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- Hacker News
- I am shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!by baal80spam
- As a Maltese person, I'm sorry. I feel embarrassed to be one right nowby vrighter
- It's just sad what happens in the world. It's awful. But most likely it's one of the "zombie" projects. That will never be removed until they are passedby Joyniness
- This is a push by one individual, or maybe a small group. I don't think we should generalize this to the whole European commission, or the whole EU. Hopefully and most likely it will be shut down if put up for a vote.by onel
- Her, Kaja Kallas and Ursula Von Der Leyen ... who is the fourth horsewoman of the stupidocalypse?by ReptileMan
- Henna Virkkunenby nonamesleft
- With democracies like this, who needs dictators?by antiloper
- The title is incorrect and editorialised, Metsola is the president of the parliament, not the commission.
A conservative from a highly Catholic country (Malta), pushing conservative/far right values. Not surprising but still disappointing, that's what happens when the populace thinks voting far right is a "protest vote" and the election hands them 1/3 of the assembly.
by goobatrooba - So if I get this right all she can force is conciliation, which needs the parliament to agree on it in third reading anyway?by IsTom
- Original title: President vs Parliament: Metsola overrides MEPs in bid to force through child abuse law
Content from TFA:
> Ambassadors on Friday will consider an “invitation of the President of the European Parliament [to] proceed with the Council’s first reading position” on the proposal to allow tech companies to choose to scan for CSAM
> The European Commission proposed the temporary CSAM bill as a stopgap measure to allow companies to scan while legislators agreed on a more permanent solution.
> Tech firms continued to scan, despite the legal limbo.
> If capitals choose to adopt their position, the law does not automatically pass: The Parliament would need to either accept it or re-enter negotiations. “There is no certainty that [the Parliament] would adopt the legislative act in second reading in line with the Council’s first reading position,” Cyprus wrote in the note.
> Gregorová rejected the suggestion that lawmakers would budge. “The Parliament mandate is clear: A majority voted it down, meaning that we reject the extension.”
by agarsev - Guess who is funding and lobbying this?
Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.
by miohtama - I never imagined Ashton Kutcher's pivot to evil tech titan back when he was being goofy on That 70s Show or Dude Where's My Car?.by Schlagbohrer
- Ashton Kutcher wrote a letter of support for Danny Masterson and his character when Masterson was convicted of multiple counts of rape. When this showed up in the media his defense was he thought this letter would be private even though it was sent to the judge in a criminal trial. Apparently, he and his friends should be able to use their fame/connections to quietly help their rapist friends get reduced sentences but everyone else should have their private communications scanned.
- We're moving towards total surveillance slowly but surely. Age verification. Chat control. To an extent also the digital euro. It all seems hopeless, they're pushing this through despite what semblance of a democratic process we have clearly being against it. [that is not to speak of how undemocratic the european system is and how badly it needs reform. Von der leyen should never have been able to get the role she holds]by schmorptron
- This is and has always been inevitable with tech. Politics can only postpone people's inherent desire to control and dominate and powerful tech makes this easier and cheaper.
We (the tech people) have built the perfect tools to centralize and automate control and we're still doing it, mostly for free.
The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.
It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient. There are many examples of this in the world right now and it's only going to get worse.
We can only push back to postpone this, but the tide is against us and too few really care about these things.
by delegate - > We're moving towards total surveillance slowly but surely
We're actually speedrunning towards total surveillance.
I don't believe in democracy at all anymore.
by iLoveOncall - To clarify for fellow readers, since this is a messy situation:
This is about a new temporary measure to legally allow instant-messaging providers to scan their users' messages. Providers lost that legal right when the previous interim act (the Interim Derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, sometimes called "Chat Control 1.0") expired on 4 April 2026. Several large providers have said they'll keep scanning regardless.
This is only one piece of a bigger effort. For years the Commission has been trying to put a more permanent regime in place (the CSA Regulation, or "Chat Control 2.0") without success.
As both a lawyer and a software engineer, I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages, if they actually want to combat online abuse. The research points the other way:
- Most messages on these services are end-to-end encrypted, so they can't be scanned at all (assuming the E2EE is implemented correctly). The Commission itself says 70% of messages on popular chat platforms are E2EE [1].
- Instant messaging isn't the main distribution channel for CSAM in the first place, per data from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [2].
So the evidence points to low overall efficacy for message scanning against its stated goal of combating online child sexual abuse.
I don't think it'll pass this time. What worries me more is the spread of mandatory age-verification laws worldwide. That train is already going full steam ahead..
[1] https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/internal-security...
[2] Page 18, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
by ChaosOp - > I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages
I believe that's a form of corporate greenwashing. If you can prove your claims that you do everything in your power to prevent abusive materials, you're going to get less attention from annoying authorities next time a pedo network/terrorist cell hits the news.
Aside from that, there are a lot of well-meaning people who want to try every little thing to help stop horrific abuse. Police investigations are happening too slowly (if at all); if the police won't help solve the problem, going the civil route may help, even if just a little. I think it's an act of desperation rather than malice. Plus, just like there are plenty of people who say "they've got nothing to hide, I don't need encryption", there are plenty of people who feel like a tech panopticon is worth it if it catches some abuse cases. Besides, in cases like these, scientific evidence often doesn't matter as much as the emotion behind proposals, and most messaging providers couldn't appear more devoid of emotion if they tried.
I don't agree with the idea to scan every message for various reasons. If the police won't investigate criminals with the massive amount of power they already possess, overwhelming them with "abusive" material from an algorithm is only going to make it harder to filter out the real criminals. Plus, if a few large providers do it, that will put pressure on all the other providers that don't do it (see, for instance, that time they arrested the CEO of Telegram for not volunteering information without a warrant, like other messaging providers seem to do).
But, as much as I disagree, I do understand where those people are coming from. And then there are also the blatant comic-book villains that just want totalitarian government control over all information exchange, of course.
by jeroenhd - As both a lawyer and a software engineer, I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages, if they actually want to combat online abuse.
They don’t want to combat child abuse, they want to improve their advertising fingerprints.
by eska - You could additionally point out that most EU states are DEfunding helping actual victims of CSAM. Because they are. So is the UK, for what it's worth.
This supposed goal of the legislation never even gets mentioned in the discussions about these laws.
Which seems to go further into that direction you're pointing to as well: this is about scanning all instant messages across the entire EU, for reasons other than protecting children. They don't even discuss actually protecting children.
by spwa4 - Given the insistance to pass this and the will of EU enforcement agencies to be able to monitor all communications in a Stasi-like manner, there is a large chance that the EC is applying the "salami technique" here.
First, install a monitoring system "for the kids", then you can expand for surveillance, and repression of incorrect political thought. Just like what China and Russia are doing, which has started the same.
by Saline9515