[theshrike79]

Just in case people don’t read the article:

    the European Parliament’s position removes indiscriminate chat control and allows only for a targeted surveillance of specific individuals and groups reasonably suspicious of being linked to child sexual abuse material, with a judicial warrant. End-to-end encrypted messengers are exempted.

[SenAnder]

How does this differ from the status quo? I would assume targeted surveillance, without requiring 3rd parties sabotage the security of their products, is already a legal law enforcement procedure?

[ponderings]

The EU standardizes a lot of laws that a lot of countries should have had already. I'm sure there must be bad examples but I've really only seen improvements in action. Countries have to part with their idiotic version or give up on their idiotic proposals. NL for example had some issues wanting forced labor for unemployed people with social support but that would be called a job and require minimum wage.

[derefr]

Doesn't have to be different from the status quo. EU law acts upon member countries like the US federal constitution acts upon member states: it prevent individual members from ever changing their own laws to take more extreme positions than the recognized consensus position.

[g-b-r]

To my knowledge EU Regulations are simply laws that overrule local EU countries' laws, so whether it's possible or not for local laws to be more extreme only depends on such laws being at odds with what the Regulation prescribes (but I'm not a lawyer and only looked into that years ago).

[bmicraft]

From what I've been told how it actually works is that eu law doesn't apply directly to member states, but member states are required to amend their laws to be at least as strict as eu laws on all matters.

[g-b-r]

There's not a single type of EU laws, there are "regulations" and "directives".

Regulations are complete laws applicable immediately across the EU as they stand, the states are required to amend any conflicting law but the regulations already automatically prevail on any conflicting local law.

Directives instead need to be transposed into local law by each state individually, and can leave many details to the individual implementations.

[vaylian]

Correct. But the chatcontrol proposal would have changed that. The proposed law mandates untargeted surveillance and bypassing of encryption through client-side scanning.

[ExoticPearTree]

The status quo now is that each country does as it sees fit. This will unify legislation across the whole of EU and basically forbid countries to have laws that contravene to this.

[ls612]

It doesn’t really. Much like the UK, the EU appears to have blinked when faced with the loss of both WhatsApp and iMessage.

[hyperman1]

Not really. This was expected. The commision tends to align with big business friendly proposals. The parliament tends to align with inhabitants, but has less power. Proposals go back and forth.

What makes this story special is how blatantly bribable the commission must be to make them spit out this proposal.

[malermeister]

https://netzpolitik.org/2023/chatkontrolle-lobbyismus-in-37-...

Here's an article in German about the sketchy dealings of the commissioner in question. Apparently, Ashton Kutcher (who's the main lobbying force behind this - how did that happen???), got a meeting with her confirmed 37 minutes after requesting it, while emails from privacy advocates continue being ignored.

[defrost]

Is Ashton Kutcher the actual "main lobbying force" or the hired face of the main lobbying force?

It's relatively common for lobby groups to hire known public faces to front for their interests .. a celebrity face can open a door to a meeting that might not otherwise happen.

It works both ways, celebrities will often hit a point in their careers where they start to look for a good noble cause to front for in order to keep their name and face in the public eye and aligned with <insert feel good values>.

[malermeister]

I think his star power is a big part of what makes the lobbying effective in the first place, so I'm not sure if that distinction even makes sense.

[thesnide]

even more:

    In detail, our position will protect young people and victims of abuse much more effectively than the EU Commission’s extreme proposal:

(...)

    At the same time, we are pulling the following poisonous teeth out of the EU Commission’s extreme bill:

[matthewdgreen]

It seems like this is a proposal, but it hasn’t been adopted and it’s not clear this coalition will prevail. It’s hard to tell because the language of the article makes it seem like a “done deal”, but I’m less optimistic.