https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-th...
The right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, article 8 [0].
It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this.
[0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...
the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies.
you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, itâll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesnât restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel.
stop treating the ECHR like some talisman that keeps the wolves at bay, as if authoritarian drift politely obeys paperwork. stop playing with this whole âactually, the loophole is X,â âno, the loophole is Y,â like you're debugging a bad API instead of staring at the obvious: when a state wants to expand surveillance, it does, and the justifications are retrofitted later, be it "public safety", or "keeping your children safe."
(6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union.
I sort of hope someone will leak all private information about Peter Hummelgaard. He is one of the people behind this proposal, just so he would get a taste of his own medicine.
Eternal vigilance is needed to stop this. Good luck! It will take just one (manufactured) crisis.
How about applying this kind of surveillance to the government? After all we are paying for them to rules us, so why not publish all government, politicians, law enforcement, military messages for everyone to read? Why everybody must be treated as a criminal, because they cant do their job of keeping us safe?
Denmark has a month and a half as EU presidency to go. I still don't get why they want this to be their legacy so badly.
The problem is that they can repeat this game indefinitely, Chat Control 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 231.24, ... Just slightly modify the initial Chat Control proposal, make it sound less harsh, and then resubmit it until they achieve a sufficient majority in the EU Parliament, while the general public gets too tired of the topic to create sufficient resistance.
The original article says: "The legislative package could be greenlit tomorrow in a closed-door EU working group session." That was November 12th.
On the 13th, Breyer wrote:
> Yesterday, EU gov'ts rejected changes to mandatory backdoor #ChatControl & anonymity-destroying age checks.
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1155418089245415...
Article on Breyerâs own site: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-th...
Apparently it didn't work last time, so why not try again with a more vague language, an expanded scope and even slapping the age verification on top of it? And all of this while still preserving our privacy.
This time, we should feel 100% completely reassured (from the proposal):
Regulation whilst still allowing for end-to-end encryption, nothing in this
Regulation should be interpreted as prohibiting, weakening or circumventing,
requiring to disable, or making end-to-end encryption impossible.This can backfire bigly for the EU. The whole union is sustained on shared values and interests. Sneaking in surveillance is extremely offputting for the sentiment towards EU in many circles. Every member state has plenty of skeptics who want to brexit and this is gasoline for them. And rightly so. This isnât a fluke from some misinformed non-technical stray politician who âwants to save the childrenâ (yes, they exist too), but rather a deliberate anti-democratic sabotage of core human rights.
In a nation state, itâs easier to pull off authoritarian shifts, because citizens will not usually revolt over such things alone. But the EU relies on sustained support and a positive image. There are already at the very least 10s of thousands EU skeptics created from the last wave alone, and probably much much more to come.
Zooming out, I think this is the time when the EU is needed the most, given the geopolitical developments. Both Russia and China are drooling about a scattered Europe consisting of isolated small states. That makes it more infuriating. Someone, ideally the press, needs to dig into the people behind this and expose them.
I wish I would not have a standard post for topics like this:
Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...
Society can't win this without fighting the personalities who drive it. In the end, there's a individual that pushes this, so this very person should be targeted personally.
Someone said it's an asymmetric conflict, so we need to pull it to our (human-size) level and fight on our chessboard.
I guessed the term Chat Control had to be made up by opponents of the legislation, so searched for the real name. The official name of the legislation is: âProposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuseâ (COM/2022/209 FINAL). It is often referenced more simply as the âChild Sexual Abuse Regulationâ (CSA Regulation).
So many attempts over the years to infringe upon citizens privacy and civil liberties, I don't know about the rest of EU population but I'm done with it.
Might as well let it go pure evil so when the time comes, the people will be less hesitant to get rid of the whole EU bureaucracy and the armies of corporate lobbyists altogether
This is an ongoing terrorist attack and authorities fail to stop it. Please report these people to the police as attempted terrorist attack. People behind Chat Control should be arrested.
A snippet I posted before:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then âChat Controlâ qualifies in substance. Violence doesnât have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason itâs not âterrorismâ on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
The eu skeptic partiers, unfortunately, seem to be on quite solid footing on claims of EU bypassing democracy in their decision making. How can the same bill effectively be struck down so many times and then get passed through the back door?!
Isnât there precedent for many other governments secretly or openly doing exactly this? Snowden etc?
Thereâs an arms race element to this that I donât see people discussing.
Do EU citizens have any privacy from US tech? Is there anything to protect?
Do we want the USA to have exclusive right to spy on the world?
Is it better to have 1 Big Brother or 10?
So, you want to negotiate on how much privacy you are willing to give up in order to have a strong state-level control. But what do you have at your disposal, to influence that negotiation? Vote? Technology? Tariffs?
I just don't believe they would be able to roll it out. A lot of messaging services won't implement chat control. If half of the messaging apps are getting blocked, people will get angry.
There will be massive backlash towards EU. Texting is just so embedded to the daily life, if the EU causes inconveniences or trouble with texting, this might create massive anger. It could start off Brexit-like campaigns in some countries.
I'm not saying that it is impossible this is going to be implemented. But I think it's just some bureaucrats dreaming.
Grateful for Breyer's consistent excellent work tracking and opposing these proposals.
The Zombie proposal just keeps rising from the dead. The technical/mathematical objections donât change.
I still havenât seen a counter-argument stating why a mass-scanning architecture should be expected to work, given the base rates and error rates involved.
what is it theyâre so concerned about people talking about these days exactly anyway?
This is an asymmetric conflict. The factions who want this to pass have more resources, time and background influence and can keep pushing this until they get lucky.
And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult.
How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
They will keep trying until some version of it passes.
Will it possible to "DDoS" those systems?
It can't be illegal to role-play a grooming situation between consenting adults in a private conversation. If millions of people do that, they must be buried in reports.
Is the EU still democratic? serious question...the public is obviously against it, but they want this authoritarian law, no matter what.
These things are rather pointless, as one could always use a standalone encryption app, and copy&paste text to and from a non encrypted chat app. i.e. how one originally made use of PGP.
The difficulty which PGP had of key exchange could be handled somewhat like Signal does now, via a personal physical sync of the phones.
At which point, the authorities will still be able to make use of "traffic analysis" as they always have. So they'll be able to tell which parties are communicating, but not what is being said.
> to scan every private message, including those protected by end-to-end encryption.
Then it's no end to end, or at least end to end while traveling but easily collectible at rest, I mean it already is, who would stop meta from collecting messages in clear on the whatsapp ui? We should opt for a peer to peer solution or implement one
This shady approach of trying it again and again is so disgusting to me. Just be upfront about. If you will do it anyway at some point, just fucking do it. It's not like other countries like China that are much further than we are in this regard are in constant turmoil over it. I guess we won't be either.
Instead we take a moral high ground over Russia banning and blocking what are basically non-compliant messaging platforms and pushing Russian citizens to Max, which is controlled by the government. All the while these legislations in Europe will lead to the same end result.
How am I supposed to to argue against chat control in Russia when we are doing it too, just with a different twist.
I poked my Europarliamentarians. But it's -like- already almost 15:00 on the european mainland, so I'm not sure how much it still helps.
It seems it was a matter of time.
Germany first voted against chat control 2.0, then they clarified why they were against it, became "undecided". And now "Denmark" came out with a (lighter) version "some others" are more willing to vote for. [0]
What a joke. In front of our eyes.
Then they wonder why people hate their guts and are becoming increasingly violent, euro-skeptical, etc.
[0]: https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/
It's a foregone conclusion that it will pass. There is no such thing as saying "no" to EU power encroachment.
I guess pretty much all of us will become criminals if this passes. Have a phone that is running GrapheneOS you are a potential criminal. Running linux probably also a potential criminal.
This Chat Control 2.0 nonsense has to be killed off once for all.
The "risk-mitigation" loophole in EU Chat Control uses the same vague, discretionary language in the Digital Services Act that Elon Musk and others warned lets regulators coerce platforms into censorship and surveillance.
I think "oops" or "d'oh" are the phrases we're looking for here.
I find it sadly amusing that the proposed "compromise text" document is marked as "(Text with EEA relevance)" - i.e. they want to push it on the EEA states.
Privacy needs codified! The illusion of safety is not worth it for the fascist regime who turn keys it into a panopticon.
I remember that back a few weeks ago on reddit, before I left it, I warned people about this.
Well - colour me not so surprised. The lobbyists are back at it.
I think we need to permanently crush them now. They attack us here. This is a war.
At this point I 100% see the EU as a failed experiment and I would love to witness a mass exodus of the slavic countries, and then Germany and France. Burn this thing to the ground. Nothing good came out of it.
If I'm an EU citizen, who do I call and email to yell at about this? I assume my relevant MEP, but anyone else?
But I was told that the EU was the good guysâŚ
Writing about yourself in third person like this is really odd.
They just try and try again. They only have to succeed. Once. The people who care about privacy have to succeed every time.
The only real solution is to counterattack. Get legislation through the EU parliament that guarantees a right to privacy and anonymity.
Dunno if there's any chance of that happening.
This makes me feel pissed off. I used to be Pro EU, now I'm not so sure. (Suddenly I understand Trump voters.)
Dystopian BS. It's unfortunate that we've got people in society that are keen on mass surveillance
It will eventually pass, it's EU after all.
Again? Seriously? We shut them down, what, last week? They really are going for the activism fatigue approach aren't they?
I wonder if one could train an LLM to automatically protest all the new chat-control? This is getting ridiculous.
A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's not proposed by governments. These online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids, not the government or other people.
The other excuse being used to push these laws is CSAM scanning. But CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. A society's efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place.
These attempts for more surveillance and control are being pushed under the guise of these very bad excuses, and we need to call them out in every conversation to reduce the number of gullible dorks that might vote for it.
People need to actually understand that governments are very close to having the tools needed for authoritarian governance all around the world. It might not happen immediately, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost inevitable.
We can't just hope to rely on technological measures because we can't out-tech the law at scale all of the time. But we can and should fight back on both fronts. On the technological front, the first step is securing VPN access to ensure anonymity on the Internet. The best effort at the moment IMO is SoftEther, which is VPN over Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS.[0] It's open-source. It has a server discovery site called VPNGate.[1] You can host a server to let somebody else use, then use a server someone else is hosting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN
[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/
We're really only missing a few things before there's decentralized VPN over HTTPS that anyone in the world can host and use, and it would be resistant to all DPI firewalls. First, a user-friendly mobile client. Second, a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a sparse and decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent (or we may be able to make use of the BT protocol as is), and we'd have to build such auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client itself. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its existence for other clients to discover.
If we can make and keep the Internet a free place, these discussions can keep happening without fear of censorship and prosecution, and people can coordinate to fight authoritarianism and create better technologies to guard against it in the future. This is very much doable if we tried. So let's ensure the free flow of information is not a temporary blip in the long arc of humanity's history.
Honestly I think privacy is lost. Regardless of what side you were (big fan of privacy here) I feel we have nothing to do but move on and think how to live in a world without privacy.
I never wanted privacy anyway: I wanted no discrimination, inclusion, healthy democracy, etc, etc.
Privacy has always been a tool for me.
At this point, selective privacy like we are experiencing today (we cannot know whatâs in the epstein files, but google can send a drone and look into my backyard) serves none of the things I am interested in!
My Europe doing european stuff...
Do you know where there is no chat control possible? XMPP / Jabber [1]. Private, convenient, reliable, distributed, free.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908672
> According to Breyer, the existing voluntary system has already proven flawed, with German police reporting that roughly half of all flagged cases turn out to be irrelevant.
A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to:
> Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word âloveâ or âmeetâ appears somewhere.
then apparently either there are so many perpetrators that regular conversations with partners etc. are about as common as crime, or such regular conversations don't have such a high risk of being reported after all.
I don't think chat surveillance is a good idea. But please use transparent and open communication. Don't manipulate us just like the enemy does.