EU council reaches position on Chat Control (consilium.europa.eu)

aestetix 15 minutes ago

Honest question. The EU was created as an economic and trade institution. How has it morphed into a wierd political institution, which NATO was already supposed to be?

The root question: how did an organization that ushered in things like the Euro become a body that decides whether Europeans are allowed to have personal privacy?

saubeidl 7 minutes ago

> The EU was created as an economic and trade institution. How has it morphed into a wierd political institution, which NATO was already supposed to be?

That is not the case.

The 1957 Treaty Establishing the European Community contained the objective of “ever closer union” in the following words in the Preamble. In English this is: “Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe …..”.

> The root question: how did an organization that ushered in things like the Euro become a body that decides whether Europeans are allowed to have personal privacy?

Sensationalist framing aside, how does any government become a body that decides anything?

aestetix 1 minute ago

That treaty was established just over a decade after Hitler surrendered, when there were two Germanys, an Iron curtain across Europe, and a lot of other things which changed significantly after the Wall fell. Surely you would agree that those words meant something quite different then than they do now?

I don't think my framing was sensationalist at all. Chat Control is using the threat of child porn to make people forget the reasons why the ECHR cares so deeply about privacy. I'm not sure why Denmark is pushing it so hard, but governments have long feared and hated encryption.

johnwayne666 1 hour ago

Does this already include the parliament's position based on a trilogue or will there be amendments before it's voted in parliament?

throw_a_grenade 56 minutes ago

IIUC no, this is Council position before trilogue.

thecopy 1 hour ago

Seems… fine? At least i dont see any invasion of privacy or encryption related obligations in this proposal.

The EU ostensibly wants to improve innovation, i wonder how these new assessment regulations help with that, especially for SME and startups.

halJordan 1 hour ago

"High risk" providers will be obligated to "contribute" technologies "to mitigate." Seems like a doublespeak way of saying enforced decryption or enforced backdoors.

potato3732842 14 minutes ago

It's one of those things that will obviously be used to boil the frog over time via beurocratic rules.

Year 1 a minimum viable effort manual process will be fine. But they'll say "not good enough" to someone every now and then and the minimum can do in order to get a) permission b) enforcers not crawling up your ass (IDK if it will be permission based or enforcement after the fact based) will ratchet up.

By year 10 or 20 "everyone" will have an API or a portal or whatever.

And worse, by creating a compliance industry they create a whole suite of business and people who will ask for more, more, more more.

stephen_g 52 minutes ago

Yes, I see this as the people pushing for surveillance and control taking what they can get for now, with the view to bring it back to mandatory scanning before all is said and done.

throw_a_grenade 1 hour ago

The crux is in those „risk assessments”, to be approved by authorities. IIUC those authorities will be able to designate e.g. Signal „high risk” and slap penalties unless they „mitigate” the risk. Hard to tell what will happen without seeing final regulation.

jacknews 1 hour ago

I know it's the recognized term for 'officially designated authority', but 'competent authority' seems to conflate two traits that do not necessarily co-habit.

pavlov 1 hour ago

Legal competence is like a legal person — it's a subset of what we normally associate with the term.

Zaiberia 1 hour ago

Just read it as ”we have the competence to make decisions with authority on this issue”, though we all wish it always meant ”we have authority to make competent decisions on this issue” xD

giuliomagnifico 1 hour ago

In a nutshell, there will be no more intrusions into chats, but only obligations for the companies to provide preferential channels for victims of these crimes.