> keep at it until they succeed

Is there any EU process to codify principles (e.g. Human Digital Rights) that need to be upheld in future attempts?

Its both, ultimately politics is not all-knowing and you can't stamp out all technical solutions.

Like, breaking encryption is just not possible if the encryption is set using a proper algorithm. Governments try, and they try to pass laws, but it's literally impossible. No amount of political will can change that. Ultimately I can write an encryption algorithm or use GPG or something and nobody on Earth, no matter how motivated or how rich, can read what I encrypted, provided I do not let out the key. If I just keep the password in my head, it's impossible.

So, until we invent technology to extract secrets from a human brain, you cannot universally break encryption. Its just not possible. Doesn't matter if 7 billion people worldwide vote for that. Doesn't matter if Elon Musk wants it. Doesn't matter if the FBI, CIA, and the NSA all work together.

People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true. It's still up in the air whether you can defeat a law using technical measures, but it is a thoroughly settled matter that you cannot legislate away mathematics.

We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.

Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.

The EU isn't undemocratic, but it feels undemocratic to many, and that's a legitimacy issue worth taking seriously

Democratic or undemocratic are always subjective terms. For me personally, the level of indirection is a problem. This problem was known since the inception and the reason why the subsidiarity principle was underlined. Sadly, that doesn't seem to apply for important issues like chat control. Imagine accountability on a communal level. We wouldn't even see this crap.

You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.

You are not only being far too generous in your rationalization for how the EU is democratic and representative but are making category mistakes.

The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.

It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.

Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.

Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.

The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.

It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.

For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.

But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.

What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.

America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.

The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.

In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.

As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive

The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards

And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down

It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform

A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)

Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them

Do any member states follow the model of only the non directly elected upper house can propose legislation?

Wow, Apple paid 7M for 9 people to have 144 meetings with the EC. I'm in the wrong line of business.

On the other hand, I'm thinking can we find 9 unpaid volunteers on HN to do the same?

This site even has a disclaimer on the front page that its information is not necessarily accurate. Take it all with a grain of salt.

No, for a time any criticism about EU democracy was brushed away. Especially at the time around Brexit. For obvious reasons. But they are undeniable in theoretical and practical terms. This is why the competence of the EU was restricted at first. Problem is that this restriction did get too loose.

Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.

How does Swiss politics work? They also have multiple languages.

Democracy is where people, or at least those given full citizenship, have a duty to debate and decide the rules they will be agreeing to follow, directly.

Anything else is green washing.

Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.

Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.

> candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country

Few people would do the homework of researching hundreds of candidates from other countries.

> and for almost all issues a veto

Notably ChatControl is not one of them.

Except the Commission and Von Der Leyen keep pushing to assert themselves as an executive branch.

I don't think much abstraction or design is needed. We are looking at the output here and that is chat control. The EU will have to be measured against this output.

The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.

> The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.

Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.

This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.

This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.

In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...

This feels like a recipe for dysfunction and more paralysis.

The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.

The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.

The US has that in theory, just like the limits on the president. But in practice the US has been centralizing power since the start, and the EU has a looooong way to go to come even close.

The EU is not sovereign. Member countries can just outright ignore EU law (see: Hungary or the former UK) and the only recourses are civil things like issuing declarations, withholding payments, crossing them off treaties, or kicking them out of the EU. There are no EU police that can be involuntarily forced on a country the same way the USA can send armed federal police or military into its states. Doing anything like that would be a declaration of war.

A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.

I was under the impression that Faraga was heavily advocating for Brexit and he and his supporters ultimately got what they wanted so at least some people should be really happy that it happened (the ones who went into it with realistic expectations at least).

He's had 15 years of success without his vote in a westminster election getting to 15%

Actual election results:

2010: 3%

2015: 13%. He was the only party to endorse leaving the EU in that election.

2016: (52% vote to leave the EU)

2017: retired

2019: 2%

2024: 14%

Yet his prime policy was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2019.

You don't need people to vote for you to get your policies passed. You need people to just believe in what you say, and other politicians will see that and implement them. The most successful politicians see all sides "steal their policies" and implement them. That's assuming your goal is the policy, not the power.

It depends on how you ask the question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI

> > In the UK the public overwhelmingly support the age controls

> This couldn't be further from the truth.

> People usually support the idea if asked on the street in passing

So pretty close to the truth then?

Some say "Apple got too much shit for on device scanning". I think they didn't get nearly enough.

If you as much as give the "think of the children" crowd an inch, they'll take a mile. And giving them on device scanning was way more than "an inch".

That is exactly the problem. I still can imagine that they come up with some scheme as a compromise, that particularly targets particularly encrypted group chats along with all kind of server side automatic scanning, that as you mention could be abused at least by intelligence to track non CSAM content. I wonder what other 'compromise' will actually be effectively possible.

I bet what the politicians mean is "we have to make sure our surveillance is safe, like our digital health data, so that no bad actors can tap it". The only one who should be reading your messages is you, the sender, and the government.

They could have just left out Article 8. Its a “no interference by a public authority unless it want’s to.” “Well-being of the country”, “protection of health or morals” are terms that make this statute irrelevant and dependent on the current mood of the EU.

Privacy needs to be an absolute right. Any invasion of privacy of any individual is a violation of their rights and needs to be treated as such with actual repercussions following misconduct.

> Everybody has a right to privacy (except where inconvenient).

No, human rights and children's rights declarations are ratified individually.

I think you missed my point entirely. I'm not trying to argue there shouldn't be any privacy or anything like that

That's not my questions at all. My question is, is there some good clear framework for what should and shouldn't be private. B/c otherwise it's kind of some meaningless platitude, like "everyone should be nice to each other"

> I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right

Human rights are famously almost impossible to clearly define because they're an entirely abstract category relying very much on cultural consensus for their practical definition

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

> Is this definition problematic?

Yes, very much so. By qualifying that the interference must not be unlawful it essentially makes any interference by law (like what was proposed here in the first place) fine

> privacy, family, home or correspondence

This is very restrictive, for instance there's nothing in it about online storage or your laptop / phone since they're neither your home, family or correspondence

> unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation

This manages to be so unclear that if applied strictly it'd ban any criticism of a politician or anyone else as long as you can construe it as "attacking their reputation"

I think HN has a higher than average number of people who are unable to detect irony or sarcasm.

I reckon that would only serve to play into their hands. There is just enough plausible deniability for conspiracy-theory optics. Moreover, European politicians really hate to be publicly humiliated like that, so it might as well achieve the opposite from desired effect. The Balkan Insight findings, among other journalistic results, were published years ago, and it had little, if any effect. The audience that would resonate with anti-American messaging on the subject are already catalysed contra ChatControl, and the undecided would just read this as conspiracy theory...

US interests are running the show.

They are a proxy for other powers

I mainly remember the Zensursula title in connection with the ISP-level DNS-blocking initiative (the Stopsign thing) which was to combat CSAM.

I remember all the nerds going "That's a slippery slope to blocking other stuff as well though", and being dismissed. Now we got the CUII blocking libgen, scihub, piracy sites and as I recently read on HN, russia today(that's not the cuii I'm pretty sure, but same mechanism).

In many countries it's prison time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

Dormammu, I've come to bargain

The primacy of European Union law applies to member states of the European Union. That is part of what the countries agreed to in order to become a member state. Some countries negotiated opt-outs for specific laws that they felt shouldn't apply to them before joining - and disgruntled member states could attempt the same by threatening to leave.

The only way that the European Union can 'force' compliance of a member state is for the EU Commission (or, exceptionally, the Parliament and Council) to withhold EU funds from that member state. Those funds were never the property of the member state in the first place though - again, no infringement on national sovereignty.

What link?

In the case it is declared unconstitutional, there are two options: take the fight to the eu/amend the law, or change the constitution. The latter is more probable than the former in the political climate of our times. So we are talking at best for some delay in implementing it.

These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.

In Ireland this isn't something the public really even knows was proposed, I highly doubt the public would be in support of this, although can't be sure about it. You would think given the country's history they wouldn't be in favour of government overreach in this way but you never know.