And the underhanded way of trying to get something as controversial as this to pass, says a lot about the politicians pushing this agenda.
Chat Control is about allowing mass surveillance and removing privacy, no should be the obvious answer here.
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
You think children should be executed in the streets? Neither of us said any such thing, why ask that as a question even?
My only point being that Epstein himself doesn't seem related to EU Council, based on facts, while he was very close friend of the current sitting US president, and the whole thing is still being actively swept under the rug by the US Justice Department. Two governments located on two different continents...
I would be utterly shocked if facebook et al. were not scanning all of your messages (either in transit or at terminus to get around 'E2E' claims).
Or are we saying this is being used for something specific that happens to be illegal?
Not all services should be treated equally. We've figured this out earlier about letters, it's typically illegal, even for postal services, to open and read your letters without your consent, because there is an expectation about privacy.
Fast forward some years since then, and now basically IMs are the new letters, and sadly we have few big actors (yet again) controlling the transportation of our communication. People generally still want privacy in their communications, so regulations were made that companies cannot open your messages ("letters") without your consent, so we humans still have more or less the same protections as before, just tailored to the new specific implementation.
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party. The right of privacy to one's own letters is the main legal basis for the assumption of privacy of correspondence. The principle has been naturally extended to other forms of communication, including telephony and electronic communications on the Internet, as the constitutional guarantees are generally thought to also cover these forms of communication
it's unconstitutional in most places to read letters - same thing should be applied to other form of communication as well
Why would you need to moderate private messages between users?
It's very common in some spaces to get people who send unwanted (spam/harassment/etc) DMs to tons of people. Just expecting everyone to block those people makes for a horrible user experience, because it means new users might be suddenly met by a bunch of unwanted DMs from aggressive randos that remain unbanned. You really need to be able to ban these people (and that means being able to verify that they did what they're accused of).
This is not the same as scanning all messages (which makes E2EE moot).
Always the same political excuse
The institution that forced this through is the EU Council, the body that represents national governments and is composed of heads of government.
The reason they have to force it through and couldn't do 2.0 is because the EU Parliament stopped them.
In other words, it's the nation states that want this and the EU institutions that are blocking it, not the other way around as often framed online.
If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states.
You can see this play out in real-time in the UK, which has gone real dystopian ever since Brexit.
Who is in the Council? You are saying "nuh-uh", but not addressing any of the substance of my comment.
Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
You know what the Council consists of? The heads of national governments.
You know who they're having to force it through against? The EU parliament, an actual EU-level institution.
The more accurate read would thus be "national governments are trying to force this against the will of the EU".
The fact that you come away with the exact opposite read is a good demonstration of said propaganda's effectiveness.
That some actors may ride it, is not their stain, but the eu's.
And, about «precisely the misinformation I mentioned earlier»: you think this infomess was caused by foreign agents, instead of internal european lack of clarity?
If a government body wants to interfere in your privacy and take it away, isn't it normal to be against that government body pushing that policy?
It's not a bias, it's just a normal common sense reaction to tyrannical behavior, and pushing against that government body is the only way to enact the positive change you want to see.
Otherwise if you just bend over and take it all the time, just so randos on the internet don't accuse you of being "anti-EU", then nothing will change and you'll see more and more of your rights taken away. And even if it were "EU bias" it's my right as an EU citizen and taxpayer to have it if I want to.
Alos BTW, what's with this defensive attitude of treating the EU like some sacred cow that's somehow beyond reproach HN? Are they paying you guys to AstroTurf or what?
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.
The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.