This seems more and more like an uphill battle. It’s proposed, somehow rejected, and comes back again after 6 months. Rinse and repeat until it’s accepted.
I’m not European so I don’t have a vote in this, but it’s pretty concerning
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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Translation of parts from the German netzpolitik.org article:
[...] For over two years, the Commission has wanted to oblige internet services to scan the content of their users for criminal offenses and send it to the authorities in the event of suspicion. For almost a year now, the Parliament has described this as mass surveillance and has called for only unencrypted content of suspects to be scanned. [...] The EU Commission demands that internet services scan their users' content for three types of criminal content: known child pornography, new material and grooming. For known material, there are established systems for matching unencrypted content with hashes. This technology alone has been criticized. [...] A majority of states also agree with the new proposal.
Ten states even emphasize that "the current proposal has reached the limit of their willingness to compromise". [...]
The EU Commission emphasizes that its draft law and the current proposal also cover encrypted content. The Commission believes it is "still necessary to have the possibility of detection in encrypted communications" - i.e. to override encryption. [...]
Other states also reject the current proposal. Six states "stated that they could not agree to the proposal due to fundamental concerns.
[...]
The Legal Service of the EU member states supports the critics. Last year, the experts came to the conclusion that chat control is contrary to fundamental rights and will fail in court. These concerns have "still not been dispelled". The lawyers also believe "that the proposal would not stand up to judicial review" - i.e. it is illegal.
[...] If either France or Italy - or two states from the Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic - reject the new proposal, there will still be no majority in the Council.
[...] The Hungarian Council Presidency is sticking to its optimistic timetable. Hungary actually wanted to "further negotiate the proposal at a technical level". That would be the Council working group on criminal prosecution. It met today, but did not discuss the chat control. Instead, the advisors for justice and home affairs are to negotiate the Hungarian proposal on Monday. If Hungary has its way, the Permanent Representatives will then decide on the Council's position, followed by the Justice and Home Affairs Ministers on October 10. France and Sweden are "explicitly" in favor.
It would help your cause a lot if you explained what it was about.
[Genuine] Does visiting the link https://chatcontrol.eu not explain well or enough?
That link isn’t present in the post.
[Genuine] Does the image not show up for you or are you unable to see it?
A-ha! So there’s a bit of both client issues and user error. My client crops the preview image of the site. And when I clicked the link to the mastodon post, I didn’t pay attention to the image because I had already seen it in the client.
Still, this being a general privacy group, it would be good if OP didn’t assume the reader was familiar with current EU politics. A small paragraph would be enough to contextualize the post.
The last link in the post explains it well
Too many redirects.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/
It works well for me. But let me paste it here anyway:
Chat control is back on the agenda of EU governments. EU governments are to express their position on the latest proposal on 23 September. EU Ministers of the Interior are to adopt the proposal on 10/11 October. Latest update of 12 September…
In June we managed to stop the unprecedented plan by an extremely narrow “blocking minority” of EU governments: Chat control proponents achieved 63.7% of the 65% of votes threshold required in the Council of the EU for a qualified majority.
Several formerly opposed governments such as France have already given up their opposition. Several still critical governments are only asking for small modifications (e.g. searching for “known content” only or excluding end-to-end encryption) which would still result in mass searches and leaks of our private communications. Therefore there is a real threat that the required majority for mass scanning of private communications may be achieved at any time under the current Hungarian presidency (Hungary being a supporter of the proposal).
That is why we now need to get involved and raise our voices to our governments and raise awareness in the wider population.
→ Previously supportive governments must be convinced to change their minds
→ Critical governments need to be pushed to demand comprehensive changes, as proposed by the European Parliament, and not just minor changes to the proposal.In the absence of such fundamental revision, the proposal should be rejected altogether.
Thanks!