Yesterday and early this morning there has luckily been a massive push from Belgian media. The proposal this time around came from the Belgian presidency, so it was up to them to withdraw the vote.
It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively in the Belgian elections about two weeks ago.
In an short interview in De Tijd [1] with one of the Belgian MEPs pushing this (Hilde Vautmans, OpenVLD, liberal, lost big), and another short line in De Morgen [2] from outgoing Belgian Minister of the Interior who was part of the talks for this new version (Annelies Verlinden, CD&V, Christian democrats), both of them made it appear like they mostly just care about getting it done (because nobody else has succeeded yet). There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This morning, after the press attention, high rank party officials across the spectrum (and from the parties mentioned above) publicly called the proposal dangerous, so it's likely the pressure worked this time.
Next time this can come up for the vote will likely be from Hungary. They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed. Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
[1] https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/fel-privacyprotes...
[2] https://www.demorgen.be/snelnieuws/verlinden-buigt-voor-luid...
As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't ever get any insight. I wish we could launch some civil legal probe into EU institutions themselves, but that would probably end up being like staring at floating points of a tensor.
We don't get a lot of insight, but we do get some. For example, when it does come up for a vote in the Council, we'll know which countries voted in favour (something you can take into account in your next national elections).
Then the Parliament will have to agree as well, and we can see which parties there voted in favour, which you can take into account in the next European elections.
The Commission is toughest to hold accountable. The Commissioner pushing it (Ylva Johansson in this case) was nominated by a country's (Sweden, in this case) government, so Swedish voters could hold the parties in that government accountable in their next national election, I suppose, but that's a very weak signal.
And you know, fund lobbyists. Shocking I know, but it's not just corporations who have lobbyists, NGOs too.
I've been donating forever to Signal, and at this point, I'm resigned that it won't reach WhatsApp parity. Just hire some lobbyists to keep encrypted communications legal as a human right.
That wouldn’t help. The proposal “got around” weakening encryption without outright removing it.
They “just” wanted anything you sent to be scanned before it was sent encrypted.
Stupid and dangerous, the even have sections in the proposal that talk about encryption being important, but somehow less important than thinking about the children and putting a cop looking over the shoulder of every single citizen.
That's like saying only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.
The solution is to remove guns/lobbyists, not attempting to beat them at their own game because you will absolutely lose.
With your solution bureaucrats only have access to registered lobbyist to be eliminated. Bribery remains.
I wonder why NGO advice does not correlate with decision directions at all. Remember the CCC talks by NGO lobbists, usually culminating for everything they do in a"anyway that was what we advised, they however would vote/do/the thing we advised against". Had a huge speakerscorner going nowhere vibe and europes youth kicked that play pretend democracy in the nuts last election.
What can I do about foreign politicians?
Push your own politicians to talk to them. Most serious EU Parliament groups are trans-national.
It's like asking what can you do about parliamentarians elected in other districts.
That's always problematic. The best shot you have is pressure your own politicians (at whatever level) to try to strongarm them.
For example, US policy has quite a lot of influence on me, but I can't vote for US politicians. Or Russian policy, for that matter.
Your MEPs are likely part of a parliamentary group with foreign politicians and coordinate with them on policy.
If your commissioner and MEPs have been solidly opposed to a policy there might not be much you can do. But do you know that that’s a case? Many governments tend to blame unpopular proposals on the EU while the commissioner that they themselves chose vote in favour.
Ylva Johansson was proposed by the previous Swedish government though (a Social Democratic one), which (sort of) lost the last election. No idea why the current (right wing) government is keeping her in place.
In practise, that means she's supported by all except one of the relevant Swedish parties.
Commissioners are typically not replaced when a national government changes, which is a good thing from a stability perspective (countries can often have two or three different executives in a single year). In the end, a Commissioner is proposed by a country but is then meant to work in the interest of the entire Union, in what is largely an administrative role (Council and Parliament are the real political entities). They are supposed to be uncontroversial people, respected across the entire political spectrum, and typically will stay in post for the duration of their mandate unless embroiled in scandals.
The commissioner before her was Cecilia Malmström 2010-2019, a liberal party politician (right bloc) whose second term was wholly during a social democratic (left bloc) government because the nomination happened before the election.
Unfortunately, both Sweden’s most recent commissioners have been prominently advocating against encryption and for mass surveillance. I really hope our new commissioner for the 2024-2029 period ends up with a better track record on privacy advocacy.
Isn't it kinda late to act?
makes a nice plot for a Dr. Who episode.
Didn't they can Dr Who finally?
Why would they end it?
They did in the '80s, after a run longer than the current revival. Sometimes things come in and out of fashion.
No its still going on as "The most BBC show ever made by the BBC"
They did a soft reset, with Ncuti's new season being marked as the Season 1 of the 2023 version. It's still going strong, with this season being very strong, IMO.
I think this is what happens when you get an appointed council making decisions rather than a democratically elected one. It's a bad idea because it lets the appointees and appointers to point fingers and dilute blame, which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best interest (often the opposite of those for the 99%) passed.
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%. Rich or poor, we all use the same communication infrastructure. Rich people don't want their chats monitored either. People don't want this. Intelligence agencies want this. But ask the people working at those agencies, ask them as individuals, and they won't want this on their phones either.
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%
Ideally, yes. In practice, the 1% have resources the 99% don't which allow them to minimize their exposure to mass surveillance. Whether this means carving out exemptions for their own communications or conducting their meetings in person, in private, in other jurisdictions.
Who do you imagine the 1% to be? Probably I‘m the 1% in my country. I have no extraordinary power whatsoever. Maybe you mean the 0,1% or the 0,01%.
Yes, your family doctor is also likely part of the 1%. Unfortunately, the term 1% has shifted to basically mean "the people with most of the wealth and power in a country" which is a much smaller group of people, perhaps even less than 0.01%.
Quibbling over the mathematical inaccuracy of the term is tilting at windmills. You'd have better luck getting people to stop using the word "literally" to mean its opposite.
That wouldn't help anyway because most important things happen between national governments and the people they nominate. The EU institutions would work very differently if they were directly formed and managed by the European parliament. Alas the national governments know very well why they won't ever allow that.
You can get quite a bit of data, what are you looking for?
Thanks for that very thorough look into this ...
I wanted to say. It will return.-
This is one of the things that irks me the most: The abusive, emotional "mislabeling". Children have nothing to do with this, and it is an abuse of public good faith to mislabel these sort of initiatives using "children" as leverage, preying upon a tech-lliterate public.-
In fact, that is also an issue here: The public needs to be brought up to speed (technically) and/or we should at least demand technical expertise from our politicians, when legislating or acting upon mainly technological issues.-
Yeah this is the main thing
I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think it's more that most people don't care about the value of privacy.
I imagine it's easy to blame other citizens. Alternatively though, corporate interests are just far more influential than we realize.
I never really understood this line of thought. Corporate interests _are_ citizen interests right? Those corporations are made up of (a lot) of people, and if those corporate systems thrive in a certain condition, then the people within these corporate systems will largely want to maintain or create those conditions. Those citizens do vote as well, and from personal experience, a lot of people vote in their own interest rather than national or moral interest. From research, I could not find conclusive numbers regarding altruistic [0] vs self-interested voting rates.
The more people are working for these corporations, the more we create and sustain the conditions that hold these systems in place. Whether that is 'good' is another debate.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_theory_of_voting
On a sinking ship one way to get to higher ground is to go to one end and make sure that the opposite side gets more water faster.
That's just a way to sink faster. Even in the parallel.
What's the difference? They "don't care" about it as long as they don't suffer any direct ill effects from their indifference.
Once things get to the point where every facet of our lives is actively under surveillance, and authoritarians in power start abusing their power in ways that affect those who "don't care", they'll start caring really quickly but by then it's going to be too late.
Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being taken for granted.
Ironically since fascist (in the broader sense) parties and the likes don't seem to support Chat control (yet, I guess) the other parties have a harder time passing it to not lose votes to them.
It is strange how such an anti-democratic law is pushed so hard but there is still tip toeing around actually passing it.
Being a child from Portuguese revolution, and witness of how the Berlin wall went down, it is really bad that newer generations don't have any sense of what it meant to live during those days, and vote into such parties with protest votes nonsense.
(And, sadly, it might serve to combat "semantic satiation" and reinvigorate now oft-bandied-about terms that are losing meaning)
Privacy is a very ephemeral thing.
The retail service price of Gmail, Maps, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. together probably would exceed a couple hundred dollars a year. People would rather pocket that money, especially with how tight budgets are becoming.
I think you've betrayed your own argument, because talking with people would have been more effective than screaming at clouds, to use your metaphor.
Just because you're putting something out there doesn't mean anyone else is receiving it. And if they're not receiving it, you can't judge whether or not they care.
Sadly, like much of everything, only once you lose it ...
It's always the Council (i.e. the national governments) with the worst proposals and then the EU has to take the blame.
This is just not true. Only the Commission can propose new legislation. This very proposal also is quite aggressively pushed by the Commission (see for example the advertising campaign: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio...).
And the Commission is formed by national governments.
The Commission is formed by commissioners, each of which has been nominated by a different nation's government. The Council consists of actual members of the national governments.
The third party that can't propose legislation but has to approve it (and which strongly opposed this) is the Parliament, which is directly elected.
No. The Commission is formed by the national governments and of commissioners.
OK, this is probably some nuance of the English language that I'm missing as a non-native speaker, but I meant that the people that make up the Commission are not part of the national governments. The people that are part of national governments each get to nominate one commissioner though, in addition to being part of the Council.
The Commission agenda and mandate is set by the Council that nominates it, and periodically reviewed by the same Council. Items are set in meetings, the agenda of such meetings is typically public.
If the Commission pushes, it's because the Council told it to push.
That is a technicality relying on a shallow look at the word "propose". The commission frequently takes direction from the council when deciding what to focus on which leads to them "proposing" legislation. In this case the push for this has come from the Council and certain national governments combined with a particular commissioner.
Specifically this is being pushed by Ylva Johansson [1] from Sweden, who has (reportedly) financial connections to the organisation Thorn which is hoping to sell this chat monitoring software.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson
It's only them and the commission who can make proposals right
Only the commission
But commission and council aren't acting in a void (parliament neither), if there's appetite for a legislation amongst national governments the commission will work on a proposal
The same works to a lesser extent with the commission and parliament as well
The Council is as much part of the EU institution and as legitimate a part of them as the Parliament
There's no avatar of the EU manifesting out of thin air in brussels so it makes sense for the EU as a whole to bear the blame for the actions it takes, regardless of where it originated
I think the point is that the EU hasn’t actually taken any actions yet. This is just infighting between different arms of the EU governance structures, trying to figure out what actions should be taken.
So it is unfair to label rubbish coming out of the commission or council as something the EU has decided, when it’s only the first step of many for actually making a decision.
It would be like taking any random bit of legislation proposed by a member of congress, and labelling it as the collective stance of the entire U.S. government, completely ignoring the fact there’s a long road from proposal to enactment.
Proposals should have an exponential backoff algorithm. Otherwise they'll keep proposing over and over until it passes.
Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final effect is mostly the same.
I know a similar principle is successfully applied in judicial courts, in some cases.
If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?
Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.
I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074
Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-
Opposition needs public support.
The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages.
I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.
But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight against the same thing over and over and over.
Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.
Can't we just pass a law that is incompatible with this proposal? Or can a new law always overrule existing laws?
This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive.
There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.
Even if it does succeed, that would mean the Commission and the Council are in favour, but they'll still have to reach an agreement with Parliament as well. Parliament has already come out strongly against the proposal, but we just voted in a new, more conservative, Parliament, so I'm a bit anxious to see whether it'll stick to that stance.
I get the feeling most of those conservatives entering the parliament are of the libertarian and anti-establishment variety.
Within the European Parliament, The ID Party represents many of the rising rightwing national parties, such as AfD, RN, Lega, PVV. Among other things, the ID Party stands for "Defense of individual freedoms and protection of freedom of expression, in particular digital freedoms"
https://id-party.eu/program
The concept of a centrally-managed surveillance apparatus in the EU runs contrary to the stated beliefs of the Euro-skeptic ID Party, which wants to reverse the centralisation of power within the EU.
There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.
Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.
Authoritarian center is called 'extreme center' for a reason.
I wonder if conservative/progressive and right/left were false dichotomies. At the extremes there are remarkably similar outcomes. Corruption is present at the extremes and the more moderate center. Some of the corruption is more explicit and illegal (pay me and I'll do this), other less so and legal (you did this while in office so now we hire you for big $ to do little.)
I'm not so much concerned about the rise of the ID party in this regard, but instead the growth of EPP and decline of the Greens. And possibly also Renew, though I'm not sure where they stood - if they were in favour then I guess their decline helps here.
This doesn't really fall across conservative / progressive lines, and those lines are already pretty blurred in the EP
We'll see how it goes but it's hard to say what the result will be purely based on the elections results.
That is absolutely true, and the best thing to do is indeed to wait and see. And cross our fingers.
There may be more than one reason, but yesterday Germany said they'd vote against the proposal so it was DOA.
This kind of access to information still brings up Stasi memories in lots of us, or PIDE/DGS, in my case.
But there are too many interests to make it in, sadly.
How the hell is the stasi relevant in any way whatsoever?
I am not German, but when I lived in Germany I got the impression they were very wary of political proposals that infringed on the privacy and liberties that the German people enjoyed.
Not that they didn't pass any shitty laws, but that the question "how can this be misused?" always was present.
This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power.
In the US, by contrast, I see one political power eager to give powers to their candidates which they would hate to give to the rival party. It's like they've forgotten that they are giving power to the Government, not to a party, and if the other party gets power they get those powers.
"This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power."
This trait can be found all over the former Soviet Bloc, because we have had enough experience with either one or two homicidal authoritarian regimes (the Nazis and the Communists). That experience was paid in a lot of pain and blood.
Places like Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia or the US, where governments within living memory weren't as oppressive against their own population, have a lot of naive people, "well, they mean it well".
The point that you have to ask that question, in the context of state surveillance, is quite telling.
Germany publicly announced they will vote No. I don’t know about others. Maybe it just became clear that it wouldn’t pass?
It was a sneaky try anyways, right after the election.
And during the UEFA Euro 2024.