Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).

The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.

Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.

Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat

> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?

There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).

There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.

The wild part is that both the United States and China will get the decryption. There's too much money and corruption in the world.

Maybe local(European states) won't care as long as they can use it against their people in their feifdom.

> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.

The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.

Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.

That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.

> In reality, they want to be dictators.

Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.

I don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).

That is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants.

Who picks the comissioners are the national governments.

It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap.

It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down.

This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name

Europe has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.

It's linked in the second paragraph of article.

  More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies

  Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:

  …
  · A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
  · A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.

> Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me?

Depends on where you live. If for example you live in the UK, they will jail you until you pony up the PIN to your phone and any other passwords they want from you. Don't know how it is other countries.

No one really cares about your individual comms. The goal of legislation like this is to ensure that E2E chat apps are no longer distributed on the app stores, so even if a tiny amount of nerds like us might use them among ourselves, they are no longer relevant socially.

The problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members).

There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.

It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.

There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".

They are not going to do anything to you, but they will throw anyone into a jail who develops end to end encryption.

If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls

Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.

It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

There is a reason why the popularity of far right is all time high everywhere in the EU.

We see it in the EU here but the groups pushing for that are everywhere, including the US, UK, Australia, etc

So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years

There are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block.

In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.

FWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't.

A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.

The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.

So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.

[1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

As someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it.

We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.

They don't have to. Signal, in particular, since it's not connected to massive revenue streams, can just wait to see if the country blocks it.

> IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).

I'm pretty sure they'd see it as a win, at least unless it led to massive public backlash. So why not skip that step and just give them the backlash?

Sorry, maybe I'm dumb. Why would "gatekeepers" poke the bear?

There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.

The OP/submitter's history basically looks what I expect coming from a US or Russian propaganda bot.

Thank you, should be top comment.

Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol

The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.

I think people use emoji for this

Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.

The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.

Rare AI slop use case

I'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.

I live in Scandinavia, and I’m sad to say, but most progressive legislation comes from the EU.

Our national government only legislates on populist issues. Racist laws, more surveillance, less oversight of cops and authorities, bans on big dogs and burkahs etc. - either symbolic issues that affect very few people in reality or mostly just limiting freedom and civil rights, never expanding on it.

I don’t like that we have many unelected technocrats and the corruption sucks, but the EU changes my life for the better. I honestly can’t say that about our national governments over the past two decades.

It's not that, it's calling the EU a dictatorship, meanwhile the US has genuinely slipped out of the liberal democracy rankings to a electoral democracy (the same as Hungary last year) and seems to be on the path to full blown oligarchy. There is genuine concern here about this bill but it's not the elephant in the room. The EU hasn't threatened to invade a NATO country, isn't initiating trade wars with close allies and seemingly done a 180 on foreign policy in the past 2 years.

Last year, there many seemed to have major concerns about Hungary but again it was pointed out that things could be turned around. I don't see how the US is doing to turn this around.