Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

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• Hacker News
• All new laws should be given a trial period where the lawmakers are forced to live with them for 90 days before the public is subjected to them. At any time during that period lawmakers can change their vote.
  by jmward01
• This is an incredibly good idea. 90 days is too short to feel the effects of some things though. Better make it a year.

  The downside is "lets try giving everyone basic income of $100k/week". But apart from that great!

  by mosselman
• In addition there should be pretty specific criteria to determine if the law is successful or not. After 90 days it can be evaluated, and either rolled back or extended
  by dgellow
• Is anyone working on a "No chat control at all, ever law"? If these can be defeated, presumably one of those could become law.
  by Cider9986
• This happened in Switzerland with cash.
  by theragra
• I would have thought that the right to privacy as a fundamental human right would have been sufficient. But apparently not....

  Equally, there is abundant precedent for forbidding interference with old-fashioned postal communications, that seemingly doesn't translate to electronic communications...

  by pcrh
• A “no ever” law requires a constitutional majority. And for this concrete case, some member states effectively already have that via privacy guarantees in their constitution.

  Finally, it’s important to realize that the power of laws is limited to the extent that people are able and willing to enforce them. Some dictatorships have wonderful things in their constitution that are not heeded at all.

  by layer8
• No one will do anything to stop it, nor ChatControl 2.0 in the future. No one will revolt, or seize the government in response to anything that happens.

  The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.

  by sucrosesucrose
• If this is true, then the system will eventually collapse upon itself, as its governance feedback loops have been broken. No defeat is permanent.
  by iamnothere
• Exactly. And don't forget complaining on the internet. But algorithms will ensure few will see it.
  by brikym
• In your doomed reality maybe, but in this reality it was already stopped a couple of times and chances are good, that it will be stopped again - unless people believe all is doomed.
  by lukan
• The real joke is that these MEPs leave for summer break like they are school children and their attendance doesn't matter to the whole.
  by iamsaitam
• First they tried to approve software patents during an agriculture and fisheries council session, now they are bending procedural rules to hack it in before summer vacations. Some weird form of democracy™.
  by storus
• Why are we so passive to the promotion of such scams?

  I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.

  But this stupid reaction finally explains to me why human life for ordinary people will always largely be a life of suffering.

  by asxndu
• You have to dumb it down and make it more oriented around some kind of nefarious long game.
  by 0dayz
• average people never have skin in the game too. They barely understand a lot of the things that make things possible
  by kingleopold
• > I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.

  Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.

  In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."

  by dsign
• I was curious to see how the MEPs voted, you can check it here.

  https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338

  For once I'm pleasantly surprised that everyone I voted for was against.

  by yreg
• This is so cryptic that I wouldn't even know if for or against would mean for or against 'chat control'
  by mosselman
• So many comments about the EU constantly re-trying the same law with minor tweaks, and about how legislatures do this in general. I wanted to provide an explanation for this behaviour.

  The way legislation is expected to proceed in countries with parliamentary systems, especially with strong civil services, is that

  1) a problem is identified. This can be the civil service detecting it on their own, petitioning from groups impacted by the problem (lobbying, the public etc).

  2) The government prioritizes problems to solve according to political imperatives.

  3) The civil service and/or parliamentary committees gather evidence on the problem and possible solutions.

  4) the civil service and/or committee report on the issue. In practice this always finds the solution that the government wanted.

  5) A bill is drafted based on the report.

  6) The bill then proceeds through parliamentary committee, legislative votes, and whatever else is part of the lawmaking process.

  When we see this issues fail, it's typically at step (6). But the problem still exists, and the issue is still on the agenda. It's still a priority to solve. So steps 4-6 are re-tried with different parameters that hopefully allow the bill to pass and the problem to be solved.

  Just failing to pass parliament is not enough. You also need the political leadership to redirect their prioritization and implicit preferred solution.

  I'm not saying this is good, just this is what happens.

  by advisedwang
• Except the only need Chat control is fulfilling is the governments and bureaucrats need to control and check all civilian communications.
  by gillesjacobs
• But for chat control the problem never existed in the first place.
  by 11mariom
• > But the problem still exists, and the issue is still on the agenda. It's still a priority to solve.

  People are pushing back on this every single time. Maybe it's time legislators read the room instead? Is there a step for this too?

  by StrLght
• Step 6 is entirely missing in the EU. The parliament doesn’t form a committee to debate and perhaps refine the law, it just votes on what is put before it.
  by mr_toad
• Even if you are not in the EU, this will affect you. Some countries really like to copy such regulations from others. Once services starts complying, other governments will go like "if you did for them, you can do it for us, right? so it's not technically impossible", and things only get worse from there. Not all services will simply block the EU as well, which would be better to send a stronger message if approved.

  I really fear where this is headed.

  by harrisoned
• This is existing regulation being extended. It allows sites to scan messages. Not mandates.

  These kind of responses is why it is hard to trust privacy advocates on HN. They are high on rhetorics, but half the time dont know what they are talking about.

  by watwut
• Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.

  In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)

  by pr337h4m
• “We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

  And

  “If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”

  - Jean-Claude Juncker

  by rollulus
• And the worse part is: they do that because the alternative means you're building a railway on a surface tunnel because some people don't like it (or worse, not building anything)
  by raverbashing
• From a post on Mastodon:

  > democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is

  It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.

  by iamnothere