts with that, it obviously can't be valid.
Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level. Ratification of other Treaties without the sovereignty component is decided upon by the states' national parliaments in all other member states.
Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists.
In the particular, the Seville Declaration recognised the right of Ireland (and all other member states) to decide in accordance with National Constitutions and laws whether and how to participate in any activities under the European Security and Defence Policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Declarations_on_the_Tr...
It's enshrined in German Case Law as 'Identitätsvorbehalt'.
https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/das-europalexikon/30945...
The Polish constitutional court has also ruled that EU law does not supercede national law. Thus, primacy of EU law is wholly rejected in Poland.
https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/07/polish-court-rules-some-...
Sometimes yes.
> I was under the impression that the principle of supremacy isn't absolute and doesn't extend to overriding a country's fundamental constitutional rights.
What are a country's fundamental constitutional rights can be "dynamically adjusted" depending on the political wishes. :-(
> With authoritarian regimes gaining power everywhere, it would only take a few of them working together to pass an EU law that makes everything fair game.
There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.
Doubtful. We on hackernews are staunchly opposed. Most regular people either support or don't care.
In other words, it's very believable. It is incredible how billions of hours have been spent on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and nothing has been learnt. Potentially the best phenomenon in existence at showing that humanity is, after all, so much less intelligent than it believes it is - that even after such a destructive event and so much performative effort at analysis and learning, the key takeaway did not become part of the social psyche whatsoever.
Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
but not for chat control but another things, they have going much worse
There were similar problems in areas other than privacy and encryption, or indeed technology.
UK's one is easily avoided.
But reality is that NONE of those options should be even considered.
Exactly. There is a reason why more and more EU-skeptical movements gain traction in various EU countries.
Europeans in general like or is indifferent towards the EU.
My observations are different.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1360333/euroscepticism-e...
The "positive" number has recovered from a low in the wake of the Eurozone crisis but is still fallen significantly from the pre-crisis level of around 50%.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by country - The EU's own report suggests very big variations between countries: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/905...
Also, negative and positive feelings are not the same thing as a vote. For example, some people who felt negative about the EU voted remain because they were worried about economic disruption (the government was predicting a severe recession in the event of a leave vote - not after leaving, merely as a result of a vote). I am sure people can think of other examples and both ways, but the point is that "feel negative/positive" and "would vote to leave/remain) are not the same number).
Sure, the eurozone debt crisis of the 2010s was rough for the trust mumbers, taking them down to 33% but they've fully recovered from that.
it seems to be using a different measure (numbers do not match the link I posted) and I cannot see any numbers from 20 years ago.
There is graph from 2012 but that is from the low (if you look at my link).
Have a missed a pre-crisis comparable number in skimming it? If not, then what I see is still a significant decline over the last 20 years in the net positive.
IMO the Eurozone is very likely to have further crises. The architects of the Euro expected a greater degree of fiscal union but that never happened. A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.
> A single currency without a large central budget is a mistake and makes it much harder to correct instability.
That's an opinion. You're free to have that opinion, but trust/distrust of the European Union has little to do with that opinion.
[1]: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3372
France held a referendum on the creation of the EU in 1992, and approved it.
You're thinking of the 2005 referendum, which was about the TCE. The EU already existed before that.
It's easy / tempting to extrapolate from our limited bubble / point of view, but it doesn't tell you anything about a population at large.
How difficult is it to run? How much money do you need? What are the barriers to success? Is it set up so that only the already rich and powerful can run and win (and therefore they are just pushing their own interests), and if not do you need considerable financial support (and therefore are beholden to the already rich and powerful who funded your campaign)?
It is much easier to break into EU than the local governments, since EU has so much less power, so you have more weird people there.
And citizens don't vote for the Commission directly, meaning there's a lot of backroom dealing in its selection.
[1] Which also covers, I think, the act of repealing prior legislation.
Obviously I'm not expecting that my actions alone are enough to get the outcome I want, but it's difficult not to feel the bite of "if voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." It's just going to be some other paid-for dickface in corporate pockets, every time.
There should't be a discussion at all.
This law proposal is explicitly against the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the allegedly institutions that are supposed to upheld the charter are CJEU, European Commission, FRA, NHRIs, where are they?
That will take time, though, so I guess they are either hoping that some impossibly secure, reliable and unerring technologies emerge in the meantime, or they are prepared for a forever battle with the Court, coming up with ever new adjustments as soon as previous schemes get struck down[1], meanwhile allowing European law enforcement agencies to keep testing, developing and iterating on whatever client-side scanning or other techno-legal approaches they may come up with. I think this was roughly what they — ie, basically a group of a dozen or two law enforcement reps from different member states agencies and ministries along with like one lonely independent information security expert — said themselves in some working group report as part of some kind of Commission roadmap thing presented by von der Leyen not too long ago.
[1] On the data protection side we've already seen this kind of perpetual movement through the years with respect to different “safeguarding” mechanisms made available to enable transfers of personal data to the US without too much hassle, from Safe Harbor through Privacy Shield to the current Data Privacy Framework.
Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data have exemptions for government. The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].
[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...
[2] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/8-protection-per...
They themselves even wrote it in the proposal - "Whilst different in nature and generally speaking less intrusive, the newly created power to issue removal orders in respect of known child sexual abuse material certainly also affects fundamental rights, most notably those of the users concerned relating to freedom of expression and information."
This proposal is de facto a mass communication surveillance of EU citizens.
Exactly as you mentioned every single member state and EU have laws that can for example issues a court order and seize your communication devices if you are braking a law for an investigation, there is no need for EU to have a law that first goes against the very essence of EU, second it also brakes I am pretty sure every single constitution of each different member states.
If this law passes you live in a totalitarian state and there is no excuse for that.
And be told to sod off.
From Wikipedia: [0]-"Currently, there is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
- Mogens Jallberg
Regarding your Stalin "quote", please see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/ .
Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it. In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.
The general process is a bit like this, simplified:
- the Council of heads of state appoints the Commission
- the Commission proposes laws
- the Parliament approves laws
- the Council of ministers implements them
- the Court blocks any unconstitutional laws
The problem has been for the longest time that the Commission appointments are not elected, somewhat mired in cronyism, and they keep proposing nonsense laws while the elected parliament can just stand there and vote no while not being able to suggest any legislation we actually need.
Please inform yourself or you're in danger of letting things happen through your ignorance. The commission is not pushing this. They're acting on instructions from a certain number of elected politicians.
And, you're misleading others when you post stuff like this.
None of us posting in these topics wants this proposal to pass. And in order to fight it, you've got to be correctly informed.
But at least when it comes to Chat Control, it is not EU level, it's member states pushing for it and at least for now EU blocking it, so at least for once it is a good thing and the minority of ~8 states can still block it for the majority, block it for all 27 states..
The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.
OK. How do I vote out Ursula vd Leyen?
Edit: there was a copypaste of voting requirements here, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/voting-ri.... This is apparently wrong; you can also vote if you're not residing in the EU, only EU citizen. (I thought this was the case, and that link not saying that made me suspicious.) How it is possible that they've put up incorrect information on voting rights, I have no clue.
Actual reference, this time legal text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Any person who, on the reference date:
(a) is a citizen of the Union within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 8 (1) of the Treaty;
(b) is not a national of the Member State of residence, but satisfies the same conditions in respect of the right to vote and to stand as a candidate as that State imposes by law on its own nationals,
shall have the right to vote […]
So either citizenship or residency is sufficient.
This can only be done indirectly.
Under https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/27/which-meps-bac... you can at least find a chart ("Von der Leyen 2 Commission: How political groups voted") how the political groups in the European parliament voted regarding Ursula von der Leyen's second mandate as European Commission President.
So the short answer is "YOU can't".
Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good about this type of democracy.
Just like in your country's own elections.
It's p-hacking democracy. If a proposal has 5% chance of passing just resubmit it twenty times under different names with minor variations.
It wastes time that lawmakers could spend on proposals that the public actually want.
Which is many things, I' might call it cynical, but it doesn't seem undemocratic.
the issue is that they try to push it despite citizen protests, and each time they try people just grow more fatigued.
What do you mean, this can just be reverted it isn't like these laws can't be changed. Currently most people don't vote in EU elections, so you don't need much to affect those even if just 10% hates this proposal and go out to vote it would massively effect the outcome.
Therefore its much harder for unpopular things to persist at EU level than country level so far. Until EU has stable parties that is, but currently there is nothing stable at EU level, a tiny thing can change it all.
How do I vote out hostile countries? I’m Dutch, what can I do with my vote to have effects on Denmark, which seems to be the biggest proponent of this BS?
The same way you can vote out other politicians in your own country - you can't. Assuming you live in (say) Amsterdam, you have no right or control of who people from other regions of the Netherlands vote for.
How do i vote out representatives if all of them support the measure despite it being unpopular in my country, no matter the faction? That was the case with centralized copyright checking.
EU parliament, and especially EC, are so far removed from any form of accountability, that frankly votes are almost irrelevant - same factions form no matter who's there, and EC runs on rotation.
Lobbying takes prime spot over votes.
EU is sitting in the middle ground between federation and trade union... and we get downsides of both systems.
Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.
If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.
But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.
That's very naïve.
What makes you think those people would be any less dangerous to your freedom when unbounded by law?
Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.
their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...
Especially Germany should know better. If you build two autocratic dictatorships on average per century, maybe start to take care that state powers are restricted.
The US is fully correct in its criticism of Germany regarding freedom of speech and house searches. Sure, on surveillance their arguments would be very weak...
Absolutely nothing positive will be gained by this surveillance, so there isn't even the smallest security benefit. On the contrary.
No way I'm getting into the restrict state powers discussion as that is highly complex and not something that can properly be discussed on an internet forum.
We had that in Germany by extremist autocratic parties and these policies are quite a clear mirror.
"Scanning the communications of everyone" - Might want to let that go through your head again.
It's definitely a disgusting horrible proposal.
Democratic governments clearly are about addressing community needs and coordinating efforts that require pooled resources (at least). I'm not denying there may be a monopoly on violence. However, in a democratic system, such a monopoly would be voted on, giving the monopoly some legitimacy (not saying it's necessarily moral).
Yet in reality, the US, for example, has the Second Amendment, which grants citizens the right to bear arms and form militias. That doesn't sound like the government has a monopoly on violence.
I guess the weasel word is "legitimate"? But is that legal or moral legitimacy (or something else)? By whose definition and arrived at how?
It feels like such a pithy comment, "a monopoly on legitimate violence", like it's expressing something deep. Yet I get the sense that supporting it requires some contortion of logic and language. Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem self-evident to me at all.
You can start from the Wikipedia page if you're interested[0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
So these so called <<right wing extremists>> represent the normal position.
Those who support and push anti-constitutional laws, maybe. All individuals in power, no.
And what would this change?
Ylva Johansson from Social Democrats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson#Surveillance_of...
Peter Hummelgaard from Social Democrats
https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498
One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America
Short of a direct (referendum based) democracy how do you resolve that?
Then it's not very democratic to change it.
How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.
> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)
Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.
> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.
That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.
> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.
Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.
> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.
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