Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025:
Original:
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
Translated to English:
https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...
'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
Entire world seems to be making a pivot to surveillance state :(
I wonder how much support it would have if it was called "Speech Control" instead. Probably still a depressing percentage...
Full post:
Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!
The vote is THIS October.
Tell your government to #StopChatControl!
Act now: https://chatcontrol.eu
I followed the link to that .eu website which then redirected me to https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
I was expecting to find a big CTA button that I could click to sign some message to my representatives. Instead I found a giant wall of text with "ideas on how to take action" followed by a list of points along the lines of "Is your government in favour? Ask for an explanation" OK, ask how? No links, no email addresses... basically it's just a page saying "if you care about this thing do your own homework and find a way to act"
Whoever made that page needs to look into the concept of conversion rate. As it is right now it's basically useless
More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.
I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
Are they going to vote on that every year until it passes?
Note to poster if they happen to see this: as pointed out there's alt text... But it's plain wrong, saying "Countries like Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and the Netherlands are in green, indicating opposition or neutrality" when only the Netherlands, Poland an Austria are opposed; it's probably just been copied from an older version and could use updating.
Argh, red and green colors are not great for accessibility, I had to look hard to find the countries that were opposed/neutral (Poland, Austria and Netherlands, afaict)
i know it's included in the toot, but it feels like this thread should have the link to the act now site: https://chatcontrol.eu/
"The EU Commission proposes... ...Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence... ...network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world..."
It's jarring seeing these proposals after which we like to brag about being better than China on digital rights.
The sad truth is that it's so much easier, cheaper and faster to have these laws than actually doing "police" work.
I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time. Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
Aside from the infamous privacy aspects, I'm wondering about the feasibility and the energy cost of running continously ML algos to scan content on a phone.
Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.
The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Easier than asking everyone you know to use GPG
Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.
Who would have thought?!
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia?
Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!
saying no to AI is a great way to become the third world
Because politicians are not accountable to you and are paid for by lobbyists.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a UK/US only problem. The EU nanny statism isn't a good thing nor is the loss of sovereignty associated with it.
But hey, the left right binary choice strawman made it so that people basically pushed for more gov power no matter what and now it's too late to stop the inertia.
The next time you need to vote against accumulation of power they'll scare you again with extremists, terrorists, drug dealers, children safety, disinformation (which is basically calling for suppression of freespeech and criminalization of wrongthink), etc.
If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
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Karl Popper, "The open society and its enemies":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It's all about the paradox of tolerance.
That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.
The thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that some of the worst of worst intolerant discourse is going to be allowed and protected because it's "religious": because we are open, tolerant, societies we are tolerant with intolerance.
If you have a holy book that calls for killing non-believers and taking their wive and daughters as sex slaves: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.
It's shooting the messenger.
Guess what's one of the issue concerning many people in a great many european cities at the moment? People feeling that religious extremism and obscurantism, middle-age style, is making a comeback.
And people are organizing marches all over the EU.
The last thing the EU wants is people on social media organizing themselves and protesting because they don't want the EU to become the next Syria or Somalia: most in the EU do not want the EU to become an intolerant continent.
You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.
It's really sad: I already moved three times, lived over four different countries (all in the EU) and now I'm planning to leave the EU while I still can (not that there are that many great places where I can realistically go).
P.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
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Aw, Jeez, not this shit again.
ChatControl!--because Orwell was a rabble-rousing fool
They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this