Social context (pardon the subjective background, I'm trying to only provide what's collectively shared more or less in Germany):

Ursula von der Leyen is hated in Germany as an evil war-mongering gnome. She was previously appointed to replace a highly decorated military general of the Germany Army (Bundeswehr) without having any skills in that area, except being corrupt to the core. She miserably failed the military, cost the state large losses in tax-payer money and was promoted instead being removed. Then she "somehow" became the fierce and corrupt "Queen of the EU".

EDIT (I owe you sources at least):

I think it goes much deeper, I think it's not just corruption, she's a perfect traitor of the EU and Germany. Selling all 500 million europeans out to a foreign state.

- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/eu-abgeordnete-dr...

- https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article191310021/Urs...

- https://journalistenwatch.com/2026/07/11/ursula-die-skandal-...

- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ursula-von-der-le...

- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundeswehr-berater-von-d...

- https://www.zeit.de/thema/ursula-von-der-leyen

- https://trump.news-pravda.com/ukraine/2026/06/24/360828.html

Could you please give more detail about this for those of us less informed of EU things? What corrupt things has Ursula done? Or what has she been accused of, exactly? How long has she been cancelling court dates?

Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?

Who exactly are "they"?

Her name is von der Leyen. "Ursula" is fine for your friends, but it’s awkward for a public figure. Do you write "Donald" as well?

I tried to explain to my wife (American lawyer) how the EU Commissioners are selected and she told me "I'm not having fun understanding this." I had thought it was just the heads of government from each member state. That would make sense given the immense power of the body. But that's apparently not how it works.

Exactly, also the ECJ is horribly corrupt (search for the corruption scandal revealed by a French journalist few years ago). Nothing happened back them.

This will never become law in my country(Poland). Last time they tried to push it people protested in the millions.

Yes, the Eu basically morphed into a supranational institution that allows a minority to control entire Europe and use it as a private farm for the countries that dominate it.

> However, we do not consider those as farces as well

Speak for yourself. A lot of people do.

It's mindbogling how ignorant people are when it comes to how the EU is structured and how it works ;(

The Council must go at some point. It is a "legislative" body... composed of members of the _executive_ branch of the individual countries. Granted, that's not the only problem with EU governance, but it is a rather glaring anomaly in terms of transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, at least in the case of Italy & other parliamentary systems, there's something like 3 levels of indirection between the people and their "representative" in the Council:

People elect members of the Parliament -> MPs decide who is the Prime Minister -> PM decides who sits in the Council

We should likely just replace it with either a "EU Senate", where each country elects the same number of senators, _or_ a chamber with truly European elections (as in, every EU citizen may vote for any candidate, regardless of their nation). But the latter option seems still out of reach as of today.

The Commission refused to withdraw the proposal after Parliament rejected it, leaving it on the table. The Council disagreed with Parliament’s rejection, formally forcing a second reading.

Both the European Commission and the Council itself are not DIRECTLY elected EU bodies. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.

I think what you've typed is not representative of how EU works.

The Council [1], also known as the Council of the European Union and the Council of Ministers, does not consist of heads of state. The body that consists of heads of state is the European Council [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council

AND IGNORED IT

Literally the voice of the EU voters has been suppressed on this matter despite the Parliament (elected by them) voted twice on denying this full proposal.

By any definition of the term, this is not a democracy and it's a technocracy at best.

Edit: I am Italian.

> Some folks (mostly Americans) tend to think that their laws, their definitions of terms like "democracy", their beliefs, their norms, their culture - are all universal.

The American system was mostly cribbed from Europeans to begin with. Montesquieu, etc. The structure of the EU is bizarre according to the principles of democratic governance articulated by Europeans themselves.

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Which would be fine, if it was just a trade union like originally designed. I really love the original idea of EU. I could even get behind more federation style, although trade union is vastly preferable for me - but I do understand people pushing for it.

Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.

Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:

- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.

- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.

- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.

And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.

- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.

- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?

and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.

All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.

Sounds like they did have quorum (84% present). I'm assuming the "trick" is related to the fact that it was an expired law up for renewal instead of a brand new law, which sounds pretty dumb to me. Maybe I'm mistaken about the details tho. I'm just some guy

You really should check out the list of voters, you will be surprised who exactly voted "yes". The list can be found here: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ has a better way to sort by country and political party so you can see who woted for what. It is painful to see politicians I voted for supporting this, even after I have sent them a few emails. Honestly, based on the results from my country, in the upcomming euro-elections, I am seriously considering voting alt-right.

You will be surprised to discover that the most open pro-democracy and “leftist” are also the most fascist and speech controlling ones.

At least in Spain this is exactly the case, and is really scary how much people falls for it.

Yea, like France or Germany or Belgium

You know Im right

Yeah, there are two scummy things happening here. This would not be possible if they did their job. What sort of weird example does it set, when they don't ever care enough to stay for all the voting?

Our parents are the zombies who keep voting for the destruction of their civilization just to keep their housing prices propped up.

The internet is not the problem, the algo is.

With the internet I have free MIT lessons, documentaries, debates on Youtube!

I have access to scientific journals.

I can access every book ever written in the world.

The internet is not the issue here. The homepages/fyp on youtube, tiktok, instagram is. Books and the correct asthetic needs to be prioritized.

Chat control doesn’t make the internet any less stupid.

"give me a boy until he is seven and I will tell you the man he becomes"

there will be at least 1 entire generation of western kids that spectated short form content on screens since the moment of birth. based on aristotle, this entire generation is going to be retarded. the EU legislature in question enables legal spectation of content exchanged by a generation of the retarded. the optimal path forward seems to be ensuring that the next generation is not retarded, otherwise human extinction will be rapidly accelerated. I don't see how corporate destruction of individual privacy is going to help ensure that the next generation is not retarded.

Your sons and daughters will still be wide eyed zombies, it's just that now your government will decide what mush to turn their brains into.

I heard about it 30 years ago

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Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?

If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.

Do you have source for IWF funding being by big tech?

Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)

This is really strange since the European Commission strongly recommends that staff use Signal[1].

[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26073615-c-2025-5430...

At this point we have no choice but to conclude that the Eu has been subverted by megacorps as badly as the US political system has been.

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Then I'm not very moved about this. I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another. What I care is not having a backdoor for E2E, i.e. like client-side scanning telling me what I am allowed to talk about like with the LLMs. CSAM excuse is a great excuse to turn every conversation to what we have with AI today.

Don't downplay Skype, as Teams is still just rebranded Skype for Business (LYNC).

Are my AIM chats safe?! /s

This is the whole point though. They are allowed to do this because of the original chat control from 2021 which was temporary and expired in march. Without chat control it is very debatable what companies can legally thanks to eprivacy directive.

They aren’t allowed to do whatever they want with your data, there’s strict restrictions on requiring consent for things you want to do with user data.

What are you talking about. You think service providers can backdoor aes-gcm? There will always be technology that they cannot get around. The only way to backdoor is to explicitly change the encryption.

Yes. I see no reason to think otherwise.

I think that means those MEPs are not doing their jobs. They are the representatives of their people, but somehow they left for vacation before the last day of the session. They failed in the most important part of their duty.

That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote.

Even relying on people to vote no is not enough.

> This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation

Surely this was not by someone’s design. Maybe though… you don’t leave a day early for your vacation?

Sounds like an unlawful law to me, but hey. Im an American, what do I know.

And then people wonder why there’s so little faith in the EU and why there is a perception of them being disconnected from the real interests of the people.

So 112 MEPs didn't do their job...got it.

> Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government

This antecedent is far too broad; what regulations, benefiting whom? It's pretty obvious in this case that the majority of their representatives do not favor at least this type of regulation. In other cases, the majority of representatives favor regulation which prevents private corporations from selling their PII to the highest bidder. So you're going to have to reckon with the nuance of the real world if you don't want to make obviously leading statements like this.

I don't understand either but just for reference on your point:

Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years

'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'

On the other hand look at who issued this report. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

Just to be clear, here you see the EU, but behind this there are a few corrupt national government officials that are pushing hard for this.

Yeah, it always strikes me when this crazy, obviously stupid stuff ends up "49 to 51" like either there are active forces fighting each other ending in an equilibrium, or the equilibrium is arising passively, everyone and their representatives are just randomly scribbling in the circles.

Any time now even the most pro-european EU defender will realise that what was once a trade union has slowly transformed itself into an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster.

Well, the No vote triggered some adjustments, so this is indeed relatively democratic. What would be the alternative?

And then politician always wonder why nobody has any trust left.

> What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around

They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.

Found this, source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.

"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:

- European People’s Party and

- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

Countries in favor of chat control were:

Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus

If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):

France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg

Oh, yes, thankfully the protections for privacy are much better in the US... right? Right?

How did you connect the linked Wikipedia article to EU courts and ECJ?

This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.

> Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, ...

This was done by the Council of Europe (an organisation made up of a mix of member state foreign ministers and member state parliament members)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...

No court was involved as far as I can tell...

Is this the first court system you ever hear about? Judges are never democratically elected.

Except in this case it actually passed 49/51.

>Redfish forced to cease operations as an official subsidiary of Ruptly/RT

>Immediately after Red Media gets founded by the guy, but now in Turkey

>Redfish social media presence gets renamed to Red Media

>Red Media kept staff, equipment and reused content from Redfish

Tbh I'd be pissed if sanctions could be bypassed by simply changing your logo and handle.

I'd go further and suspect the Russian disinformation apparatus just threw them under the bus for "EU bad" points.

It's such a textbook and standard Russian propaganda practice to finance and push divisive and partial views I'm even surprised people keep falling for it.

Another "journalist" the far left (in Spain at least) considers a martyr. The whole coverage of his arrest was a shitshow (Freedom of expression! Poland is fascist! Freedom for Pablo!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Yag%C3%BCe

Then it was shown he spied on Nemtsov, Polish journalists... and he even hugged uniformed GRU officers upon arrival in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, while wearing a "my empire needs me" t-shirt.

But this doesn't affect only the far left:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Europe

Anti-immigration, anti EU narratives, solid antisemitic (not just anti-Israel) stances, interviews with all sorts of sketchy characters, the whole set. Luckily for de Vlieger, he had sold the operation to literal Viktor Medvedchuk (and then the platform took a further Russia victim, Ukraine bad turn), so he remains unsanctioned.

This has an expiration date baked in for 2028 so if no new legislation comes in until then, it will undo itself on its own.

The members of parliament are elected every 5 years by the citizens of the european union. What do you mean with unelected bureaucrats?

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The fact that there was a second vote on a modified law which passed.

> What am I missing?

Nothing really.

Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.

In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.

Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.

With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.

We're currently running a long-term offshore experiment to see if 2A has any measurable impact on dragnet surveillance and the NSA.

True, the solution is to just start murdering politicians. Thanks for the advice America.

> at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.

This isn't surprising to me at all.

The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.

At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else). Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.

The reason is more than apparent.

So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.

Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.

Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.

I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.

for no apparent rason? the way they are preparing to bring the population into a war hardly can be any more apparent...

> I'm really surprised at the hurry.

Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.

Lobbyists are winning the war.

> ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately

It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.

My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.

I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.

>with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn

They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.

The reason they do this is preparation for war. Also, foreign influence bots and hostile active measures.

It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.

>for no apparent reason, lately.

for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do

this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)

obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent

> at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason

So many reasons: unpopular wars in the Middle East, repeated embarrassments in international arena, domestic unrest, decadent elites…

Didn't Steve Bannon do a tour in Europe recently to dispense some of his strategy?

This smells like him, honestly.

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well, bread is running our at beakneck speed...

that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...

This removes circus from the children.

This comment does not add any value to the discussion.

PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.

> I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

You shouldn't go that far. Simply don't vote for the EPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party_Grou...) in your country. They are the driving force behind this. Other parties have mostly voted against this (depending on the country)

Yeah, this is also a step too far for me. The EU has also done good things, like GDPR, right to repair, fining big tech again and again ... but it rarely follows up as much as it needs to.

The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at least contains the economically most powerful EU countries, so that we have enough economical weight, that the other big players cannot simply push us around. Currently, the EU seems to be hellbent on losing its support. But how to prevent that other union to go down the same road?

Anyway, it seems clear, that we can no longer allow EU decision makers to make rules for us. They are not to be trusted.

> I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

You mean the far right that talks about EU all the time and loves when EU does things like this?

Afaik, EU rules provide for urgent procedure only for proposals at first reading, while here it was used to compress a second reading vote and skip committee, just perfectly timed for the last sitting before recess.

The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.

To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.

The urgency procedure is not the issue here, the problem is that this was Parliament's second reading, and the treaties (article 294 TFEU) say:

> Second reading

> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:

> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;

> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;

> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.

The regulation was rejected today with 314 votes against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions, but because of Metsola's lawfare that classified this regulation as under an "urgent procedure", an absolute majority was required to reject.

Chat Control 2.0 is the censorship regulation. Chat Control 1.0 just legalized what Facebook was doing anyway.

It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.

Its honestly a bit sad that this in particular got people up in arms on social media, nobody gave a single shit when they sacrifice millions of people and entire nations on the periphery to their death cult of market orthodoxy.

The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.

Isn't it interesting that if you remove the US from that list, it all aligns with US foreign policy? How fortuitous that EU interests just happen to coincide so well with our American friends.

> - Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating

For which there is no good reason and which is extremely stupid

There has been zero aggression from China towards Europe and zero chance of military confrontation.

Most of the sanctions that were implemented under pressure from Us have backfired on Europe (but not so much on US)

European politicians are going around the world and telling India not to trade with Russia while Israel trades with Russia, etc.

> There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around

Nukes

EU is doing some concerning moves but, looking at your points, Russia attacked Ukraine. EU is not at war with Russia, only supporting Ukraine.

Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.

But now you have governmental overreach and legalized spying on European Citizens by (mostly) US Companies, so i would say that Law is truly binary bad.

Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.

But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.

There can be, but this isn't it. In the EU, a company can't send you an email, but it can read your email.

In this case, the phrase “consumer protections” is almost insulting when the things it’s supposedly protecting us from are a triviality compared to the horror show being introduced.

There will surely be some people who applaud your post for pointing this out. But the vast majority of people don't see "government spies on me" vs "private industry spies on me" as a meaningful distinction and there are MANY MANY recent examples of this: the discourse around Flock, the discourse around ICE using personal information to trace dissenters, the discourse around DOGE and Palantir.

But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.

No, "strong digital privacy" and "governmental overreach against citizens private data" is mutually exclusive.

Secrecy of correspondence is a pretty old concept.

To be fair, lack of regulation didn't stop us in America from passing the Patriot Act.

That was terrible. But then the NSA just started surveilling everything illegally anyway, laws be damned.

It's hard to compare US and EU internet freedom because a person usually spends most of their life in one place and is clueless about the life in other.

I've never lived in US, were there any cases of ISPs blocking websites in USA? Even DNS-level blocking counts

How many people are arrested for social media posts and other speech in each country?

At least I have still have a 2nd amendment - and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.

Yes, indeed.

In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.

Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...

Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...

Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354

> Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.

Well the criteria is CSAM?

Do you have any evidence that these systems have been used to imprison someone that wasn't CSAM related?

I think you're probably wildly overoptimistic about the ratio of police officers to private nudes.

No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...

I think a more realistic system would be hashing images and comparing them to known CSAM in some database.

I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.

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The new reading will happen if the Council rejects the amendment approved by the Parliament. When it does they have 6 weeks to negotiate, and then 6 weeks to approve the result of negotiations, if any.

Basically, the hope is that the Council rejects that amendment in its second reading (but right, the probability of this is not really high, since it codifies what was already true). I should have explained it better in my comment

If there's no shadowy cabal then why do our politicians continue to pass domestically unpopular laws? I mean, there doesn't have to be a literal shadowy cabal, the effective "cabal" could be a combination of corruption, lobbying and pressure from security agencies.

Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular. Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.

> there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air

that's really cute

Wow, I guess governments of the whole western world just woke up one morning and decided to clamp down on the free exchange of information on the internet at the precise moment their citizenry was up in arms over Israel committing mass genocide and blackmailing their politicians. What a coincidence!

This is Pegasus by Policy. There is a reason why all Epsteinist Occupied Governments are pushing the same thing worldwide and that reason is so Israel can commit future Holocausts in peace and quiet.

Israel is the horcrux of Emnity towards Freedom. This is why they destroy freedom everywhere they infect the halls of power.

Yet people remain in denial because genociding third worlders is regular programming for Epsteinists.

Or it can be many-server, with tens of thousands of server operators and one selected at random.

Only the server operators then know your IP, and they don't know who you are or what you're saying.

Session was supposed to be shut down at start of July but looks like they got enough funding from donations to keep going for now.

basically admitting they are pedos

What are the criteria to be covered by this "secrecy" exemption?

Can you cite the text where it says this?

Unless they have backdoors to absolutely every form of encryption, including https certificates, etc. you can always use that to tunnel through.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/cukcaf/goog...

Any evidence what so ever for the "mass control" claim?

I do not want E2E comms broken, but these posts on hackernews always bring out such outlandish claims.

You can't be applying the "mass control" claim for the attempts at stopping the spread of CSAM? So can you point to any evidence of wide spread "mass control" with Chat Control 1.0?

If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.

What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?

Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?

If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?

Weaponizing our own property against us, mandating that it spies and tattles on us, turning inanimate objects into policemen to construct the most total surveillance dystopia, is not in any way "reasonable". In no way does it "preserve privacy".

And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.

They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.

Okay, since it is already working system - how could I verify it scans for CSAM, not my dissident books and saved eps*ein files?

I have a question: who trains the CSAM model?

I would have expected the right wing parties to be against this, somehow, but... Nope, just checked my country's votes, and nationalists just love cc1.0 it seems.

Something something essential liberty, something something temporary safety.

It is a renewel of something highly unpopular that was voted down already. It is how the EU operates look at the other comments here about "democracy". It is put to vote on last minute where they know MEPs are on vacation... Well the ** should not go on vacation before the vacation starts but that is just another thing about EU! Why are they in vacation before it starts?! It is so complicated rules that not even the news and experts totally understand what is going on.

What do you mean by this?

I know MEPs are. But who ellected Ursula? Who as far as i understand is the mother of this survailance... Calling This orban/Putin propaganda is Low. It is removing focus from the fact that i point out democracy is slowly withering in EU and survaulance is growing. Just look at the survailance lad for cars that was accepted the other day. I have no love for either of Putin/orban im simply telling my experience not making propaganda!

Exactly. I consider myself euro federalist but bullshit like this creating a very strong antipathy.

If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.

I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.

The EU exists mostly to promote economic liberalism and free trade.

It started out as a purely trade arrangement, then evolved to become a broader union.

Here's a thought: maybe liberal democracy was never very free.

Slippery slope is not a "fallacy" by default. It can be occasionally but its a perfectly reasonably argument in plenty of cases.

Constructive argument? Just disband the EU as a whole, including all laws, treaties, contracts ...

Europe would be a much better place if the EU stayed what it was, a trade union of sovereign nations without any political power over the people.

What "constructive" argument is anyone supposed to give about authorities having warrantless access to all private conversations?

"Slippery slope" does not by itself invalidate an argument, because slippery slopes do exist.

Well they explicitly hid the fact that there was going to be a vote, AND they had already said they were going to override parliament using more drastic procedures if it didn't pass here.

So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.

I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...

I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.

(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)

the rest? they comply, or get labeled a criminal.

innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.

They don't need to use "illegal chat apps". They can just use Signal or Telegram, or any of the other ways that exist to send encrypted messages.

Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?

I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.

Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.

And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.

By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.

Discord recently had an AI malfunction that resulted in square grids getting detected as CSAM and reported to cops.

The thing is... It's not even reported on the news here (Lithuania).

Just now I scrolled through our most popular news sites. 0 mentions. Wasn't on TV either.

The vast majority of the population didn't even have a clue that the vote was happening.

I checked the top 5 most popular local news sites. There was one article about chat control in April and then 2 more from 2025. That's it.

Imagine an issue as big as this and it's not even reported. Yeah I don't feel confident about the future at all.

No, it's the other way around. Quoting another comment:

>"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject

Indeed. The vote, however, was about stopping Chat Control. The key term is "derogation" in the title.

A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.

What are you even saying? As a leftist, I want nothing to do with those fascists.

I mean sure, but there's no meaningful commie contingent in the EU.

The war on privacy at the EU level always comes from conservatives.